SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
WIldJar Call Tracking, a 5 person $2m Revenue Business, wow!
16 Dec 2020
Chapter 1: What inspired WildJar's branding strategy during COVID?
During COVID, we thought, let's invest in our brand. So previously what we've done, it's a little bit different is that we're 100% white label platform. So we found Channel Partners and the Channel Partners essentially, they grew our business.
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Chapter 2: How does WildJar differentiate itself in a crowded market?
Minimum is 100% over the past several years. Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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Chapter 3: What is the pricing model for WildJar's services?
Hey guys, my guest today is James O'Neill. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Wild Jar. It's his first startup. Their bootstrap launched in 2016, and he did this all after being born in New Zealand, grew up in Australia, now building this company from Scotland. James, ready to take us to the top? Yeah, it's good. Thanks for having me. All right. So what is Wilder?
What are you guys doing? Are you a SaaS business?
Yeah, so we're SaaS. We're a call tracking and analytics platform. So we help businesses and marketers optimize and drive revenue from their inbound phone calls.
Chapter 4: How did WildJar secure funding for its MVP?
And give me a sense of how you fit in this space. It's a very crowded space. There's a lot of VC-backed companies spending way too much money in this space. What niche have you carved out for yourself?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, so we, myself and my co-founder, so we came from a similar space. And I'm from an agency background as well. And we really looked at the market in terms of what we needed to do. And we saw that a lot of them were doing the self-serve, low-cost, high-volume. And then there was sort of that enterprise model as well.
So where we fit is right in the middle of it all, where our model is more, from a non-boarding perspective, it is a full self-serve. But we work with them in the first three months to get them to a point where they can self-serve and move forward. But we found it just fits really nicely in terms of our model.
So what are customers paying on average per month to use the technology?
So last month it was $970,000.
Okay, so not small business, not enterprise, sort of somewhere in the middle.
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Really interesting.
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Chapter 5: What was the experience of launching WildJar in its first year?
Okay, and in the backstory, you launched this in 2016. How did you guys fund the MVP?
So, bootstrapped it. So... Myself and a founder, we were at another business and we actually had this model within a traditional telco and we wanted to take it to the business and it didn't work out. I was head of product strategy. My founder was head of technology. So I left, went back to agency world.
My family has an agency and I was working in that and really wanted to obviously focus on the core side as much as we were good at. So plugged it in there, did a bit of an MVP, reached out to my co-founder, said, look, I think we need to spin off a new business. He's from Italy. He flew back to Italy and had three months at his family. And then we just sort of went from there.
Are you a developer? How did you write the code for the MVP?
Yes, it was really simple. It was purely using other platforms. So I used like a Twilio startup to start on that.
use the scripting so using like optimizely for like split testing to just show you know landing page from google ads because it was really just to start from that um and then just sort of use a proof of concept from the agency that i was in um went to another agency that we liked as well they like the look of it but obviously i'm not a developer so had to get somebody to come in and do it properly so
So your first two customers were your family agency and then another agency you sold to?
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Chapter 6: How does WildJar handle customer onboarding and support?
Exactly, yeah. Interesting. And give me the sales pitch. When you sold the second company, not your family's company, but the second company, what was the pitch to them?
Yeah, so they were actually, so we ran their search. So they were outsourcing their search, the Google ad spend to our agency. So it was kind of already half built into it, but it was two complete separate businesses. I see.
And do you remember that first year of business back in 2016? Do you remember how much revenue you did?
uh yeah we did about 170 000 okay so that's i mean that's not bad for your first year in business that's pretty good yeah we got to 30 really quickly so yeah 30 what monthly 30 monthly oh 30 000 a month yeah yeah when did you hit that 30 at the end of 2016 you were 30 grand a month yeah towards the end of 16 which we weren't expecting so we thought it'd be a bit more slow but um
My co-founder is an amazing developer and he's rewritten and rewritten lots of voice platforms before so we can get a really good product to market. So that was good.
Did you guys just decide to split equity 50-50?
No. So it's a third, a third, a third.
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Chapter 7: What marketing strategies has WildJar implemented for growth?
So the others are my agency, my family agency. Um, we thought we would need sort of some sort of equity put into it there, but we actually didn't. So it's really just my dad sitting there along for a ride.
So it's your dad of 33, you with 33 and your CTO co-founder with 33.
Yeah, correct.
Very cool. And how many total people on the team today?
Five, five and one, um, like part-time accountant, like one day a week.
And then how many engineers besides your co-founder?
Just one, just him.
So it really is just him. Wow, that's impressive. So how many customers is his code now supporting?
So we've got 172 customers of last month.
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans for WildJar's product development?
Wow, so he can support all those same code base, 172 customers. That's impressive.
Yeah, yeah, he's amazing.
Wow. Okay, so 172 customers, and you've done all this bootstrapped, right? Yep. 970 ARPU, that's about $160,000 in MRR today then, huh?
Yeah.
Yes, so last month we did 167. 167.
Yeah, I mean, that's great growth. Where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember? We were at 130. 130. Where's the growth coming from? How are you signing folks up?
For us, it was all organic. And we were in a space where we knew the industry as well. So we knew a lot of agencies. I've got a lot of agency contacts. Where we started, the Australian market, it was... There was a few sort of legacy platforms that had been there for a while and they weren't scaling very well. So we wanted to build a platform that would scale quickly. And so that's what we did.
It was all organic, all word of mouth and, I guess, But a lot of agency people moving around as well. So they'll take the platform and turn us on there.
So you've done this bootstrapped. When you say organic growth, when I hear organic growth, sometimes I go, oh, well... they're just not sure how they're growing, which is maybe a bad thing because then you don't know how to do more of it, right? So what is, I think you probably actually know how you're growing. How are you actually growing?
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