SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Would she be better off with no revenue? Focus on engagement for her productivity App?
05 Jun 2022
Chapter 1: What is the growth story behind Llama Life?
Growth rate-wise, we are growing 20% month-on-month gross MRR.
Yeah. Now look, anyone listening is going to go, yeah, but she's going from $1 to $6. It's 600% growth. But still, growth is growth. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Marie Ng.
She's the founder of Llama Life.
Chapter 2: How did Marie Ng transition from bootstrapping to raising funds?
After working in advertising in New York City, she taught herself to code by watching YouTube videos, then built and bootstrapped Llama Life as a solo founder to 700 paying customers, which we love. It has since raised a pre-seed round from high-profile investor Jason Kassianis. Let's jump into the story. Marie, you ready to take us to the top? Sounds good. Thanks for having me. You had the life.
You had the life. You're bootstrapping up paying customers. Then you say, okay, okay, fine. We're going to let them in. We're going to let the evil in. Not always evil, but we're going to let them be seen.
Chapter 3: What insights did the accelerator program provide for Llama Life?
Why change paths?
Yeah, so you're right. So I bootstrapped it to 700 paying customers. That was kind of the original plan, but it was a bit serendipitous. So I was building in public on Twitter and someone from Jason Calacanis' team saw Llama Life And they bought the product. They really liked it. And they DM'd me on Twitter and they said, hey, we can see that you're bootstrapping.
Have you ever thought about joining an accelerator program? And, you know, I had thought about an accelerator in the past. I've actually done a few startups before Llama Life.
Chapter 4: How does Marie define calm, focused productivity?
And I did actually go the VC path a long time ago. Not a huge amount. It was a very, very small check at the time for a different business. And, you know, I'd kind of been through that experience. And this time I thought I'd bootstrap it. But because it was Jason Calacanis, a huge angel investor, he invested in Uber and Calm and a lot of other huge businesses very early on.
I thought, you know, I'd take the conversation. I'd take the call. And we had a call. I... ended up like applying for their accelerator program. It's called the Launch Accelerator. It's a three-month program in the US. I'm based in Australia, but because everything's remote right now, I was able to take part.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Llama Life face with pricing models?
And I went through that program. It kind of helped me think about Lama Life in a much bigger way. You know, I think that's what accelerator programs are for, right? It's how do you grow bigger? How do you grow quickly? How do you scale quickly? And I really like the vision that kind of evolved over time. And that vision is to help people achieve calm focused productivity.
Because nowadays, there's kind of this false notion that we need to be, you know, working crazy hours, crazy busy, working all the time. And I just don't believe that's the way forward. I think we can still achieve productivity, but do it in a calm way and a way that's good for our mental health. And that's kind of what emerged out of the accelerator. And
Chapter 6: How does customer engagement impact Llama Life's growth strategy?
I really want to see if I can make that vision come true. And as a solo bootstrapped founder, I thought it was going to be more difficult. So I ended up raising money after the accelerator program closed around very, very, no, actually not long ago, like two months ago, two months ago. So I raised 690K USD. So that will give us a, yep.
And so I was going to say, and what was Launch's model? Do they take 6% for 150 or do they take equity?
Yes. So they take 6% for 100K USD. Okay.
So is that part of the 690?
No, that's on top of the 690.
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Chapter 7: What is the current revenue and customer base for Llama Life?
Okay. So before the 690, really?
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess with the accelerator, the idea is to be able to let you work full-time on it. So that's kind of what happened, right? As a solo founder, I took the 100K, gave away 6%, was able to work full-time on my business during the accelerator program, which was three months. And then after that, at the end, you do demo day.
So with demo day, I actually didn't raise any money from demo day, but it gave me some momentum. And it let me practice doing my pitch like hundreds and hundreds of times. And I ended up raising money after that. But as you know, raising money takes a while sometimes. So I think it took about
Chapter 8: What future plans does Marie have for Llama Life's pricing structure?
five months in total from, you know, when I first started to when the money actually hit the bank.
Um, but the six, what did you end up? I mean, this is a, this is a tricky time, obviously. Well, I mean, it sounds like you closed before this sort of rocky period started past month or so just before.
Yeah.
Yeah. So you rate obviously the accelerator a hundred K 6% is what a 1.6 million valuation. What valuation did you use on the seed round?
Yeah. On the seed round. So it was a pre seed round. Um, so it was 2.75 million pre pre money.
Okay.
Yep. Yep. So call it like 2.5 posts, something like that.
I would say like 3.4 posts.
Sorry, sorry.
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