SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
XFusion Hits $20k/mo Helping You Scale Your Support Team
20 Sep 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Basically we charge $2,500 per agent and we pay our team less than that. Although we do pay among the top, we pay them about 30% higher than our competitors. So effectively we make money off of the difference.
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My guest today is David Tran and his partner, Jim. They decided to start a technical support agency after they realized how difficult it was to hire and find competent agents for their own businesses. Once they cracked the code, per se, they realized many SaaS founders and owners have not figured this out, and they wanted to solve that problem for everyone. David, you ready to take us to the top?
Yep. All right, so bring Jim in here. Are you guys co-founders?
Yes, we are. We met almost about two years ago, and we really hit it off. Jim, who had the idea?
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Chapter 2: What inspired the founders to start a technical support agency?
Correct. Absolutely.
What margin will you build in for yourself?
Yeah, we pay $800 per month for our full-time agents. Okay, got it. Which is about $200 per month higher than our competitors. So we have a decent margin on that. We also have like part of my background is in customer success. So we're also able to offer customer success services as well, which is a bit of a different model and something we need to kind of think through the best way to present.
But there's often SaaS founders that need customer success, but don't necessarily need a full-time $80,000 a year team member in the US to do that.
How many companies have hired through you guys today? In other words, how many support people do you guys have employed today?
We have eight people employed across four different clients. We're just getting started. We just officially launched in May. May was our first month.
Got it. Explain to me how you guys separate roles. David, what do you do that Jim doesn't?
I think I come from a background, so I'm a former engineer at Uber, and I think one of the things that Uber did really well is scale really, really fast, really, really aggressively. And just being in that space and seeing how it was done, I think that's where my personal interest and ability lies the best. So just finding all the different ways to scale upwards.
A lot of things are still in the pipeline, but we're really targeting the scale pretty aggressively. Our competitors usually hit the five to 10 million mark within five-ish years. I'd really like to see us get it there within two to three.
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Chapter 3: How do David and Jim split responsibilities as co-founders?
made a substantial difference in the way I'm able to approach this opportunity that Jim and I have is the fact that when I was working at Uber, my intention was to build up roughly 10 years of living expenses so I can just hit the ground running for 10 years. So even if I failed constantly for 10 years straight, I can at least pay for my cost of living in a relatively frugal way.
Yeah. Well, I don't think you're going to fail for 10 years straight, but we'll see what happens. You never know. Jim, how many people are you guys today? Is it just you two?
We're the only founders, yeah. Yeah, the only owners.
But how many employees? Eight. And does that include support people you've placed or those eight people working on the business?
Yeah, that includes support people as well. So we have team leadership as well. We have somebody that's doing writing coaching. One of our differentiators is we train our agents on how to be excellent writers as well. So not just technical support, but actually writing with good tone, empathy, things like that.
So we have a writing coach and we have a team leader and someone that does recruiting as well. We're actually bringing on a customer success person hopefully next week. We're interviewing them shortly.
How many of the eight are actually doing support? In other words, you are billing them out to customers?
Yeah.
Six. I think we're at six. Got it. Okay, so it's not always a one-to-one ratio. In other words, you could have one of your full-time people that you pay $800 a month. You could have two customers paying you each $2,500 a month to get access to that same person for eight hours a day.
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Chapter 4: What unique challenges do SaaS founders face in hiring support staff?
It's just finding good ones that's challenging and time-consuming, and then managing them. So that's the value add that we bring to the table.
Early founders.
Yeah, for a lot of early founders, the most important thing to them is their time. Effectively, the time is what either makes or breaks their company. And if they're trying to save a couple hundred dollars by hiring someone directly, it eats up a lot of their focus.
Yeah, I would say the early stage, too, you're extremely cash constrained. You're trying to bootstrap everything as best you can and do everything super cheap. So it's a balance, we'll see what happens.
I think this kind of thing ends up having a lot of success actually in the mid-market enterprise space where they're too small to go wanna do direct, but they're big enough where they need 10 support people. And it's worth paying you guys 25 grand a month to just handle that. We'll see, we'll see. Very good, so you guys really, I mean 2020 you'd say is the launch date, right? Yeah, for sure.
All right, let's wrap up here with a famous five. We'll go back and forth between you guys. David, you first. Favorite book, business book? Unscripted. Number two, Jim, let's go to you. Is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Oh, gosh, several. I'd have to say Elon Musk comes to mind first.
All right. David, favorite online tool for building your guys' company besides your own?
Favorite online tool? Um, it's not so much directly related to building the company, but I really like Airtable for organizing stuff.
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