SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
ZenOutreach lands first 2 customers, $2k in MRR, How she did it
26 Jul 2021
Chapter 1: What is ZenOutreach and what services do they offer?
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 Laura Vandenherogen.
She previously co-founded a tech-based real estate service and led sales at an Amazon seller management company. She founded Zen Outreach in February of 2021. It's a company that focuses on lead generation. They offer different packages for list building, email outreach, and custom plans.
Chapter 2: How does ZenOutreach operate as a service business?
They do 100% of the work and help their customers optimize their campaigns to convert leads into sales opportunities. All right, Laura, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes. Hi, Nathan. Thank you for having me today.
You bet. Welcome to the show. So just to be clear, Zen Outreach, are you guys a SaaS company or a service business?
So we do B2B outreach for SaaS companies and for agencies, but we are a service business.
So it's almost like an outsourced, you're like an outsourced SDR team, kind of.
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Chapter 3: What types of packages does ZenOutreach provide to clients?
Correct.
Yeah. I see. Okay. Tell me more how that works. What do you, what do customers typically pay you and what are they buying?
Okay, so we have three different types of packages that we offer. The first one is what we call misbuildings, whereby we just look for leads that are within the client's requirements for their target clients. Then the second one, we do email outreach. So we do basically what we do in the first package, then we do the outreach campaign via email.
Chapter 4: Who are some of ZenOutreach's current customers?
And then the last one is a custom plan. So the client let us know what type of skills they are looking for into a sales development representative. And we connect them with that sales development representative. So the last one is a bit different.
And tell me more about, can you name some of the customers, the SaaS customers you're working with right now?
So we've worked with many requests before.
Sorry, which company?
Many requests.
Many requests.
Okay.
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Chapter 5: What results has ZenOutreach delivered for its clients?
Yeah. We've worked with Brave Software. Those are the two main ones.
Okay. So tell me more about many requests. What were they paying per month and what were you able to deliver to them in terms of results?
Okay. So they did with us first the list building service at first because they were doing their own email campaign. And when we started, we used to do LinkedIn campaigns, which we stopped now. So they used to use our services for that. So we did have good results with them. We increased the MRR of like 120%.
But is that going from like a dollar to a dollar 20 or like 10 grand a month to like, you know, 25 grand a month?
Oh, I'm sorry. Could you repeat that one?
Yeah. When you talk about increasing MR, instead of percentages, can you talk about the actual dollars? How much revenue do you help them at?
Um, well, in terms of revenues, um, uh, I don't have the numbers right now, like that by head, but I know we fund them like, um, they close several days with us, like, uh, four or five years. So, yeah.
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Chapter 6: How did ZenOutreach acquire its first customers?
And what did, what did most customers pay you on average per month?
Um, well, this building is $200 per month and, uh, email out is 550. The custom plan is a bit more expensive.
Okay. And how many customers are you working with today?
Today, we have six customers at the moment.
Okay. And who's we? Tell me more about your team.
Well, actually, we are a small team.
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Chapter 7: What challenges has ZenOutreach faced in customer retention?
It's me and another person. So I'm not sure what you want to know. Well, I'm from Belgium.
Two of you guys.
Yeah, two of us.
Are they a co-founder or do you own 100% of the agency?
No, I own 100% of the agency.
We love that. Okay. So you 100%, six customers at 200 ish bucks a month.
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Chapter 8: What are ZenOutreach's future plans for growth?
Does that mean you're doing, what is that? Like, you know, 2000, $3,000 a month in revenue?
Um, like right now we are on 1500 per month. Yeah.
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Have you thought about writing code or building your own tools to help your customers get more leads?
Yeah, we want to do in the future more developing a software as well. I'm not sure exactly how, but I do think it would be a solution also to give more, I'm not sure how to say it, to give more opportunities for customers as well and for us as well.
And how do you think about if you were going to grow your own tech team internally and build your own software MVP? How would you go about doing that? Are you an engineer? Could you build it or just outsource dev team you'd work with? How would you do it?
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