Going from $0 to $300K MRR as a self-funded SaaS business | SaaStock Tour London | SaaS Conferences

[Music] and see it so we've done through that growing from zero to 300 K you said in four years maybe that was alive for me actually took five what I've learned about growth funding and how I set priorities had started with a sexy title so I'm the one who can move to the next slide create here so first first things first I want you to look at this graph and see how painful it's been so we started at the the first quarter of 2012 so before we didn't have a tracking system or acuity was not up or I don't remember we were quite you know a little bit enterprise-e a little bit self-service we didn't really know here we started self-service for little bump and then flat flat flat flat flat flat flat flat I mean there was berries grow when you look if you if you look at the if you looked at those numbers at q3 q4 2014 you would see some growth it was like an additional 1,000 every month 2000 maybe so it was hell hopefully horrendously slow and during all these times we were losing money a little bit of money like 5 K 4 K 6 km on Benin I didn't pair sells for like a year we paid ourselves minimum wage for like a year and a half so it was really really difficult couldn't sleep at night really we were in the tunnel it was all dark and we didn't know where the light was that's really how we felt especially me and then but we kind of knew what we needed to do to get out of the tunnel and try to see the light but we didn't we had no idea how long it would take and we started to work on those different pivots I'm not going to go through them it's too long we take an entire 20 minutes and in 2015 we started to get a little lift and then in 2016 and 2017 that lift goes on and goes on and goes on and now we're well on to finishing the year at 500 K and we're going for 1 million for next year which from the outside looks like a great story but as Steve Jobs I love Steve Jobs quotes they're all great overnight success usually takes a long time and it was true for him it's true for anybody on on the business except for a couple of exceptions that the media love to brag about that those are like the 0.1% exception which is cool that we have four more years to be in unicorn because we've already spent six years so now we have four more years to be the what it is one billion dollar company which I don't really care about and what I learned from that is also something that Gary Vaynerchuk you guys know Gary Vaynerchuk everybody knows Gary there is one thing Gary says over and over and over in all these videos is you need to be patient patience patience patience is the number one skill and the number one attribute that you need to build and and he's the first one to say it took me a long time to be successful and everybody knows Gary yes like more energy than all of us combined and when you look at him say I can't be this guy so good it's so good but he had to be patient to be successful we all have to be patient to be successful so and trust me for me was like beyond hard the second thing that kind of goes with the patience is persistence things always take more time than you expect you build a house it will take more time you build a software it will take more time you're looking for success you will take more time and I want to tell you a story about that when we started Agora both Ben and I we've been working together for ten years and we've been failing at everything almost and it was just it was a bit of a despair we were not in a good mood it was kind of okay this is our last try you know where that's the third pivot where we're not going to try a fourth pivot this one has to work and I told Ben well we were starting and launching the software and we were looking at like a forty nine euro ARP you and I told then a year from now we need to be making forty nine thousand euro a month I mean if we make 49 km and I'll keep going if we don't I'll shut it down I'm done I'm done with efforts I'm done with minimum wage I've done with I'm done with not succeeding basically took us three years to get to 49 K so that's where persistence even though you you want to get there if it's going up and to the right keep doing it it may take three years but what's coming after will be worth it this the third thing I learn also is uh everybody tells you you need a big vision you need to change the market disrupt dominate the world this is what you need is a strong drive to success and I want to tell you the story I heard from a guy named David cancel David I know where lies if you listen to us is the founder of drift great product and it has an awesome podcast called seeking wisdom which is as awesome as Alex's podcasts a stock which you all have to subscribe when you get out and he told that story which resonated with me our big time it's it's it's a little bit long story but I want to tell you because I think it's very important to to get the the bottom line of it so it's a young guy who wants to be successful and it goes to a party where a lot of successful entrepreneurs any spot and all the entrepreneurs been successful in goes to him and he said I want to be successful I want to have the same level of success that you've had please teach me how and the successful guy says okay fine meet me tomorrow at 4 a.m. at the river and I'll teach you and they meet at the river at 4 a.m. and the the old guy tell the one guy's okay you're still ready you want to be successful so right for this yes I am and they start walking toward the river until they add water to the ankles and then the old guy looks at them sell you're still ready for success if you want to be successful and it's miss 4 a.m. it's kind of chilly in Boston in the winter but the young guys is super motivated he wants to get there he says yes I'm ready keep walking into the water until they got water to the waist and the old guy looks at the young guy and say you used your in it you sure you you want to continue learning how to be successful here as you guys I want to be successful and they keep walking until they get water to the chin and then the old guy I mean are you sure it's chilly here right it's freezing it's the error I want to learn I want to be successful then he takes his hat in put his head under water for like a minute and the guy can breathe it's over Texas right off and he said what did you think when you had your head under water for a minute and the guy said I wanted to breathe I want you to brave and the old girl looks at him and says you'll be ready to be successful when you'll have your hand in the world like this and the only thing you'll be thinking about will be want to be successful so I love that story because obviously it's a story it made me love - it's a story it's an image but the images you need to have a strong drive and used to think about your success and where you want to go every time in every situation even the worst so I love that story and I wanted to share it with you thank you David cancel for sharing it so that's my rant about VCS in the room VCS don't care about good business they don't care they just care about business that are shooting for the moon we're going to be owning the market we're going to own the market we're going to be leader the first billion dollar yada yada yada still seven of out of there ten investments will miserably fail so they've been mistaken seven times out of ten at least but they don't care about buying a good business or the promise of a good business we've learned that the hard time the hard way four times we try to raise money in 2011 go get out of the room we tried again in 2012 we got a little bit of seed money to 250k have to be perfectly honest and transparent here but it was very small and we tried again in 2015 they say no and we tried again last year we ended up in November by us saying no and we also try to apply to 500 startups and they said no markets too competitive your competitors are too big they're - which we don't know where how you're going to make it ya-da-da-da so the thing is right now we have good metrics we will make profit every month we're not very motivated anymore to give away equity and to have someone in the company that's not necessarily going to help us apart from the money but our takeaway is saying god we didn't need the money to keep going and my advice to you as much as you can is try to build something that does not require raising money because if you do that you're basically playing lottery you're basically buying a lottery ticket and say I hope I'm gonna have the VC in that lottery ticket oh I don't fall I go back to work and then to my old job I hate that I hate playing I hate lottery I never bought a lottery ticket in my entire life because I hate the idea of I don't own this I have no control over this and I advise you to do whatever you can to do that so very quickly arm you know some businesses require VC funding some others don't you need you heavily need salespeople you need VC money it's too expensive it takes too much time you are selling to the enterprise you need sales people you need VC money your thing has no viral effect in it whatsoever you want to be able to Olin one product that does it all in you need VC money so there are a lot of stuff that you don't want to do because they will force you to raise money and there are a lot of stuff that you can do with very little money no money is difficult but very little is feasible if you're in business is inbound SMB you wanna do a Best of Breed single feature and so on and so forth so it could do an entire presentation so I'm going to move to what we've actually done so again we have ten minutes here not even ten minutes to get to profitability so I won't just share a couple of a couple of okay we're good a couple of things we're done the first thing we've done and I know there are a lot of French people in the room be truly international from day one and I mean this I mean you hear me speaking i I spoke in English in many American conferences in my social media deal ecosystem as on that many time ninety percent of my friends are Americans or English mostly Americans because that's where all the influencer and all the our ecosystem in the social media space are and 2/3 of our company don't even speak French we're 34 people um 24 of them are Argentinian Brazilian Mexican American Irish and so on and so forth and and Slovak into and as a consequence we use English as our primary work language and when I say we use English as our primary work working language is everything we do is first in English and then in French and Spanish in Portuguese in whatever other language that we want to operate in obviously when we speak on flag to each other it's in English because the Spanish don't speak French the Portuguese on stick French and so on and so forth so it's like when you're a founding team and Ben and I we're both French and we speak French in our first five employees were French it's kind of easy to say hey let's speak French more confortable it's my native language I can make jokes they can actually understand in English it's more difficult but resist that just try to do everything in English which also means that if you want to be international I think only 20% of our clients are in France 80 percent or outside of France you need to hire people locally you need to hire people in the UK and it hire people in the US unity are people in Brazilians to hire people in spanish-speaking countries in South America because it's cheaper than Spain and you need to hire them locally mean remotely so try get prepared and organize your company in a way that it can work on a remote situation so out of 34 employees 24 of our people work away from Paris 3 put your butts in planes and go where your influencers and your ecosystems are for us it was the u.s. I think the first two years I was in the US every two months speaking at conferences attending conferences networking with people get you get out of the building I mean everybody has read the Lean Startup so do that but do that in the country where things are happening which 90% of the time is the US and finally bigger tech infrastructure and your website and everything to be ready for multi-language so you may not want to you may want to start in English only and then extend to French and other languages but make sure that what you build will be able to be turned into a multi-language like in the click of the button the second thing is you need to invest in marketing initiatives that compound over time do not do one shots I know it's exciting to get product and featured I know it's excited exciting to be a featured on TechCrunch or Mashable or whatever the hell is else but it is not going to compound and if you spend too much time and energy getting there trust me I know a ton of companies that have been featured in TechCrunch and product cons that are dead today I know very few companies that have consistently built the marketing engine that compound that's evergreen and that the king they can keep cranking that are dead today it works much better over time so content SEO or retargeting paid outreach referrals building free tools like pub spot is done very successfully for so many years things and whatever its then its tactic so it doesn't really matter here but you need to when you do something marketing you need to think about bullet compound can I keep doing this and add more and more and more or will it do like this and if it does that don't do it until you reach at least 500k or maybe a millionaire are and then you can start playing PR and stuff be obsessed about what your priority as a founder and what's your team priority I mean working a lot is not the solution to your problem working on the right things is the solution to your problem and trust me this is not easy to find out and still today six years down the road I wake up every more every Monday morning and I'm like okay I need to think about my priorities for this week and I need to think about my team's priority for this week and I need to make sure that they're aligned and if you don't do that exercise regularly and you don't check on yourself and your team on a regular basis they will be misaligned I guarantee you I mean priorities is something it's a moving target it changes all the time and if you don't redefine and rethink for your priorities on a regular basis and force yourself to that exercise things will get off sidetracked guaranteed which leads me to that because a lot of time and I have to be honest with you I didn't know what to do I didn't know what priorities I should invest on I said what should I do now what should I do I mean I'm lost I had three people there in my team others hired them I don't know what they should be doing when I was lost I said okay the one thing that will never be a waste in their some of the customers invest in customer support customer success educate your customer customer advocacy customer this customer that whatever if you do something that's aiming towards your customers and you make sure that your customers get better service better support nicer faster whatever it will be a good investment a few times so work on your priorities and when you don't know make customer your priority and do everything around them I love this one it's really it that your product will suck it will suck day one it will suck the 10 in will sick day 100 let me tell you another story I had a chat with Gale Goodman Gale Goodman is the CEO and founder of Constant Contact for those of you who don't know constant contacts a small SAS company that was sold 1.2 billion dollars six months ago in Boston based in Boston and she's basically the competitors of MailChimp everybody knows malchemia camp is the self-funded example foreign millionaire are and Constant Contact 400 millionaire are exactly the same but VC back and I was talking to her and I told her yeah but you know where version 5 of product but it sucks kind of stuck we're getting to these version 6 and it's going to be much better and then she told me Emmerich this will never stop your product you will always look at your product and think suck it sucks thank God we have a new version coming up and then your new version comes up and then it sucks again for some other reason and then you're looking for that so your product will suck and the big mistake I've made in the early days and then witness that and you know I'm sure you remember I said let's not do any promotion right now let's not do too much too many marketing right now we need that over feature but then can you build it please and then he'd build the future and then I say yeah but we need that other feature and so on and so forth I was basically hiding behind the fear of all the product they won't like it they won't buy it and I was not doing the job of promoting and marketing it and thank God 10 years later after a couple of divots I've learned that whatever I'll do whatever it takes so when the products radio when I feel the products ready it's already cranking it's all the promotion the marketing the awareness the traffic the in down all that stuff's already coming up so it's hard because you feel like I should wait for this to be great so I can talk to people and show then that great thing of mine you will never be great so do it now some people will like it few in the beginning more as you move on but they will like it and when you're ready for the big prime time and the bigger prime time and the big day you'll have your audience and you'll have you'll have your supporters to do it early prepare for it everything you've not ready prepare for it and I know I've been I've been I've been guilty of not doing it for so long find that one thing that works for you and double down don't spread yourself too thin hey let's do some Pig marketing and let's go to a conference let's do an e-book and let's do a blog and let's do some videos and let's no don't do that fine try try different things but then when you feel traction in one thing just double down on that one so for us you know over the years many things I've worked over time obviously content at some point is you at some point and then they stopped working and we try something else but what has worked for us in the last year is user reviews so we are in a very competitive market social media management software like super competitive and the competitors every zillions of dollars very very hard there's so much money and share voice that it impossible for you to appear organically on Google's results so but the first organic result is now user review site called g2 crowd and what we've done very early on we've invested we've rnps and lots of different strategies and tactics to get our clients to give us reviews on g2 crowd where I have we have 350 right now but we started three years ago and look what it does it puts us like almost like the big guys within bazillion of dollars and what's even better is the market leader HootSuite looks like look we bit him on beat it on every single items is if you setup I mean quality of support doing business with product direction they look bad and we look good and this is probably today the biggest driver for us for inbound leads and inbound marketing last but not least a couple of tools we love I know Tarte Mobile is a friend of SAS talk they were there in September chart Mobile is a tool that basically makes your SAS metrics so freaking easy to read and understand that we love it I have to say I'm totally addicted to it I have the mobile app on my phone but I check when I get up in the morning when I go to bed in the evening just to see how much turn or growth I had today it's and it's really amazing in terms of what you can get so like two years 50 years ago we didn't have ADD and creating investor presentation or team presentation to to show there or SAS metrics was a nightmare and now it's like walk in the park slack I'm not going to talk about slack but it makes remote and at the the team across you know four continents be able to work together and have that team feeling and team spirit feeling support hero because it's a dear friend of mine who launched it who is our basically the best knowledgebase for support for SAS products because it gives you insight so when you when you have a lot of support tickets coming in it helps you improve your support content so you get less of them and it helps you understand what people are searching for where they're finding answers not finding answers and and when you get to that point where you get too many incoming and you don't want to hire a third or fourth or fifth person for support but you just want to better offer better self support it does a great job in the last one receptive they were also at SAS talk in in in September it's also related to support it's basically the best software possible to gather feedback on your product so you know you know all these people say I want that teacher when they feature can you build YouTube can you add this can you add that and receptive is basically is it's like mini AI that's going to tell you okay that feature is requested by your highest paid clients this one is requested by your free trials this one is and they can rank home how much they want that feature and they are they have to like a system of point so it makes your product direction and product meeting much easier I loved receptive and it's also young dynamic startups led by two girls in the UK were very very cool and nice and a guy too so yeah that's my last slide and now I am open for questions what's the hardest thing about which it takes too long it's long long long with lots of those that's the hardest thing because you can get to the exact same point like you know mail chamber sis Constant Contact is the perfect example those two companies got to the exact same level of mr our number of clients say in awareness one didn't raise any money and the other raised a ton of money and got a ton of dilution out of it as well so you'll never raise VC then never say never ever when we don't need VC money right now so we're not looking for it it's all fully time consuming I mean you guys you've raised money to some of you right it's a pain in the neck it takes forever you have to convince this guy you think that they know you know and they don't know and it's it's horrendous it's horrible especially Matt you're laughing yeah it is right it is it's horrible it's not like we don't like you it's just that it's difficult and it takes us away from our business and what we love doing is grower business that raise money so maybe you will do someday but right now we're focusing on the business it works for us it's growing and we think our time as founders is better invested in growing that business how many employees do you have now 34 well actually it's a good question only ten in France and eight in the US or nine and we have a subsidiary in the US so technically the French and the American employees or employees and it's actually a good question and I'm wondering how the other remote company are doing it because we we are working a lot on what can we do with the Mexicans the Argentinians the Irish and the other guys because we have people from other places we can't have them as employees because we don't have a legal entity there so we were doing contractor work but we build a contractor agreement and a freelance agreement or whatever service agreement with them that kind of look like an employee an employer employee agreement where they have vacation sick leave health care and you know lots of stuff we basically we want them to have the same level of protection that our employees we can't legally do it so we're trying to do it via our contract so how many years to get to ten well for us that's going to be what's probably going to be seven seven or eight ten million AR yeah so we expect to get to ten million in 2018 probably second half of 2018 these being French founders and advantage yes actually when I went to the u.s. in the early years I was going to these conferences and sometimes I was speaking I thought I have an accent it's horrible they're gonna look at me like I'm a fool and now they love it they actively love it they say you're cute you have your exotic all the 40 50 something women came to me and became friends no it's it really I mean yeah you can't make that kind of joke in the US right you could get thrown out of the other room now it's actually invented they like the exotic side things like we like when Americans or or foreigners come come to our country and speak with an accent and as long as we can understand what they say it's all good so yeah it's an advantage of overseas and obviously there are very few French founders in the u.s. who are visible so when you are a visible in your industry or your ecosystem it's actually a plus which I thought was not true is it efficient to enter the US market without a being yes absolutely you don't need to have an office in the u.s. you have to need to have native speakers you need to have people who are from there and you can proofread your copy until you know that word doesn't work trust me it doesn't work like focus it doesn't work we have a lot of private joke in the company from our Americans who make fun of our French accent but you don't need to have local presence you need to have native speakers wherever they are and obviously if they are in the time zone is better especially if you want to provide support timely but I I would say you don't you know in in 2017 in a cell service in down base of course I'm not Enterprise on one cell to the enterprise or not sales people or field sales or whatever so it works for me too obviously if you're selling to the enterprise a different story what is biggest deal size ah 10k a year something like that like that's probably what we get the biggest the average is 120 K under 20 euro per month nr what about cells we have one inside salesperson I know we had that discussion before it got started we have one inside salesperson and she is packed with demos all day long and she absolutely freaking love it but for now yeah we have one half time french-speaking salesperson and one half time spanish-speaking salesperson but they do a lot less than the english-speaking one is doing how many sales people so like I said one full-time inside cells and one two three three part-time Portuguese Spanish and French but they also do customer success and they also really do the support they also do a little bit of everything like they are kind of like a country manager with the focus on inside selves

Channel: SaaStock

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Keywords: saas, saastock17, saastock on tour, Agorapulse, software as a service, salesforce, Self funded SaaS business

Id: KrBjQMusDzs

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017