1162 Pittsburg Placed Niche.com Passes 10m Uniques/Mo, $3m in SaaS Revenue

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2018

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Luke Skurman is the Founder and CEO of Niche.com. Luke holds bachelors and masters degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and is a member of its Board of Trustees; Luke is the Vice Chairman of the Research Innovation and Entrepreneurship committee, he is also a member of both the Finance and the Property & Facilities committees. Luke is a Co-Founder and Chairman of Ascender, a non-profit, 501(c)(3), focusing on bolstering innovation and entrepreneurship in the Pittsburgh region. Luke is the Founding Curator of the Global Shapers Pittsburgh Hub, an initiative of the World Economic Forum. Luke has won national awards related to entrepreneurship from BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Inc. Magazine and has been featured in numerous media outlets including The New York Times, CNN, and Fortune. Luke was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Pittsburgh region in 2016.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Don't outsource sales or tech and go after the biggest market possible from the niche.
0:05.4	CEO Luke founded the company back in 2013 officially from remnants that were, you know,
0:09.6	founded many years earlier that, call it 2002. But now they're scaling. They've got over 400
0:14.2	customers paying for their SaaS product, paying between 5 and 10 grand per year. So they're doing
0:18.3	about 250 grand a month just on their SaaS model. Their
0:21.4	SaaS model makes up a little less than 50% of their current revenue. So you can back into some
0:25.6	run rate stuff there. As the SaaS company is scaling 200% year over year in terms of growth,
0:30.2	he's figuring out how to increase retention. It's currently at 80% gross annual retention in terms
0:34.5	of logo today. Revenue retention is higher than that. He's making that
0:37.6	higher as time goes on. They just raise 6.6 million bucks to scale their team from where it is today,
0:42.4	60 folks based in Pittsburgh, up to 80, hopefully. This is the top entrepreneurs podcast where
0:50.0	founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn.
0:57.6	Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that
1:03.9	creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to two point seven
1:09.6	million. I had no money when I started the company.
1:12.1	It was $160 million, which is the size of any IPOs.
1:15.5	We're a bit strapped.
1:16.5	We have like 22,000 customers.
1:20.4	With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time,
1:24.6	major outlets like Inc are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes.
1:29.5	I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode.
1:34.3	Hello, everyone. My guest today is Luke Skirman. He's the founder and CEO of Nitch.com.
	...

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