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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

1594 The Main Reason He Took $1.5m Government Loan at 4% Instead of VC

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

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

4.6683 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2019

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

SaaS Founder with a passion for Employee Engagement. Ex-Google Sales Manager focused to make feedback better for everyone. Living in Amsterdam, father of two daughters.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

They are serving 250 customers, helping them really get feedback on their onboarding and recruitment

0:05.2

process. They really specialize there as he's focused as customer rates. They each pay about

0:09.1

$600 bucks per month. So doing about $150 grand per month right now in revenue, that's up from

0:12.7

about $100,000 per month, just a year ago. So good growth. They've raised $750,000 in equity capital,

0:17.8

another $1.5 million in terms of a loan from the government there in

0:21.4

Europe. They were burning about, call it 40, 50 grand per month, which obviously they can do because

0:25.7

they raise capital. As they look to scale, especially in the States, team of 35 people right now

0:29.0

between Europe and Romania, 10% revenue churn per year, but that cohort also expands by 10%, so 100% net

0:35.4

revenue retention, willing to spend up to $9,000 to get a

0:38.3

$600 a month customer. So 16 month payback period as they look at taking over the review space.

0:44.5

Hello, everybody. My guest today is Lars Van Weren. He's a SaaS founder with a passion for

0:48.4

employee engagement. He's an ex-Google sales manager focused on making feedback better for everyone.

0:53.0

Currently living in Amsterdam father of two daughters and building starred.com.

0:57.1

Lars, are you ready to take us to the top?

0:59.3

Absolutely, Nathan.

1:00.4

All right.

1:00.8

What is starred and what's your business model?

1:02.9

How do you make money?

1:04.5

Yeah, so Star is a software as a service company.

1:07.7

And what we see is that every company needs feedback from their clients but clients are

1:12.3

pretty reluctant to fill in your very old-fashioned and never-ending surveys so yeah we try to make

1:19.4

feedback better for everyone and we do that by making it very personal very short and sweet and with

...

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