4.6 • 683 Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Ryan Allis launched iContact when he was 18. He made $15m cash when he exited in 2011 for $169m. He shares his negotiation with Salesforce Marc Benioff, how he found 10 profitable acquisition channels, 70,000 customers, and broke $50m in revenues. Will he buy it back for $1 one day?
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0:00.0 | You are listening to conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. |
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0:40.3 | Mark Benny, I'll pull the term sheet at the last minute. We ended up selling in February of 2012 for $169 million. |
0:44.3 | I ended up making about $15 million after taxes. |
0:51.3 | I got to meet Nathan about 14 years ago and 15 years ago in 2009 and Virginia, like he said, |
0:59.0 | and I think you were 20 at the time, something like that, 21. |
1:03.0 | So it's great to be back here today. |
1:06.0 | My background is building a company called Eye Contact in the email marketing space. I started that company 22 years ago as a freshman at University of North Carolina at Chapel |
1:16.1 | Hill. |
1:17.3 | And I was very sad last night to see the Tar Heels lose by two points to Alabama, but it's |
1:21.5 | okay. |
1:22.5 | Today what I do is I'm building a community specifically for SaaS CEOs and founders called |
1:28.4 | SAS Rise. We started that about six months ago and it's a community for SaaS founders with |
1:32.9 | at least a million in ARR up to 100 million in ARR. Check us out at SaaSR.com. What I'm going |
1:39.0 | to talk about today is how we scaled up customer acquisition and how we grew eye contact |
1:43.5 | from zero million to 50 million |
1:45.0 | in annual recurring revenue. And I'm going to talk about how we figured out our unit economics, |
1:50.8 | our math, our business math behind the business. I'm going to talk about how we bootstrapped. |
1:55.4 | We didn't take any outside capital. We lived in the office for the first year. We took no salaries for the first three years and just accrued them. |
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