780: SaaS: How Did He 2x ARR In Last 12 Months from $6m to $12m?

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

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

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2017

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brandon Bruce. He’s the COO and co-founder of Cirrus Insights, the sales plugin for Gmail and Outlook. The company is number 41 on the Inc. 5000 and the fastest growing company in Tennessee. Brandon once raced his bicycle 508 miles across Death Valley in 35 hours and 7 minutes.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Energy Bus
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
Favorite online tool? — Google Drive and Slack
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I would’ve tried to start a full-fledged company earlier”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:50 – Nathan introduces Brandon to the show
02:25 – Brandon was in Episode 226 of The Top
- 02:38 – They had $550K in funding
02:48 – The team back then was 55-60 and now it’s 70
02:59 – No additional funding has been raised
03:16 – Cirrus Insights is a fast-growing company that didn’t rely too much on VC
03:35 – 5 years ago, Cirrus Insights wanted to solve the problem of going back and forth between Gmail and Salesforce
03:53 – Cirrus Insights brings Salesforce into the inbox
- 04:05 – They also help sales reps to seamlessly update Salesforce from the back end
- 04:13 – Salesforce isn’t actually a CRM
04:38 – Cirrus Insights just launched Flight Plans, which is an extension of their philosophy
- 04:42 – It is fully built-in to Outlook and Gmail
- 04:44 – It allows people to setup a sequence of sales touches
- 04:58 – It’s personalized and low scale
05:51 – Cirrus Insights’ growth is mostly from the Salesforce app exchange
- 06:00 – Continued growth is still from word-of-mouth
06:31 – Cirrus Insights has passed 100K seats with an average seat price of $6
- 06:53 – The average seat price has gone up now
07:19 – Flight Plans is a new tier
- 07:24 – Cirrus Insights is the product name and Flight Plans is going to be an addition
- 07:27 – There are now 3 additions to the product
08:18 – Cirrus Insights has just passed $1M in MRR
09:00 – Customers are choosing Cirrus Insights over others because some are overpaying and underutilizing marketing operations
09:29 – Marketing and sales are now working as a team with Cirrus Insights
09:58 – Cirrus Insights now charges $8 per seat
10:32 – Marketing operation has 4 big, unicorn companies
10:49 – There are now hundreds of tools in marketing operation and it will be interesting to see a consolidation
11:04 – Brandon is thinking customers will just utilize the best tools for the job
11:33 – Cirrus Insights is trying to position themselves to be the best at what they do
- 11:43 – They’re also continuing to offer more in the future
13:00 – Gross customer churn: 15-20% annually, but they’re targeting to lower it down to 10%
- 13:30 – There’s a lot less churn in the enterprise
14:17 – Net annual revenue churn is still negative and net seat churn is below 10%
15:16 – Most of the new leads are from word-of-mouth, with some small scale paid acquisition
- 15:22 – They’re more focused on the content that can drive more people
- 15:25 – Brandon has read The Slow Sale which is about how slowing down can win more deals
16:30 – Budget for paid marketing is $25-50K
- 16:43 – They’ve done sponsorship for conferences, but the ROI is getting low
- 17:25 – Check out their podcast: Our Love Hate Relationship with Sales, which drives sales as well
18:22 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

As saturated as the market is, there’s still a way for your business to stand out.
Marketing and sales teams are looking for tools that will not just help them with their workload, but encourage them to work together.
If your company constantly adds value, word-of-mouth will be your driver of sales.

Resources Mentioned:

Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	COO at Cirrus Insights and founder last time he was on which was about a year ago they had 100,000
0:05.1	customers now they're over 125,000 they increased arpoo from six bucks a seat to eight bucks a seat
0:11.0	they increased MRR from 640 grand to over a million so almost 2x year over year growth
0:15.5	which is great most importantly they're not thinking about additional product lines to diversify
0:19.3	like flight plans which I encourage you guys to check out.
0:22.7	This is the top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their
0:28.5	industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
0:32.1	You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and
0:36.0	how many customers they have.
0:38.7	I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
0:41.0	Five and six million.
0:41.9	He is hell bent on global domination.
0:43.8	We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
0:46.5	And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
0:49.9	Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B-to-B SaaS CEO that I've
0:54.4	interviewed. If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates,
0:58.6	customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to
1:03.2	G-E-T-L-A-T-K-A.com. Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself. It's so freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the
1:13.0	data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10
1:17.5	companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the
1:22.0	waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of, you've probably heard of them.
1:28.3	They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management.
	...

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