782: Crypto: With $50k MRR, He's Buildling Crypto Database To Track Accuracy

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

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

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2017

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Bruce Pon. He’s the CEO and founder of BigchainDB and he’s been playing in the crypto world.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Mungerisms by Charlie Munger
What CEO do you follow? – Vitalik Buterin
Favorite online tool? — Streak CRM
How many hours of sleep do you get?— At least 8
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Buy bitcoin earlier”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

02:03 – Nathan introduces Bruce to the show
02:44 – Bruce built BigchainDB to manage data
02:55 – Bitcoin is a payments cryptocurrency in a global network while Ethereum is a business logic in a global network
03:11 – People pass trusted data over the blockchain network for enterprise use cases and consumer applications
- 03:32 – From the business logic, you can exchange bitcoin and other types of value
03:42 – The problem with the use case on top of the bitcoin blockchain 3 years ago was it didn’t scale
04:04 – Bruce was building io which is putting intellectual property into the blockchain
- 04:25 – You can sell your intellectual property over the network
- 04:48 – It was built over the bitcoin blockchain and got difficult to develop over time
- 04:54 – Ascribe.io needed meta data about the creative work, author and licensing model
- 05:04 - Ascribe.io isn’t just built for bitcoin—it’s like trying to using a Lamborghini to move your house
- 05:49 - Ascribe.io had AI, scientists and other PhDs who told them that building Ascribe.io wasn’t worth it
06:09 – Team size is around 20 and is based in Berlin
06:24 – BigchainDB has raised $6M in price round series A
06:41 – Open source software is traditionally a dual license model
06:53 – BigchainDB is looking at an enterprise model
- 07:00 – They’re looking into the ICO craze too
07:21 – BigchainDB is like a SaaS model
- 07:27 – They’re looking at per transaction charges but it may not work for the long-run
07:54 – BigchainDB just released their 1.0
- 08:08 – They give premium support
08:27 – Bruce is looking into 5-6 figures per month for their starting price point
08:58 – One-third of the work in businesses happen in the back office
09:13 – Blockchain allows you to have a single source of truth
09:29 – BigchainDB unlocks the opportunity for different organizations to have a single source of truth
09:48 – When you can make IoT, AI and blockchain tools, you can track the product from the inception until it gets to the customer’s hand
- 10:01 – The customer will now understand how the product is made
- 10:03 – The regulators will know that the product followed the guideline
- 10:07 – The company will know if there’s a recall or quality issue and they will know where exactly the product is
10:40 – BigchainDB can work with different kinds of products
11:20 – Blockchain is definitely auditable
- 11:30 – Before the product comes to you, it will be signed by entities with a cryptographic key in every process
- 12:00 – With AI, you can also see who is in the very process of making your product
12:34 – The key metric Bruce is measuring is the number of people that are building upon them
12:56 – Target MRR is $100K by end of 2017
13:03 – BigchainDB is currently at $50-60K MRR
13:19 – Number of customers
13:44 – There are 300 developers in BigchainDB’s channels and there are 5K clones of their software
13:54 – BigchainDB has 1K monthly downloads of their whitepaper
14:45 – The ratio of developer to clone is the 300 developers to 5K clone requests
16:05 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Data that is passed over the blockchain network can be used for enterprise use case and consumer applications.
The beauty of blockchain is that it is auditable and has accountability capabilities.
Some tools that are built over the bitcoin network won’t always work; even if you have the best people in the industry.

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	Bruce Pond had success early on with many other startups, but now really focused, it will
0:04.6	specifically ascribe, obviously now building big chain DB, really to create a master
0:11.7	record across all these different kind of blockchains and Bitcoin and Ethereum, et cetera,
0:17.4	specifically to just, you know, he gave the example of tracking, you know, materials in a hat, right?
0:21.3	So currently serving, you know, about five to ten customers paying, you know, five to ten
0:25.2	grand per month.
0:25.9	This goal is to get 100 grand to 100 grand per month in MRR by the end of this year.
0:30.1	About $6 million raised with their team of 20, mostly engineers, PhDs.
0:34.9	This is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number
0:39.8	two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue
0:45.4	they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
0:51.0	I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million.
0:55.9	He is hell bent on global domination.
0:58.7	We just broke our $100,000 unit sole mark.
1:01.4	And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
1:07.0	Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B2B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed. If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates,
1:11.0	customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to
1:15.5	G-E-T-L-A-T-K-A.com. Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself. It's so
1:22.2	freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month.
1:31.4	So we're full this month, but you can go to Gitlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month.
1:35.8	And look, there's big people on the waiting list.
1:37.6	I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of, you've probably heard of them.
	...

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