815: SaaS: He's Replacing the iClicker Growing From $800k ARR to $1.5m ARR in 6 months

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

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

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2017

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Johnny Warström. He’s the CEO and founder of Mentimeter. He’s an engineer from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He’s worked in 10 countries and visited over 60. He loves adventures and growing his company and he’s getting married soon.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
What CEO do you follow? – Sebastian Siemiątkowski
Favorite online tool? — Intercom
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Do more crazy stuff”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:44 – Nathan introduces Johnny to the show
02:21 – Johnny founded Mentimeter with his three friends right out of university
02:38 – Mentimeter is an interactive presentation
- 03:00 – You can connect the audience's’ phones with the presentation and they can vote or participate
03:53 – Mentimeter has a free and premium model
04:04 – Mentimeter has over 10M users and 400K presenters who lead meetings
- 04:31 – The presenters are the ones who pay
04:50 – Mentimeter currently has 6K enterprise customers
05:03 – Mentimeter is purely a B2B SaaS
05:36 – Average customer pay per month is $150 a year
05:56 – Mentimeter also offers packages
06:13 – ARR is around $1.5M
06:47 – Mentimeter was launched in 2003 and was initially bootstrapped as a side project
- 07:00 – Johnny was part of Telecom and his co-founders were managing consultants
- 07:18 – It took them 2-3 months to build Mentimeter and they showed it to their bosses
07:40 – Mentimeter had their $350K angel round in 2004 and they have a total of $500K funds raised
07:52 – Team size is 16 and everyone is based in Stockholm
08:25 – Mentimeter has no paid activities and relies fully on organic growth
08:53 – The goal of Mentimeter is to be a mass market product
09:38 – Mentimeter has 1 in sales, 9 in product and 6 in marketing
10:27 – Mentimeter was part of 500 S tartups last spring
11:17 – Fully weighted CAC
11:42 – Payback period is almost instant
12:20 – The team has been doing different experiments to increase customer engagement
13:48 – Mentimeter is on -5 net churn
14:22 – Mentimeter has a licensed model
14:51 – 1% monthly churn
- 15:18 – Some do not continue with their annual plan
- 15:44 – Mentimeter won’t give money back, but there’s a 40-day refund
17:00 – Johnny shares about a big, annual event in Europe that he’s a big fan of
- 17:00 – Mentimeter has a built-in, voting module which functions as a simulation for a contest
- 17:37 – Mentimeter received a lot of attention from that event 2 years ago
18:12 – 2017 revenue goal is $2.3M
18:17 – 2016 revenue was $800K
18:52 – Johnny targets $10M in ARR for 2019
19:22 – “We’re not looking for funding at the moment”
19:38 – Johnny isn’t interested in selling the company at the moment
21:33 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Keep an open mind—your side project can be your next successful business.
Business ideas can come from the most unexpected of places—don’t discount your ideas.
Success gained from organic traffic IS possible.

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	founder launched the company back of metameter back in 2003 did about 300k in an angel round in
0:05.7	2004 to start seeding the growth of the company today over 6,000 paying customers doing about
0:11.7	1.5 million in monthly recurring revenue finished out 2016 at 800 grand in aar and targeting
0:17.4	2.3 million by the end of 2017 that is almost 3x year-over-year growth.
0:21.8	Pretty incredible. Team of 16, all based in Stockholm, with super healthy unit economics,
0:26.2	trying to figure out paid spend, so they can determine the best ways to scale.
0:30.7	This is the top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry
0:37.1	in terms of revenue or customer
0:39.3	base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like,
0:43.9	and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell
0:50.5	bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
0:54.6	And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
0:58.0	Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B-to-B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed.
1:03.1	If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates,
1:06.8	customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points,
1:13.8	you can go to g-et-l-a-t-a-com.
1:17.4	Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself.
1:19.0	It's so freaking valuable.
1:28.3	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. So we're full this month, but you can go to Gitlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big
1:32.3	people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of. You've probably
1:35.9	heard of them. They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an
1:39.7	impressive waiting list. Go get on now at Gitlatka.com. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Johnny
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nathan Latka, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Nathan Latka and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.