820: How to Bankrupt a $4m/yr Business then Relaunch as SaaS

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

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

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2017

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Mateo Munoz. He’s the COO and managing director of the Americas for Duuzra or Duzzra Group. Mateo has been a crucial part of the management team that helped the company turnaround from group consultancy to its second series A and is leading it from its service-based model to a SaaS-based model.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Never Eat Alone
What CEO do you follow? – Falon Fatemi
Favorite online tool? — Glow Baby and Slack
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4.5
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Listen a little bit more”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:49 – Nathan introduces Mateo to the show
02:25 – Duuzra was launched in 2012 as an event technology company
- 02:35 – It was on prem and they’ve worked with different companies
02:58 – They saw where the market was going; so, they started a solution on the cloud
- 03:18 – They got a little bit of the model wrong and there was some mismanagement
- 03:31 – They’ve burned $3M from 2012-2015
- 03:40 – Their current CEO is from a venture-traditional bank
04:14 – Duuzra then rolled over and Mateo had to deal with the IRS because of their back taxes
04:52 – Duzzra Group is from UK
05:15 – Duzzra was opened up in USA as an Inc. founded by the original management group
06:12 – Duzzra had their Series A
06:45 – In 2016, Duzzra made over £2M
07:12 – Current team size is 30 from the 80 people in 2015
07:19 – Duzzra raised £2.3M in their series A
07:32 – 20 people are in the UK, the rest are remote and are from other countries
08:17 – Mateo was the VP in marketing and he also had his own advertising company
08:42 – Mateo was offered the MD role by the CEO, he also acquired some equity
09:11 – Series A was a typical venture, but it was done through private wealth
- 09:28 – They’re currently looking into raising £5M for series B
09:39 – Duzzra just released their SaaS product coming in as a beta product
10:05 – Target revenue for 2017
10:24 – Duzzra currently has a great team that is doing an amazing job
11:24 – The valuation will be important, but they also want the investors to be happy with their series B
12:30 – Duzzra has invested $400K on their new product
13:08 – An average pay per customer is $2500 a month
- 13:11 – The benchmark for Duzzra’s predictable revenue was the license for the actual event
13:39 – Duzzra is moving to a completely different model
- 13:51 – Duzzra is now a content delivery and engagement tool with analytics on the back end
- 13:58 – Applications can be packaged quickly and easily
14:36 – Duzzra currently has 10 paying customers for the SaaS side and they still have their full-service suite
15:13 – CAC is around $3500
17:15 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Sometimes you have to accept that there will be loss at times while building a company.
If the business can maintain its credibility (even after burning millions) investors will still trust you and will invest.
Listen to others and learn from them; don’t try to do it all on your own.

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	Mateo, CEO at Duzra, took it through insolvency in 2015, where they grew it to about
0:05.5	$4 million that year in sales.
0:08.2	They had put about $3 million down the drain.
0:10.6	They had John White parachute in from a bank to lead a CEO as they start now transitioning
0:15.7	from kind of a one-time managed services business to a SaaS model.
0:19.7	They raised some money, 2.3 million pounds in
0:23.0	their Series A. 2016 did about $2 million in revenue. They've already hit $2 million here in 2017
0:27.6	on target for $4 million by the end of this year, currently raising a $6.5 million round of
0:33.5	funding for their series B. This is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one
0:40.1	or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much
0:46.0	revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
0:51.8	I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell bent on global
0:56.2	domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sole mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
1:03.1	Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B2B SaaS CEO that I've
1:07.5	interviewed. If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates, customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and
1:15.2	data points, you can go to g-et-l-a-com. Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself.
1:22.6	It's so freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that
1:27.6	have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full
1:32.8	this month, but you can go to gitlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look,
1:37.0	there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of. You've
1:40.7	probably heard of them. They're big, big private equity billions and billions under management so
1:44.3	it's an impressive waiting list go get on now at git latka dot com hello everyone my guest today is
	...

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