822: SaaS: 25 Years Old and $250k+ in MRR, Here's Trick to Starting With No Developers

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.6 • 701 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2017

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ian Blair. He founded BuildFire while he was in college and has grown up to become one of the most successful app builders with 30 employees and close to 10K apps in the app store. His expertise is online marketing and growth hacking.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Good to Great
What CEO do you follow? – David Skok and Jason Lemkin
Favorite online tool? — Ahrefs
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7.5
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Ian wished he would have taken a crash course on how the world actually works

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:55 – Nathan introduces Ian to the show
02:37 – BuildFire is a mobile app building platform that allows non-technical people to build their own app with no coding required
02:50 – BuildFire is like the WordPress for mobile app
- 03:18 – BuildFire allows customization
03:36 – Ian started BuildFire in college
- 03:40 – BuildFire has a reseller program
- 04:18 – In 2013, they were making $300K a year
- 04:32 – It was just for white labelling
- 04:42 – BuildFire was officially built with the technology in 2014
05:02 – BuildFire has raised $2.5M so far in a convertible note
05:46 – It was in 2015 when BuildFire broke their $1M a year mark
06:20 – In January of 2016, BuildFire 2.0 was launched where they added customization
06:48 – Since then, things took off
07:05 – In December 2016, BuildFire was doing a little less than $300K a month
07:33 – This year, BuildFire is developing
07:59 – BuildFire has an ongoing subscription fee and upfront payment
- 08:20 – BuildFire is getting close to $200K a month for their SaaS side
08:33 – BuildFire is now leaning more into their professional services
09:15 – Total number of customers
09:25 – Customers pay starts at $59, $149 or $499 a month
- 09:50 – Average a month is around $400 per customer
10:40 – Team size is 40
10:57 – Ian self-funded BuildFire initially
- 11:11 – Their current CTO started the initial development for BuildFire
12:00 – BuildFire gets customers mainly through online marketing
- 12:20 – Paid ads spend is around $10K a month
12:30 – BuildFire also has a lot of organic traffic and they're going to tradeshows as well
13:48 – Monthly logo churn
14:25 – Revenue churn
14:50 – BuildFire is on its way to a more predictable revenue model by the end of 2017
15:31 – CAC
17:00 – SaaS businesses are capital intensive
20:00 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Listen to your customers and make adjustments to your products depending on their needs.
Online marketing is a necessity for every businesses.
College won't teach you how the real world works.

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	in 2012 was just a hustler selling a white labeled version of his product of folks did about
0:04.7	25 grand a month or 300 grand that year in revenue has since scaled between a thousand and
0:09.5	5,000 customers now paying a minimum of about 59 bucks per month unit economics look healthy
0:14.9	2015 was their first million dollar year 2016 they wrapped up at about 250 grand per month
0:20.0	in December so you can obviously do the run rate math, well over two and a half million bucks.
0:23.7	Run rate there, 2017, looking to continue to grow.
0:26.6	They raised $2.5 million, all convertible notes, gross churn, logo churn monthly, 5%.
0:31.2	Revenue churn somewhere closer down to 3%.
0:33.6	Team of 30 out there in San Diego, building build fire.
0:37.4	Over 10,000 apps drag and drop
0:39.2	build the platform they also help you with customization.
0:42.4	This is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their
0:48.2	industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
0:51.7	You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks
0:55.2	like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell
1:02.1	bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
1:09.6	Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B2B SaaS CEO that I've
1:14.0	interviewed.
1:14.8	If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates, customer
1:18.7	accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to G-E-T-L-A-T-K-A.com.
1:26.0	Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself. It's so 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
1:35.8	I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list.
	...

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