EP 383: Prospect.io $0 to $17k in MRR in 6 Months, 400 Customers

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

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

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2016

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Vincenzo Ruggiero, founder of Prospect.io. Vincenzo has a wife and two children, with one born just days ago. With the chaos of a new baby, Vincenzo has still found a way to support himself and his family and manage a new and growing business.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Getting Real, Rework
What CEO do you follow? — Joel Gascoigne
Favorite online tool? — Freshbooks, Slack, Trello, Appear
Do you get 8 hours of sleep?—No
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? — Be humble.

Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:15 – Nathan introduces Vincenzo
01:40 – Prospect.io is a sales software
02:00 – Recurring revenue from monthly plans
02:20 – Launched in January 2016
02:40 – June revenue was $17k
03:15 – Customer pays more the more they use it
04:10 – Average is $45/month
04:30 – How they have driven customers
04:50 – word of mouth
05:50 – Different types of customers
06:20 – Self-funded
06:45 – Team of 3
07:30 – The system in Belgium makes Vincenzo the sole founder
08:00 – Vincenzo started with other web businesses before he started Prospect.io
09:10 – His family (two kids)
09:35 – How he supports himself
09:45 – He lives off of savings and a very low salary
11:10 – The company breaks even
11:30 – Growth each month
11:50 – How they got such fast growth
13:15 – Customer churn is 6% monthly
14:25 – Customer acquisition cost is $50
15:00 – Lifetime value is $570
15:30 -- @VincenzoR on Twitter
17:35 -- The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
Plan out financially how you be able to afford to start a new business.
Don’t let your arrogance get in the way of your success.
A success work life does not have to take away from a success home life.
Resources Mentioned:
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible.
Freshbooks - The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts.
Leadpages – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.
Slack, Trello, and Appear – Online tools that Vincenzo uses for his business

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
0:09.0	You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
0:16.0	I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
0:18.0	Five and six million.
0:19.0	He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 units sold mark Five and six million. He is hell bent on global domination.
0:21.2	We just broke our $100,000 unit soul mark.
0:23.9	And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
0:27.6	Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Ferran.
0:32.9	He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it. For your chance to win
0:39.1	100 bucks every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word
0:44.5	Nathan to 3344 to prove that you did it to enter. This is episode 383. Coming up tomorrow morning,
0:53.1	you'll hear from Carissa Hill, who has turned Facebook live into webinars.
0:57.7	She sold over $105,000 on her last Facebook live.
1:02.5	She'll break down how she does it, including the psychology and the tool she uses.
1:07.6	Top tribe.
1:08.9	Good morning to you.
1:10.3	Our guest this morning is Vincenzo. And I got to tell you, you know, this guy is his company is Prospect.io, but he's been an entrepreneur for almost 10 years in the web industry, mainly software as a service or SaaS. He's currently the founder and CEO of Prospect.io. So, Vincenzo, Ruggiero, are you ready to take us to the top?
1:33.1	Yeah. Sure. All right. Let's do this. So first things first, what is prospect.io and how do you make money?
1:40.5	So, Prospect.com.com. It's a software, an online software, a SaaS software, in fact.
1:47.0	What we do is, you know, sales prospecting automation.
1:50.0	So we help sales representative to do prospecting online in a more efficient way, you know.
1:58.0	Great. So what, tell us how you make money.
	...

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.