EP 426: 1500 Customers and Profitable, $5.5M Raised with Pablo Fuentes of Proven.com

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

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

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2016

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Pablo Fuentes, founder and CEO of Proven—a company that specializes in small business HR solutions. In addition to his passion for helping both minorities and women start businesses, Pablo also owns a BA from UCLA and an MBA from Stanford.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Art of Learning
What CEO do you follow? – Richard Branson
Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn

Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Absolutely
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? – “Start Jiu-jitsu earlier”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:35 – Nathan introduces Pablo to the show
02:04 – How Pablo’s business generates sales and collaborates with talent managers
- 03:21 – First year revenue in 2009 versus revenue in 2015
03:45 – How do you make money?
- 03:55 – When small businesses post a job
- 04:30 – Average pay per company location
- 04:51 – Average revenue per user
- 05:00 – Lifetime value
06:10 – Average churn = of 2 years
07:10 – August Revenue
08:10 – Subscription vs. pay as you go pricing
- 09:40 – 50% gross margins
10:15 – The biggest lever to increase profitability
- 11:55 – Company is fully remote
13:55 – Revenue goal for 2016
16:56 - @provenpablo
19:44 – What were you trying to raise before you stoped last year?
22:10 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Don’t give up just yet – give your company a time to grow.
Balance is everything.
Have a goal and focus on pursuing it.

Resources Mentioned:

Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to quality of Toptal developers.
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.
@provenpablo – Pablo’s Twitter handle.
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

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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.
0:21.2	We just broke our 100,000 unit sole mark.
0:23.9	And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
0:27.7	Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Avila.
0:32.4	He is a 17-year-old that doesn't want to go to college and he wants to start his own business.
0:36.6	For your chance to win 100 bucks just like Jose every Monday morning, simply subscribe
0:42.1	to this podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 3344 to prove that you did it.
0:49.6	Okay, many of you heard I made a big league acquisition of a company called Send Later, and I'm a greedy
0:55.5	business guy. I didn't want to give away equity to a technical co-founder. So I found my coders on a website
1:01.4	called TopTL at Nathan Latka.com forward slash T-O-P-T-A-L. I've paid over $12,000 to the site to a guy
1:09.1	named Hee Shiming in China, who I've never met,
1:12.4	but we're going to build a big business together.
1:13.9	I'm taking Send Later public by the time I turn 30.
1:16.9	I'll tell you more about TopTil later on in this episode.
1:20.5	Top Tribe, this is episode 426.
1:22.6	Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Keith.
1:25.1	He did a million dollars in his agency in 2015 and
1:27.9	launched a SaaS business called Seg Metrics out of that. Already doing five grand a month.
	...

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