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680: How to Start SaaS Company with Very little Savings, with Reply.io CEO Oleg Campbell

680: How to Start SaaS Company with Very little Savings, with Reply.io CEO Oleg Campbell

FromSaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders


680: How to Start SaaS Company with Very little Savings, with Reply.io CEO Oleg Campbell

FromSaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

ratings:
Length:
22 minutes
Released:
Jun 4, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

Oleg Campbell. He was born in Ukraine and starting working as a programmer at the age of 19. He moved to Canada when he was 22 and founded his first startup at 24 successfully. Then at 27, he founded Reply.io and he’s currently living between Ukraine and San Francisco building this company. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Losing My Virginity What CEO do you follow? – Jason Lemkin Favorite online tool? — Chart Model How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-8 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Be more fearless”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:45 – Nathan introduces Oleg to the show 01:28 – Oleg is a programmer and read Kawasaki’s, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and Tim Ferriss’, 4-Hour Work Week, which influenced him to build a software for himself 01:58 – Oleg found out that his first business was a lifestyle business when they failed to grow it 02:02 – The technology was built on top of QR code 02:22 – The highest revenue the company reached was $150K annually 02:32 – Oleg put the business in autopilot, took the money and invested in a new venture 02:28 – Oleg has never saved any money, but just invested it into businesses 03:21 – Oleg founded his first startup while he was working full-time 03:37 – With Reply, Oleg invested what he took from his salary from his previous startup 03:45 – Initial investment was around $30K 03:55 – Oleg hired 2 developers to build the product and Oleg started working on marketing and sales 04:08 – The developers are in Ukraine and it cost Oleg only $2000 per month 04:46 – Oleg found the developers through online job postings 04:58 – There are websites in Ukraine where developers hang out 05:18 – Reply focuses on replacing routine sales tasks with AI and automation 05:25 – Reply now automates sending emails, follow-ups and initiating phone calls 05:44 – The development team is building more features to automate more sales tasks 05:53 – Reply is a SaaS business 05:57 – Plans start from $25 to $120 per user 06:03 – Average pay per user is $90 per month   06:14 – Reply was launched in 2015 06:18 – Current team size is 34 06:28 – There’s a sales team in Canada and the development and marketing teams are in Ukraine 06:50 – There are 15 developers 07:20 – Reply spends an average of $4K for developers 08:04 – Reply has 1000 customers right now 08:15 – Average MRR 08:21 – Reply just hit $100K in monthly revenue 08:42 – Reply raised capital a year ago with a small $400K seed round 08:54 – One of the investors reached out to Reply and to raise a round 09:13 – It was on a convertible note 09:17 – It was in March 2016 09:24 – Reply is now close to closing a big round of funding 09:34 – Oleg decided to find out when it would be a good time to raise money 09:42 – Oleg reached out to some investors and used his software called Outreach 10:03 – In 3 weeks, Oleg met 15 investors 10:11 – Oleg then found out that they were still early for a round A 10:32 – The sample email Oleg sent to the investors 11:26 – Reply has been profitable for the last 4 months 11:38 – Oleg has been operating at right around zero 12:08 – Most of Reply’s money is spent on headcount and they’re just starting with advertising 12:18 – They are now spending on AdWords 12:43 – Churn is, in terms of numbers, would be close to 5% and in terms of revenue sharing, it would be closer to 3% 13:12 – Reply’s customers are adding more seats 13:39 – CAC would be around $200 but will still varies and organic is definitely lower 14:03 – LTV is if you just take all our customers, it would be close to $100 14:19 – But in terms of bigger accounts, it will be much lower to a few grand at least 14:36 – Reply launched in Product Hunt some of their free products as lead generation tools 14:59 – They have a great number of fans in Product Hunt 15:09 – Reply also creates content and promotes it 15:16 – Reply recently interviewed a lot of sales experts and they created articles 15:43 – After the launch
Released:
Jun 4, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

Over 10M founders, CEO's, and investors have downloaded this 15 minute daily podcast from Nathan Latka. Each day Latka interviews a software (SaaS) CEO and gets them to share how they've grown (or not) so fast all backed by hard data points. To date, over 1000 CEO's have been interviewed that together do over $6b in revenue, have raised over $5b, and employ more than 180,000 employees. The magazine for CEO's: http://nathanlatka.com/magazine The Book for CEO's: http://nathanlatka.com/bookamazon