How Hellosign CEO Joseph Walla grew Hellosign to $7.2M revenue and 47K customers in 2016.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs to our number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have i'm now at twenty thousand dollars per top five and six playin his happens on global domination we just blow for a hundred thousand units ol mark and i'm your host Nathan lapka okay Tom tried this week's winner of the hundred bucks is repped Guillen's he's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck he wants to start his own software business so congratulations red for your has a champ to 100 bucks every Monday morning simply subscribe to the podcast on itunes now in order to enter and then text the word Nathan two three three four four four to prove that you subscribed guys if you want an easy tool to use to book your meetings back to back to match your calls to make sure people actually show up when they schedule you want to use 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for businesses to sign and collect legally binding documents online the idea behind hello sign was sparked by Joseph's first successful product alongside his co-founder Neela morrow hello fax hello fax launched in 2010 after attending a prestigious startup accelerator y combinator Joseph are you ready to take us to the top absolutely 64 government you Batman okay hello sign up tell us real quick what does it do and how do you make money yeah I think big zooming out a little bit the fundamental thing that we're doing is we're solving the document transaction problem and people don't realize that they have this problem and originally started out with you know hello fax because we were working in on the go and we don't have a fax machine and then we figured out that when get it signed up who's going to go to kinkos as well and then we found out that a lot of people need to automate these document transactions and that's when we launched our API in terms of how we make money we have a premium product so people can go they can try out the products for free and then when you know the a certain limits that's when we encourage them double grace and we're to say your Dropbox or boss and what is the average kind of customer pay per month yeah so that's not something that we can share what i can say that the you know the pricing plans that we have on he'll sign go from say fifteen dollars a month up and tell you know um yes sir there isn't royal limit because people pay per seat and then I'm aegi side we gotta bucketed pricing so within you know the first plan you get a certain number of document transactions and the second bucket you get another level document transactions and additional functionality okay at walk us through and the pre call I forget who was it was one of your assistants I think I name was maybe Megan but she had articulated one of these you guys have done tell me the wrong so your cash flow positive so walk us through that you know in general give us a range how much are you doing kind of top line and how do you manage expenses yeah so we've been cash flow we were possible closet or 2014-2015 and we always took a very I almost think it was a contrarian you we haven't raised in three years um you know three years ago we raised some money how am I just um yeah so after why she would raise two million and then about it two years later we raised another million in house erased 39 million total um but you know I robbed interestingly we have more money in the bank than our you know our previous from that we raised I think what was your previous round the 1 million yeah it was one and a half yep what a nap okay like over three years in it at this point I think um the thing that we've always done that was a little different as we always thought of ourselves as building a real company and since we never raised a ton of money I feel like we always had to be very disciplined about how we spend our money and how we focused and and I think like what happens a lot with a lot of startup companies they raise huge amounts of money they made a big mistakes and then they go back dramatically which is really damaging for the company so I think we've we've had to focus more on the customer than I say I think like a lot of other companies have had to isn't it sad that in our world that that is such a profound statement like you think when John Rockefeller would say well no right but in our day and age that's like amazing yeah what's interesting is that one up until up until January it was something that was really weird and then the market crashed and then everybody thought it was just like brilliant thing but I think we've always had the same ethos whether the markets hot or whether it's um you know crashing and we'll go through these cycles by the garden so so always stay to saying yeah so we're give us since the sides now where are you at in terms of monthly recurring revenue last month yes that's also know we can share it all I'll tell you you know what's your range Joseph just arranged yeah so also not something I can share the biggest possible that else keep it really vague your here's what i can tell you i can tell you we have 40 boy I you know I looked at this number and a little bit but we were on 47,000 pain customers so they bust Mirza chaos every month and then we have about 60 full-time um a little more you know employees in San Francisco and then in terms of our user base we have you know 526 million users across our products okay and so you've got about 5 million free users you can order about 50,000 and a paying customers yeah so by the six million and then yeah so we converted about you know yeah up your fifty thousand paying customers and number one reason people convert from free to paid yes it's mainly um transactional so people come in and they get up to three document transactions free per month and we think about that as giving people an opportunity to try the product in a blue Oh cost way and then once they hit higher volume amounts it's a natural upgrade point either that or they wanna like additional functionality and so it's a very low cost way to sell the product to a lot of people and I think that's why we've been able to have a pretty small team for the number of customers that we support you said you have 60 employees on San Francisco yeah but what would you what would you say well let me not ask that that's it I'm sorry what do they span kind of tech inside sales like what kinds of jobs are those yes it's really across the border from you know the product and engineering and design to the sales team to the support team to customer success to we invested actually one of the unusual things that we've done really invested a lot in team operations so making sure that a team is happening has everything that they need so really a really rough support what would you say and for those people kind of not in the valley because we have a lot of people that are kind of not in these kinds of bubbles what would you say kind of the average salary kind of across your entire kind of employee basis I mean is it would you say it's above 100 k each oh that's a rich for you um 11 of it was sharing but I mean you can definitely look at it you know salaries in the valley are certainly higher than well no I mean it's joseph is real quick sorry you know this is like public stuff right you mean you can go look at any kind of kind of things that look at text average techstars in the valley and you can see that a CT on average makes 220 k i'm just asking you're much better than an aggregated data source because you're actually doing it write what you know well the average kind of kind of developer salary into that in the valley whether it's at your company or just on average is what based off your perspective yeah i mean this is something i mean if you go okay um I mean it's really it's really hard for me to say because it really depends on the state of the company and I think what you'll notice is that um you know salaries are different from say if you were a google versus like a startup company or different stages of the company and different equity versus salary mixes so I think you know really hard for me to give like a salary number and I think generally what you do is um you know you saw her like pay scale and other...