Metadata Revenue & Funding (2024)

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording the bank account went down and down and down how do you compete with a giant that has like 400 million if I'm not mistaken in funding how do you compete with someone like that now how did we make it and that's the majority of this presentation hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so Far We've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview from 2 million to 12 million in ARR and what particular playbooks we use to get there some of them are not very sexy but they've been tried over and over and over and are guaranteed to produce pipeline so focus on that a little bit about myself I'm a software engineer a robotic software engineer in my background I turned into a marketer at some point did a good job because I have a technical background and today B2B marketing is a very technical job so I've done well as a VP of marketing and at some point I saw the gap between what is available to a vpf marketing in terms of data and technology and what is possible in terms of data technology for a BB marketer and I made a choice to take the leap and start a company that if you're our customer you essentially don't have you don't have to hope for pipeline you don't have to you know be a rocket scientist to generate pipeline because you use experimentation and data as a means to an end to guarantee that you have predictable Pipeline with economies of scale a little bit about our Revenue because that's that's the proof that you should listen we had a very interesting path where it took us years to find product Market fit for years we built this piece of software and did a lot of customer development and in 2020 we found what we thought was product Market fit I was so happy after years finally a meaningful re Revenue number a meaningful ARR but unfortunately this also happened at the same time have you ever been in a situation as a Founder where you're worried about your Runway I couldn't sleep during that time we had less and less money in the bank and although we had product Market fit you know we had a repeatable sales cycle the same kind of customer the same kind of pitch roughly the same amount of Revenue but the bank account went down and down and down and investors wouldn't take my money not the good investors I had a bunch of sharks who thought it were bleeding and would give us terrible term sheets but no good investors want to put their investment on the table and so in one day I've decided that try instead of trying the same thing trying to raise money with the same story that I have product Market fit Etc I have to take ownership on on the future of the company and so we decided to cut enough of the spending and I'll show you exactly what tactics we did what we took such aggressive measures to make sure that next time we go fundraising we don't need a fund raise and when you don't need the money when you go to an investor and you tell them this is happening anyway you are invited to join us for this journey the conversation is very very different you talk to different people much Kinder people and you get term sheets that you're proud of not something that you're ashamed to go to your board with so what did we do first things first the decision that many people don't like to do cut expenses we I went through every line item in QuickBooks every line item in my American Express credit card and whatever was not necessary to keep the lights on I didn't pay just like that my credit score went down to about 300 at some point with American Express they didn't like that and they would call me every day pay your bill I like I'm not paying anything out of the bill until I have money then I'm paying all of it and you know that happened eventually but I didn't like the the the path in between I have some derogatory marks uh and I'm proud of it because it saved the company I also went to my sales team who were doing great and told them look I can't really pay you but you're doing a good job can I convert some of your commissions into stocks and surpris inly more than 50% said yes the best sales people in fact said yes and now they are they majority stakeholders in the company a bunch of other hacks we did we launched I talked to all of the customers I I decided that moment that I'm going to meet every customer that I have you know we only had like what 50 or 40 but I met all of them and learned that for some of them that were about to churn a piece of the product was still relevant to them so we launched a mini version of the product and we're able to to maintain some of the some of the grr some of the retention we did a bunch of other measures for for example every campaign that I had every marketing campaign that I had had the all the way to revenue uh Roi return on investment I made sure that every campaign that we have generates Revenue not just pipeline not just leads but actually goes all the way to revenue and so we were able to focus and then quadruple down on what was working and so that was that was kind of the mecs we took from here I can tell you we got into Break Even it you don't see it here that was the previous present a but I got we got all the way to I think 25 Grand in the bank it's like not a lot of money in the bank almost going under and then slowly going up from that moment I was able to get 200k in account receivable debt from that I was able to get 300K in convertible note and then $2 million uh raise and then a 4 and a half million right after that so being sustainable company chills out investor they're like all right there's one less risk I know you're not going to run out of money I know this is happening anyway looks like you have product Market fit now I'm going to give you a shot and that year was a special year because after we raise that money suddenly the survival was like we didn't have to survive we didn't wake up every morning okay how am I making it one more day and from that mindset when you not have when I still get cash updates by the way twice a week so I still have a little bit of PTSD but I don't wake up every morning thinking I'm running out of cash and that gives you a little bit of okay now let's think about the vision what do I want and when things started working out the product Market fit was really there and so once we started investing in sales in marketing we're a little bit more more spendable than before we started focusing on what is what is repeatable that can take us to the next level and we actually negotiated if if the year before I negotiated with the board to cut the growth by half because I didn't have the money to support that growth this year we're like hey how much more can we grow this may not last forever which it didn't right the economy tanked so like how do we take advantage of a market that is growing and so we we renegotiated with my leadership team three times and we almost made it to the third goal so instead of gr to five instead of going to 7 and a half which was the new goal we decided 12 and a half is the third goal and we almost made it now how did we make it and that's the majority of this presentation there are four four cool playbooks some of them came from us metadata and some of them came from our customers because we run demand generation for B2B companies B2B SAS companies mid markets then we have a lot of proof a lot of quantitative proof on what works when I say works again I don't talk about vany metrics I don't care about leads don't care about Impressions click through rates all of those cool you know kpis that that you know growth uh hackers talk about I really don't understand much about I dive all the way into board level kpis Revenue cak pipeline comparison guides so we were poor still even with an a round we were competing with giants that were creating categor is spending lots of money on SEO and sem you know owning all the display inventory so how do you compete with a giant that has like 400 million if I'm not mistaken in funding how do you compete with someone like that one hack is called comparison guides we were able to parachute into deals in the last minute and steal it away How does it go so most companies invest advertising and marketing money in the entire funnel everything from what is this category about what problem are we solving who's the best vendor what are the features why is our pricing the best this is cool if you have the money to do it that's amazing if you don't we didn't we said hey we're going to focus on one area only when they get to the place where they're already qualified they already know they want to purchase something and they're just comparing vendors comparing features based on the problems that they have I want them to know about us in fact when they do the comparison I want to be the one that gives them the comparison guide and so what did we do first thing is um review sites just like there is Yelp for a consumer there is G2 there is trassy radius and a bunch of other websites to help consumers of SAS determine which vendor they should go with right this exists we started paying the biggest check I paid was for G2 I paid them for two things one to have lots of reviews so that our profile looks good our customers loved us and wanted to make sure it's very public so we had one of the best G2 profiles if you go there you're already half in the second one is how do I know that the deal is being cooked right if my competitor is talking he's not telling me hey I'm talking to this to this Prospect you should join in I need to figure out that the deals are in the making so I purchased the buyer intent signal it's a very fancy name to pay for a web blog data G2 would send me their web blog data it's like an a bunch of ips and URLs and what I did with that is reverse IP so I understand which company it is which which location it is I know who is my customer so I will go and find the contacts of that customer and I would start bombarding them with emails and adds to tell them hey I think you're in a buying cycle for this particular product right here's a comparison guide It's a gener generic comparison it's objective comparison guide and the comparison guide was not created by us it was created by G2 so there is credibility to it but as the author as the one who is sorry as the as the vendor I can determine which which features I'm sorting the guide by and I can sort it by the features that I'm best at for example we're best at Roi the best vendor in our category and so I would go and sort the buyer guide based on this feature and when the customer if they care about Roi or ease of implementation or customer service boom we come up first even if you don't come up first it's still worthwhile to do it because if you're in the top three or top four it's very likely that the person is going to give you a shot they're going to give you half an hour on the phone to make convince them even if they use it as a negotiating tactic they're going to give you the time of day to at least compare you to someone else so comparison guide from review sites you don't brand it don't brand it with with your logo make sure the the the the person who is buying understand this is an objective as much as possible objective comparison and you'll get a shot at a table this is how to do it it's not very complicated I do the step by step by by the end of this presentation you have my email I think Nathan will also send you uh these slides but this is a very easy to implement within I would say a month you can have this up and running second one convo ads many times CEOs of SAS companies or VP of marketings for SAS companies ask me how can I generate pipeline quickly I am told that there's no Silver Bullet it's wrong there are some silver bullets out there you can apply tactics a Zer some game of time and and money and and the audience you're going after right like you have there there are some restrictions but there are particular playbooks that can generate pipeline quickly I'm not talking about like ebook leads webinar attendees no I'm talking about people who will hop on a call knowing they're going to be sold to is the person you want to sell to and you have half an hour to try to sell them I can't guarantee you'll sell them but you'll have half an hour to try and do it how do you do it LinkedIn has this ad type called conversational ad it's basically a promoted email right you get emails all the time on your email you don't open them they're in the promotions tab but on LinkedIn you get emails and if you pay for it as a vendor you can be on top of the list so you'll be the first person that they see on their email and it's a chat bot that you can create it's a workflow that basically ask them and the work for that we use is either giving a gift card a donation or an audit a marketing audit for your company so something of value you get something of value for free in return you give us your time half an hour 25 minutes for a demo this tactic we've been using it maybe for four years now it hasn't been exhausted all of my customers use it it hasn't been exhausted it's you know the RP Char is not there you can't get it for really cheap anymore because many people know about it but this works and within weeks within maybe a we two weeks of of executing this campaign you would be able to start seeing a flow of demo request as simple as that uh it's not rocket science the steps are here you can determine exactly which buyer which influencer which message you want to get them you pay for the email you pay for the targeting you also pay usually for some sort of a value ad where it's a gift card or an audit or whatever it is that you want in return you get a shot in selling to your prospect and if even if you don't sell at the very least you get the objections and you can learn and iterate next one Clos loss campaign this didn't use to be like nicely packaged in a slide like that but I started using this tactic many years ago it used to be me and my VP of sales sitting in a bar doing shots two of our laptops open and as time goes by we're less worried the typos and the type of emails that we send and how many emails and is it perfect no but basically the tactic is you lost many deals sometimes to price sometimes to a competitor sometimes due to timing and so you go back to the same company and you go back to the same buyers two different a revenues same buyer different company things change same company different buyer different point of view you go and you use whatever reason you lost that deal if it was budget maybe now there is budget if it was timing maybe now is the right time if it was a competitor maybe that competitor sucks so you go and you have that message you started conversation with that person and the other Avenue is we want a huge deal just by going to the same person who liked us but it could she couldn't bring us into that company she later joined topot big ass logo that we still have and we were able to win that just because we walk it up it's like hey you remember us you liked us you work in a new company now and so the are very simple here where you need to gather the data from your Salesforce you can add on top of that information from user gems user gems is a very unique data source that tells you which people switched which jobs uh another thing that you can put there is the reason why you lost that deal because that's how you personalize the message you you the the the opener for the conversation that simple tactic always gets you uh pipeline back always this is the email that we sent it's not very sexy it's long but you can notice two things maybe you can you cannot I'll tell you first this is not hopspot this is a polo we have hopspot but we don't send this email from hopspot because this is not a marketing email it's a sales email also the email doesn't come from a marketing at metadata or my my AE or my VP of sales no this comes from the same ICP I find the same person that I sell to and I find the same person in my company who is equal and I sent that email from them because there is much more credibility there's comaraderie between a marketer and a marketer versus a salesperson and a marketer those two things very high M very high open rate and reply rates and you can see below oh no you cannot see now you can see below the bunch of opportunities within less than a week it's a healthy open rate you know 30% of the people open the email some of them reply a bunch of new opportunities some of it you don't even see here it's conversations that happen over text oh I saw that email yeah I'm I'm ready to to to hop on another call oh it wasn't right before let's hop on a call now so not very sexy tactic I do it every quarter guaranteed to wake up some buyers and get you some uh some deals back on the table it's very important to add new contacts to to the companies that the the the champion moved to another one so you add more and more people into that into that contact so that one of them will give you a shot last but not least b2c social how many times have you heard the sentence Facebook doesn't work for B2B they say it all the time all kind of secret cows out there go Massacre them because you'll be the one who breaks the status quo you'll be one of the only marketers out there who goes and bid on people on Facebook on Twitter on Instagram on Reddit on Tik Tok people are everywhere all the time and if you target them if you like if you target them properly meaning if you don't use the channels native targeting which sometimes doesn't make any sense for B2B right Facebook doesn't care about B2B they make 90% of their revenue from political and consumer campaigns so they don't have any job title or company name on seniority but we do we're not not not the only vendor but we're one of the layers of targeting for a company like Facebook so if you target exactly the same people using the same email the same piis now you have a whole new channel and first of all it's interesting because you'll be able to distract them they're so accustomed to the usual content on Facebook some see a B2B ad for them you're going to get their attention two you're going to be doing crazy Arbitrage in our platform we constantly clone automatically campaigns exactly the way they are chel one campaign type to the other because the cap goes down significantly you're you're competing against many many less people so gives you the opportunity to Target more people with the same budget so take a look every channel gives you different types of targeting capabilities on Kora on Reddit you can Target based on questions on tags people are asking questions about what problems are you solving whatever problems that you're solving put them in a long sentence now you'll start targeting based on that tag it's very very powerful but you have to experiment you have to experiment constantly and see what works for you just by trying just by trying you'll be outside of the 99% of the marketers who only go after LinkedIn and Google and that's it that's it I'm one and a half minute before my end thank you for your [Music] time thanks very much