How YouMail Added 20 Enterprise Accounts on Top of a 65,000-Subscriber Consumer Base (Interview with CEO Alex Quilici)

Introduction and Founder500 Promo

Nathan Latka

00:00What is going on YouTube? You know, we are just two weeks away from Founder500 in Austin, Texas on September first and second. There's over 500 B2B SaaS founders all coming together. You don't want to miss it. Ticket prices increase every three days. I have it on an automatic accelerator every three days, and we're almost sold out. You can see there's about nine left when you go to the event bright link, about nine left, and it's updating

00:23real time. So check it out today. It's founderpath.com. Then in the upper left, you can hover over our product dropdown and click the event stream. I'll also put it in the description here of the YouTube video. I'd love to see you there. Hey folks, my guest today is Alex Quilichi. He's the CEO of youmail. Before that, co founded and was the CEO of quack dot com, which provided a consumer voice portal service that was essentially Siri

00:44over a 1-800 number back before there were even smartphones. AOL acquired Quack for 200,000,000 in August 2000 and just eighteen months after it was founded impressive short life cycle there. And at AOL, he was vice president of voice services where he helped drive the acquisition, the division to multiple product launches and over a million paying subscribers and over $50,000,000 in annual revenue. Today's building youmail, which helps you stop spam calls and messages. Alex, you ready

YouMail Today: Stopping Spam Calls for Carriers and Enterprises

Nathan Latka

01:09to take us to the top?

Alex Quilici

01:10>> I am. Let's go.

Nathan Latka

01:11Alright. Now I love this. When I had you back on in early twenty nineteen, you had an ARPU. You remember that what you told me, you had an ARPU about $12 a month on average. You are B2C only. What has changed?

Alex Quilici

01:22>> So the biggest thing is, youmail wants to stop spam calls either before they get to the consumer's handset or even better when they're actually made. So we've created products that enable carriers to monitor their network and detect when they're originating these bad guy calls. And we've created tools that allow enterprises to shut down imposter scams. Those calls you get to pretend to be Marriott or pretend to be your bank.

Nathan Latka

01:46So when you say, so Carrier would be AT and T. So you help AT and T monitor their networks to prevent these like bad guy calls or these fake Marriott hotel, fake social security calls.

Alex Quilici

01:56>> Actually, it's not AT and T, T Mobile and Verizon are the carriers that are interesting here because they're not really responsible for making the calls. It turns out most people don't know there's almost 3,000 wholesale carriers in The US. And those carriers can provide things like hospital telephony, they can provide international telephony, they can provide call center telephony, They provide all these different ways to make phone calls. Well, the bad guys just abuse many of those

02:22>> carriers and sometimes they don't even know it. So we try to have them discover one or two of those.

Nathan Latka

02:28What's that? Can you name one or two of those?

Alex Quilici

02:30>> Sure. There's like Airstream is an example of a wholesale carrier that provides services for enterprises, but bad guys can use their network. There's tons of them. The way to find the full list is go to the FCC. They have something called a Form four ninety nine that you have to file if you're a carrier. There's the list.

2019 Backstory: B2C Model with 65,000 Customers at $12 ARPU

Nathan Latka

02:49Interesting. Okay, so let's just get the backstory though. So in 2019, what were consumers paying you for?

Alex Quilici

02:55>> So they were paying us for essentially robocall blocking and privacy protection, as well as second phone lines that were robocall free and had a number of business phone features. That was the consumer model.

Nathan Latka

03:08Now, these notes could be wrong, so feel free to correct me. But my notes say that you had about $12 a month per customer. Had about 65,000 customers, right?

Alex Quilici

03:17>> Yeah, that's spot on.

Nathan Latka

03:19Okay, so multiply that. I mean, you were doing like almost a $10,000,000 run rate B2C back then, right?

Alex Quilici

03:24>> Pretty close. That's right.

Nathan Latka

03:26So, I mean, I would say that's a pretty successful B2C company. Why pivot at all? What did you realize?

Alex Quilici

03:32>> Well, we realized that the carriers of the enterprises needed help. They're willing to pay up for that help. If you're an enterprise and someone's using your name in making tons of imposter phone calls to rip people off, that not only gives you customer support costs, but it causes brand damage. And you may even have to reimburse those people as a form of goodwill. So there's tremendous damage there that they're willing to pay a portion of to

03:56>> stop the problem. And enterprises are not $12 They're not $120 a month. They're substantially larger when you can find and get these contracts successfully. Carriers are the same way.

From Zero to $1M Revenue in 2009

Nathan Latka

04:08That's really interesting. And just to build up the backstory before we focus throughout the interview on the enterprise motion today, what year, do you remember what year you passed? I know you launched in 2007, but what year did you pass a million in revenue?

Alex Quilici

04:18>> That was a while ago. That was probably 2009, actually.

Nathan Latka

04:22Oh, wow. Okay, so you went from zero to a million in about two years.

Alex Quilici

04:25>> Yep, that's correct. In fact, we did it in about eleven months because we were completely free service. We're running out of money. We needed a business model and we quickly pivoted, found a subscription and got to a million.

Nathan Latka

04:37Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

05:00your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:24get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is

05:46not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired, the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

06:12going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

06:34you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the

07:00interview. That's amazing. You bootstrapped or have you raised?

Alex Quilici

07:04>> So it was an interesting company. I actually came in not as the founder, but as an early investor. They've raised a couple million in angel money before I even got there. I came in as a board member to help them raise VC funding, and then I became the CEO. So we're a company that has VC funding. And then we also did a crowdsource round in 2015, which was really transformative for us.

Nathan Latka

07:26How the hell do you keep a cap table clean with all this going on?

Alex Quilici

07:29>> Well, you don't at first, but we keep it as clean as we can. You know, one of the things is even in the crowdfunding round, we didn't go after the thousand dollar investor, we went after the 50,000 plus investor. So that doesn't add too many new people to the pool, you know, even if you raise a few million dollars.

Nathan Latka

07:45I see, okay. So I guess maybe just let's get the most up to date data. So what was the last round? When did you raise it? Was it your series B or C or what?

Alex Quilici

07:52>> So the last round was a series B and it was 2015. So since then we've been acting like a bootstrap company. We try to keep breakeven as roughly where we run. Sometimes we'll lose a little money as a project to help spur growth, but we've been growing all that growth as a breakeven company.

Nathan Latka

08:09Well, that's okay. So last round, just to be clear, was 15, 5,000,000 or 15,000,000?

Alex Quilici

08:14>> It was 5,000,000 in 2015.

Nathan Latka

08:16Yeah, which is maybe a big round for 2015. And maybe, know, today markets are now correcting, but okay. So 5,000,000 series B, and I guess what, including the 5,000,000, what's the total you raised it, including crowdfunding?

Alex Quilici

08:28>> So we've raised a little over $15,000,000 in our history, but what's important to know is youmail with several different companies. It started off as a voicemail for carrier company and ran out of runway trying to sell to carriers, which turns out to be pretty difficult, right? If you're trying to help them do something that affects consumers. We then got stuck around for about four or five years where we're embroiled in a bunch of lawsuits over a

08:50>> feature we had. They were all dismissed. We pivoted to a call blocking company, raised the 5,000,000. And that's really how we view youmail now is we've done almost everything with the 5,000,000.

Legal Battles: Four Class Action Lawsuits and $250K to Resolve

Nathan Latka

09:00What year did you officially come in as CEO?

Alex Quilici

09:03>> I came in in 2007, 2008. So very early in the life cycle. Yeah. Yeah. Basically Day one. I've been through the first wave of trying to take a strategy someone else had and executing it with carriers, seeing that fail, moving to transition to a consumer company, seeing that struggle because of lawsuits and other challenges, and then pivoting to a call blocking company. And now we're pivoting again, but to some degree, to be call blocking for carriers

09:29>> and enterprises, not just consumers.

Nathan Latka

09:31A lot of founders listening today are doing ambitious things that sometimes run into sort of like legal issues, right? Competitors just trying to be nasty and sue them because they're early to kill them. You won that battle. Mean, give us some funding. How much did you spend on legal bills back in the day? And like, how much time and energy did it take? How did you get the team morale high to make it through that?

Alex Quilici

09:49>> So it was pretty ugly. We had four class action lawsuits over a feature we had where if you called me, it would send you a text back saying, I'm busy, go to my website, send me an email, whatever the user wanted. That was called auto reply. People said, Oh, that's violating TCPA, and sued the founders personally, right? And the executive team personally, as well as the company. It took three years and about a $250,000 to get

10:14>> out of that mess. Ultimately, the FCC found we were doing nothing wrong. We're actually innovation that they like to see. If someone calls, they're giving you permission to call them back. That was essentially it. Totally. And so that, but that was extremely draining. The team stuck with it because we believed in the vision. Even in 2012, 2013, we saw call blocking coming. We started our first variance of our features to make that easier. And once we

10:42>> got done with the lawsuit, then we were able to raise the crowdfunding round and the rest is sort of history. Everybody's really glad they stuck around because we're making such a huge difference now.

Nathan Latka

10:51Now, this makes tons of sense. Really interesting story. Okay, now let's fast forward to sort of present day. So what are you selling today? What's the average enterprise paying when they sign up per year and what are they getting for that?

Alex Quilici

11:01>> So, you know, they're paying what a typical enterprise pays, which means, you know, five digits, but we can't talk about all the details, obviously. It can be somewhere in that range.

Nathan Latka

11:09That's kind of But like $10,000 a year is fair, right?

Alex Quilici

11:12>> What's that?

Nathan Latka

11:13More than, you have customers paying more than $10,000 a year.

Alex Quilici

11:15>> Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's the enterprise and the carriers are similar. And what an enterprise gets for that is if there's somebody out there that's being an imposter, that's pretending to be them, we will let them know how many of those calls are out there and we will shut them down. And so we will make it so those guys can't pop up. If they pop up again, we whack them. And so that's a really great business

Enterprise Motion: $10,000 ACV and 20 B2B Customers

Alex Quilici

11:36>> because it essentially protects the enterprise's brand reputation, protects their call centers, and protects just random people from harm from a given impostor thinking it's whoever that enterprise is.

Nathan Latka

11:49Did you just let the 65,000 B2C customers churn off or like how many customers are you serving today?

Alex Quilici

11:54>> Actually, it's grown a bit. The thing is the B2C business is critical for us. They're a sensor network that tells us what's going on with scam calls. So everybody who has youmail is contributing to the fight to stop robocalls. There's data about this illegal call hit this person and let this message pretending to be, say, Amazon. That's extremely valuable for the enterprise side of the business because we have all this data we can use that tells

12:18>> us, here's exactly what's going on, here's where those calls are coming from, and here's how we get rid of them. Same with the carriers. So if there's a wholesale carrier, we can look at what's coming from their network and show them, here's the illegal activity that's hitting our pool of consumers. So in our case, the B2C business is the critical enabler that allows us to have a differentiated B2B solution.

B2C Network: 10 Million Sign-Ups as a Sensor for Spam Data

Nathan Latka

12:37And so I guess, let me just split it up then, right? So how many B2C customers do you have now today? You know, critical part of your network.

Alex Quilici

12:43>> So B2C customers, we have actually had 10,000,000 people sign up for youmail. And so a significant number of them are active every month as free users, plus the paid users. So that's the size of the network. It's literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of phone calls coming into us.

Nathan Latka

13:00That's great. What I'm trying to measure is how successful you've been converting 10,000,000 free or active, which you still get value from because there are alerts in your ecosystem. But how successful have you been converting those folks into paid? Is it still about 65, 70,000 paid?

Alex Quilici

13:12>> Yeah, it's in that ballpark. It's grown a little We actually focused on increasing ARPU rather than trying to grow that base. So get more money from the pool as opposed to make the pool bigger. That was the right thing to do, I think, during COVID times. But the data we've collected is fantastic because the free business keeps growing. We keep getting more and more people in there, and eventually they convert.

Nathan Latka

13:33You've touched on enterprise motion of $10,000 ACVs, but we were before talking about a B2C motion of $144 a year, $12 a month. To your point, with 70,000 customers, if you increase ARPU by $10 a year across 70,000 customers, that moves the needle for your business. It's adding almost a million bucks of new ARR. You haven't talked about what products you've started selling more into the B2C range to increase that ARPU by a couple of dollars

13:53every year. You want to talk about that?

Alex Quilici

13:54>> Yeah, so one of the things we did is we have a product called youmail plus which is our privacy protection offering. What we did to that offering is we added something where we can guarantee you won't get robocalls. A 100%, no robocalls are gonna get through. That's something that consumers found worthwhile and that enabled us to move from a $4.99 ARPU for that particular product up to where it looks like it's $5.99 $6.99 even with discounting

14:18>> and with annual plans. And so it was creating a better value It was one thing to, we'll block most of them, we'll give you some customization. It's another thing to say, nope, we guarantee it. We're gonna block every single robocall. There is no way a robocaller is gonna get through. And when we were able to deliver on that promise, we're seeing that churn goes down and we can charge more.

Nathan Latka

14:37That's amazing. Okay, that's the B2C side. How many folks are paying on the B2B side today? We're like a handful, ten, twenty or more like a thousand?

Alex Quilici

14:44>> No, we're in the 20 ish range, think somewhere in that ballpark. It's something that started with one paying customer two years ago. And so that's pretty good to get that kind of growth. And I think we're going to see it double or more in the next year, just at the pace.

Nathan Latka

14:57But I guess, so then just to be clear, if we break, like if you look at your full, like all your revenue from last year on a percent basis, the majority is still B2C versus B2B.

Team Structure: 30 Full-Time and Contractor Network

Alex Quilici

15:06>> Yep, I'd say eighty twenty is a rough approximation of where we've gotten to somewhere in that ballpark. I think if you look out two years, it's going to be the other way around. We can see it for three years, it's going to move to, well, probably 40% B2C, 60% B2B and go from there. So consumer is growing steadily, but slowly B2B is doubling every year or more.

Nathan Latka

15:27That's great. Let's talk a little bit more about your team here. How many folks are full time today?

Alex Quilici

15:31>> So we have 30 full time employees, but the really interesting story is that during COVID, we were able to take advantage of remote work, which enabled us to hire people all over the world, including as contractors. So the total team size is approaching 70, but a lot of that are people who work on a contract basis. And we found that it's a really efficient way for us to get development done, get certain kinds of marketing done,

15:53>> do customer support. You don't need to have an employee sitting in California. They can be somebody at home in Jamaica and be just as good at doing that customer support.

Nathan Latka

16:01Okay, everyone wants the playbook to using contractors. Someone's gonna build a billion dollar business and have one FTE as the founder and then a network of contractors. So you gotta teach us here. I mean, who are you using for development and how did you find them?

Alex Quilici

16:15>> Well, so the really key thing for us is that we have a core development team. We aren't outsourcing it a 100%. What we wanted to do was find support for tasks like maintenance or relatively simple tasks that don't require a really complicated skill set. If you're fixing iPhone bugs, that's completely different than if you're building an iPhone UI from scratch, you're building complicated data manipulations, that's a different group. So we contract out a lot of what

16:39>> I would say is the easier stuff. And it was through our network, we found someone who basically built a contracting firm in Asia who knows how to pull people together with the skills we want, and has been able to staff up and down as we need.

Nathan Latka

16:50It's amazing. What's the name? Can you share the name of that company in Asia?

Alex Quilici

16:57>> It's actually a person. It's an individual who's one of our friends, who, one of our contacts.

Nathan Latka

17:01Oh, so it's not like a network that anyone can go use?

Alex Quilici

17:05>> No, it's, we got lucky that we were looking for someone, we found this guy to help us, who developed for us. And he said, I have a whole network of people I can bring in. And we just went from there.

Nathan Latka

17:14What about support?

Alex Quilici

17:15>> What's that?

Nathan Latka

17:16Contractors, support. How do you find the support contractors?

Alex Quilici

17:19>> So again, that was a contact from our past who'd done that for another company. He actually had done it for a company called Line two, which was a second phone line. And it built up a remote support team through essentially an agent who knew how to pull everybody together in Jamaica and knew how to evaluate customer support. So we put that together, leveraged him, and now the team's fifteen, twenty, something like that of just those contractors there.

17:41>> They do a terrific job.

Nathan Latka

17:43That's answering the live chat on the website, phone

Alex Quilici

17:45>> calls Live chat on the website, emails, phone calls, phone support, all of that.

Nathan Latka

17:50Nice. Can I if I wanted to use them, are you like, are you open to me reaching out?

Alex Quilici

17:54>> Yeah. If you send me an email, I think I wanna be careful about having a zillion people contact him. But, yeah, he's perfectly happy to build support teams up for people. He's very, very That's amazing.

Nathan Latka

18:03Okay. And then lastly, marketing. How do you find marketing contractors that know what they're doing?

Alex Quilici

18:07>> So it's kind of the network effect there too. So there's a lesson here, right? So in our network, we had one person who's been kind of an outsourced CMO for a variety of companies. We brought him in to help us with strategy positioning, a whole set of things. And he started going, well, you guys really need help here. I know somebody, let's bring them in as a contract for twenty hours a week and work on something.

18:26>> I know somebody else and gradually built that up. And then we've been hiring people too, like some of the contractors that become full time, they really like working with us. But you know, when you start out your online marketing guy doesn't have to be forty hours a week, your online marketing guy can be ten hours a week to run a limited set of campaigns and tests that they're trying to do to advertise your B2C stuff. So

18:46>> we found the contractor model really, really works, but it's because we have trusted people who are bringing them in. We have not just gone to a random firm who's contacted me on LinkedIn and said, yeah, let's outsource development. So it's about building your network, right? And I think it's really critical to build up a good network that you can then leverage for this sort of stuff.

Nathan Latka

19:05That makes tons of sense. Now, terms of size of business, say again, if you're doing 10,000,000 in ARR back in 2019 or around there with 65,000 B2C customers, sounds like you've grown that maybe up to 70,000, you increased ARPU a little bit, so maybe that takes you to 12. And then you have a little bit, maybe call it a million or so coming in through the B2B side. Are you sort of in that like twelve to

19:23fourteen million AR range today?

Alex Quilici

19:24>> Let's put it this way. I'm probably gonna get fired if I'm not hitting 15 by somewhere about the middle of next year, at least. So your estimate's not bad.

Nathan Latka

19:33Fair. Well, so let me ask you this question. I mean, you raised Series B back in 2015. Those folks, this isn't a knock on you or anything, but they've written this investment off. Right? It hasn't tripled every year, which is ridiculous anyway, but that's what you sign up for when you do VC. So, I mean, can you buy those early folks out, clean up the cap table and get more of this bad boy back? Or if

19:51not, why not sell the business and move on to the next thing?

Cap Table, Debt, and Breakeven Operating Philosophy

Alex Quilici

19:54>> So, you know, the thing is the value we've created in the last couple of years exceeds everything we created in the first, you know, ten, twelve years of doing this. So the whole point about when do you want to sell out? When do you want to try to buy out investors? Is when do you think you've hit the point where you can get a really good return for them and you're probably not going to do better

20:12>> over time? If we'd sold this thing in 2018, the business was kind of flat growing slowly. We hadn't completed our transition. It would be completely uninteresting to get a 2X or maybe even lucky a 3X on 5,000,000 in revenue, right? Nobody's happy. Now we're growing at a good clip. Everybody can look out a couple of years and go, if you keep that up, this is going to be a nine digit plus business when it goes. Why

20:34>> would I jump out now? And so it's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy people have, right? Because it's kind of the opposite, which is this isn't going anywhere. It's never going to go anywhere in the future. You can't make that conclusion. You have to look at where it is now and say, what's going on? What's the evidence this is going to succeed or fail?

Nathan Latka

20:49Well, it's less about you. It's more about those funds. Those funds that wrote a check-in 2015, where the life cycles of a fund is ten years, those funds are almost dead. Those fund life cycles are almost dead relative to what you're building now. So it's less about you, it's just more about timing on the VC side.

Alex Quilici

21:03>> Well, and the interesting thing is there's mostly crowdsourced individuals and individuals are patient, right? If you put 50,000 in or 100,000 in, you're fine with taking your time to see that turn into something big. If it can turn into a million, you're over 7, 8 x. I see. You're happy. We do have some institutions and they of course always look for ways to kind of get out or trade, but they know that this is growing now. So some

21:25>> of them are sitting there going, okay, well, this isn't bad, we stuck around and didn't try to force something.

Nathan Latka

21:30Well, if you wanna buy out your investors, we have $145,000,000 of fresh capital. This is one of the top use cases, how we're working with bootstrappers or well, almost bootstrapping. We give them million, 2,000,000, 5,000,000, $6,000,000, they go buy out the early folks and they own more equity.

Alex Quilici

21:43>> So, one I love, I love debt. So, we took some debt a couple of years ago in order to accelerate growth. We said, we're going to burn some money for a little bit. We have a very specific plan. We're going to build this B2B thing. We took some debt. The challenge with debt is always you've got to pay it back. That actually is money you cannot spend on growing your business.

Nathan Latka

22:01How long did you have to pay it back?

Alex Quilici

22:02>> So we have what, three years to pay a couple million in debt back, a little

Nathan Latka

22:06bit more than that. And you weren't able to add, you weren't able, I mean, that's three years is still a long time. You weren't able to take the upfront cash and add enough MRR to more than cover the interest payments over three years?

Alex Quilici

22:14>> We're looking at various strategies here, right? We want to figure out what to do. And so there are possibilities. We're always getting approached by people saying, hey, we'll give you $5,000,000. You can do this, this and that with it. But we're a little bit conservative because we think, well, if the B2B business grows at the rate it's growing, it makes a lot more sense to do this six months or a year from now because there's plenty

22:33>> of EBITDA to cover it.

Nathan Latka

22:36Yeah. A tough part.

22:37You profitable?

Alex Quilici

22:38>> Have to balance growth versus how much they want to burn.

Nathan Latka

22:40You're profitable today?

Alex Quilici

22:42>> Yeah. We're running breakeven, deliberately breakeven to maximize growth.

Nathan Latka

22:46Yep, that makes sense. Very cool. Great story here. Alex, let's wrap up with a famous five. Number one, favorite book?

Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions

Alex Quilici

22:51>> My favorite book is Still Free by, I think it's Chris Anderson from like ten, fifteen years ago.

Nathan Latka

22:56Yep.

22:57Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Alex Quilici

22:59>> Well, every like everybody else, Elon Musk. I think he's just awesome. And I love the fact he's so honest about everything. He has no filter. And I think more CEOs need to be like that.

Nathan Latka

23:08Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building youmail?

Alex Quilici

23:12>> My favorite online tool for building youmail, it's really interesting. It's actually Slack now because communication is so critical to the business working, especially when you go remote.

Nathan Latka

23:22Number four, what's your favorite, sorry, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Alex Quilici

23:25>> I'm actually getting seven and a half now. My doctor told me I better. I used to get six and that wasn't That's awesome.

Nathan Latka

23:30What's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Alex Quilici

23:33>> I'm married, two kids, both now are gonna be in high school. I'm kind of aging out.

Nathan Latka

23:37That's amazing. How old are you?

Alex Quilici

23:40>> I'm not saying publicly. It's one of those things that's too embarrassing with all the kids listening.

Nathan Latka

23:45That's fair enough. Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Alex Quilici

23:49>> I really wish I started being an entrepreneur earlier in life rather than later in life. And I didn't realize how satisfying it is as a career. Even if you hit wall after wall, when you finally don't hit a wall, it's just a wonderful feeling to make an impact.

Nathan Latka

24:02Guys, youmail started off helping consumers block robocalls on their personal phones, built up 65,000 paying customers with $12 a month and 10,000,000 ARR around there back in 2019. The business has been sort of flat since then. However, they now have a B2B play that with 20 enterprise customers on there with higher ACV, call it $10 k a year, scaling nicely. And in his own words, I'll be fired in the next twelve months if I don't break $15,000,000

24:24in ARR. We're obviously rooting for you. Alex, thanks for taking us to the top.

Closing Summary and Wrap-Up

Alex Quilici

24:28>> Alright. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

24:31One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

24:56p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's

25:17an acquisition, a big fundraise, big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people

25:39are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter

25:59those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you. Hi.