Jose Cayasso
- Founder and CEO at Slidebean
GetLatka interview
How Slidebean Ran Cash-Flow Positive at Around $100K MRR and 10,000 Subscribers (Interview with CEO Jose Cayasso)
Jose Cayasso (Founder and CEO of Slidebean) spoke to Nathan Latka.
Slidebean figures from the interview
- Paying Customers
- Around 10,000
- New Signups
- Around 30,000 per month
- Cash Flow
- Cash-flow positive
- Total Funding Raised
- $850,000
- Team Size
- 20
“We've been really focused on improving the app itself and improving so many holes, like so many holes in the bucket and the funnel and churn. So we kind of took an important company decision. We built ourselves to have a profitable team and then not to force ourselves to be in a position to raise money again, and then use that revenue simply to improve on the product, knowing full aware that we were going to stop most of the growth hacking efforts and simply dedicate on building a much more solid product to support our users much better.”
“We are, we are. We're actually dealing with a bunch of new problems this year, like taxes on our revenues and actual margins.”
“We motivate a lot of users to pay yearly, and that's something that any SaaS business should really focus on. When a customer pays yearly or prepays an annual plan, you have that revenue upfront and you have that revenue to invest again in growth or to invest in the product or to invest in the team.”
Bio
José Cayasso (commonly known as Caya) is a Costa Rican graphics designer and entrepreneur. Caya was a Trainer and Senior Support Agent for Intel, covering Desktop Boards and Processors for the North America Region; he obtained extensive experience with hardware and software support over the course of 6 years. In 2011, Caya founded Saborstudio, a creative content company. Their first startup, Pota-Toss, was an iOS game crowdfunded on Kickstarter and released to the App Store on October 2012. It was deemed by Techcrunch and CNN as "The Next Angry Birds" and having its graphics compared to a Pixar movie by Business Insider. Pota-Toss was installed in over 300,000 devices that year. Saborstudio was also the first Costa Rican startup to be selected for a major US Accelerator. In November 2012 Caya was selected as a one of the 40 Under 40 Costa Rican innovators by El Financiero Newspaper; and was also named an Innovation Champion by the Costa Rican Ministry of Science and Technology. Caya was also invited to speak at the 2013 TEDx Joven PuraVida Conference in Costa Rica, along with speakers like Luis Von Ahn and Michael Lindenmayer. In mid-2013, Caya founded Slidebean, a simplified, cloud-based presentation tool. Slidebean was part of Startup Chile, one of the most important accelerators in Latin America and then selected for Batch 11 of 500 Startups, one of the top US Based Accelerators according to Forbes and Techcrunch. Slidebean has been featured in Techcrunch, TheNextWeb and The Economist, as the third most valuable internet startup in Costa Rica.