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saas
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What are some of the inflection points in the business when things started clicking in gear? We’ve talked about one of the key issues which is really turning into this metrics-driven organization. What other inflection points have you experienced in building this business? Josh McCarter: I think there are a few. The early
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What is your conclusion about where you wanted to pin your customer acquisition cost? How does that correlate to your lifetime value for your SaaS business? Josh McCarter: All of the benchmark studies say that you need to be north of three times LTV. That seems to be the number where people feel
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What happened after you raised the $15 million? How did the business move? What were the strategic moves that you made to get to the next level? Josh McCarter: The major move that we made was, we started investing in sales and marketing. We started building out our team. We took on some larger contracts that,
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What did you have in place when you went to raise capital? Josh McCarter: We had a functioning framework of the software. We had about 700 customers and a team of about 30 people. It was, at least, beyond a prototype and proof of concept. The business was doing under $1 million in revenue. We had
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to? Josh McCarter: Around 2001. Sramana Mitra: What happened then? Josh McCarter: The company’s IPO was successful. After six years, I was looking to do something new. I went and joined a company called Spafinder. It was a travel-based magazine and was call center-oriented. We were trying to turn
Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. In 2010, SaaS investors were less rigorous than they are today about unit economics. Josh managed to raise a $15 million Series A and acquired a significant runway to figure out the metrics of his SMB-focused SaaS business. Read more about his journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s
Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking that last year, you did over $10 million with 50 customers. I can see that business model going to $40 million to $50 million in the next three years. You’ve told me that you’re switching business models, and your focus is going to be on the
Bootstrap First to Exit, Bootstrap Again, Then Raise VC Money ALL from St. Louis: Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: It’s, effectively, becoming a competitor to Mechanical Turk and UpWork. Stephanie Leffler: Absolutely. UpWork also happens to be our partner. We’re fully integrated with UpWork and have an API integration. If you’re hiring freelancers there and you want to scale your project, people will often use OneSpace. UpWork provides people but they don’t provide
