Ryan Allis
Founder and CEO, SaasRise. On 2 shows, 1 appearance, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@ryanallis ↗LinkedIn ↗saasrise.com ↗
Ryan Allis co-founded email marketing software provider iContact in 2003, serving as CEO until its $169 million acquisition by Vocus in 2012. He currently serves as the founder and CEO of SaasRise and authored the book Zero to One Million.
2shows
1appearances
33statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Ryan Allis said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
iContact scraped Constant Contact newsletters to acquire its first 500 customers
“We subscribed to about a 100,000 of their customers' newsletters, and then as soon as we got them, we'd send a reply back offering them half off. That got us our first 500 customers.”
Marc Benioff offered $95M for iContact before walking away in 2009
“In 2009, Marc Benioff reached out to us and he said, I wanna buy your company. We're gonna buy, pay you ninety-five million. I said, that sounds good, let's do it. He strung us along for a few months finally ended up buying ExactTarget a few years later. Walke…”
Allis: Founders should take secondary liquidity to think long term
“I think the value as an entrepreneur of having a million dollars in your bank account, for example, is that it does allow you to think longer term. And to think bigger. And so I do encourage other entrepreneurs if they have the opportunity to take some chips o…”
Software startups rarely need more than 1x ARR in equity capital
“Unless you're building a rocket ship company, or a hardware company, or a defense manufacturing company, you don't need more than one extra ARR in, in equity capital in order to scale. And certainly not before you figure out what your unit economics are.”
Bill Gates Sr.'s law firm sent iContact a cease-and-desist in 2003
“We did the same thing with Microsoft List Builder back in 2003 when they were around, and what we got was a cease and desist letter from Bill Gates' dad's law firm.”
Bundling shared account managers let iContact increase monthly pricing 20x
“If we just add a shared account manager, we can take the same product and sell it for 20 times the price. So instead of selling it for 50 dollars a month, we sold it for a thousand dollars a month, and you got a shared account manager and a couple extra featur…”
Allis: Hitting over 75% of goals means targets were not ambitious enough
“The secret with goals is if you're hitting 75% of your goals aren't ambitious enough, and most people feel bad when they don't hit a goal. I feel bad when I'm hitting too many of them, as ironic as that sounds. And so, you want your goals to be sufficiently am…”
Allis: Annual goals must remain locked and never adjusted mid-year
“You never adjust your goals. Your goals are locked for the entire year. Okay. You have to judge yourself against your original projection.”
Allis: The role of an entrepreneur is to minimize risk
“I think the role of the entrepreneur is to constantly minimize risk. As ironically as that sounds, your goal is to arrange land, labor, capital, entrepreneurial ability to create a value of outputs that's greater than the sum of the inputs and to hopefully cre…”
Allis: CEOs of 100+ Person Companies Must Focus 3 to 12 Months Ahead
“My rule of thumb for a CEO of a company larger than a hundred employees is you should be, you should rarely be working on anything that's gonna affect the current month. If you're working on something that's gonna affect the current month, you're working on th…”
Ryan Allis Made About $15M Post-Tax From iContact's $169M Exit
“I ended up making about fifteen million dollars after taxes but that's good.”
Allis: Gaining deep mentor collaboration requires aligning economic incentives
“In order to get the level of a collaboration, you often need to align economic interests in some way by allowing them to invest in your firm or by potentially paying them on a monthly basis for their advice.”
Allis: Scheduling meetings at abnormal times prevents people from showing up late
“Well, there's a, you want it to be an abnormal time so people aren't late. If it's an, if it's a normal time, people are four minutes late. If it's an abnormal time, then people are right on time.”
Allis: Large preferred venture rounds increase liquidation risk for common shareholders
“When we raised forty million dollars in, in series B preferred security, which is how you do venture capital, that forty million dollars is now senior in the capitalization structure, which means above all of the common shareholders, which is me, my co-founder…”
Allis: Driving organizational change multiplies in difficulty past 150 employees
“And so, I think when you get beyond, I think the magic number is a 150 employees, things become, ah, a multiple, ah, things become challenging at a multiple of the degree of difficulty that they were previously in order to drive change within an organization.”
Allis: Startups require formal processes and metrics around 50 employees
“It generally tends to be that when you get to a scale of about 50 employees, you need these wonderful things called processes and you need these other wonderful things called metrics.”
Allis: Startups with 10 to 15 people must codify their values
“When you get to 10 or 15 people, you need to find, ah, the adjectives that describe your culture, and you need to take the time to write down the values.”
Allis: Startups Should Hire a COO Around 30 Employees
“One is hire a chief operating officer. When you get to about 30 employees,”
iContact took zero outside capital until reaching $1M ARR
“We didn't take any outside capital. We lived in the office for the first year. We took no salaries for the first three years and just accrued them. And then once we got to a million, then we raised capital.”
iContact's $500 CAC and $1,800 LTV enabled a $40M fundraise
“That we were an annuity cash flow stream engine that was trading 500 dollars up front for 1800 dollars over three and a half years, and that math allowed us to go to the investors, raise about forty million dollars over the course of the next five years, and s…”
iContact spent $2M monthly to acquire 4,000 customers at $500 CAC
“We were spending two million dollars a month in sales and marketing by the time we got acquired. In early 2012, that 2000 dollars a month in sales and marketing was going to acquire 4000 new customers each month, about a 500 dollar customer acquisition cost, a…”
iContact raised $40M from JMI Equity, including $15M in secondary sales
“We went to a mid-market growth equity firm out of Baltimore called JMI Equity. Worked with Jitson Ha over there and Brad Wallison, and we raised a forty million dollar round of capital with the help of an investment bank, Allen & Company. Fifteen million of th…”
iContact generated $20M ARR from 1,400 enterprise customers
“So we had 68,000 SMB customers, 1400 enterprise customers. Now, if you do the math, it's about thirty million in SMB revenue, twenty million in mid-market or enterprise revenue.”
The other half of the tape: Ryan Allis's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 1Adam Robinson 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 2
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ryan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MIXERGYLEDGER | Founder and CEO, SaasRise | 1 | 18 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Mixergy → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder and CEO, SaasRise | 0 +1 | 15 | — | full record on Top Founders → |