Nathan Latka
350 statements across 253 episodes · 117 bullish · 74 bearish · 53 people on the record · first statement Jan 18, 2016 by Justin Williams · said 2 times in 2 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Nathan Latka's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Nathan Lackey (1), Kevin Moenne-Loccoz (1)
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2024 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Nathan Latka, oldest first
Jan 18, 2016
Jan 22, 2016 negative
Jan 23, 2016 positive
Jan 24, 2016 neutral
Jan 25, 2016 bullish
Latka: Artists and creatives will rule the world as AI advances
“And I think as AI artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to advance, The artists and the creatives are going to eventually rule the world because you can't automate to empathy, which is what architecture majors and artists and people like you h…”
Jan 25, 2016 positive
Jan 25, 2016 negative
Jan 27, 2016 bullish
Jan 27, 2016
Jan 27, 2016
Latka argues webinar cash distracts founders from building high-valuation companies
“I feel like a lot of smart business minds get attracted to the dopamine hit, which is refreshing your sales back end after a webinar. I do this too, by the way, and seeing like 10 grand or a hundred grand or a million dollars in sales come in really fast, but …”
Jan 31, 2016 negative
Feb 5, 2016
Latka shared all buyout offers and negotiation bids with entire team
“I decided very early on in the process to have the whole team see the offers come in, See kind of how I bid up each offer on Hale, and they all got to learn from the process, and people that, where it was clear that they had moved away, and that they weren't g…”
Feb 5, 2016
Seed investor Pat Matthews urged Nathan Latka to sell Heyo
“Pat Matthews, one of our early, early seed investors in the business, and one of my, I've learned a ton from him. He, you know, his advice to me was, Nathan, you need to look at this as an opportunity to, you know, declare victory, close this chapter of your l…”
Feb 7, 2016
Feb 8, 2016
Armijo: Wait for a contract before telling your team about buyout interest
“I would say that wait till they show you a contract, because right now they might just be fishing, and, you know, dangling a carrot in front of you, and it would be harder for you to tell your team Oh, the deal fell through.”
Feb 8, 2016
Feb 8, 2016
Feb 8, 2016 positive
Feb 8, 2016 negative
Feb 8, 2016
Feb 8, 2016 bullish
Feb 24, 2016
Feb 25, 2016 positive
Mar 1, 2016
Mar 1, 2016 negative
Mar 4, 2016 positive
Nathan Latka: Founders Must Maintain Alternative LOI Leverage During Due Diligence
“Due diligence is a pain in the butt, but look, you have to keep leverage when you're doing these deals, and I had a hundred percent confidence that if it fell through, we could very easily go back to one of the other companies who made an offer in one of their…”
Mar 4, 2016 positive
Mar 4, 2016
Apr 1, 2016 positive
Apr 1, 2016 bullish
Apr 3, 2016 negative
Latka: Conferences that don't pay speakers attract ego-driven, low-quality talent
“And it drives me crazy because the only speakers you're going to get in that environment are the ones that need an ego boost in front of a big crowd, but they don't have good content. And the speaker, the event organizer uses them because it's cheaper, but the…”
Apr 3, 2016 negative
Jun 8, 2016 negative
Jun 9, 2016 negative
Jun 11, 2016 bullish
Jun 13, 2016 positive
Latka: Allocating 5% of earnings to building businesses yields highest returns
“For every dollar I earn, if I take 10 cents and spend it immediately, of that 10 cents, I'd say five cents of that goes to things like clothes and food and a mocha every morning. The other five cents of every dollar I earn is going towards me just inventing ne…”
Jun 13, 2016
Jun 14, 2016 positive
Jun 15, 2016 negative
Jun 15, 2016
Jun 19, 2016 positive
Latka: Early-stage founders teach listeners more than billionaires do
“People learn so much more from folks that are where you are. It's one thing for me to get a billion. I have billionaires on here all the time. They tell their stories. The problem is they don't remember what they were doing when they were just starting out.”
Jun 20, 2016
Jul 2, 2016 positive
Latka: AdEspresso Raised $20M and Reached $1.8M Run Rate
“Didn't they just raised twenty million bucks? They did. Yeah, they did. We had Armando back on in episode 70 at NathanLacca.com forward slash the top 70. He broke down how they got past a 1.8 million dollar run rate with a hundred dollar ARPU and a thousand do…”
Jul 8, 2016 neutral
Latka: Autonomous fleets will shift car ownership to corporate balance sheets
“I believe that very soon, you know, the assets of a car is going to live on the balance sheet of a company versus an individual because companies are going to have automated vehicles are going to have Fleets like Google, Apple, and Uber, and people aren't goin…”
Jul 17, 2016 negative
Aug 6, 2016 positive
Aug 14, 2016
Hurdlr only prompts upgrades after users hit verified dollar savings thresholds
“So what we're looking at is tying into, so our system tracks your savings through deductions, right? So we want to hit a certain mark that you save X amount of dollars. And once you hit that, then we'll ask you if you feel like you got value to upgrade.”
Aug 21, 2016 neutral
Sep 2, 2016
Sep 3, 2016 bullish
Sep 5, 2016 bullish
Sep 7, 2016 bullish
Sep 8, 2016 positive
Sep 8, 2016 negative
Latka claims Gary Vaynerchuk has aged twenty years from overworking
“Gary, by the way, you look at pictures of him from five years ago and where he is now, you know, like when the president takes office, and it's like, before he took office, now, and they look like they've aged 20 years, that's what Gary is killing himself. I d…”
Sep 8, 2016 bullish
Sep 8, 2016 neutral
Sep 9, 2016 bullish
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 negative
Latka avoids romantic relationships because they give others leverage over him
“This is one of the reasons, by the way, I don't have a relationship. It becomes very, if I have a relationship, it becomes obviously clear what I care about, whoever I'm with, right? And if people then know how to cater to whoever I'm with, it's actually a wea…”
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Sep 14, 2016 neutral
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 neutral
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 neutral
Latka deceptively lists unconfirmed speakers to sell conference tickets
“What it said, if you go look at that particular part, it said confirmed and invited. They have been either confirmed or invited. And what I will tell you, as sales come in and I have more money to play with, the likelihood that I actually confirm all of them i…”
Sep 14, 2016 neutral
Sep 14, 2016 neutral
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 negative
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 negative
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Latka claims smart entrepreneurs intentionally make people root against them
“Any smart person in business, and I think I'm pretty smart, has to manage their personal life and know when you're trying to get people to root for you and when you want people to root against you. I want everybody rooting against me right now because the lowe…”
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Latka advises early-stage founders to aggressively copy competitors over inventing categories
“I believe in copying like hell. Anyone who has an ego that thinks they're going to create something new is never going to be successful, in my opinion, right? Especially, I'll take that, especially in the early phases. Once you're an Elon Musk, you can start t…”
Sep 14, 2016 positive
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 negative
Sep 17, 2016 positive
Nathan Latka loves unfiltered confrontation in business
“I love confrontation. I love it because It allows me to never have like a filter. It just, if I, if something, if I don't like something or I disagree with somebody, I just go after it. No matter how big of a person or a list or how rich or whatever they are, …”
Sep 17, 2016 bullish
Sep 17, 2016
Sep 20, 2016 bullish
Sep 23, 2016 bullish
Sep 24, 2016
Latka: Healthy SaaS companies trade at 3x to 5x ARR multiples
“When I'm valuing companies, what I do is I typically take, especially SAS monthly recurring revenue, assuming churn is below three percent monthly. That's a, that's kind of good economics. I'll take the five grand multiplied times 12. So you annualize it and t…”
Sep 24, 2016 neutral
Sep 24, 2016 bullish
Sep 25, 2016 bullish
Oct 1, 2016 bullish
Oct 4, 2016 bullish
Nov 4, 2016 neutral
Info-product companies compete for users' consumption time, not just content quality
“You can have the most amazing content, but you're really in the business of convincing people to consume your content. And that is a tough freaking business because you're competing, trying to take time from them to get them to go through your courses.”
Dec 10, 2016
Dec 10, 2016 positive
Dec 10, 2016 bullish
Dec 17, 2016 negative
Latka: B2B data winners succeed through marketing, not product moats
“This is not like a Warren Buffett, like where he says he wants moats around company. I've talked to so many people in the space. It all sounds like the same damn thing to me. And the people that are going to win are going to be the ones that are better markete…”
Jan 9, 2017
Jan 10, 2017
Latka: Executing an Email and Sales Tool Roll-Up via TheTopInbox.com
“I am actively executing a rollup in this space. So if you go to the top inbox.com, I've acquired many, many companies already kind of in the kind of get leads, email the leads, send later, set reminders, close deals kind of space.”
Jan 11, 2017 neutral
Jan 21, 2017
Jan 21, 2017
Feb 24, 2017 positive
Mar 1, 2017 positive
Mar 20, 2017 neutral
May 9, 2017
Latka: Info product apps struggle with retention rather than downloads
“The issue is not driving downloads because usually they're built by very smart marketers like yourself. The issue is utility in that most apps you download, you don't open. I mean, I may be on my phone open maybe five apps on a daily basis and everything else …”
May 20, 2017 negative
Latka: 600 SaaS companies average just $137.5k in annual revenue per employee
“They've raised together over five billion dollars. If you added up all their revenue, they're doing about 1.8 billion dollars annually. So that would be a healthy company altogether, but get this, when you add up all the team members and divide it into the rev…”
May 27, 2017 positive
Building internal agency tooling is a proven playbook for launching SaaS
“I think it's such a good piece of advice for folks listening right now, thinking about trying to get, build their own software company to start up in an agency, because I have talked to so many agencies where they have all these clients and they start realizin…”
Jun 11, 2017 positive
Jun 12, 2017
Jun 20, 2017 negative
Jun 28, 2017 positive
Jun 30, 2017
Jul 13, 2017 positive
Latka: My podcast achieves an effective $900 CPM from sponsorships
“So, sponsors now, if I actually figured out what the CPM was, like, if I took my total sponsor revenue annually, And then looked at my total downloads annually. I'm cranking somewhere near, near, not as good as you, but somewhere near like a 900 dollar CPM.”
Jul 19, 2017 neutral
Latka has built an email subscriber list of 250,000 people
“So like, if I brought you on to do like a launch that I was doing, and I had already done the, you know, decade plus of work it took to build my email list to, you know, what it is now, which is, you know, quarter of a million people, right?”
Jul 19, 2017 negative
Latka argues that group coaching is unscalable due to high churn
“I've never seen group coaching work in a scalable format, and people will try and convince me it does, but then I ask a simple question, which is, okay, you have, I'm making this up, you have 4000 people paying you 97 bucks a month for your membership site. We…”
Jul 23, 2017 negative
Jul 30, 2017 positive
Jul 30, 2017 positive
Aug 8, 2017 negative
Latka: X.ai's automated scheduling assistant Amy is broken and unusable
“Jose, I hate that thing. There are so many CEOs that I'm trying to schedule a meeting with, and they say, oh, I'm going to introduce you to Amy. She'll help us find a time. I just, I ignore the CEO completely. That thing is so broken.”
Aug 10, 2017 negative
Latka: Having children is a 'bullshit' excuse to avoid entrepreneurial risk
“I meet so many parents with kids, they use their children as excuses of why, like, I mean, there is a limit, but it's such an easy excuse for parents. They say, well, Nathan, I can't take the risks you took because I have a kid. Bullshit. Like, you can figure …”
Aug 23, 2017 bullish
Aug 29, 2017
Mobilewalla monitored swing state polling locations in real-time for campaign teams
“What we did for this particular party, who spent way less on, feet on the street than the other party, we were monitoring every polling booth, every polling location in a certain number of states, And we were telling the ground team who showed up to vote and w…”
Aug 31, 2017 bearish
Latka: Crypto claims of pure democratization without individual wealth are false
“It's because everyone I talk to talks about, it gives power back to the people, it democratizes everything, but ultimately there is still, people are going to get rich off this thing, and I'm trying to decode who's going to get rich and why, and the response a…”
Sep 16, 2017 neutral
Latka: Liquidating ICO Ether Early Cost FirstBlood $69 Million in Upside
“If you had, that was in September, if you had waited just six months and liquidated all those shares at the 372,000 shares at the current price, which is almost 200 bucks, you would have basically had seventy four million dollars in cash in your bank.”
Sep 17, 2017 neutral
Sep 22, 2017 negative
Latka: Bestseller status creates massive ROI for keynote speakers
“The problem is that it's just not working like that, because they're able to put in their bios everywhere, on their keynote pages, blah, blah, blah, New York Times, Washington, Best Seller, and that one sentence adds So much value. It, 10 X covers up any negat…”
Oct 3, 2017 negative
Latka loses respect for CEOs who use x.ai's scheduling bot Amy
“I hate that damn thing. I, when CEO, when I'm trying to schedule someone for my podcast, and they say, meet Amy, and then I very quickly realize Amy's a bot who's not actually helping me find a freaking time. I get so pissed, and I lose complete respect for th…”
Nov 2, 2017
Nov 4, 2017 positive
Nov 4, 2017 positive
Latka: College resident advisors make the most successful founders
“If there's one predicator in college on who's going to be a successful entrepreneur, it's the RA. Cause you got to deal with all the bull crap. You have to be a disciplinary at some times, but you also want to like try and be friends too. So everyone gets alon…”
Dec 2, 2017
Dec 5, 2017
Definition of financial breakeven reveals a CEO's true risk tolerance
“You can learn about the risk tolerance because they'll say, well, we're hovering like plus or minus five grand black or red, or someone say plus or -200 grand or 500 grand. You get a sense of the risk level of the CEO by getting what that plus or minus is arou…”
Dec 9, 2017 positive
Dec 24, 2017
Dec 24, 2017 bullish
Dec 25, 2017 neutral
Coupa priced its IPO at a unicorn valuation, avoiding a down round
“No, no, no. That's not our good either. We were somewhere in that same neighborhood. It was just like roughly unicorn kind of thing. And we entered in at the same place and then it went up to I don't know, 1.7 billion or something. And it's, so it's been aroun…”
Dec 31, 2017 negative
Latka: YC startups artificially inflate revenue by selling to each other
“The problem is when you go into due diligence with a YC company, their customer list is a bunch of other YC companies. So it's almost like a network marketing scheme where like they all buy each other's products to inflate the thing, but it doesn't make any se…”
Jan 18, 2018 negative
May 1, 2018 positive
Stevenson: Chatmatic will generate $25k to $45k monthly from renewals
“I would say that in, in any sort of projection that we've run, I'm probably more along the lines of a 25 to 45,000 a month when it comes to them, for them to actually recur, like, for them to actually continue on and to upgrade, because a lot of people I mean,…”
May 5, 2018 positive
May 22, 2018 bullish
Latka: High-volume apparel makers are shifting from barcodes to active fabric tags
“There's a lot of companies I speak to that do volume at a large scale. I'm talking hundreds of millions of units that are moving essentially from barcodes to some sort of active transmission system built into the tagged fabric.”
Jun 4, 2018 bullish
Jun 18, 2018 positive
Jun 18, 2018 neutral
Jun 23, 2018
Jun 26, 2018 positive
Jul 15, 2018
Jul 15, 2018 negative
Jul 16, 2018 neutral
Jul 19, 2018
Jul 22, 2018 bearish
Jul 22, 2018 bearish
Jul 22, 2018 neutral
Jul 26, 2018
Jul 30, 2018 negative
Host Nathan Latka regrets rejecting a life-changing buyout due to ego.
“I'll never forget the mistake I made at my first company where I turned down an acquisition offer that would have changed my life, but I'm like, you know what? I read that Mark turned down Yahoo for a billion and you know what? My dick's big too. So I'm going …”
Aug 2, 2018
Latka secures six-figure podcast sponsorships via UTA and CAA agents
“What I mean by that is, you know, for the show, for example, the podcast, we have many advertisers that pay in the six figures and on a few of them, we've actually had to work through the CEO's agent at UTA or CAA, you know, very high touch model.”
Aug 3, 2018 negative
Latka: Selling SaaS lifetime deals on AppSumo is a stupid strategy
“I think it's the stupidest thing for CEOs of SaaS companies to put deals on AppSumo because Noah's a genius, and he knows if he can convince a SaaS CEO to sell a lifetime subscription, by nature, it's going to get a lot of signups. By the way, it also kills yo…”
Aug 24, 2018
Nov 4, 2018 positive
Nathan Latka signs Portfolio book deal using Simon Sinek's writer
“I just signed a pretty large book deal with Portfolio. I went through the exact same thing, but I did, I decided, you know what, I'm really good at talking, so I will talk my book, and I will hire Simon Sinek's writer to write what I talk, and that's how we're…”
Nov 8, 2018
Nov 23, 2018
Latka tests 30 Fiverr freelancers at $10 each to find full-time hires
“Currently like how I find new talent to hire full-time at my company is I'll just put out like a, the same process doc to like 30 different people on Fiverr and I'll pay them all, you know, 10 bucks to do the task. And then whoever like goes above and beyond l…”
Dec 14, 2018
Jan 5, 2019 neutral
Jan 6, 2019
Feb 24, 2019 negative
Latka: Walking away from early Heyo buyout offer was a major mistake
“One of the biggest mistakes I made at my first company, Heyo, is when everyone else was raising huge rounds, and I thought it was very frothy. I had a large acquisition offer on the table, and I walked away from it, and then sold for way less than that four ye…”
Feb 24, 2019
Mar 2, 2019
Mar 2, 2019
Mar 2, 2019 positive
Mar 2, 2019
Mar 2, 2019
Latka: Acquired SendLater and 75k Email List for $1,000
“Four days after that email, we had a deal. No lawyers. No accountants. Just an email agreement and me sending a thousand dollars via PayPal. It was an incredible setup because that 1000 dollars included a working Chrome extension and a 75,000 person email list…”
Mar 2, 2019 negative
Mar 2, 2019
Mar 2, 2019
Mar 2, 2019 neutral
Mar 2, 2019
Mar 4, 2019 bullish
Latka: Bootstrappers Should Enter VC-Funded Markets to Leverage Competitor Spend
“If investors are sinking all that money into one industry, they're growing the industry and making it easier for you to find new customers. You turn their resources into your resources when you join the space that they're pouring money into.”
Mar 4, 2019 negative
Latka: Raising outside capital inevitably forces liquidity demands from LPs
“Look in a second, it doesn't matter if you raise a dollar or a hundred million. The second you've raised was someone else's money. They can tell you they're patient. They can tell you they love you, but ultimately when their LPs come knocking and saying a deca…”
Mar 5, 2019 negative
Mar 5, 2019 positive
Latka: Founders should proactively initiate buyout talks rather than waiting to be courted
“Forget the tired thinking that you can only get a great offer for your business if buyers woo you into selling. You need to make it known that you want to sell with the reason people will believe to get conversations going.”
Mar 5, 2019 neutral
Latka: Issuing a letter of intent significantly hooks prospective buyers emotionally
“When I'm looking at buying companies, I know that once I issue an LOI, I'm significantly more invested. I've learned more about the CEO, the company financials, and the systems the team uses. I can still walk away, but it hurts more to walk away at that point.”
Mar 5, 2019 neutral
Mar 5, 2019 positive
Latka: Feigning personal desperation gets competitors to start acquisition talks
“Email a few of your competitors and say, I really need to sell the business to take care of some personal stuff. Want to chat? Leave it at that. This sounds desperate, but that's the point. Your desperate vibes will get prospective buyers to engage in conversa…”
Mar 5, 2019 neutral
Mar 11, 2019 negative
Latka: Local TV Station Apps Have Virtually Zero Weekly User Engagement
“Because, I mean, even engagement rates on these local apps, these, you know, every TV station thinks it's sexy to have an app, but how many times once it's downloaded does it actually get engaged within a week? Like zero. People don't go back into these things…”
Mar 11, 2019
Latka: Print magazine is bundled only for $10k/month SaaS database clients
“We have just launched a magazine, right? It's a beautiful magazine, right? And we've launched it, but we have, the only people that get this, they pay me 10 grand a month for access to my database on SaaS companies. So this is only going out to people who pay …”
Mar 11, 2019
Apr 8, 2019 positive
Apr 8, 2019 bearish
Apr 10, 2019 bullish
Apr 13, 2019 neutral
May 22, 2019
May 30, 2019
Jun 5, 2019
Latka: Heyo peaked at $90K monthly before selling due to 7% churn
“My first company, Heyo, it was a drag and drop for Facebook apps. Every Tuesday morning, we knew that we were going to have something broken because that night Facebook release, that's when they did the release. And eventually we topped out about 80, 90 grand …”
Jun 16, 2019 positive
Jul 6, 2019
Webinar platforms suffer 7% to 10% monthly churn, killing SaaS valuations
“I can share with you guys listening, other, other webinar platforms I interviewed, I mean, you're typically seeing monthly logo churn in the, like, seven, eight, nine, 10% range, which obviously is too high to get the valuations that most SaaS companies get. Y…”
Jul 10, 2019 negative
Latka: Keeping minimally profitable startups alive without kill criteria is dangerous
“Nobody puts parameters in place for when to kill something, right? And this is like, the rationale you just used, I think is just dangerous for, especially people that haven't had your success, right? If their logic is, if it's profitable, if it's making a dol…”
Jul 13, 2019 positive
Jul 24, 2019 positive
Latka: Top SaaS companies start as agencies before pivoting to software
“The most successful SaaS companies though, you're right, that I've interviewed have all started for a year or two as an agency, and then they were ruthless in either selling the agency or shutting it down. And going all in on the software, even if revenue took…”
Aug 16, 2019 neutral
Latka: $1M-$5M founders struggle to identify their single customer value metric
“There's so many founders that I talked to that are like in the million to four or five million range, and they're trying to figure out like expansion and pricing. And like the biggest issue I always see is They can't identify, like, a single, like, the single …”
Aug 16, 2019 neutral
Aug 18, 2019
Latka: Investors prefer proven paid CAC models over purely organic growth
“In a world where the person that can pay the most wins the customer, you actually want to see people that have proved that they can afford a two dollar dollar based CAC to get a new dollar in ARR. That's actually where you want to put your money.”
Sep 7, 2019
Nov 13, 2019
Nov 19, 2019 negative
Nov 25, 2019
Dec 15, 2019 negative
Latka: AppSumo lifetime deals harm long-term SaaS sustainability
“There's a lot of founders like you that get blinded by the initial, hey, here's a hundred grand or 200 grand, right, that an AppSumo can drive you, but it actually really hurts your ability to build a long-term sustainable business because you then have to go …”
Jan 30, 2020
Feb 7, 2020 neutral
Feb 24, 2020
Mar 2, 2020 bearish
Mar 15, 2020 positive
Mar 25, 2020 negative
Latka: I Would Never Invest $1M Before Securing First Dollar of Revenue
“I would never put, I don't care if I would, if I had a hundred billion dollars, I would never put a million dollars into something. Like, I always, my thought whenever I get into new businesses, How, what little amount of money can I put in to get the first do…”
Apr 3, 2020 bullish
Nathan Latka offers to match SaaS founders' COVID relief with debt
“One of the things that I'm considering doing, and if you end up doing this, email me or tweet me is I am matching. Whatever you get from COVID. So if you like applied and got a 200,000 dollar check from the COVID funds, I will, would give you another 200,000 d…”
Apr 3, 2020 bearish
Nathan Latka: The $349B PPP stimulus funds will run out quickly
“So the trick with this that, you know, Connor, that I'm trying to share with people is I think the money will run out. Right. If you take three hundred fifty billion. Right. At a max of ten million per company, that's only 34,000 companies. Right. Even even if…”
Apr 3, 2020
Apr 7, 2020 negative
Apr 16, 2020 bearish
Latka: Pitching feedback software during Covid is selling falling people tissues
“I just, I don't see how you sell customers on a customer feedback tool in a time where everyone cares right now about not dying. I think it's like trying to sell someone who has just fallen out of an airplane, like a tissue and saying, hold it above your head …”
Apr 25, 2020
Perfect market data would attract universal competition and erode all profits
“If data was perfect, and the world knew that this exact tool, if you build it was a billion dollar tool, everyone would do it. And the competition would erode all profits. The mere function of what you just described will never exist because if it, if perfect …”
Jun 3, 2020 neutral
Nathan Latka secretly removed code from Heyo releases to preserve product simplicity
“We got in massive fights at hay when we were building it, where in every product release, we would secretly remove at least seven, like some artificial number lines of code. And if no one complained about it, we'd leave it removed.”
Jun 4, 2020 bearish
Jun 7, 2020 neutral
Jun 7, 2020 positive
Jun 11, 2020 bearish
Latka: ClearBank Revenue Financing Carries an Effective APR of 24%
“So a deal from ClearBank is going to look something like one X your monthly revenues on a two month Term with an interest rate of two percent per month, right? I mean, and that's on the bottom side. That's a 24% APR essentially. That's expensive.”
Jun 20, 2020 negative
Latka: Existing Revenue-Based Financing Options Take Advantage of Founders
“I think ARR is a real asset. And I think that it should be valued like an asset. And I think you can lend against that as an asset. And I think right now, most of the options in the marketplace are taking advantage of entrepreneurs and they're way too expensiv…”
Jul 21, 2020 bullish
Startups can secure 10x debt leverage against cash reserves for M&A
“There's tons of deals I'm seeing right now where companies are doing exactly what you're doing, but they're only like when you buy a house, they're only fronting 10% of the equity. So you're going to get, let's see, you could work with a debt firm right now an…”
Jul 30, 2020 positive
Sep 10, 2020 neutral
Sep 20, 2020 bullish
Latka: Mid-Market Enterprise Is The Sweet Spot For Managed Support Agencies
“I think this kind of thing ends up having a lot of success actually, and they're like the mid market enterprise space where they're too small to go want to do, do, do, do direct, but they're big enough where they need 10 support people, you know, and it's wort…”
Sep 24, 2020
Nathan Latka shut down a $100K ARR Google plugin over platform risk
“I used to have a plugin that did sort of the same thing inside Google and I just shut it down. It was doing a hundred grand in ARR. Just shut it down. Cause I'm like, I can't keep up with Google and they're going to release this for free anyway soon.”
Nov 4, 2020
Nov 8, 2020
Latka: Crowdfunding campaigns must secure major soft commitments before public launch
“If you want to raise 200 grand, what you do is you say, We're raising 300 grand. You go get soft commits of 200 grand, so that you hit 200 grand on day one, and so you're definitely gonna hit your target, and then other people who you don't know coming into th…”
Nov 12, 2020 negative
Latka: Wi-Fi marketing is the hardest sell for agencies during pandemic
“I'm just saying of all the things that they could pitch the restaurant owner, my wife, like this wifi solution would be in my opinion, the last thing that they would try and sell them. Consider it's the hardest sale right now, considering all the other digital…”
Nov 18, 2020 neutral
Almabase averages $3,500 to $4,000 total CAC per new customer
“I think our CAC from a lead gen perspective is obviously different for different channels, but I think it averages out to about 1500 to 2000 dollars per customer in terms of lead gen. And then if I add the cost of the account executive as well, including salar…”
Dec 3, 2020 positive
Dec 18, 2020 neutral
Latka: First sales hires almost never outsell the founder
“A lot of founders make the first sales hire, they make the assumption that that first sales hire should sell more than the founder, and it's almost never the case, because the founder knows the product, the founder has an unfair advantage, because customers al…”
Jan 3, 2021 bullish
Jan 22, 2021 negative
Mar 16, 2021
Latka: Scaled Marketplaces Must Monopolize One Niche Before Expanding
“We've interviewed almost 3000 SaaS founders of which about a 180 of them have built marketplaces doing between, you know, caught a million and up to a hundred million per year in revenue. And almost all of them exclusively talk about how they had to monopolize…”
Mar 16, 2021 positive
Mar 16, 2021 neutral
Mar 21, 2021 bearish
Apr 1, 2021 bullish
Apr 2, 2021 negative
Apr 8, 2021
Apr 21, 2021 negative
Apr 27, 2021 bearish
May 1, 2021 neutral
May 19, 2021 negative
May 30, 2021 bullish
May 30, 2021 positive
May 30, 2021 neutral
Latka: Highest SaaS valuations require net dollar retention over 150%
“The companies right now, they're in the highest valuations. They all have net dollar retention above 150%. Right. So like, that's one of the key, that plus just overall growth rate are really the key drivers I'm seeing today of SAS valuations.”
Jun 21, 2021 positive
Jul 9, 2021
Jul 29, 2021 bearish
Aug 6, 2021 bullish
Latka values EstateSpace at $60M-$70M based on a $2.2M ARR
“I mean, I personally would argue you're worth more than if you're already at a 135,000 dollars per month in revenue, right? So that's about a 2.2 million dollar run rate. I'd say like minimum sixties. Although all you investors listening aren't going to like t…”
Aug 29, 2021 neutral
Sep 1, 2021 bullish
Sep 2, 2021
Sep 25, 2021
Oct 11, 2021
Oct 18, 2021 positive
Dec 16, 2021 bearish
Dec 20, 2021 negative
Jan 12, 2022 negative
Latka argues building a $5M bootstrapped SaaS beats chasing a unicorn IPO
“Tyler's, it's way easier and less risky to build a five million dollar SaaS company than it is to go try and raise five hundred million and build a billion dollar business that you own like one percent of at the time you try an IPO.”
Jan 19, 2022 positive
Mar 13, 2022 positive
Mar 13, 2022 bullish
Mar 17, 2022
Mar 17, 2022 neutral
Mar 29, 2022 bullish
Apr 12, 2022 bullish
Apr 19, 2022 positive
Apr 22, 2022
Apr 24, 2022
Bad output from reputable dev agencies usually stems from terrible specs
“If you work with sort of a reputable development shop, like the one you work with, then you get back in bad product. It's usually because you gave terrible specs. It's very rarely the developers, you know, it's very rarely the shop's fault in my opinion.”
May 1, 2022 positive
May 7, 2022 bullish
May 8, 2022
May 15, 2022 negative
May 16, 2022 bullish
May 22, 2022
May 29, 2022 bearish
Jun 4, 2022 negative
Jun 27, 2022
Latka: Founders should secure any first exit to self-fund future ventures
“This is why I try and get founders all the time. I say, guys, just get your first exit done. It doesn't have to be 10 X. It doesn't have to be a Christian Patrick deal. Just get your first deal done. So you have some money so you can go double down on yourself…”
Jul 14, 2022
Jul 16, 2022 neutral
Jul 19, 2022
Aug 5, 2022
Deduplicating signup domains reveals hidden enterprise sales opportunities
“It's a good thing for anyone to do that's just like the self-serve folks is go look at all your thousands of self-serve users paying 29 bucks a month. Look at the domain name of signups, sort, you know, alphabetize them and then highlight conditional formattin…”
Aug 6, 2022 neutral
Aug 6, 2022 negative
Mealy refuses to share internal metrics, citing a 'competitive intelligence' team
“And we have a competitive intelligence team and we understand how that information gets out. And we've chosen to keep a lot of that private. We're not Interested in debuting a lot of that on the public front. We're not really gonna expose that kind of informat…”
Aug 10, 2022
Aug 10, 2022
Nathan Latka tests Upwork contractors by paying 10 simultaneously
“What I do is I put filtering in place and I click on the most expensive hourly rate. And I pay 10 people to do the same task. And then I look at the work quality and then I use the one ongoing, which would, who gave me the Best hourly rate for the best value o…”
Aug 10, 2022 neutral
Aug 15, 2022 bullish
Aug 21, 2022
Aug 23, 2022 bullish
Aug 23, 2022
Latka: Rapidly scaling software founders almost all start as agencies
“The most successful software founders that I've interviewed, I'm talking to ones doing, you know, going from zero to whatever, you know, a 100,000,200 million in revenue fairly rapidly. They almost all start off as an agency, just like you're doing.”
Aug 28, 2022 bearish
Sep 2, 2022 neutral
Sep 9, 2022
Latka: SaaS lifetime deals must cap usage at activation metrics to upsell
“The trick is you have to understand what your software what with the activation metric is. So if it's number of leads reached out to per month, the lifetime deal closes down once they hit a hundred and then you upsell once they break a hundred. But if you've g…”
Oct 12, 2022 positive
Oct 12, 2022 positive
Latka: Setting early secondary precedents makes future founder liquidity easier
“They will always look at the prior term sheet. So if you've already set precedents that you did a small secondary already, it's way easier to get a bigger one the next time. So like, I would argue as soon as you can ask for, even if you're only raising a milli…”
Nov 1, 2022 positive
Nov 1, 2022 bullish
Nov 30, 2022 neutral
Ranjan: Cerebrum X charges $6 to $10 per vehicle monthly
“So, so typically you get an average revenue per, per vehicle. It goes somewhere between 72 dollars, which is six bucks per month to up to 10 bucks, right? Which can go up to around one 20 dollars per month, right? So it depends upon What data they're getting.”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Latka: Founders leak their metrics on my podcast to induce acquisition bids
“I full disclosure have, I won't name them, but I have founders who call on my show specifically because they want a reason to share their numbers live where it looks like I'm beating it out of them, but really they want to share it because they want the market…”
Dec 4, 2022 positive
Latka: Founders use debt to buy back early equity at 1.5x returns
“This is the number one use case we see at founder path right now is, is our folks that raised a little bit going, man, I want to give those investors 1.5 X their money, but buy back 20% of my equity. And we fund it with obviously with debt.”
Dec 8, 2022 positive
Latka: Upfront service fees prevent SaaS churn and boost retention
“This is the counterpoint guys, the VC argument that you shouldn't sell services inside of your SAS. I would always argue the opposite, which is if you touch a SAS sale with a big upfront fee, like five K, they're just not going to turn your net dollar retentio…”
Dec 23, 2022 negative
Dec 25, 2022
Dec 29, 2022 negative
Latka: Raising more capital makes startups significantly riskier
“Significantly more risk, the more money you raise. Significantly more risk. You have to grow faster. Everyone burns more. You lose your creativity because everyone wants to throw money at problems. I would argue it's way riskier to raise a lot of money.”
Jan 6, 2023 negative
Latka: IP-to-Email Web Visitor Identity Tools Are Rarely Accurate
“I mean, I've tested a bunch of these tools where it basically says, you know, Hey, Nathan, we'll give you the email, the person on your site from their IP address. They don't even have to create an account. That way you can email them and get them to like sign…”
Jan 19, 2023 neutral
Latka: Hired growth CEOs typically receive $250k–$350k cash and 5–20% equity
“Most CEO comps, you know, in this kind of situation, you're going to be making cash to 50 to three 50, and you're going to have an equity slug. That's something between sort of five and 20% of the business, somewhere, somewhere sort of in that range.”
Feb 5, 2023
Feb 9, 2023 positive
Feb 17, 2023 negative
Mar 22, 2023
Jun 23, 2023
Jul 10, 2023 neutral
Maruthavanan: 85% of SaaS Startups Never Cross $1M ARR
“85% of the SaaS startups that start out do not cross a million dollar in ARR? This is statistics from Nathan's Database that he puts together where he tracks the entire SaaS universe. There are about 32,499 startups as of yesterday. And out of them, about 4766…”
Jul 31, 2023 neutral
Aug 7, 2023 bullish
Aug 10, 2023 negative
Aug 30, 2023 negative
Sep 20, 2023
Oct 7, 2023
Dec 5, 2023 neutral
Latka: Marketplace Success Depends on Feature Sequencing, Not Generating New Ideas
“When you sit on so much data, the hard problem is not, like, I didn't just give you some brand new idea you never thought of, you know about that idea, but the hard part and who wins marketplace is it's actually what do you decide to launch first, second, thir…”
Dec 7, 2023 positive
Dec 14, 2023 positive
Latka: Neglected Chrome Extensions with 500K Downloads Can Be Bought Cheaply
“They'll see that a Chrome extension has 500,000 downloads, but there's a thing that says when the developers push the last update. If it's more than a year ago, it's probably sitting there doing nothing. You buy that for cheap. It's a 500,000 email list.”
Jan 23, 2024
Jan 30, 2024
Britton: Suzy's 2021 Series D valued the company at 10x ARR
“It was closer to about three hundred million of post money. We had a 10 X valuation. We had a 10 X valuation, which is a healthy multiple because we didn't get above our skis. A lot of, we had term sheets with higher multiples. I'm happy that we took The 10 X …”
Feb 20, 2024 positive
Feb 20, 2024 positive
May 21, 2024 positive
Nov 5, 2024 negative
Jun 10, 2025 bullish
Latka: Vertical AI tools that implement user memory first will win
“My bed is these AI tools, the first tools that in a specific niche, so you'd be video editing that allow me to store my memory, me teaching and sticking the memory into some magic is what creates the lock-in. And I think turn is going to drop the second people…”
Feb 4, 2026 bullish
Latka pitches Spiegel a live $5M credit line with no warrants
“My offer, just so you have in the back of your head, we would do a five million dollar line of credit with somebody like you. That's under 60% leverage against your ARR, 50% leverage against your ARR. It's a line of credit. So it can sit there and you pay noth…”
Feb 18, 2026 bearish
Latka says software companies need proprietary customer memory to rival AI
“I think you're going to see a lot of software companies today realize that they can't compete with AI unless they sit on some kind of memory about their customers that the general AI foundational models don't have access to, right?”
Mar 25, 2026
Mar 25, 2026