Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Solving client problems manually gives SaaS spinouts an unfair market advantage

Steli Efti · EP 463: Close.io More Than $200k MRR, 500 Customers, $400 ARPU with CEO Steli Efti Who Wont Sell for $40M · Oct 30, 2016 · at 4:04

Steli Efti discusses why building software out of an agency or services business increases odds of success.

0:00 / 0:31exact quote · 31.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Yeah, this is a very common, I think it's a common, a trend for like a pattern to get to a great valuable business idea, which is you're stumbling or identifying a problem that real customers, real people have, and then you build a solution for that because you're really intimately familiar with both the customer and the problem. So you're able to develop a solution. By the time you have a solution, you don't have to wonder who's going to buy this. You don't have to wonder how to establish a brand in the market. You already know people. You've already serviced Customers. You've already solved these problems for them, maybe manually.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Steli Efti

Insight
Churning a bad-fit customer is entirely a marketing and sales failure
“Well, that is a tragedy still, because why the fuck did we close them in the first place? What did we do wrong in our marketing? What do we do wrong on our sales to never indicate that this should, this is a customer that shouldn't buy our product. We did some…”
Steli Efti Oct 30, 2016 ▶ 12:29 EP 463: Close.io More Than $200k MRR, 500 Customers, $400 ARPU with CEO Steli Efti Who Wont Sell for $40M
Insight
Selling incomplete software reveals actual customer demand and prioritizes product roadmaps
“What we did is we said we have one very unique, strong thing that the product does. If people really care, they'll buy even if it's really insufficient in many other areas. Like we sold sales software that didn't have any reporting in it. And people still boug…”
Steli Efti Oct 30, 2016 ▶ 14:03 EP 463: Close.io More Than $200k MRR, 500 Customers, $400 ARPU with CEO Steli Efti Who Wont Sell for $40M
Disclosure
Steli Efti refuses to sell Close.io for $40 million
“Not even close.”
Steli Efti Oct 30, 2016 ▶ 19:38 EP 463: Close.io More Than $200k MRR, 500 Customers, $400 ARPU with CEO Steli Efti Who Wont Sell for $40M
Insight
Efti: Channel testing requires pre-planning for ambiguous results
“And I think one of the most important things that, that I teach people and the thing that we've learned to do is to plan for all three scenarios and say, okay, what does success look like and failure, but what is the in between? And what do we do if the first …”
Steli Efti Oct 30, 2016 ▶ 18:43 EP 463: Close.io More Than $200k MRR, 500 Customers, $400 ARPU with CEO Steli Efti Who Wont Sell for $40M
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Efti: Close.io generates millions in revenue with under 20 employees
“It's a very small team. We're less than 20 people and we're driving many, many millions in revenue and are competing with massive organizations.”
Steli Efti Oct 30, 2016 ▶ 2:10 EP 463: Close.io More Than $200k MRR, 500 Customers, $400 ARPU with CEO Steli Efti Who Wont Sell for $40M
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Close.io's average customer pays between $400 and $500 per month
“The average per month is probably, you know, in the four or 500 dollars.”
Steli Efti Oct 30, 2016 ▶ 6:03 EP 463: Close.io More Than $200k MRR, 500 Customers, $400 ARPU with CEO Steli Efti Who Wont Sell for $40M
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 2,600 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.