Naveen Gupta. He’s an entrepreneur with experience building startups and growing a hundred million dollar profit and loss statements. Before cofounding BirdEye, which is his current company, he held executive positions at RingCentral, Monster and Yahoo. He’s launched industry-leading products across advertising, consumer search, social media and monetization. He lives in Sunnyvale, California with his wife and two kids.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Predictable Revenue
What CEO do you follow? – Brian Halligan
Favorite online tool? — Outreach and ZoomInfo
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4-5
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Naveen wished he would have taken more risks and pursued his dreams of starting a company

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:40 – Nathan introduces Naveen to the show
02:19 – BirdEye is the leading SaaS product that helps businesses on their customer journey
02:54 – The two things that drive purchases are customer experience and business ratings
03:20 – BirdEye grows 160%, year-over-year in revenue
03:33 – BirdEye has 25K paying customers
- 04:40 – Business model is based on location and not per seat
- 05:20 – On average, a business would have 2-3 locations
05:47 – BirdEye caters from SMBs to enterprise businesses
06:07 – BirdEye has a broad platform which has different functionalities
07:42 – Pricing on SMBs start at $3K and $100K for enterprise per year
08:12 – ACV is around $5K
08:33 – 50% of the revenue is SMB, 30% mid-market enterprise and 20% for channels
09:00 – ACV is per location
09:24 – MRR is close to $2M
10:43 – BirdEye was launched in 2012
- 10:55 – They came up with the idea after looking for a surgeon with great reviews to take care of their mother
12:07 – BirdEye was initially bootstrapped
12:33 – BirdEye has raised a total of $33M
13:16 – Team size is 170 globally
- 13:48 – Around 60 are on engineering, 70 on the sales sides and the rest are in different departments
- 14:30 – BirdEye is investing heavily on hiring the best people
14:45 – CAC is around $1K for a new business
15:05 – Payback period is 3-4 months
15:21 – 60-70% of their contracts are paid up-front, annually
16:00 – Revenue churn
16:11 – Net churn is close to 0.5%
16:28 – BirdEye is still too young to calculate LTV
- 16:48 – Naveen’s estimate is 3-5 years
17:05 – Paid ads spent annually is $200K
17:55 – Gross margin is 85-90%
18:43 – To acquire new customers, they email potential clients and ask them if they want to know their competitors’ reputations and how they compare to them
19:24 – 2016 ARR was close to $13M and 2017 will be close to $30M
19:37 – 2015 ARR was $5M and 2014 was $1.5M
21:10 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Have a business model that will benefit not just your own company but your customers as well.
Most people rely on business reviews before trying out a product or service.
Hire the best people and you’ll have the best product and provide the best customer experience.

Resources Mentioned:

Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

845: SaaS: 2014 $1.4m, Now $30m ARR how BirdEye Aiming To Be Hubspot 2.0

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders