How I built 3 SaaS companies to $20m ARR

please welcome Adam Baker to the stage [Applause] [Music] my father once told me that if you fail to prepare you're preparing to fail so this should be an interest in 20 minutes buckling I'm Adam I'm the founder of actually Four SAS companies one failed so I talk about that more than I do the the successes I've had I'm based in London I'm currently the founder and CEO of

dealpad oh that's not me oh God there you go I told you I don't lie all right okay so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my journey um specifically what I've learned across building four companies bootstrapping um every single company I've raised 2.5 million across those four companies um and my last come my previous company blotter we got to about 17 million ARR

on that two and a half million other than that I've bootstrap so um if we can skip another side oh what do I press here that's what it is there you go I can run companies but I can't operate tech there you go um so my my first company was called blotter uh and it was a real journey for us it was a passion of mine I wanted to change the world and and how the world

consumed news I was convinced still am that so much is being undiscovered so many news events happen that we don't know about because of bias or because journalists can't get there and I wanted to be the Catalyst of changing that and so I set about building out some machine learning that authenticated news footage from Anonymous sources around the world and we built a Global Network of a million people we had a team of 27 people uh and 18 months later we had zero Revenue

and it was a it was a really kind of I guess pivotal time in our um in our company where I had similar to Gill earlier I had to tell 27 people that I couldn't make their payroll and I didn't know when I was going to better make it and so I moved to New York and I to get away from it obviously from London I moved to New York um and we turned off everything that we'd done for the last 18 months which was this front-facing consumer LED

platform and we turned off our entire network and everyone was thinking what what are you doing you're nuts but it wasn't working and I did a beauty parade in New York and I went around to every single media organization I could get into which was pretty much most of them and I showed them what we'd done over the last 18 months which was breaking news stories before any of the mainstream media were able to do and I came away with 11 sign contracts in about 10 weeks we had about

300K of ARR in 10 weeks and I went back and I paid everybody um similar to Gill and we built that company out and five years later when we exited um 23 of 27 people were still with me and it really defined our culture that moment where you know you shouldn't have to go through these seismic kind of challenges but that moment where we were just had to be together and we all stayed together it just defines culture and that's I think that was definitely one of the reasons we were so successful

and then um my my next company was is churnley and I'm still the CEO of churnley but um probably not for for much longer um for good reasons um so I launched in 2018 and if you look at our 19 Revenue our 18 maybe we had 20K and then in 19 we had about 600 K's worth of Revenue and then covid happened and our customer acquisition went absolutely nuts because everybody

stopped thinking about how can we generate Revenue it's how about how can we save our customers how can we avoid churn and so timing for us was great we were all walking around in like double masks hoping it would never end I'm joking um but but the timing was was was was good for us as a business and we we moved from about 600k to six to about five and a half million US dollars in 18 months just just under just under two

years and that obviously led to quite a lot of growth challenges for us in terms of people in terms of support and being able to um make our customers successful but what the real challenge now for us is that we've gone on this massive hockey stick over the last kind of couple of years but we can't sustain that because companies now aren't thinking about churn as much and so the challenge that I've got as the CEO of this company is how do we continue to grow and so um obviously as a company

that solves churn problems we can't lose our customers so that's our number one priority um and then how do we grow and so what I'm going to show you is just some some of the tactics that we've used so we We Grew From um about 200 000 USD to 2 million um in 12 weeks and the way we did it um is by finding our ICP our ideal customer profile and for us that was a really defining moment for um for for fraternally so let me just tell you a

bit about our customer base so we custom everything right so there's nothing off the shelf with churnally we've got some models that we use one of the biggest challenges we have is data getting our customers to or our prospects to share data with us it's one of the biggest challenges we've got from from one data center to the other for lots of different reasons and so we we really had to go back to the drawing board and figure out who our customer was who did we want to service we had at one point we had DHL calling us and

telling us they wanted to they wanted to work with us we could never support DHL but we we had that conversation we wasted months talking to the HL and we we really had to home in so we decided we would focus on B2B software companies that had a platform and the reason for that is because then I'll talk a bit about this in a minute when you think about churn a really big um denominator of why users churn is how they use your platform we're not just in a single feature it's things that the

human eye wouldn't find It's a combination of features that will contribute to that particular user not using the platform enough or not growing enough and I can talk about that in a bit so what we did we really looked at okay who's our customer who's our ideal customer and then inside that customer who's our ideal buy-in Persona and let's live their life let's really understand what they care about so if you look here you know um we're we're talking about you know what keeps you from being more efficient at work what limits you from doing your job the right way you know what parts of your skill set do you need

to work on what are you being asked to do more of by your business and your company what's going to make you successful we really wanted to understand things that probably weren't that relevant to what we were going to deliver to them but we wanted to understand who that buying Persona was and then we looked um at the problem we were solving so is it a critical problem is their life going to stop if we turn this off at some point you know what what are we solving for that company and have knowing the customer that we really

wanted to Target knowing the user that we were going to hopefully be providing the software for and then really understanding how our solution could fit that was a really significant help and so we build out built out this framework um that enabled us to go through this it took us months but it was absolutely the probably the biggest reason why we were able to then scale so at churnley our average contract value is about 150k so we've got customers a lot more than that and we've got customers that put us a

lot less but typically it's about 150k our sales cycle is anywhere from about four months to a year and whatever right it's it's long it's complex so we are talking to multiple stakeholders across multiple teams from Finance to customer success to sales uh so anybody that's involved in in customer retention and and revenue growth and so we really had to make sure that um that we had the right ourselves the

right tools and the right framework so we went back to the drawing board and we um we started to look at what we needed to build what Solutions we needed to build to serve our ideal customer and our ideal buying Persona and then from there we built out our roadmap and what was really clear was that we needed to integrate into more of the our customers workflows and we didn't do that very well initially and again that was a real Tipping Point for us because the moment we could go and sit inside a customer and we could say yep we do integrate into sap or Oracle which are the two

main Integrations we have um it was it was a game changer and we didn't we wouldn't have known that had we gone if we had not gone through the research and so I just want to talk to you a bit about how we then win because we still win good high value deals in a very very complex sales process so we've built out something called value validation and what that is for us it means that we absolutely want to get the executive

sponsor of this project to the table and if we don't we don't continue the conversation that's the first thing we ask for when we go into a sales process who owns this at the top of your company is there a budget approved for this already can we get access to them and it's not just a hello we want them at the table and we have our own process now one of the things with Sellers and I'll go back to um I'll come on to my latest company deal pad because this is fundamentally sits across it but one of the the biggest challenge that I've seen with sellers

is that they're scared to ask questions they're scared to take their buyers through a journey and so what happens is they they just fall into the buyers sales process and they're out of control of that process themselves nothing worse trying to run and build a sales organization when your sellers are out of control and so what this value validation framework does is it helps us stay in control so we ask our customers to commit to five workshops before we even give them a proposal

right if they can't do that we're out we don't talk to them so the first thing we want is that executive alignment the second thing we want is to make is to ask that executive who's who's the kind of the management layer here that's going to be responsible for for doing this both in terms of um deciding and evaluating us but also in terms of delivering it integrating it and using it and we then have a workshop with them we ask them lots of questions and then from there okay who are the user group that are going to be actually in this product every day who's going to live this and we get that group to the table

as well and then we we almost always talk to a the IT department so how do we then get your data what data do you have how's it structured can we even work with it and we go it takes about six weeks and we go through this process now you can do this for any single sales process you run it hasn't got to be as as detailed as this but if this works right because if you start getting the executive alignment um even if it's a 10K deal you're going to close that deal I've I've seen it

worked repeatedly where we're in competitive processes and differentiation is pretty slim but we've won it because we've got to the exact sponsor first and we've built that relationship with them and and that's actually got us the deal and so at the end of all this then what we do is we we build out a small demo that will then take back to the entire team we've probably got anywhere between 15 and 30 people in that call and we will then present back to them value and that's the key it's the value it's the outcomes we're going to drive nobody

cares how we're going to help them save their customers nobody cares what they care about is can we and what does it look like what's the indicative value we can offer you as a customer of ours that's what wins us our deals but we wouldn't we wouldn't know that if we hadn't gone through this process and we wouldn't have everybody there and so this is just how we uh how we then deliver that that last that final session in your company

is right here it's you you will as a Founder you will always be the best seller I get involved in every single sales deal in my in my two companies and it takes a lot of my time but it's it's powerful and I can tell you when I um when I Outreach I get 70 more response than my sdrs or my AES and I I you know I've I've written these these emails um and Karma at the end and the guy from

narcos if they don't respond to me I just send them one of those and honestly I get about 50 of the responses back just from those if so I know that if I send two or three emails to to usually a founder or the exec sponsor of the of the company we're trying to um we're trying to win if they don't respond to me which is pretty usual I'll just send them the guy from narcos and and I get a response and it opens the door and and silly little tactics

like that really do well and so um you know I reach out this is one of the emails I've sent uh for dealpad uh I you know tell them what we are uh someone from my team is trying to contact you um and I'd like to let you know um that if there's anything that I can do as a Founder um I'm really I'd love to help you so you just let me know nothing else no sales pitch nothing just just to let them know that somebody from my team is trying to contact this that works brilliantly so again if you're a Founder

try and align on on that and then just some ads we run so again um we don't do very much inbounds to be honest but we run a few ads on LinkedIn so we've put some eBooks out there we've put some some kind of ads these work really well and although the numbers aren't High you know that generated 8 000 post impressions for us which was a 3 000 increase and so just small little incremental um kind of touch points across LinkedIn for example

um make a big difference so I'm obsessed with outcomes as I've probably already said value and outcomes is what I'm obsessed with we we sell outcomes and I think every if you think about your business it doesn't matter what you sell you should sell outcomes don't worry about your features if you sell features I guarantee you you're going to be drawn into price and you'll be in price negotiations all the time people are going to haggle and try and get your price down focus on outcomes and value if a customer buys

your product what are they going to get back what's it going to do what's it going to help with try and show them reference stories of customers that look just like them and what you're doing for them I promise you it will Elevate everything you're doing in your sales motion so we're really focused on on not talking about features we hardly ever demo we never demo on a first call ever um and and you know we we will just talk about value can we solve the problem that you're looking you know that you

have what is that problem really dive into that problem can we solve it and then on the back of it you'll get really good reviews um and we've got a whole bunch of five star reviews because we deliver value we understand what value looks like to our customer we're not just going into this thinking oh great they've bought our software now let's just get them in there we actually know what the outcomes are they want to get out and invested in our software makes a big difference sounds really simple but not many companies are doing it so let's look at churn

how many of you look at contraction right now when you think about a customer attrition one of you over there too maybe yeah not many right contraction is churn and people don't think about it they look at churn and they think oh we've still got a customer what they're not looking at is if you sell by how many of you sell per seat here quite a few of you so if you're selling by seat contraction is the biggest killer for your business because you'll get you'll bring a

customer on you might sell 100 seats and you've still got that customer in 12 months time but you've probably churned 60 of your seats so you're Contracting Revenue and so what we look at is how you how you stop contraction and what we've found is that there are a number of kind of common triggers that um that really um determine whether a customer is going to Churn it on and so credit card expires if you if you if you enable your customers to pay via your your web app and they pay on the credit card their

card expires they're not coming back to your your platform and updating their card and so you'll you'll keep on sending them reminders and they probably won't do anything about it that customer at some point churn or they'll contract particularly if it's a single seat business if you're selling single seats it's very very unlikely um the other thing is with single seats if you sell single seats I guarantee you're not going to grow that company as well as you could because when you sell single seats the organization that your that company work

that person works for doesn't know anything about your software what what we've when we we sold by C initially and then what we did is turn that off and we just go and sell into the company now and we sell directly into the into the organization it takes longer but you'll get a much higher ARR and you'll retain that customer much better than you would had you um you know then if you sold single seeds if you don't see it sounds obvious one if you don't see growth from an account the likelihood is they're gonna churn

right then or they're going to contract you need to develop growth strategies for your customers every single day and I see csm's customer success margins customer success teams just focus on engagement they're focused on how do we make that customer successful that's great but how are you going to grow that customer how are you going to service opportunities for that customer to do more with you and become more dependent on you because if you keep if they keep on buying more things from you even if it's just small incremental things they're going to stay

and and so growth in in a customer success team I think is the the number one part of of a customer success team's job because you think about it you're never going to grow a customer if they're not engaged so they have to be engaged to grow so think about growth and how you're going to surface growth opportunities we see that a lot and then finally I've touched on it but um this this is where this is very arbitrary and it's very very difficult to to to to understand from the human eye but when you look at a platform you might have we put a little bit of

JavaScript into each each product feature in our customers platform and when you um when you actually look at the usage and how people are interacting you can start to get patterns and so and but it's it's very different from every every company which is why we custom build our software but you'll start to see that the you know if you use this feature with this feature in this feature you're more likely to better grow that customer and so that's the kind of predictive analysis analytics analysis that we um we provide our

customers and so just very quickly this is just a classifier this just shows you that we've got our our Precision on our on our machine learning prediction to 98 which is the highest um in in industry for sure so I've covered most of this um integrating to workflows if you want to really make sure that you're building customer value and Customer Loyalty very very difficult for a customer to leave you if you're embedded into their workflows they're not going to turn you

off if you're not and they're using your platform on a web browser for example it's very very easy to switch it off move to a competitor and you'll lose them so if you can figure out what their workflow looks like what what's their text there what's their sales step what's their CS stack and bake into that you know don't have them in your platform what you know you don't you don't need them in your platform have get into the workflows that they're already working and it becomes way way less likely that they'll leave you single seats again as I said and a

growth strategy I think they're they're the biggest reasons I think that you um the customers will will stay with you so moving quickly on I've got 30 seconds on this clock but it's going to take me a couple of minutes um my my latest company is called deal pad and deal pad helps companies get deals closed and so this is a combination of all the work that I've been doing over the last 15 years building my four or previously three software companies and I've used this this framework all the way through those organizations and particularly with journey to get these deals closed so

deal pad is a digital sales room and it's a space where you bring all of your buyers together in one place and you share all the content all the information they need to evaluate you and then you build out Mutual action plans to align on a closed date and so everything that needs to be ticked off in order to get a deal closed you align with your buyer and your entire buying team you attribute um who's who the owners are and what what the close dates are so every single task is a closed date so you're actually

working to a main close date through very small little incremental close dates and it's very very unlikely that a deal slips and I don't know how many of you suffer from slip deals and your sales person saying to your this is going to close on the 25th of August and that comes and goes and the deal doesn't close because the buyer isn't aligned the buyer doesn't know that's a milestone for your business and so what what deal pad does is look this looks at that and just to give you an indication of how um how it works this was one of our customers this was this was their closed

one in uh Q what is that Q3 last year then they started to build out Mutual action plans via the opad and in the next quarter that's their close one and the following quarter that's their close one so mutual action plans and bringing your buyers together works brilliantly we see it repeatedly so I've already spoken to you about that and then finally I'll just jump through these things I just want to talk to you

a bit about some traps that I fell into um I'm sure there are some experienced people out here you've got more experience than me but three things that um I learned really quickly was you need balance and as a Founder it's very very difficult to get balance you need to be a quitter so I learned to quit and you need to really think really carefully about exiting if you're fortunate enough to get Acquired and so um the whole idea Inception piece for a

Founder is that you know you're always going through this cycle I do it every day and I've I've said I've built four companies you know I'm stupid I'm making bad decisions you know why am I doing this I don't believe in myself and you have to kind of check yourself all the time um to ensure that you're on the right track but believe in yourself you're going to get so much negativity you do I'm sure you do I get it every day people say no people telling you that you're stupid believe in yourself because nobody else

will believe in you if you don't and then from here it's doing the right thing but understanding when you do the wrong things quick quickly and it's almost that fail fast kind of mentality don't be afraid to quit and I've seen so many Founders I invest in about 20 odd software companies and it's crazy how many Founders just can't quit they keep doing the same thing all the time and and you know if it's not working just park it and move on and do something

else you know and not business-wise find another strategy because you'll find something that works but you've got to keep quitting and then finally balance um you know if you look on the on this chart this was me before um when I I used to work 90 of my time and now I work about 60 of my time and I'm way more efficient I'm building I'm working across two companies as uh CEO um the main um thing here is I've really focused on my meetings and so I've cut my meetings

back and I focus way more on product and sales for me that's all I care about if I can support my company and my team in one way it's going to be on sales that moves the needle on everything it makes everything easier if you don't have sales you're not going to grow you're not you're not going to raise money or at least at the valuation that you want as a Founder going back to my my previous point you are the best salesperson in your organization leverage that

and I guess this is where I'm at now um so I'm spending a lot more time on personal things I love holidays I probably drove Nathan mad because I was on an island a few for for a few weeks and he couldn't get hold of me and I put my slide in for this about three days ago but you know that's my life I want that you know like I've that's how I balance my life now and if if other sorry if other people have to kind of you know work around it then so be it you know it's what works for me and I think as a Founder you've got to find

what works for you and then finally just earn out so I won't go into this too much but I'm doing a um a brain day at one o'clock I think downstairs so we can talk about this but if you're interested in kind of what happens during during an exit um I've got some horror stories that I can share with you um well just one very briefly was that um when I sold my first company I um I was a soul I've been a sole founder I haven't co-founded a company um but I didn't have any investors so I

just did this on my own with a lawyer that I've also never done it before and um and we agreed that most of my Equity was going to come at the obviously at the back end of my earn out and the company kept moving the goal posts and so when I did the deal um I I my earn out should have been something in a region of about five million so it wasn't massive but it was enough and when I came out the back of it I got about 900k from it

because they kept moving the goal posts through through that period and so if you're going to go through an exit make sure that you know you're in the driving seat of this deal it's your business you've put your life into this make sure that the terms are right for you and if they're not don't be afraid to say no and walk away from it and that's a really really difficult thing to do but I can tell you that you know you you will have so much more peace if you if you say no and keep control then if you do a deal because it feels right and you

haven't done that you haven't got the right kind of things in the contract and the agreement at the beginning um it will it will come back to hurt you so you're as a Founder stick to your business and and make sure you're doing the right thing for yourself all right so over the last 20 minutes I think a bit more um I've kind of shared my experience particularly around where customers leave why deals get closed and some kind of hopefully some ideas for you guys to think about and help you build your uh your companies thanks so much

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