Mikita Mikado. He’s the CEO of PandaDoc, a company founded to accelerate the way organizations transact. He’s an entrepreneur, engineer, and executive focused on creating self-sustaining companies.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Pitch Anything
What CEO do you follow? – Satya Nadella
Favorite online tool? — Google Calendar
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Mikita would tell himself that he doesn’t have to focus on making so much money and just focus on learning as much as he can

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:24 – Nathan introduces Mikita to the show
02:03 – Jared Fuller was in episode 193 of The Top and is still part of PandaDoc
02:25 – PandaDoc helps organizations the way they transact
- 02:39 – all kinds of transactions
02:52 – PandaDoc focuses on deals that have substantial value and paperwork
03:06 – PandaDoc can build proposals, quotes, contracts and close deals in a digital fashion
03:30 – PandaDoc’s RPU has increased since last year
03:56 – Annual deals
- 04:10 – Average customer pay
05:10 – PandaDoc gets most of their customers from word of mouth
- 05:32 – Using SEO to expand operations
06:15 – PandaDoc gives their small customers templates that they can use in their deals
06:58 – The marketing team finds keywords that are most popular and relevant to them
- 07:20 – They use Moz and other tools to find keyword
07:59 – PandaDoc isn’t built on top of PDF
08:03 – The templates from PandaDoc are in HTML and not PDF
08:41 – QuoteRoller was the first product that was launched in 2011
- 08:56 – Pivot to PandaDoc at the end of 2015
09:06 – Team size is now 106
09:23 – The last year total raised was $4.5M in cash and $2M in debt
- 09:41 – Currently, debt has been paid
- 09:50 – Total amount raised is $19.5M
10:17 – PandaDoc has more than 7K customers
- 10:30 – 2 different cohorts of customers
- 10:55 – PandaDoc has a legacy product and a new product
11:22 – Gross churn is satisfactory
- 11:50 – From last year’s revenue churn, it was 9%
- 13:21 – Some inbound marketers use PandaDoc to close a deal then will stop using it
- 13:50 – 5% monthly logo churn is high for Mikita
14:38 – PandaDoc has around 100 team members and 2 are focused on target customers
15:13 – CAC and LTV varies
16:00 – Mikita is trying to get under 12 months of payback period
16:29 – Fully weighted CAC can be $1200
- 16:48 – How Mikita assumes CAC
18:47 – The industry’s rule of thumb for payback period is 1.13 of ACV or 14 month payback period
19:05 – PandaDoc has channels with a payback period of 6 months and 2 years
19:29 – PandaDoc has an outbound sales team that is their delta force
- 19:54 – The outbound sales team finds the industries that PandaDoc should target
- 21:05 – Paid spend total is under quarter of a million
- 21:19 – PandaDoc is closed to hit a million in MRR
  - 22:08 – “We want to make an impact”
  - 22:22 – This is a horizontal product
- 23:47 – PandaDoc focuses on workflow and the actual collaboration on the workflow
  - 23:58 – “We want to system of records for deals or transaction”
- 24:05 – PandaDoc isn’t going to the CRM space
  - 24:18 – Mikita has been in the CRM space before
  - 24:43 – One of the challenges of CRM now is the emergence of AI
- 27:12 – Mikita’s consideration on price of acquisition
- 30:20 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Create a product that can serve a different market and fill the gap that the others haven’t seen.
Let your goals guide you, but also keep in mind that having a business means being responsible for your employees.
Multiple revenue cohorts will lead you to multiple marketing and sales strategies.

Resources Mentioned:

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

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