Allan Willie. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Klipfolio, a software-as-a-service dashboard company with over 8500 paying customers including Jet.com, Zendesk, Aviva and Ikea. He previously co-founded a company called Espial, an internet device software firm that is now publicly traded on TSX. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and 2 daughters.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Lead by Greatness
What CEO do you follow? – Tobias Lütke
Favorite online tool? — SEO Plus Chrome plug in and Owler
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5-7.5
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Listen, build something of value and then see if you could raise money”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:07 – Nathan introduces Allan to the show
01:50 – All of the meeting rooms in Klipfolio’s office have different wallpaper
02:12 – Klipfolio is an online, cloud-based, dashboard vendor
02:18 – Klipfolio works with mid-sized businesses who use them for everything
02:40 – Nathan uses Klipfolio quite aggressively, especially for his Facebook live streams
04:17 – When Allan was last on The Top, he was passing 7K customers—now he has 8500 customers
04:36 – In January, Klipfolio announced a $12M raise which was an insight round from existing investors
- 05:14 – The initial round was to raise an external round
- 05:43 – “We did use market to validate”
06:12 – Klipfolio had verbal offers that were lucrative
- 06:40 – The valuation were multiples for some of the terms
07:00 – Klipfolio also had some acquisition discussions
08:08 – Allan won’t call the acquisition discussions offers, because it would still have to go through a lot
08:59 – In every acquisition discussion, you want to layer how much information to present to another company
09:35- Customers usually get the $70 plan for the first month, then move up to $150 in a year
10:10 – Some of the customers are partners who can pay directly or pay as a partner
- 10:24 – 30% of Klipfolio’s income come from their partner channels
10:35 – Last month revenue was $500-600K
11:16 – Klipfolio’s valuation was between $700-800K
11:25 – Some of the VCs that Allan has talked to are putting terms in place with a higher valuation
11:47 – You have to sustain your valuation to get into the next round
12:34 – Anything on Klipfolio is being tracked
13:15 – The weirdest use case
- 13:25 – There are NGOs who use Klipfolio to push some of their metrics out
- 13:34 – Red Cross uses Klipfolio for flooding, zika virus and other stuff that is happening in Africa
14:11 – Churn has gone up slightly
14:35 – Klipfolio started paid ads for $120K a month
- 14:41 – Klipfolio has a blog about the lessons they’ve learned from Facebook Ads
- 15:24 – One of the cons of ads is that the conversion rate drops and churn goes up—which is normal
15:40 – CAC
15:54 – LTV
16:05 – LTV to CAC is still relatively healthy
16:26 – Team size is around 90
- 16:47 – The team is moving to a new space in November
18:20 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Maintain your valuation in order to get into the next round.
Not all acquisition talks are considered offers.
A company of great value has a better chance of raising money and getting acquired down the road.

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
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

710: How This SaaS Company is Using $20 Million to Scale

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders