Matthieu Vaxelaire. He’s the CEO of Mention where he moves all Trello cards to the right and closes deals. He splits his time between Paris and New York City.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
What CEO do you follow? – Rand Fishkin
Favorite online tool? — Hull
Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— 6-7
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Do more things and read less as you learn much more by doing than reading”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:17 – Nathan introduces Matt to the show
01:37 – Mention is Google Alert on steroids
01:51 – Mention is a SaaS business
02:05 – Mention has different segments of customers
- 02:08 – The SME customers pay an average of $65 monthly
- 02:13 – The mid-market customers pay an average of $400 monthly
02:25 – Average customer pay per month
03:20 – Most of Mention’s customers don’t like sharing their information
03:40 – Ogilvy uses Mention to track the campaigns they’re building for their clients
04:17 – Mention is also an inferential tool
04:49 – Mention raised capital at an early stage
- 05:03 – Mention raised a total of $500K
05:11 – There are 45 people on the team and 10 are in NY, the rest are in Paris
05:50 – Prior to Mention, Matt worked at eFounders which is a startup studio
- 05:57 – Mention was one of the startups built by eFounders
06:20 – Mention has over 600K users and over 4K paying customers per month
06:42 – Mention’s free version
07:20 – Mention uses a number of features
07:53 – There’s no touch sales in the SME market
- 08:01 – The mid-market is inside-sales driven
- 08:15 – There are 2 groups of inside-sales teams: the inbound and outbound with 6 people in each group
08:50 – Average MRR
09:28 – Mention is more focused on gross MRR churn
- 09:35 – SME gross churn is 2%
- 10:43 – Mention is almost in a negative net churn
11:20 – Mention has an average of 10K signups per month
11:47 – Mention is currently spending $5-10K on paid advertising
- 12:04 – Mention is exploring other advertising options like G2 Crowd
- 12:20 – Mention’s first trial result with G2 Crowd isn’t that encouraging
12:44 – Mention uses a strong open-content strategy to drive people to their website
13:17 – CAC
- 14:00 – Matt is willing to spend up to $1K to generate new mid-market customers
14:17 – 2017 goal
- 14:58 – Mention is currently in the process of raising
- 15:07 – An $800K MRR by the end of December 2017 is a good number
17:10 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Sometimes, you got to spend to acquire those new customers.
Paid advertising isn’t the only solution to drive traffic to your site.
Get out there and start moving—you learn more by doing than by reading.

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
Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
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
Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

630: Mention Helping 4000 Customers With Google Alerts on Steroids, All Paying Minimum $60/mo for $240k in MRR with CEO Matthieu Vaxelaire

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders