Matt Ekstrom. He’s one of the founders of Prospectify and formerly co-founded HiringSolved. He’s in-charge of all things revenue for Prospectify, which is a promising sales and intelligence platform.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Sales Acceleration
What CEO do you follow? – Gary Vaynerchuk
Favorite online tool? — Google Search and HubSpot
Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I would have studied more about startups and being an entrepreneur”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:30 – Nathan introduces Matt to the show
01:55 – Prospectify is a SaaS model
02:14 – Prospectify’s long term goal is to be able to scale personalization from the sales standpoint
02:25 – Prospectify has monthly subscriptions
02:45 – Prospectify’s pricing:
- 03:25 – The prices from the website are $40, $190, $490, and $975
03:33 – Average customer pay per month is $352
03:50 – Prospectify was launched in February 2016, and was in beta in January 2016
04:16 – Current number of customers is around 100
04:46 – MRR is over $20K
05:09 – Prospectify is based in Phoenix
05:20 – Prospectify just closed their first month
- 05:25 – It was in Angels and a million dollar round
05:45 – Matt shares why he decided on an equity round and not a convertible note
06:31 – Matt uses the trajectory to argue for higher valuation
07:29 – Prospectify is about to launch their company search which includes 12 million companies starting in the USA
08:10 – The people Prospectify has targeted
08:18 – Prospectify’s customer base is diverse
08:45 – Annual customer churn
09:45 – Matt shares what he will do to keep customers paying and NOT cancel after receiving all the data
11:10 – Prospectify’s top data sources
- 11:22 – Matt shares what they used to validate the concept of Prospectify
12:18 – Fixed cost per month for crawling
13:11 – Matt shares where to get credits
14:00 – Customer LTV
14:34 – Current team size
- 14:45 – Headcount expenses
16:30 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Keep people up to date—that way, they will keep on paying.
Decide whether an equity round or convertible note will be most advantageous for you.
Discern what is the right track and try to stay on it.

Resources Mentioned:

Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel
Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal
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.
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
Jamf – Jamf helped Nathan keep his Macbook Air 11” secure even when he left it in the airplane’s back seat pocket
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

EP 553: Prospectify Raises $1M at $4M Post Money Valuation, $25k MRR, for Better Prospecting with CEO Matt Ekstrom

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders