Glen Coates. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Handshake. It focuses on putting the right product on every shelf in every store. He goes between Sydney, San Diego and New York City.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
What CEO do you follow? – Dave Yarnold
Favorite online tool? — Boomerang for Gmail
Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Yes
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Glen wished he knew how intense running this company was going to be and to spend a lot more time making music and going surfing.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:37 – Nathan introduces Glen to the show
02:15 – Handshake is about getting the right product on every shelf, in the world
- 03:30 – Handshake brings the Amazon-like buying and selling platform to businesses
- 03:55 – Handshake Rep is the mobile app used by sales reps who work for the brand
- 04:21 – Handshake Direct is the mobile and web-based ecommerce for B2B
05:00 – Handshake is a SaaS business and they sell to manufacturers and distributors
05:10 – Handshake’s customers are the manufacturers, distributors, and their customers who log into Handshake
05:22 – Handshake has a similar model to Salesforce
05:40 – Glen started working with Handshake in 2010 and got their first customer in 2011
05:51 – First year revenue
06:16 – Average number of customers at the moment
06:51 – The pricing model is per seat per year for Handshake Rep, Handshake Direct is made-to-order
07:37 – Average customer pay per month
08:24 – December 2016: total average revenue range
09:35 – Handshake used to have monthly contracts
- 09:59 – Most of the contracts now are annual contracts
10:07 – Total capital raised is around $24M inclusive of Series B
- 10:29 – Series B closed in February 2016
10:40 – Handshake isn’t in any acquisition talk
12:03 – What Glen and his team is building is grand in scale and requires a lot of hard work
12:44 – Team size and location
- 13:05 – Glen shares the number of people per team
14:10 – LTV
- 14:15 – “I don’t think much about lifetime value”
- 16:51 – “I care about delivering 100% growth with a better payback period than I care about delivering 200% growth with like a terrible payback period”
- 17:05 – Handshake growth is 100% annual
17:30 – Glen shares the flagged payback period in VC communities
18:48 – Glen is currently burning close to $500K a month
18:56 – Glen thinks that it should take at least 6 months before having to raise again
19:50 – Glen usually raises for a couple of years and each time he raises gives them 2 years of runway
20:15 – Gross annual customer churn
- 20:30 – Churn has come down when they shifted their market
- 21:25 – Glen shares what they did to combat high monthly churn
- 22:38 – Handshake always has a negative revenue churn
23:30 – Glen wouldn’t sell Handshake for Nathan’s sample offer
25:10 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

It’s difficult to create a SaaS that is web-based and mobile-based – it takes hard work.
Delivering 100% growth with a better payback period is better than delivering 200% growth with a terrible payback period.
Raising usually takes 6 months and it is the CEO’s responsibility to decide how he can leverage each raise.

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 547: Handshake.com Raises $24M, Helping 1000+ Customers Manage Store Product Purchasing with CEO Glen Coates

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders