Mark Ross, a man who’s spent 20 years working in senior level global technology management, and owns board-level experience with Fortune 500 financial services companies. He’s the co-founder of GridMarkets and senior level advisor for a number of startups. Listen as Mark discusses why he jumped into entrepreneurship and how it differs from big-time corporate life.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Tipping Point
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Slack

Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— “Never”
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? – “Startups are a whole lot harder than you think”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:42 – Nathan introduces Mark to the show
02:07 – What is GridMarkets and how does it generate sales?
- 02:18 – Power extensive engineering applications
- 02:40 – Serve studios that make animations and simulations
03:33 – Similar with dark-power concept
04:08 – Agreements with the suppliers
04:20 – GridMarkets has their own grid
05:00 – Idea of GridMarkets started in 2011
- 05:47 – SaaS in the sense of push-button
06:39 – Give credits to new customers
- 07:20 – Offering credit hours at $ 1.60
- 07:30 – Credit numbers per month is over a million at the moment
07:57 – GridMarkets is self-funded and 10 people invest in the company
09:46 – Valuation of GridMarkets
- 10:15 – Investors’ different valuation
10:40 – Number of current customers
- 11:00 – Fantastic feedbacks from customers
11:20 – MRR
11:48 – Team size
- 12:26 – There’s a lot specific skills and knowledge needed
- 12:50 – The demand would justify having our own machine
13:10 – Amount a computer can handle per month
- 14:00 – Millions of computer hours needed to serve studios
- 15:00 – Spinning up machines
15:45 – Connect with Mark through his email
18:06 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

It won’t hurt to give your customer something for free to start off.
Invest in your people.
Value your customer’s feedback and learn from it.

Resources Mentioned:

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 quality of Toptal developers.
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible.
Freshbooks – The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts.
Leadpages – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.
Mark.Ross@gridmarkets.com – Mark’s email address
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

EP 444: $1.5M in MRR, SaaS, Helping Studios Render Film Faster with GridMarkets CEO Mark Ross

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders