830: SaaS: With $20m Raised, $10m+ ARR, He's For Enterprise Customer Management on Social Media

Josh March. He’s the founder and CEO of Conversocial, a customer engagement solution that helps businesses increase their customer loyalty by enabling effortless, in-the-moment, customer service to social and mobile channels. The largest global firms including Google, Sprint, Hertz and Hyatt Hotels turn to his platform to deliver an amazing, social, first, customer service experience at a large scale. He previously founded the leading social application platform, iPlatform, one of the world’s first Facebook preferred developer which was acquired in 2012.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• What CEO do you follow? – Ben Horowitz
• Favorite online tool? — Twitter
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Be more self-aware and your own thinking can become your bias

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:40 – Nathan introduces Josh to the show
• 02:51 – iPlatform was sold to Betapond in 2012
  • 03:28 – The acquisition was a mix of cash and equity
• 03:53 – Conversocial is an enterprise SaaS product
• 04:20 – Conversocial follows up on customers through social media sites
• 04:38 – Conversocial collects messages from different social media channels and analyzes them
• 05:04 – Conversocial has raised $20M of venture capital
• 05:33 – Conversocial started from iPlatform
• 06:00 – Josh saw that they needed to move quickly with Conversocial, so they raised funds
• 06:29 – The first round was $2.5M and was a priced equity round
• 07:24 – Some of Conversocial’s customers were an upsell from iPlatform
• 07:34 – Team size is around 100
• 08:00 – Josh was initially involved with the product development of Conversocial and as they grew and hired great people, he began shifting more of his time to customer acquisition
• 09:33 – Their biggest customer pays around a million dollars annually
• 09:50 – Conversocial also has customers who pay from $25K to $200K
• 11:00 – Conversocial focuses on customer care
• 12:00 – The need for a customer contact center is greatly increasing
• 12:28 – Conversocial currently has 200 clients
• 13:30 – Conversocial has passed their $10M ARR mark
• 14:12 – Conversocial has a higher logo churn with small companies
• 14:47 – Conversocial’s net churn is around 120%
• 16:21 – Josh flies a lot just to meet customers
• 17:48 – Fully weighted CAC varies dramatically depending on the deals
• 18:24 – Payback period is around 18 months
• 18:43 – Josh won’t sell to Sprinklr
  • 19:10 – Josh thinks Sprinklr’s vision is far off of Conversocial’s vision
• 20:30 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. Focus on the needs of the customers and figure out how you can solve their problems.
2. Social media is being used not only for marketing, but for customer service as well.
3. An entrepreneur should go the “extra mile” just to get a client.

Resources Mentioned:

• Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
• 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
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• 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