Hey - Marc here.
Happy Saturday morning Motivated B2B SaaS Founders.
Here's at least one tip to keep in mind as you grow your B2B SaaS company
Today's issue takes about 5 minutes to read.
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Today, I’ll be sharing with you interesting key points from the interview between Nathan Latka, the host of Daily interviews with SaaS Founders, and Kevin Dawidowicz, the Founder and President of a company called CoachMePlus on how the company was able to raise $2m on $10m post-money.
For the record, CoachMePlus is an applied sports science platform that is currently changing the way coaches and athletes prepare for competition. It is a company built around a simple idea which is to help coaches and athletes work together to achieve their fitness-related goals. They serve a range of fitness-minded professionals, from personal trainers to gym owners to professional sports coaches, and military human performance specialists.
How CoachMePlus Started:
CoachMePlus is an outgrowth of high-school athlete Kevin’s meticulous tracking of his athletic process in old-fashioned notebooks for the benefit of his coach. With the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic, lots of gym owners had to shut their doors, and for them to do that, they needed a way to maintain their revenue, maintain connections with their clients, create, and build engagement between the coach, and athlete that doesn’t depend on them being in the same room. This led to the launching of the fitness tool CoachMePlus.
The way CoachMePlus started was more of an enterprise service. But over the past year and a half, they moved into a set of packages that are available to basically any kind of gym owner that might be interested in getting the same type of service that the professional sports teams have used at a much-reduced cost, and in a smaller package that's served as a typical software and service model.
Challenges:
1. After reaching cash-positive in 2019, the company approached 2020 with scaling in mind while opening a new world of opportunities. However, at a certain point in their business, it became clear that the company was going downstream due to the impacts of COVID and gyms shutting down, and it was hard to think of the next step as they were already so invested in the current business, and what works for it. There was also a limit to how many pro teams and pro clients they can have. Already, there were 132 pro sports in North America, US military and so on and while those are great customers to serve, they reach that end point where they began to think of where to take their business from there. Was it going to be more into enterprise level sales and getting into things like corporate wellness, large insurance customers and so on, which was sure going to be a very long and detailed sales cycle.
However, they were able to find a sweet spot which has allowed them to scale effectively, and they now have a profitable business model that can scale with additional resources.
2. Another Challenge CoachMePlus faced was global competition. There was a lot of competition which made them sort of pull out from where they thought there might have been a blue ocean global approach. They then began to figure out other ways to pivot. One of those directions was going into military and the other direction was in high school gyms, which ended up working out.
Advice to Other Founders:
1. Competition is inevitable. No matter what type of product or service you sell, the market is always changing, and so are the customers' needs. It makes every business stronger, and it forces companies to innovate their offerings to stay ahead of the competition. When it comes to your own business, you need to know how to differentiate yourself from others, and make sure that your product or service stands out from others in its field by looking for ways to pivot and provide a solution that is not entirely affected by the competition in order to bring in revenue!
2. Be customer focused. The best way to ensure that your company is successful is to understand what customers want, how they want it, and what they're willing to pay for it. You can use this knowledge to create a product that will meet the needs of your customers, and appeal to their tastes. The more you know about your customers, the better business decisions will be for you and for them.
Bonuses:
1. A business book Kevin read called ‘’Nudge’’ by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, talks on Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
2. Kevin is currently following - Gary Vaynerchuk, commonly known as Gary Vee,
3. Kevin's favourite online tool (at the time of this interview) is SuiteCRM
TL:DR:
CoachMePlus was built around a simple idea, to help coaches and athletes work together to achieve their fitness-related goals. From that idea, highly configurable enterprise software with an app front-end was created. They now have tools that manage fitness, nutrition, wellness, and data from other wearables and fitness apps, all in one system, so coaches and trainers have the tools they need to help their athletes. Remote fitness has become the new normal, and they want to help fitness pros stay connected with their clients and athletes.
Link to the full Episode on Youtube: CoachMePlus raising $2m on $10m post money right now
Link to CoachMePlus website: Helping coaches and athletes work together to achieve their performance and fitness goals | CoachMePlus
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See you again next week.
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