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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In today's issue, I share some key takeaways from a recent interview between Nathan Latka, the host of Daily Interviews with SaaS Founders, and David Boskovic, the CEO and founder of Flatfile. They discussed how he raised $50m, and what their MRR, NET retention, and growth are.

David's light bulb moment came when he tried to convince his co-founder to join him — and realized that this was the Tesla opportunity of data. At no point in history has an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) product had this volume of access to subject matter experts.

About Flatfile

Flatfile is a hyper-growth platform on a mission to accelerate human innovation by automating and securing data exchange. With the billions of decisions they've observed across their customers, they can automate 97% of the decisions in the data exchange process.

It was built in 2018 after David redesigned the annoying CSV importer for the millionth time. Since then, Flatfile has completed over 26 billion data mapping decisions for companies like Sage, CBRE, Square, HubSpot, and ClickUp.

P.S. They have a free startup program for small companies. Their average ACV for the mid-market commercial segment is about $15k annually.

Challenges

He has failed startups before.

When he started his first startup, he walked away with a handy seven figures and then burned all that money on the second one. He spent everything before losing everything, shutting down startups left and right. Nothing is certain but start with passion. Don't get excited about the problem – start there instead.

Building a CRM is useless until the customers bring their data.

He has built SaaS products for over 15 years, and he's never seen anything like the latest challenge. You know how it goes: you build a visitor management system to help your customers keep track of who comes into their building, but then they need lists from employees or daily visitors coming in as well.

Advice to Other Founders

Don't try to monetize at the low end of the market.

Start with more minor contracts and grow over time rather than pre-paying and loading that all upfront. ClickUp was their customer when they were just seven employees. They've been with them as they've grown and expanded.

Give your customers more of what they need.

With several organizations in their system performing well, there is an opportunity to grow with these companies. If you care about coming alongside early, helping them succeed, and knowing that small businesses will continue growing before scaling meaningfully further – be ready for the growth!

Reach for more tools across marketing and revenue organizations.

These are the changes they make in the business to try and get their money/CAC back faster. Make sure that the company's advertising dollars are being spent wisely. Take a more targeted approach and build better-sophisticated content to generate a pipeline.

Bonus

David's favorite book "Die Empty" by Todd Henry, is a powerful and engaging read that tackles the topic of how we should approach life. It suggests that our goal in life is not to escape terminal nature but to make sure it's all worthwhile by giving as much as we have to the world.
He wishes he knew that you could let go of things sooner than you want to with very few repercussions.

TL;DR

Little did David know that his frustration with CSV importers would lead to such success, but it's been an incredible journey. He launched Flatfile in 2019 and saw him break a million bucks in revenue in 2020. In 2021, they did $4m in revenue and are on track for double this year. He changed his position from a CAC payback period of 24 months to get healthier from a unit economic perspective. He raised an additional $50m to continue scaling Flatfile with his team of 80 full-time employees.

P.S. Here is a link to the full interview if you are interested in listening to the full episode: Flatfile Raised $50m Today: What is their MRR, Net Retention, and Growth?

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See you again next week.

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