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.

_______________________________________________

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 Phani Sama, the CEO and co-founder of Bip. They discussed how his pre-revenue business plans to convert current users into paid customers after spending $200k.

Phani Sama also founded redBus – the world's largest online bus ticketing company with operations in 6 countries and sales of over a billion dollars. He's also a young global leader at YGL, received a fortune 40 under 40 award twice, and serves on the board of Tea Works – India's largest hardware prototyping center.

About Bip

Bip is a social workspace — a document and task management tool —- built for the future of work. This platform is for DAOs, niche communities, and learning, featuring:

Deep integration with Discord
Create and collaborate with git-enabled documents
Engage your fans with their social features

They measure adoption based on the number of users coming in and starting their own workspace. In September, they had about 100 workspaces created, with thousands of people within those workspaces. They have 3000 workspaces with 10% retention — making Bip their primary source of truth.

The document creation life cycle is front-ended. One of their active users has around 300 documents. Most of them are created in their first six months of usage, and overtime reduces a bit, and that's where their task management feature like Kanban boards come in.

P.S. They found good traction in Taos. In the last 15 months, they saw initial traction, and most of their customers now happen to be from web3 — a decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain.

Challenges

They keep chasing feature parodies.

These features are something that Notion already has. Most of their users are from web3 — they pay using their own tokens out of the treasury project and still thinking about how they will convert those tokens into USD soon.

Haven't brought the pricing question up yet.

They're still on pre-revenue. Have a birth of 20k per month and have spent about 200k so far. The pricing cannot be per seat because it engages a larger audience. They've been postponing and still figuring out their pricing because they need more bandwidth to build other features.

Advice to Other Founders

It's all about making progress and taking a chance.

They don’t tier pricing to something volatile and just charge a SaaS fee and be done with it. It's an option, but they're trying to figure out if there's an innovative way. This is just one part of their business. They did not build this just for web3 users but as a workspace for people building in public.

Note: It should be apparent from this interview that you don’t need to know everything before getting started as ou can see from Phani’s case, but he is continuing to push forward.

Communicate with your most engaged users.

These are the users who are actively using your product and are more likely to provide valuable feedback. By talking to them and understanding their experience, you can gain insights that will help you improve your product. By talking to them, they learned that Bip is their primary workspace.

Bonus

Phani follows the CEO of Freshdesk, Girish.
His favorite online tool for building Bip is Sigma.
He gets 7 hours of sleep every night and has two kids at 42.
Phani wished he knew in his 20s that marketing and sales were as important as innovation.

TL;DR

Bip.so is a workspace for communities that are building in public. It was founded about a year ago and has attracted 3,000 users who create documents on its platform every week. However, the company is still in its early stages of development and is burning through cash at a rate of $20k per month. Phani Sama, CEO and founder of Bip is hoping to get pricing figured out in the next couple of months so they can start building their monthly recurring revenue. In the meantime, they are relying on the generosity of their users and the 200,000 of their own money that they have put into the company.

P.S. Here is a link to the full interview if you are interested in listening to the full episode: He's spent $200k already, pre revenue, list of 3,000 users. How to convert them to paid?

_________

See you again next week.

Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. 1:1 SOPs Call (Consultation Call for Guidance)

2. Work 1:1 with me to create customized Sales SOPs to remove yourself from the sales process and virtually guarantee that your investment in your next salesperson ensures they will hit their number? (Done for your Service). Click here to see if you qualify.