Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Google PodcastsWe spoke to Mike Korba, Chief Commercial Officer at User.com about scaling in a fiercely competitive environment, how to build a $100M SaaS business by using an animal analogy and management techniques to steer your product in the right direction.
In this episode, we speak with Mike Korba, the Chief Commercial Officer @ User.com, a marketing automation platform that touches many different departments: marketing, sales, and customer support, ultimately allowing you to convert every user into a happy customer.
Mike joined User.com in 2016, approximately one year after its inception, not only as a team member but as an investor, he put his savings on the line.
We caught up with him to understand how the company got to scale in such a fiercely competitive space up against companies like HubSpot, Pipe drive, and Intercom, to name a few. We dig into their growth and onboarding strategies, as well as funding and management techniques that Mike has deployed to help steer the ship.
I’m sure you noticed the domain name, User.com. Well, it took one year of negotiation which started at €400k. Yes, you just heard that right. If you listen to the full episode, you’ll hear the story that led them to almost selling their cars and houses to help cover the cost. I loved Mike’s openness, honesty,, and approach to growth and business. He loves what he does, and that truly shines through in our conversation.
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Quick bio
Name: Mike Korba
What he does: CCO at User.com
Mike on the web: LinkedIn
The one reason to listen to the episode: Mike’s explanation on the company’s experiment with the freemium model from the initial hypothesis that turned the offer into free access to a specific feature of the application to the learnings and the team’s current setup. User.com now has a pre-qualification team manually checking who the company is and they decide whether it will be a free user or have the potential to upsell them and they move them to sales.
Top tips from this episode
The first question to ask yourself when you start a company is – which kind of customers do you want to serve?
Serving customers of all sizes can lead to suboptimal results for all. Mike’s take on customer segmentation links to Point Nine Capital’s model on how to build a $100 Million business and start scaling by “hunting” one of the five customer categories: flies, mice, rabbits, deer, and elephants.
Mike refers to the original infographic that indicates how many customers you need, for a given average revenue per account, to get $100 Million in annual revenue. For details on the infographic, see more here.
“There’s this famous infographic that shows how you can earn $1 million. You can “hunt” for flies – 1 million for $1; you can “hunt” for mice – 10 to 100,000 for $10. Rabbits, deer – so then you have to “hunt” a lower number of customers, but with the higher value”.
You have to grow, sure, but grow wisely
For any startup, Mike advises growing sustainably, even if it means following a different route than the Silicon Valley way. How does this alternative track look like for User.com?
“Customers of our customers are a good source of our traffic and have our leads, like live chat on the other web installed on our website is good traffic.
We are experimenting with outbound sales, so we are trying to do cold outreach, and it’s working, it has a positive ROI. For example, we are reaching out to the companies who are using – I don’t know, Intercom and like oh, but you’re using Intercom, and you’re using HubSpot. Maybe it’s a good thing to think to have it in one place.
So the strategy of the second solution is working for us. I believe outbound, Capterra, and referrals. Sometimes Quora works for us, like going in some discussions. It also went well, like investing in the right domain is also a good growth hack.”
Episode Highlights
Transcript excerpts from the interview
How to protect your time: start playing to your strengths
“I was fighting with myself. I was trying to write more articles. But after I jot down those bullet points and start writing, it takes me so much time. I was never satisfied with this part of the job, so it’s better to rely on people who are better at that than me.
And yes, analyze yourself: what are you best at? Don’t fight with yourself. It’s a good idea to protect your time and be more effective.”
How to efficiently prioritize tasks and focus on the bigger goals
” If it will cost five hours of your time, and this is a cost of like $15,000 for the company. You can delegate it through Fiverr or through a student, it will take you only one hour of managing, do it! Don’t be afraid of it, like make our work as effective as possible.”
Growth is not the most important aspect
“I believe that if you’re running online businesses, you have to achieve growth on some level. However, if your NPS (net promoter score) is lower than zero then you shouldn’t scale.”
Top quotes
[57:58]
You should work on your product, on your customer success, on your processes, and then you should start scaling. If you’re scaling with a shitty product or shitty service or like the KPIs will be matched, yeah.
If you will spend a lot of money on CPC and have your sales team engaged, you will reach your KPIs. Still, you might not be ready for a growth stage. I believe that bad advice from especially VC – you have to grow. Indeed, growth is important, but sometimes it should be sustainable growth.
[59:18]
No, money won’t solve the problems – I’m talking about investment money. The money will make new problems, which are you aren’t aware of why you don’t have this money. And still, old problems won’t be solved.
[1:01:03]
Build a sustainable business with which you can grow. Scaling shouldn’t be fast, a business is not a sprint. It’s a marathon— so this a better way.
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