October 8, 2020 • 47 mins
As a startup CEO, where do you spend most of your time as the company grows?
Common answer: in meetings;
Ideal answer: prioritising your customer base more
Chris Ronzio, CEO and founder of Trainual walks us through the lessons and key decisions that took the company from 0 to 5 Million ARR in just two and a half years.
By our standards, that's pretty impressive.
We also cover:
- how to approach unit economics as a SaaS startup
- the simple practice that helps him answer all the common messages he gets on his channels
- how to use customer feedback to drive your business
Links >>
Upraw media: https://uprawmedia.com/
Episode highlights: https://uprawmedia.com/blog/customers-trainual
If you are keen to know more about Upraw Media or be a Masters of SaaS guest speaker, visit uprawmedia.com or DM us on LinkedIn. We are also on Youtube if you'd like to put a face to the names and voices of the best in SaaS. Thanks for tuning in!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Todd Chambers (00:08):
Hey guys, welcome to the Masters of SaaS podcast
brought to you by Upraw Media, agrowth marketing agency for SaaS
specialising in paid media,content and conversion rate
optimisation. I'll be your host,Todd Chambers.
I have the absolute pleasure ofchatting with really smart
people from the SaaS industry.
The goal is to extract as muchvalue as possible. What are
their strategies, theor tactics,theor failures, funny stories,
(00:32):
key learnings? All of this canthen be used to help you grow
and scale your own SaaSbusiness.
In this episode, I speak withChris Ronzio, the founder and
CEO of Trainual - the leadingonboarding, training and
knowledge management platform.
Chris was able to take Trainualyour from zero to 5 million ARR
in just two and a half years,and by my standards, that's
(00:53):
pretty impressive. The episode'squite fast paced. We cover a lot
of ground and interestinginsights from their difficult
first year, but how they pushedthrough it and found their
primary traction channel inFacebook and Instagram ads;
Strategically, and the key wordhere is strategically, getting
into $300,000 of credit carddebt, selling wedding gifts, and
a bunch of other stuff to payfor ads that ultimately fueled
(01:15):
the growth of the company.
The importance of getting yourpaid media unit economics nailed
down before you throw fuel onthe fire, this is something I've
spoken a lot about, so wedefinitely jammed on this,
Trainual's funding rounds andconsiderations for founders
looking to take funding, theimportance of feedback and how
he met the infamous Gary Vee intheir headquarters in New York.
(01:37):
Hope you enjoy the episode guys.
let's jump straight to it!Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Ronzio (01:41):
Thank you excited to be here!
Todd Chambers (01:43):
Yeah, it's good to have you on! Maybe we can
start off just by basicintroduction: who is Chris?
Chris Ronzio (01:49):
Sure! So Chris Ronzio - I'm the CEO and founder
of a company called Trainual, soyou think training manual
smashed together is basicallythe playbook for business. All
your policies, processes,procedures, roles,
responsibilities in one place,online.
Todd Chambers (02:04):
Nice. I actually love the name by the way. It's
short, it's easy to spell. It'skind of descriptive as well.
It's, was it was a challenge tocome up with a name or?
Chris Ronzio (02:12):
no, it was like where I took all the business
buzzwords and tried to mash themtogether. And this was the only
one that like sounded ok and hada domain available, so it was a
pretty quick process.
Todd Chambers (02:22):
Okay, nice. I think I procrastinated and took
way, way too long to come upwith a company name, which I
don't even like anymore. But Ithink many people spend a long
time coming up with a companyname. So yeah, good. You were
able to just...
Chris Ronzio (02:35):
Yeah, it was quick. But some people think
it's like, train y'all or trainyou all, so t's got that like
subtle thing in there too, butI'll take it!
Todd Chambers (02:45):
Cool. We were just talking about - I was
listening to on the SaaS podcastwith Omar Khan, and I was also a
guest on the podcast, and thetitle of his, your episode was
going from zero to 2 million ARRin 18 months. And we were just
saying, it hasn't quite been 18months. It was in May 2019. So
(03:05):
how is the current performanceof the company doing? Have you
progressed since then?
Chris Ronzio (03:09):
So I guess the updated headline would be zero
to 5 million in 30 months orwhatever, since two and a half
years.
Todd Chambers (03:17):
Nice! 5 million ARR. Congratulations! That's
quite some achievement in such asmall amount of time.
Chris Ronzio (03:21):
Thank you. There's a there's a market need for it,
I guess. So we've we've takenadvantage.
Todd Chambers (03:27):
For sure. And it's actually quite interesting
time for us, we're a smallcompany, we're just nine people.
And we hired a couple of peopleover the last six weeks. And I
find myself having the sameconversations, like I would
onboard someone I wouldallocate, you know, a morning to
explain, you know, like, this ishow you get coffee. This is you
know, how you book holiday, thisis how you do X, Y and Z.
(03:47):
And it was like the third orfourth time I was having those
conversations and it was like,"okay, Todd, we really do need
to systematise" so I guess thisis a huge problem. Do you find
that this kind of a tippingpoint where you reach a certain
company size that that's likeour ideal customer profile? Like
how do you think about that?
Chris Ronzio (04:04):
Yeah, it's right about where you are. So it
depends on the company and whatthey're doing, but for some
companies, it's five people forsome it's 10, for some, it's 15.
But that's kind of the sweetspot where you go from people
and functional areas in thebusiness, sort of dividing and
conquering, to now you've gotmore people you're hiring and
you're specialising in certainroles, and you need to formalise
the the best practice the way todo things.
So just like you said, you don'twant to be repeating yourself
(04:27):
over and over, especially ifyou're hiring more than a couple
people a year. And so there'ssome function of how much you're
growing, how many people you'rebringing on. And there's some
function of just like how theroles are changing in the
business.
Todd Chambers (04:40):
Big question
the company come about?
Chris Ronzio (04:44):
Yeah, so it's kind of been a long time coming along
process of my own experience. Sowhen I was in high school, I had
a video production company thatdid live sporting events. And it
started with just me, my friendsat my high school and by the
time I sold it, we had over 300camera operators, and so we only
over and over again would bookevents, we'd find crews, we
train them to do the event, thenthey'd ship back the footage and
(05:05):
we'd send out the videos.
And so it was this repeatableprocess. But for every new
event, every new city, we had todocument how we did things. And
we had to make sure that thecrew showed up looking and
feeling like us. And so it wassomething that at the time we
did with, you know, emailtemplates and docs and PDFs and
laminated sheets and theequipment we shipped out, and
(05:26):
then we moved into like,password-protected WordPress
sites, and how do we do onlinetraining?
So when I sold that business,that was my specialty. It was
like systems and processes andSOPs, so I started consulting
for some friends and theirbusinesses, and I saw everybody
kind of wants this systematisedturnkey business, but there was
no real platform that wasdesigned to do this. It was like
(05:49):
something people hack together.
And so Trainual was an idea thatwas to be like designed for
this. So first, it was just formy consulting clients. And then
a few years into it spun it outinto its own business.
Todd Chambers (06:02):
Yeah, interesting. So you have the
need, and then you went andbuilt it out. So did you take
funding? Did you kind of buildon the side of the service
business? Like, how did thatmanifest?
Chris Ronzio (06:11):
Yes, so the first couple years of the product,
there was no funding, there was,like I said, it was just for my
consulting clients. I wascharging $49 a month for it and
I had built up like, you know,$1800 dollars a month in
recurring revenue. So for me,that was massive, it was like
mailbox money, it was paying myrent. And I thought, this is
cool. I've got this proprietarything.
(06:32):
And then the turning point was Istarted having consulting
clients referring it out ormentioning it in a blog post, or
whatever. And there werestrangers that wanted the tool
but didn't want my consulting.
And they said, you know, I'llpay for this, but I don't need
your help, just like, let mesign up.
And so I thought, wow, strangerswill pay me for this, like, this
could actually be something. Andso I had five employees at the
(06:54):
time. And we decided "let's justlet's just go for it, let's take
a swing at this!" And so it waslike a pretty cold turkey
process where we shut off theconsulting, December 2017. We
launched the product made it itsown business, its own entity.
And then we just started sellingthe SaaS product and giving away
(07:14):
the consulting as like freemarketing, free advice. That was
the big shift. And so it's beena real fast ramp since then.
Todd Chambers (07:23):
It feels like there's a transition of people
that are in service business,like we're in the service
business, and it's tough. Beingthe service business is tough. I
mean, essentially, you're tryingto scale time, which is really,
really hard. And obviously, SaaSbusinesses are way more
scalable. Was there this kind ofmoment where you thought
yourself, hang on a minute,maybe if I'm looking towards the
future, I should be looking moretowards software and something
(07:43):
that is a bit more scalable?
Chris Ronzio (07:44):
Yeah, I mean, you can look at services as like a
really great income and a goodlifestyle type thing, or you can
look at it as paid R&D. Andthat's what I was looking at it,
you know, it was like, we wereworking so closely with our
Todd Chambers (07:55):
So you have the services business, you're five
target customer. And then when Ihad a product that I thought
could really scale, I knew theirbusinesses inside and out. And
so it really informed how webuilt the product. And the whole
time we were getting paid by thecustomers to learn that instead
of launching a new businesswhere you know nothing about the
customer and you spend yourfirst couple years trying to
burn through funding while youget up and running.
(08:18):
people you decide "okay, cool!Let's go all in on this, this
SaaS product". How did theemployees take it, by the way?
Were they kind of totally cooljust transitioning their entire
job roles?
Chris Ronzio (08:28):
Yeah, they were like. You know, a few of them
were like, you know, "I neverthought I'd work in tech or work
for a software company. This isweird". I came in one day, I had
redesigned the logo with 99designs. And I came in with
like, new t-shirts for everyoneand sat everybody down. I was
like, here's what we're gonnado. And they all they all bought
in because the fallback was ifthis doesn't work, we'll just go
(08:49):
back to consulting. It's notlike that bigger risk. It's not
that the other business wasn'tworking. The other business was
doing great. And so it was kindof like a hiatus from client
work to give this thing a realchance.
Todd Chambers (09:02):
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not a
developer. You're not technical,no?
Chris Ronzio (09:05):
No, not technical, but part of the consulting work
I was doing was helping peoplewith their workflows. And so,
you know, part of efficiencyprocess consulting, was going
into business, talking toeverybody, interviewing them,
and understanding how thingsmoved through the chain. You
know, how a job started, howthey sold it, how they fulfilled
it, how they, you know, maintainthe customer relationship. And
(09:27):
so part of what we started doinga few years before Trainual was
having contract developers buildlittle tools to fill in the gaps
for a customer where it wouldjust automate certain processes
that they have. And so throughthat, I found myself wearing
this like Product Manager hat,where as a consultant, I was
understanding the problem. Andthen I would try to translate
(09:47):
that to the developers. And thatreally set me up to be able to
run, I think the the softwarewhen we wanted to build our own.
Todd Chambers (09:55):
Nice, so you are five people, you fully
transitioned to having this SaaSbusiness, very small amounts of
revenue, I assume you're prettymuch burning cash at this point,
covering people's salaries. Sohow did you start growing it?
Like what are the initial thingsthat you did to try and grow the
company?
Chris Ronzio (10:15):
Yeah, so those first six months were the
hardest, I would say. It took ussix months to get to $10k MRR.
And just for some context, theconsulting business had done
about $200,000 in Decemberbefore we made the switch. And
so fortunately, we had built uplike some saving some cash
savings and we were able to fundthis runway. You know, and, and,
(10:38):
and be okay burning, but it tooka while to build up sales.
The couple big steps were, youknow, month two, it was, month
one was just announcing it.
Telling everyone I knew, we hada launch party, invited
everyone, we had a reporterthere, we had a photographer
there, try to make some fanfarearound this thing. Month two, we
launched it on Product Hunt. Weset up an affiliate programme, I
(10:59):
you know, I was I was justcaught like hard selling and
being an affiliate for us andtrying to get people to post the
link on Twitter and things likethat. Month three was when we
started experimenting withFacebook and so my brother and
I, my brother's our CMO. We juststarted shooting videos in the
office where I was talking aboutdifferent business problems or
scaling. He and I were walkingdown the street, and we were
(11:21):
talking about just justchallenges we had had. And those
really resonated because theywere pretty authentic and just
totally raw. And so we wererunning Facebook ads and
Instagram story ads. And we werejust testing out the funnel. And
once we felt like we weregetting predictable sales,
that's when we felt Okay, reallyinvesting in digital, which
(11:42):
became the way that we scaledfrom, you know, 10 to 100. k.
Todd Chambers (11:49):
Obviously, our businesses is ads. So one of the
really cool things that I heardyou talking about on the SaaS
podcast was the unit economics.
And actually on the episode Iwas speaking to Omar, we spoke
about the six common mistakesthat SaaS companies make running
PPC ads. And the number onething is getting the unit
economics correct. So what mostpeople do is they say, okay,
cool, we have this product, wethink that a good customer
(12:11):
acquisition cost is, you know,50, they just kind of put the
hand in there. And they justmake, you know, some kind of
best case guess. You actuallydid the correct thing, which is
where you reverse engineer fromcustomer lifetime value. You
said like, okay, we earn thisfrom a client, we're willing to
give up about this in customeracquisition cost, and so on. So
maybe you can kind of explainhow that played out.
Chris Ronzio (12:34):
Yeah, so like you said, you've got to reverse
engineer your lifetime value.
And at the beginning, that'skind of like a best guess. So
you're still guessing, butinstead of guessing the
acquisition cost, you'reguessing the lifetime value.
And so we knew what we werecharging per month, we knew how
many customers were signing upin the first couple months. And
we had a couple years of data ofthe customers I knew most
(12:54):
closely that we're using it. Andso we knew that if we found a
good customer that they would beon for, you know, a year or two
years, and we felt like that wasa pretty safe bet to make. And
so the acquisition cost, I hadseen these ratios that were
like, you know, CAC to LTV, youwant to be like a three to one
ratio. And so I thought, okay,let's just go with that. And so
(13:16):
if someone's gonna pay us, youknow, 1500 dollars over their
lifetime of the product, then wecan spend $500, to go acquire
them, let's try to do that.
And so in our first month, thatwe did digital ads, we started
spending $100 a day on one ad so$3000 for the month, and we got
five customers off Facebook thatmonth, so $600 a piece, and it
(13:38):
was like, okay, we're in thesweet spot! Like, let's increase
that. And so little by little,we just started increasing our
ad budget. So from $3000 a monthto $5000 a month to $10,000 a
month, and making sure that thethe funnel still worked. And the
math is actually getting better,because as we were training
Facebook with our look-alikeaudience to say "here's a
(14:00):
customer that actually signed upwhen through the trial paid, go
find more customers like that"we saw our CAC was driving down
and so instead of $600, it wasyou know, $450 and then it was
$300. And when you get to thatkind of, you know, two, three
month payback, the beautifulthing about that was that I
didn't even have to pay off mycredit card balance for 60 days,
(14:22):
so I could just totally exhaustmy credit cards on Facebook ads,
and then wait 60 days to pay it,and then just start the process
over again. So during that timethat that was, uh, you know, the
second half of 2018 was like the"go deeply into debt" years in
my life, but it was intentional.
You know, I had a reason for it.
Todd Chambers (14:42):
Yeah, you make you make a really, really good
point. So obviously, thecustomer acquisition costs in
the SaaS industry, I think it'sa three to one ratio, right? So
let's say you're charging $100 amonth. Most people stick around
for 12 months your LTV is $1200.
So basically that would say thatyour customer acquisition cost
(15:02):
is $400, which is like, supersimple. But I guess problem is,
if you're spending $400 toacquire that customer on day
one, and you're only charging$100 a month, like you said, the
payback period is four months.
So you get into this, like cashflow troph before you come out
the other end. So tell maybe youcan tell your story about your,
your credit cards, and I thinkyou, you leverage that as far as
(15:23):
you could possibly go.
Chris Ronzio (15:26):
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I had
had a business for a long timebefore then.
So I had business cards, I hadpersonal cards. And when I had
this like epiphany of how thefunnel worked, and how we could
use the credit cards to justincrease our RMR month, over
month over month, I was like,let's go all in. You know, no
reservations.
(15:46):
And so first I went, you know,blew through my savings. And
then it was, you know, all thebusiness credit cards, and so
wrote up those balances to, youknow, $50,000 on this card and
$20,000 on this card, and thenthe personal credit cards,
started sending you those checksthat you can like, you know,
balance transfer checks and allthis. So I started using those
(16:06):
for payroll, things you couldn'tput on credit cards, and and it
was just steadily building thisdebt. So at the at the height,
it was a little over $300,000 incredit card debt that it climbed
to.
But it got to the point where,you know, my my wife was like,
calling me frantically from thegrocery store, because all of
(16:28):
the credit cards were declining,and she's like, embarrassed and
there's a line behind her. And,you know, we have this this
Vespa, this this motor scooterthat I bought for our wedding.
It was like she was on the backin her dress, rode away from the
wedding into the sunset. And Ilike sold it on Craigslist for
$2500 to just to like coverexpenses.
(16:50):
So it was that that phase wherelike, you know, I was walking
around taking stuff out ofcloset selling it on eBay, just
like how do we continue fundingthis? But it wasn't to fund
burn, you know, it wasn't to tryto validate something, it was to
grow it. I think that's the bigdistinction. Because as our MRR
was increasing month over month,you know, it went from 10, to
(17:12):
17, to 25 to 34 to 43 to 57, youknow, and like, every month, it
kept going up. As a SaaScompany, you get valued based on
your recurring revenue. And soif I someday wanted to raise
funding, I knew that the furtherI can push this thing myself,
the more of a company I'll beable to hold on to, which was
(17:33):
really important for me. And soto me, it made no sense to go
out and find investors thatwould put, you know, an angel
investor that would put $50,000or $100,000 into the business,
if I could, you know, scrambleand get those resources myself.
I wanted to show that I wasfully invested in this. So it in
(17:53):
the end, it paid off. It was agood strategy, but it was
definitely risky.
Todd Chambers (17:57):
Yeah, for sure.
You're like a full on Facebookaddict. You were selling all
your stuff on eBay, just to fundyour Facebook addiction.
Chris Ronzio (18:06):
Yeah.
Todd Chambers (18:06):
So actually funding is an interesting
question. So you mentionedfunding there and I think equity
is the most expensive way tofund your company, right? So
what do you mind if I ask you?
Do you have other shareholders?
Have you ever taken funding? Orhave you just bootstrap the
whole thing?
Chris Ronzio (18:22):
We have. Two times. So we bootstrapped that
first year until AmericanExpress shut me off, and
basically said, you know, likeanybody that has an American
Express charge card, they say,there's no limit. But there,
there's definitely a limit, youknow, you as you're charging
that, that it just stops workingone day.
And so they sent an email andsaid, you know, we'd love you to
(18:45):
continue using this, but you'vegot to pay off the balance, and
then you can continue using it.
And at that time, it was like,Well, I don't have $80,000 to
pay off the balance. Sofortunately, you know, as we
were making this progress,I wasnetworking and keeping people
updated the whole way.
And so that's I think, tipnumber one is that you want to
start the fundraising work theprocess way before you need it.
(19:09):
Like, in my, you know, in mybusiness, my consulting business
before, I was in masterminds andnetworking groups and things
like that with people that wereactive investors. And so even in
month one, when I had thatlaunch party for Trainual, I had
people that wanted to put moneyin. They were like, this looks
cool. I want it, I want in.
And so by not taking the moneyfor that first year, when it
(19:32):
came time that I needed it, itwas just a couple of phone
calls. And they were like, "nowI can get in? Absolutely! Let's
do it!" It was just working outthe details. So that that first
round of funding was just aconvertible note financing that
we did a year into the business.
And so that lasted us anotheryear where it just continued to
buy ads and let us keep scaling.
(19:54):
And then last November of 2019,we did a series A so that was
our first institution around.
The reason for that was, again,not because we needed it. We're
fortunate, basically that thiswhole time that our our MRR
covered our operating costs, soour only burn was the over and
above ad spend to really fuelthis aggressive growth. And so
(20:16):
if, you know if ever we weneeded to pump the brakes, we
could just stop growing and beprofitable. And so that was a
good place to be in. But thereason to raise the series A
money was we need todisproportionately invest in
making an industry leadingproduct. And we need to invest
in expanding from our one or twomarketing channels to eight
(20:37):
marketing channels with the samekind of CAC. And we need to
build a leadership team, becausewe have aspirations of getting
to that next big company size.
And so I think the decision totake funding is a really
personal one, it comes down towhat kind of company you want to
build. And if you want to builda profitable lifestyle business,
and maybe sell it for a massiveamount, but you know, you're
(21:00):
totally in control, and you haveyour own destiny, like that's
one path. If you want to be abrand that is known around the
world and you want to go on thatride, then that's that's a
different path. And so that wasjust the decision we had to
make.
Todd Chambers (21:13):
Yeah, how has that been for you? So we spoke
about 2 million ARR, Now you'reat 5 million, you've taken
funding, and I guess there'smore pressure on you from the
board to really scale thiscompany and make it really well
known worldwide? How does thatlook like today, when you're
looking to grow the company? howdo you kind of think about
growth, given your situation?
Chris Ronzio (21:34):
Yeah, so again, it comes down to the investors that
you pick as well. So certaininvestors will have different
expectations on the growth thatthey want to see. And when we
were interviewing investors,spent a lot of time with them
trying to understand that theirtrajectory was a good fit for
for the one that we wanted. Andso for us, it's not it's not
about growth at all costs, it'sabout smart strategic growth.
(21:57):
And so we are very efficientstill with how we spend the
money, but we you know, whenwhen you raise money, you raise
it at a certain valuation, andinstantly your dollars of
ownership in the business goesway down. Because you go from if
the business is worth, say, $100today, and you own 100% of it,
(22:18):
and then you raise money, andnow you own 60% of it, or 70% of
it and the business is worth$100 plus whatever the new money
they put in, but you only owe64%, that number is almost
always lower if you do thatmath. And so in order to make it
a good deal for the founders,the team, you've got to do some
(22:38):
back of the napkin math to say,well, in order for my 60% to be
worth what my hundred percentwas worth on the day before
investment, we've got to growour revenue to this mark. And
that's kind of your minimumthreshold, and we better grow at
least to this amount, or thiswas a terrible deal, you know,
that we took. And then it'susually some multiple above
(22:59):
that, that you're expectingwhere the investors that came
in, are hoping to get two orthree or five or 10 times their
money. So it's it's about havingthat conversation and making
sure it's realistic.
Todd Chambers (23:09):
Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like Facebook
advertising and paid ads were ahuge component of how you fueled
the growth of the company backin the early days. How have you
seen that paid advertising isstill one of the biggest growth
drivers or have youfound/unlocked some other
channels that work really wellfor you now?
Chris Ronzio (23:26):
Yeah, absolutely.
Facebook and Instagram were ourprimary acquisition channel. So
you know, early on, it was like95% of our new signups came
through there. And as we matureas a company and the word gets
out, and you start to developmore, you know, referral traffic
and organic traffic and SEO andreviews, then the number of
organic signups that you getstart to compete with those paid
(23:48):
signups. And that's a healthything, I think, for the
business.
But we still see that if weincrease our budget on Facebook
or LinkedIn or Twitter orwherever, we see an instant bump
in the signups because it isvery much a direct response sign
up for a trial kind of thing.
And so that's still a very bigpart of how we get traffic. But
(24:08):
now as a more mature business,we're investing in brand and
we've got a whole video team.
We've got four podcasts that weproduce. We've got copywriters,
we've got graphic designers.
Those aren't necessary for justa direct response acquisition
model, but they are necessary ifyou're trying to build a big
brand that relies more heavilyon organic.
Todd Chambers (24:31):
What about, sorry to just kind of segue here I was
thinking about like activation.
Seems like you guys are reallygood on the acquisition and
getting people to maybe you signup for a free trial. But have
you guys tested different waysto get people to activate kind
of more of a human-led approach,like a product-led approach?
Like have you tested differentthings?
Chris Ronzio (24:48):
Yeah, so initially, it was all
product-led because we didn'thave any humans to lead them
through that. So it was likesign up, totally do it yourself.
There's no demos. There's nosales calls. There's no
onboarding like, there's no oneto one, we had one customer
support rep for 3000 companies,you know, so we just didn't
(25:10):
have the bandwidth to beproactive. Now that's entirely
changed.
So being kind of a leader inthis SOPs and training,
management onboarding, we have aalmost a responsibility to help
people get started with theproduct. And so we've we've
really doubled down and buildingthat team. So we've got a whole
customer success, customerexperience division now where
(25:34):
we, you know, from from thetheir first entry point, we're
teaching them like contentdesign principles, we've got
dozens of pre- built templatesthat are just plug and play to
get started and they customisedbased on your company. We've
got, you know, one to one, setupsessions for people, we give
them credits in their accountthat they can cash in for, like
(25:54):
consulting sessions. And so it'sbecome more people-supported,
even though it's still thefoundation is product led for
that do-it-yourselfer.
Todd Chambers (26:03):
So do you mind if I ask how many people you have
in the company?
Chris Ronzio (26:07):
As of this recording 43.
Todd Chambers (26:09):
That must have been some challenge. So, how do
you structure the people in away that kind of facilitates the
best outcome for the company?
Like yeah, do you have kind ofquarterly objectives? Like how
is the structure of thebusiness? Yeah, anything you can
share on that?
Chris Ronzio (26:25):
Yeah, I think, so early on, we were really nimble.
We were those first five peoplefor the first whole year. So we
weren't hiring at all.The nextperson we added is for anyone,
it's going to be the the areathat is the weighs the heaviest
on you. And so for us, it wasinbound chat and demo requests
(26:46):
and people that wanted to get onthe phone or said, Can you send
me some collateral.
So we brought in kind of acatch-all sales account manager
type person to handle thoseconversations. Even though the
numbers didn't support that thatwas like a positive ROI. At the
beginning, it's just like, whocan take the most work off all
of our plate you know? So thenwe started building out the
(27:07):
product team. So we brought in auser experience designer,
director of product moreengineers, because you have to
have a strong product. We didthat sort of in tandem with
building the the marketing team.
So we don't have any kind ofoutbound sales, we're 100%
inbound traffic. And so wedecided we wanted to build like
(27:28):
a marketing agency withinTrainual where, you know, we
could speak to the product andthe need and the pain better
than anyone. And so we builtthat as a core, you know, kind
of like, core skill of ours. Sowe invested heavily in that. But
hen it circles back to yoursupport your customer success,
(27:50):
you get all these customers, butif they're not getting activated
in the tool, or they're notsticking around that long, now
you've got a hole in the bucketto fix, and you should invest in
that. And so it's it goes inwaves, where now those things
are, are kind of happening atthe same time. But that was our
approach.
Todd Chambers (28:06):
Yeah. Where do you spend most of your time? Do
you spend a lot of time onmanagement? Or do you have
someone that sits directly toyou? I mean, you're doing this
podcast right now, which isreally cool. Like, what where do
you spend most of your time?
Chris Ronzio (28:21):
So most of my time is on on the strategy for the
company, the vision for wherewe're heading, coaching - I have
six direct reports, so coachingthem, working with them on on
their teams. And then just thecontent, the marketing side,
because I think the closer I canbe to the customer, and doing
(28:41):
calls like this, doing callswith investors doing calls with
partners, you know, I'munderstanding the market the
ecosystem more clearly everyday. And then I translate that
understanding into the visionthat drives the rest of the
departments. And so that's what,where I spend most of my time.
And then we've got amazingleaders that at the top of each
(29:02):
department that, you know, leadthose initiatives.
Todd Chambers (29:04):
It seems like you've learned really, really
well, from you know, your ownmistakes. How do you think other
SaaS founders should approachcustomer feedback? You just
mentioned that getting as closeto the customer as possible, but
let's let's take a more simpleexample. You know, a SaaS
company that has limitedtraction, maybe a 510 K and MRR.
How much time do you think theyshould really be investing in,
(29:26):
you know, getting feedback andlearning?
Chris Ronzio (29:29):
Almost all of it.
At five to 10 K, I was doingevery demo, I was you know, I
was physically going to thebusinesses that were in town
that I could go to to watch themuse the product. I was
developing personalrelationships so that even if
they like hated the product,they wouldn't cancel and they
were just hold on because theyknew it was going to get better.
(29:50):
You know, like that's reallyimportant at the early days. So
I think you should spend allyour time there and if someone
had limited resources to grow,but still five to 10 K in MRR I
would say like, there's got tobe someone that's getting value.
Who's getting the most value outof all your customers? Go figure
out what they're doing, what'sthe pain point that you're
(30:10):
solving for them? Why is itworking so well for them and
compare and contrast that to thepeople that are going out the
back door. And so that'ssomething we're constantly
revisiting. And as we gotbigger, we would look at all the
review sites and basically justuse the language customers put
on the review sites, in our ads,and on our website, because
they're, they're speaking theterms, you just need to be able
(30:33):
to flip that around into salescopy. I think that was crucial
for us to get past that point.
Todd Chambers (30:41):
That's really, really nice advice. I love the,
if you have enough reviews goingthrough it and using the same
terminology that your customersuse, that's, that's really,
really good advice, especiallyin our text. We spoke like, so
important to get customerfeedback, but one super critical
and very, very hard thing inrunning any businesses hiring
and getting, you know, reallygood people. So how has your How
(31:05):
do you approach hiring and kindof has that changed as the
business has grown?
Chris Ronzio (31:10):
It's changed a lot. So initially, you know, the
first five came through myconsulting practice. And so that
was they just kind of were, theydidn't have a choice, they kind
of came, came into thisbusiness. The next handful, you
know, I didn't have too muchexperience in in hiring. And so
there was a lot of trial anderror. And we had people that
(31:32):
didn't work out. But I thinkthat the big lesson was making
very fast decisions, like wehired one person and let them go
on day three, because it wasapparent that they weren't the
right fit for the role. And so Ithink early on, you're trying to
figure out what you need. And,and people can promise things in
the hiring process. But ifyou're moving quickly, you're
probably going to make mistakes.
And it's okay. We got much moreintentional about our hiring
(31:55):
process in our second year. Soour 13th hire was ahead of
people, which I think is reallyearly. But we knew that we were
going to grow headcount. And weneeded someone that all they did
was focus on recruiting, hiring,onboarding, performance and
engagement, you know, andthere's like this employee
lifecycle, that you've got totake care of your people at
(32:17):
every stage, you've got toattract the best people, you've
got to screen them, you've gotto test them, make sure that
they have the skills that theysay they have, you've got to run
an amazing interview process andget your other team members to
collaborate. And then you've gotto treat people right with the
right compensation, the rightbenefits, the right performance
reviews, and so we built thatout really early.
Todd Chambers (32:41):
Yeah, to steal a word from Gary Vaynerchuk. And
what you just said about actingfast, I think you said, hiring
is guessing and firing isknowing, which is a nice segue
on to Gary Vaynerchuk. And it'sreally funny because I was on
your website, I think I got aremarketing ad of you doing one
of your video ads, and you weretalking about your experience
(33:03):
meeting Gary Vaynerchuk. Somaybe you could actually funnily
enough, I think you were on oneof the four DS daily digital
deep dive. I think that's whathe calls it. There.
Chris Ronzio (33:13):
Every deep dive.
Yeah, digital discovery and deepdive. Yeah,
Todd Chambers (33:16):
yeah, he, I think I'd already seen you on that
video. And then I saw the ad. Somaybe, maybe you can explain how
that came about
Chris Ronzio (33:25):
It's like inception, like so many people
saw that that the video becausehe posted it on his YouTube
channel. And I had the the shirton with our logo. And then he
actually released this big deckof all these marketing tips on
his birthday last year. And oneof the screenshots was me and
him sitting at the table at histhing. So it's like really cool
exposure. But that was such acool experience. So my brother,
(33:48):
Jonathan, I mentioned is ourCMO. And he's followed Gary for
years. And so I've known about,you know, Gary Vee, and I've
seen some of his stuff scrollingthrough through social, but
never really followed him didn'tlisten to his podcast wasn't
wasn't sure, like what he wasall about. And so in the spring
of last year, my brother startedlike, every day sending me you
(34:11):
got to listen to this, you gotto listen to this started
listening to this guy. And thethe, his content is, is so
people first You know, there'slike an empathy and a level of
caring and and just authenticitythat he has, that really
resonated with me. And so I juststarted to love this guy. And,
and the the four DS thing. I hada friend that went through that
(34:33):
process. And, and so I knew whatit was. And so my brother and I
were brainstorming one day andwe thought, you know, maybe if
if maybe if we just fly to NewYork and we do his thing and we
invest the money, then we wewill be able to use some of that
experience for marketingcontent. And so we justified it
based on saying like, that's itscontent, its content, like if we
(34:55):
can shoot some videos, and he'llgive us a clip or something then
And the cost of paying for thatsession will be more than paid
for by the reduction in CAC onour ads. And so again, it was
like a calculated bet. So webooked the session, we flew out
to New York, sat in the officespend the whole day with his
(35:17):
team got some great feedbackfrom him, it happened to be on
the day that they were launchingthe empathy wines as well. So we
got invited to the the launchparty for that, such a cool
experience, but then our betpaid off. So him coaching us
about our target market, turnedinto clips that we were able to
put in our ads is just advicefrom him. And people love him.
(35:37):
He's got a huge following. Andso attaching your brand to some
authority, like Gary, is areally smart thing to do.
Todd Chambers (35:45):
Did that ad perform particularly well?
Chris Ronzio (35:47):
Oh, yeah, it was like that, like millions of
views. So so you know, and theneverything kind of runs its
course. But it opened our eyesto the fact that we can do that
with other influencers andcelebrities. So our newest ad is
a few of the actors from theoffice, the American comedy
show. And same thing, we've got,you know, five, 6 million views
(36:11):
on that ad, because there's somethere's some sense of authority
that you attach, you know, theactors you might not know train
you will you watch the ad now,you know, train, you'll, you
know, there's like this, it's aneasy one to step into selling
something.
Todd Chambers (36:25):
I think it's really, really good advice there
as well leveraging otherpeople's audiences. Like if you
don't already have an audience,try and get you know, a guest
podcast guest post or try andget a speaker on that podcast.
You know, like, I assume youhave a similar philosophy,
because you're speaking to meright now, I guess, the power of
leveraging other people'saudiences? Yeah, is really,
(36:45):
really valuable. Yeah. How doyou approach culture? You
mentioned that you had, I thinkyou said the 13th hire you had
like a head of people? Is thatperson also responsible for
culture as well? Or is thatsomething that kind of comes top
down from you?
Chris Ronzio (37:15):
it was, like two days ago on Instagram, and it
said, "the best part abouttelling the truth is, you don't
have to remember what you said."And I loved that quote, when I
saw it. And, you know, I thinkit relates to this relates to
culture, because if your cultureis just the authentic
representation of how thingsactually are, there's nothing
(37:37):
really to do, you're just kindof fostering that and finding
creative ways to continue to getit out among your people. But if
you make it up, and it's thiskind of manufactured thing, then
your people don't buy into it.
And so culture for me was just,you know, it's it's like, what
do we believe in? What are thepillars of this business? What
(37:58):
what type of environment? WouldI want to be in in five years
that we could start to lay thegroundwork for today? And so
are, you know, we've got somereally cool core values and, you
know, best places to worktowards, and that stuff's really
important to me.
Todd Chambers (38:17):
Yeah. Nice. So to maybe talk about something a bit
negative, but I think it'ssomething that everyone is
experiencing, we're in this, youknow, worldwide pandemic and
recording this now. It's Augustin 2020. We're based in
Amsterdam, and you're based inthe States, I believe you're
you're in Boston right now, howis COVID affected you from from
(38:39):
a business perspective? And howhave you done things to combat
that?
Chris Ronzio (38:44):
Yeah, so fortunately, Trainual is a tool
that empowers remote teams toshare the ways they work. And so
you know, that was just luck ofthe draw, I think that we are a
tool that we were able to stillgrow and perform well
financially during this time.
And so the business metricshaven't been too impacted beyond
the fact that, you know, subsetof our customers are really
(39:05):
struggling with their business.
And so our initial reaction tothis when it when it all
happened was how do we take careof our customers? And how do we
take care of our employees? Andso you know, that that's what it
was all about. So we wentremote, midway through March,
you know, fortunately, again, weuse all all remote tools, we had
(39:26):
a really flexible work from homeand remote policy to begin with.
So we were able to just flip theswitch. And our first went, you
know, thing went out to all ofour employees, like how do we
support you we understand thisis a tough time, you might have
spouses that are beingfurloughed or laid off, you
might have kids that are homefrom school, and we need to
accommodate that.
So first and foremost, it wasabout supporting the team. And
(39:48):
then early April, we put out a,I guess a mandate where any
customer that couldn't pay theirbill, it was okay. We would just
like let them let them go. Andso for a few months, we did that
and this summer now we'vestarted to see those
subscriptions coming back. Andwhat's amazing is that 84% of
the people that took advantageof those free months, those free
(40:09):
coupons have come back into evenpaying customers. And you know,
you the support that the thanksthat we got from the customers,
I think just really deepenedtheir, you know, their
relationship with with us withour brand it they felt they felt
supported. So that was reallyimportant to do. And we gave
accounts away to nonprofits andto schools and people that
(40:32):
needed them the most.
So really, it's been more of astory of just being supportive,
I think, then then necessarilychanging any big strategy. I
guess that the only other thingwe did from a business
standpoint, is we saw a 300%increase of traffic to our
website, as people werescrambling to finish to figure
(40:53):
this out. And so we lifted therequirement to put a credit card
in to start a trial, because wefelt that be the environment
made more people want to try theproduct. And we finally had the
the capacity, the bandwidth tofollow up with those people and
close them into payingcustomers. And so that was one
thing we shifted.
Todd Chambers (41:16):
How do you how do you protect your own time? So
I'm sure you get so manyopportunities, so many requests,
so many people pulling you frompillar to post? How do you?
Yeah, how do you protect yourtime and only work on the things
that matter? Most?
Chris Ronzio (41:34):
Yeah, so I have an amazing chief of staff who is my
first employee and my consultingfirm. She's been there since the
beginning. And so we talk everyday, she helps organise my
schedule, she coordinateseverything, and, and putting
that that type of person inplace is really crucial to being
able to, to not say yes toeverything. So that's been a
(41:56):
huge help. The next thing isI've tried my best to repurpose
content. So I get you know, Iput my cell phone number out
there, I get Instagram andLinkedIn direct messages all
day, every day. And and as muchas I can I try to send people
recordings of me answering aquestion that I've gotten
before. So so just, you know,kind of eating our own dog food,
(42:16):
documenting the things that youdon't want to be repeating. I do
that with, with questions aswell. And then it's, you know,
you've got to have hard lineswith with family time. So I've
been married for 10 years, butwith my wife for 17. I have two
kids, a six year old two and ahalf year old. And so you've got
to just shut it off sometimes.
And so when when, when I reallyneed to escape, I just give my
(42:40):
phone to my wife. Just say likeput this somewhere. I don't want
to look at it. But But you know,try to be intentional about
every day having time to playwith the kids and do family
dinner and hang out at night.
And my wife and I have beenreligious about a weekly date
(43:00):
night and and making thathappen. So you just got to, you
know, draw some lines and stickto them.
Todd Chambers (43:07):
Yeah. Is there anybody in particular that you
look up to and aspire to be morelike?
Chris Ronzio (43:16):
Oh, wow.
Todd Chambers (43:17):
Tough question.
Yeah.
Chris Ronzio (43:21):
A lot of people...so, you know, recently
I've been just reaching out to abunch of different founders, b2b
type founders. And so DavidHauser at grasshopper Dan
Martell, who's had clarity FMClate Mask from Infusionsoft.
(43:42):
There's so many great peoplethat have that are a few steps
ahead of the the path that I'mon. And I think if you know
where you're trying to get to,it becomes easy to spot who
those people are that havewalked that path before. And so
I've never been shy aboutreaching out to people that I
want to build a relationshipwith. And you know, for me and
this, like b2b SaaS, smallbusiness, that you know, that's
(44:06):
that's a great criteria forfinding some mentors, and I've
had a bunch of them.
Todd Chambers (44:11):
Cool. What about any passions outside of work? Is
there anything that you'rereally into outside of work?
Chris Ronzio (44:19):
Yeah, I started doing triathlons. Last year, I
did a half Iron man, which washuge accomplish. Training. Oh m
gosh, it was like, it was one othose things that like I coul
never imagine doing. So thamade me want to try it. Like
I've done that since I waskid. I think anytime I'm like,
could never imagine that. Likwhen I was in seventh grade.
(44:42):
played one year of footballbecause I thought, I'm proud
I've never played my whole lifeI'm too old to do it. It fel
weird. I was like, I'll jussign up. I'll try it and then
got the crap kicked out of mand decided now I'm good wit
that. And so this the Iron Mawas similar. It was a Like,
can't imagine running that racseems impossible. So let me jus
(45:04):
sign up and will it happen? Syeah, and they are in Arizona,
live near a lot of mountainsAnd so I do a lot of trai
running and biking and that sorof thing
Todd Chambers (45:13):
Yeah, that's really nice. Okay, so last
question. This is a little bitabstract and and never asked
this question before, it justkind of came to my mind. But
we'll see how it goes. Why? Why?
Why do you do all of thesethings? Like why do you try and
build a company? Why do you? Isthere something inherently
within you? That's kind ofambitious and kind of goal
orientated? But yeah, why do youdo all this stuff?
Chris Ronzio (45:36):
Yes, there is. So.
So for me, it's, you know, I,like I mentioned, I've had my
own company since I was 14. Andin all of the conferences I've
been to, in books I've read andmastermind groups, I've went to,
I've always looked up to theseexperts that are generations
before me, you know, and thepeople that are writing the
(45:57):
books that everyone buys, orspeaking at the conferences,
they're, they're not, they'renot young, you know, kind of
people like me, that are thatare, you know, up and coming,
people and so I realised, like,there's an opportunity to, to do
what they've done for the nextgeneration. And I really want to
(46:18):
train people to make adifference for small growing
businesses around the world, youknow, to help people create the
playbook for their companies sothat they don't have to do it in
this fragmented all over theplace kind of way. And so it's
that larger calling of of being,you know, being the guide
(46:38):
through that is reallymotivating to me. So that's,
that's, I think, what gets meup.
Todd Chambers (46:46):
Cool. I got some really, really nice way to
finish you've been reallygenerous with your time and
yeah, I really appreciate youdoing this. So what can we do
that cliche thing at the end ofpodcasts now Where Where? Where
can people find you? or How canpeople follow you?
Chris Ronzio (47:00):
You can find me on all the normal places. So
LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube,just search Chris Ron CO, and
I'll come up. You can also textme if you want. If you're in the
US. It's a 480-531-8411 I replyto everything just might take me
a couple days. But yeah, I'dlove to connect.
Todd Chambers (47:21):
Thank you so much, Chris. Really appreciate
you taking the time. Have a goodday. You too. Take it easy.
Thanks for listening to thepodcast. Guys. If you want to
get links to any of theresources we discussed in the
interview, head over to ourpromedia.com forward slash
podcast. Until next time, takeit easy
Hey guys, welcome to the Masters of SaaS podcast
brought to you by Upraw Media, agrowth marketing agency for SaaS
specialising in paid media,content and conversion rate
optimisation. I'll be your host,Todd Chambers.
I have the absolute pleasure ofchatting with really smart
people from the SaaS industry.
The goal is to extract as muchvalue as possible. What are
their strategies, theor tactics,theor failures, funny stories,
(00:32):
key learnings? All of this canthen be used to help you grow
and scale your own SaaSbusiness.
In this episode, I speak withChris Ronzio, the founder and
CEO of Trainual - the leadingonboarding, training and
knowledge management platform.
Chris was able to take Trainualyour from zero to 5 million ARR
in just two and a half years,and by my standards, that's
(00:53):
pretty impressive. The episode'squite fast paced. We cover a lot
of ground and interestinginsights from their difficult
first year, but how they pushedthrough it and found their
primary traction channel inFacebook and Instagram ads;
Strategically, and the key wordhere is strategically, getting
into $300,000 of credit carddebt, selling wedding gifts, and
a bunch of other stuff to payfor ads that ultimately fueled
(01:15):
the growth of the company.
The importance of getting yourpaid media unit economics nailed
down before you throw fuel onthe fire, this is something I've
spoken a lot about, so wedefinitely jammed on this,
Trainual's funding rounds andconsiderations for founders
looking to take funding, theimportance of feedback and how
he met the infamous Gary Vee intheir headquarters in New York.
(01:37):
Hope you enjoy the episode guys.
let's jump straight to it!Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Ronzio (01:41):
Thank you excited to be here!
Todd Chambers (01:43):
Yeah, it's good to have you on! Maybe we can
start off just by basicintroduction: who is Chris?
Chris Ronzio (01:49):
Sure! So Chris Ronzio - I'm the CEO and founder
of a company called Trainual, soyou think training manual
smashed together is basicallythe playbook for business. All
your policies, processes,procedures, roles,
responsibilities in one place,online.
Todd Chambers (02:04):
Nice. I actually love the name by the way. It's
short, it's easy to spell. It'skind of descriptive as well.
It's, was it was a challenge tocome up with a name or?
Chris Ronzio (02:12):
no, it was like where I took all the business
buzzwords and tried to mash themtogether. And this was the only
one that like sounded ok and hada domain available, so it was a
pretty quick process.
Todd Chambers (02:22):
Okay, nice. I think I procrastinated and took
way, way too long to come upwith a company name, which I
don't even like anymore. But Ithink many people spend a long
time coming up with a companyname. So yeah, good. You were
able to just...
Chris Ronzio (02:35):
Yeah, it was quick. But some people think
it's like, train y'all or trainyou all, so t's got that like
subtle thing in there too, butI'll take it!
Todd Chambers (02:45):
Cool. We were just talking about - I was
listening to on the SaaS podcastwith Omar Khan, and I was also a
guest on the podcast, and thetitle of his, your episode was
going from zero to 2 million ARRin 18 months. And we were just
saying, it hasn't quite been 18months. It was in May 2019. So
(03:05):
how is the current performanceof the company doing? Have you
progressed since then?
Chris Ronzio (03:09):
So I guess the updated headline would be zero
to 5 million in 30 months orwhatever, since two and a half
years.
Todd Chambers (03:17):
Nice! 5 million ARR. Congratulations! That's
quite some achievement in such asmall amount of time.
Chris Ronzio (03:21):
Thank you. There's a there's a market need for it,
I guess. So we've we've takenadvantage.
Todd Chambers (03:27):
For sure. And it's actually quite interesting
time for us, we're a smallcompany, we're just nine people.
And we hired a couple of peopleover the last six weeks. And I
find myself having the sameconversations, like I would
onboard someone I wouldallocate, you know, a morning to
explain, you know, like, this ishow you get coffee. This is you
know, how you book holiday, thisis how you do X, Y and Z.
(03:47):
And it was like the third orfourth time I was having those
conversations and it was like,"okay, Todd, we really do need
to systematise" so I guess thisis a huge problem. Do you find
that this kind of a tippingpoint where you reach a certain
company size that that's likeour ideal customer profile? Like
how do you think about that?
Chris Ronzio (04:04):
Yeah, it's right about where you are. So it
depends on the company and whatthey're doing, but for some
companies, it's five people forsome it's 10, for some, it's 15.
But that's kind of the sweetspot where you go from people
and functional areas in thebusiness, sort of dividing and
conquering, to now you've gotmore people you're hiring and
you're specialising in certainroles, and you need to formalise
the the best practice the way todo things.
So just like you said, you don'twant to be repeating yourself
(04:27):
over and over, especially ifyou're hiring more than a couple
people a year. And so there'ssome function of how much you're
growing, how many people you'rebringing on. And there's some
function of just like how theroles are changing in the
business.
Todd Chambers (04:40):
Big question
the company come about?
Chris Ronzio (04:44):
Yeah, so it's kind of been a long time coming along
process of my own experience. Sowhen I was in high school, I had
a video production company thatdid live sporting events. And it
started with just me, my friendsat my high school and by the
time I sold it, we had over 300camera operators, and so we only
over and over again would bookevents, we'd find crews, we
train them to do the event, thenthey'd ship back the footage and
(05:05):
we'd send out the videos.
And so it was this repeatableprocess. But for every new
event, every new city, we had todocument how we did things. And
we had to make sure that thecrew showed up looking and
feeling like us. And so it wassomething that at the time we
did with, you know, emailtemplates and docs and PDFs and
laminated sheets and theequipment we shipped out, and
(05:26):
then we moved into like,password-protected WordPress
sites, and how do we do onlinetraining?
So when I sold that business,that was my specialty. It was
like systems and processes andSOPs, so I started consulting
for some friends and theirbusinesses, and I saw everybody
kind of wants this systematisedturnkey business, but there was
no real platform that wasdesigned to do this. It was like
(05:49):
something people hack together.
And so Trainual was an idea thatwas to be like designed for
this. So first, it was just formy consulting clients. And then
a few years into it spun it outinto its own business.
Todd Chambers (06:02):
Yeah, interesting. So you have the
need, and then you went andbuilt it out. So did you take
funding? Did you kind of buildon the side of the service
business? Like, how did thatmanifest?
Chris Ronzio (06:11):
Yes, so the first couple years of the product,
there was no funding, there was,like I said, it was just for my
consulting clients. I wascharging $49 a month for it and
I had built up like, you know,$1800 dollars a month in
recurring revenue. So for me,that was massive, it was like
mailbox money, it was paying myrent. And I thought, this is
cool. I've got this proprietarything.
(06:32):
And then the turning point was Istarted having consulting
clients referring it out ormentioning it in a blog post, or
whatever. And there werestrangers that wanted the tool
but didn't want my consulting.
And they said, you know, I'llpay for this, but I don't need
your help, just like, let mesign up.
And so I thought, wow, strangerswill pay me for this, like, this
could actually be something. Andso I had five employees at the
(06:54):
time. And we decided "let's justlet's just go for it, let's take
a swing at this!" And so it waslike a pretty cold turkey
process where we shut off theconsulting, December 2017. We
launched the product made it itsown business, its own entity.
And then we just started sellingthe SaaS product and giving away
(07:14):
the consulting as like freemarketing, free advice. That was
the big shift. And so it's beena real fast ramp since then.
Todd Chambers (07:23):
It feels like there's a transition of people
that are in service business,like we're in the service
business, and it's tough. Beingthe service business is tough. I
mean, essentially, you're tryingto scale time, which is really,
really hard. And obviously, SaaSbusinesses are way more
scalable. Was there this kind ofmoment where you thought
yourself, hang on a minute,maybe if I'm looking towards the
future, I should be looking moretowards software and something
(07:43):
that is a bit more scalable?
Chris Ronzio (07:44):
Yeah, I mean, you can look at services as like a
really great income and a goodlifestyle type thing, or you can
look at it as paid R&D. Andthat's what I was looking at it,
you know, it was like, we wereworking so closely with our
Todd Chambers (07:55):
So you have the services business, you're five
target customer. And then when Ihad a product that I thought
could really scale, I knew theirbusinesses inside and out. And
so it really informed how webuilt the product. And the whole
time we were getting paid by thecustomers to learn that instead
of launching a new businesswhere you know nothing about the
customer and you spend yourfirst couple years trying to
burn through funding while youget up and running.
(08:18):
people you decide "okay, cool!Let's go all in on this, this
SaaS product". How did theemployees take it, by the way?
Were they kind of totally cooljust transitioning their entire
job roles?
Chris Ronzio (08:28):
Yeah, they were like. You know, a few of them
were like, you know, "I neverthought I'd work in tech or work
for a software company. This isweird". I came in one day, I had
redesigned the logo with 99designs. And I came in with
like, new t-shirts for everyoneand sat everybody down. I was
like, here's what we're gonnado. And they all they all bought
in because the fallback was ifthis doesn't work, we'll just go
(08:49):
back to consulting. It's notlike that bigger risk. It's not
that the other business wasn'tworking. The other business was
doing great. And so it was kindof like a hiatus from client
work to give this thing a realchance.
Todd Chambers (09:02):
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not a
developer. You're not technical,no?
Chris Ronzio (09:05):
No, not technical, but part of the consulting work
I was doing was helping peoplewith their workflows. And so,
you know, part of efficiencyprocess consulting, was going
into business, talking toeverybody, interviewing them,
and understanding how thingsmoved through the chain. You
know, how a job started, howthey sold it, how they fulfilled
it, how they, you know, maintainthe customer relationship. And
(09:27):
so part of what we started doinga few years before Trainual was
having contract developers buildlittle tools to fill in the gaps
for a customer where it wouldjust automate certain processes
that they have. And so throughthat, I found myself wearing
this like Product Manager hat,where as a consultant, I was
understanding the problem. Andthen I would try to translate
(09:47):
that to the developers. And thatreally set me up to be able to
run, I think the the softwarewhen we wanted to build our own.
Todd Chambers (09:55):
Nice, so you are five people, you fully
transitioned to having this SaaSbusiness, very small amounts of
revenue, I assume you're prettymuch burning cash at this point,
covering people's salaries. Sohow did you start growing it?
Like what are the initial thingsthat you did to try and grow the
company?
Chris Ronzio (10:15):
Yeah, so those first six months were the
hardest, I would say. It took ussix months to get to $10k MRR.
And just for some context, theconsulting business had done
about $200,000 in Decemberbefore we made the switch. And
so fortunately, we had built uplike some saving some cash
savings and we were able to fundthis runway. You know, and, and,
(10:38):
and be okay burning, but it tooka while to build up sales.
The couple big steps were, youknow, month two, it was, month
one was just announcing it.
Telling everyone I knew, we hada launch party, invited
everyone, we had a reporterthere, we had a photographer
there, try to make some fanfarearound this thing. Month two, we
launched it on Product Hunt. Weset up an affiliate programme, I
(10:59):
you know, I was I was justcaught like hard selling and
being an affiliate for us andtrying to get people to post the
link on Twitter and things likethat. Month three was when we
started experimenting withFacebook and so my brother and
I, my brother's our CMO. We juststarted shooting videos in the
office where I was talking aboutdifferent business problems or
scaling. He and I were walkingdown the street, and we were
(11:21):
talking about just justchallenges we had had. And those
really resonated because theywere pretty authentic and just
totally raw. And so we wererunning Facebook ads and
Instagram story ads. And we werejust testing out the funnel. And
once we felt like we weregetting predictable sales,
that's when we felt Okay, reallyinvesting in digital, which
(11:42):
became the way that we scaledfrom, you know, 10 to 100. k.
Todd Chambers (11:49):
Obviously, our businesses is ads. So one of the
really cool things that I heardyou talking about on the SaaS
podcast was the unit economics.
And actually on the episode Iwas speaking to Omar, we spoke
about the six common mistakesthat SaaS companies make running
PPC ads. And the number onething is getting the unit
economics correct. So what mostpeople do is they say, okay,
cool, we have this product, wethink that a good customer
(12:11):
acquisition cost is, you know,50, they just kind of put the
hand in there. And they justmake, you know, some kind of
best case guess. You actuallydid the correct thing, which is
where you reverse engineer fromcustomer lifetime value. You
said like, okay, we earn thisfrom a client, we're willing to
give up about this in customeracquisition cost, and so on. So
maybe you can kind of explainhow that played out.
Chris Ronzio (12:34):
Yeah, so like you said, you've got to reverse
engineer your lifetime value.
And at the beginning, that'skind of like a best guess. So
you're still guessing, butinstead of guessing the
acquisition cost, you'reguessing the lifetime value.
And so we knew what we werecharging per month, we knew how
many customers were signing upin the first couple months. And
we had a couple years of data ofthe customers I knew most
(12:54):
closely that we're using it. Andso we knew that if we found a
good customer that they would beon for, you know, a year or two
years, and we felt like that wasa pretty safe bet to make. And
so the acquisition cost, I hadseen these ratios that were
like, you know, CAC to LTV, youwant to be like a three to one
ratio. And so I thought, okay,let's just go with that. And so
(13:16):
if someone's gonna pay us, youknow, 1500 dollars over their
lifetime of the product, then wecan spend $500, to go acquire
them, let's try to do that.
And so in our first month, thatwe did digital ads, we started
spending $100 a day on one ad so$3000 for the month, and we got
five customers off Facebook thatmonth, so $600 a piece, and it
(13:38):
was like, okay, we're in thesweet spot! Like, let's increase
that. And so little by little,we just started increasing our
ad budget. So from $3000 a monthto $5000 a month to $10,000 a
month, and making sure that thethe funnel still worked. And the
math is actually getting better,because as we were training
Facebook with our look-alikeaudience to say "here's a
(14:00):
customer that actually signed upwhen through the trial paid, go
find more customers like that"we saw our CAC was driving down
and so instead of $600, it wasyou know, $450 and then it was
$300. And when you get to thatkind of, you know, two, three
month payback, the beautifulthing about that was that I
didn't even have to pay off mycredit card balance for 60 days,
(14:22):
so I could just totally exhaustmy credit cards on Facebook ads,
and then wait 60 days to pay it,and then just start the process
over again. So during that timethat that was, uh, you know, the
second half of 2018 was like the"go deeply into debt" years in
my life, but it was intentional.
You know, I had a reason for it.
Todd Chambers (14:42):
Yeah, you make you make a really, really good
point. So obviously, thecustomer acquisition costs in
the SaaS industry, I think it'sa three to one ratio, right? So
let's say you're charging $100 amonth. Most people stick around
for 12 months your LTV is $1200.
So basically that would say thatyour customer acquisition cost
(15:02):
is $400, which is like, supersimple. But I guess problem is,
if you're spending $400 toacquire that customer on day
one, and you're only charging$100 a month, like you said, the
payback period is four months.
So you get into this, like cashflow troph before you come out
the other end. So tell maybe youcan tell your story about your,
your credit cards, and I thinkyou, you leverage that as far as
(15:23):
you could possibly go.
Chris Ronzio (15:26):
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I had
had a business for a long timebefore then.
So I had business cards, I hadpersonal cards. And when I had
this like epiphany of how thefunnel worked, and how we could
use the credit cards to justincrease our RMR month, over
month over month, I was like,let's go all in. You know, no
reservations.
(15:46):
And so first I went, you know,blew through my savings. And
then it was, you know, all thebusiness credit cards, and so
wrote up those balances to, youknow, $50,000 on this card and
$20,000 on this card, and thenthe personal credit cards,
started sending you those checksthat you can like, you know,
balance transfer checks and allthis. So I started using those
(16:06):
for payroll, things you couldn'tput on credit cards, and and it
was just steadily building thisdebt. So at the at the height,
it was a little over $300,000 incredit card debt that it climbed
to.
But it got to the point where,you know, my my wife was like,
calling me frantically from thegrocery store, because all of
(16:28):
the credit cards were declining,and she's like, embarrassed and
there's a line behind her. And,you know, we have this this
Vespa, this this motor scooterthat I bought for our wedding.
It was like she was on the backin her dress, rode away from the
wedding into the sunset. And Ilike sold it on Craigslist for
$2500 to just to like coverexpenses.
(16:50):
So it was that that phase wherelike, you know, I was walking
around taking stuff out ofcloset selling it on eBay, just
like how do we continue fundingthis? But it wasn't to fund
burn, you know, it wasn't to tryto validate something, it was to
grow it. I think that's the bigdistinction. Because as our MRR
was increasing month over month,you know, it went from 10, to
(17:12):
17, to 25 to 34 to 43 to 57, youknow, and like, every month, it
kept going up. As a SaaScompany, you get valued based on
your recurring revenue. And soif I someday wanted to raise
funding, I knew that the furtherI can push this thing myself,
the more of a company I'll beable to hold on to, which was
(17:33):
really important for me. And soto me, it made no sense to go
out and find investors thatwould put, you know, an angel
investor that would put $50,000or $100,000 into the business,
if I could, you know, scrambleand get those resources myself.
I wanted to show that I wasfully invested in this. So it in
(17:53):
the end, it paid off. It was agood strategy, but it was
definitely risky.
Todd Chambers (17:57):
Yeah, for sure.
You're like a full on Facebookaddict. You were selling all
your stuff on eBay, just to fundyour Facebook addiction.
Chris Ronzio (18:06):
Yeah.
Todd Chambers (18:06):
So actually funding is an interesting
question. So you mentionedfunding there and I think equity
is the most expensive way tofund your company, right? So
what do you mind if I ask you?
Do you have other shareholders?
Have you ever taken funding? Orhave you just bootstrap the
whole thing?
Chris Ronzio (18:22):
We have. Two times. So we bootstrapped that
first year until AmericanExpress shut me off, and
basically said, you know, likeanybody that has an American
Express charge card, they say,there's no limit. But there,
there's definitely a limit, youknow, you as you're charging
that, that it just stops workingone day.
And so they sent an email andsaid, you know, we'd love you to
(18:45):
continue using this, but you'vegot to pay off the balance, and
then you can continue using it.
And at that time, it was like,Well, I don't have $80,000 to
pay off the balance. Sofortunately, you know, as we
were making this progress,I wasnetworking and keeping people
updated the whole way.
And so that's I think, tipnumber one is that you want to
start the fundraising work theprocess way before you need it.
(19:09):
Like, in my, you know, in mybusiness, my consulting business
before, I was in masterminds andnetworking groups and things
like that with people that wereactive investors. And so even in
month one, when I had thatlaunch party for Trainual, I had
people that wanted to put moneyin. They were like, this looks
cool. I want it, I want in.
And so by not taking the moneyfor that first year, when it
(19:32):
came time that I needed it, itwas just a couple of phone
calls. And they were like, "nowI can get in? Absolutely! Let's
do it!" It was just working outthe details. So that that first
round of funding was just aconvertible note financing that
we did a year into the business.
And so that lasted us anotheryear where it just continued to
buy ads and let us keep scaling.
(19:54):
And then last November of 2019,we did a series A so that was
our first institution around.
The reason for that was, again,not because we needed it. We're
fortunate, basically that thiswhole time that our our MRR
covered our operating costs, soour only burn was the over and
above ad spend to really fuelthis aggressive growth. And so
(20:16):
if, you know if ever we weneeded to pump the brakes, we
could just stop growing and beprofitable. And so that was a
good place to be in. But thereason to raise the series A
money was we need todisproportionately invest in
making an industry leadingproduct. And we need to invest
in expanding from our one or twomarketing channels to eight
(20:37):
marketing channels with the samekind of CAC. And we need to
build a leadership team, becausewe have aspirations of getting
to that next big company size.
And so I think the decision totake funding is a really
personal one, it comes down towhat kind of company you want to
build. And if you want to builda profitable lifestyle business,
and maybe sell it for a massiveamount, but you know, you're
(21:00):
totally in control, and you haveyour own destiny, like that's
one path. If you want to be abrand that is known around the
world and you want to go on thatride, then that's that's a
different path. And so that wasjust the decision we had to
make.
Todd Chambers (21:13):
Yeah, how has that been for you? So we spoke
about 2 million ARR, Now you'reat 5 million, you've taken
funding, and I guess there'smore pressure on you from the
board to really scale thiscompany and make it really well
known worldwide? How does thatlook like today, when you're
looking to grow the company? howdo you kind of think about
growth, given your situation?
Chris Ronzio (21:34):
Yeah, so again, it comes down to the investors that
you pick as well. So certaininvestors will have different
expectations on the growth thatthey want to see. And when we
were interviewing investors,spent a lot of time with them
trying to understand that theirtrajectory was a good fit for
for the one that we wanted. Andso for us, it's not it's not
about growth at all costs, it'sabout smart strategic growth.
(21:57):
And so we are very efficientstill with how we spend the
money, but we you know, whenwhen you raise money, you raise
it at a certain valuation, andinstantly your dollars of
ownership in the business goesway down. Because you go from if
the business is worth, say, $100today, and you own 100% of it,
(22:18):
and then you raise money, andnow you own 60% of it, or 70% of
it and the business is worth$100 plus whatever the new money
they put in, but you only owe64%, that number is almost
always lower if you do thatmath. And so in order to make it
a good deal for the founders,the team, you've got to do some
(22:38):
back of the napkin math to say,well, in order for my 60% to be
worth what my hundred percentwas worth on the day before
investment, we've got to growour revenue to this mark. And
that's kind of your minimumthreshold, and we better grow at
least to this amount, or thiswas a terrible deal, you know,
that we took. And then it'susually some multiple above
(22:59):
that, that you're expectingwhere the investors that came
in, are hoping to get two orthree or five or 10 times their
money. So it's it's about havingthat conversation and making
sure it's realistic.
Todd Chambers (23:09):
Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like Facebook
advertising and paid ads were ahuge component of how you fueled
the growth of the company backin the early days. How have you
seen that paid advertising isstill one of the biggest growth
drivers or have youfound/unlocked some other
channels that work really wellfor you now?
Chris Ronzio (23:26):
Yeah, absolutely.
Facebook and Instagram were ourprimary acquisition channel. So
you know, early on, it was like95% of our new signups came
through there. And as we matureas a company and the word gets
out, and you start to developmore, you know, referral traffic
and organic traffic and SEO andreviews, then the number of
organic signups that you getstart to compete with those paid
(23:48):
signups. And that's a healthything, I think, for the
business.
But we still see that if weincrease our budget on Facebook
or LinkedIn or Twitter orwherever, we see an instant bump
in the signups because it isvery much a direct response sign
up for a trial kind of thing.
And so that's still a very bigpart of how we get traffic. But
(24:08):
now as a more mature business,we're investing in brand and
we've got a whole video team.
We've got four podcasts that weproduce. We've got copywriters,
we've got graphic designers.
Those aren't necessary for justa direct response acquisition
model, but they are necessary ifyou're trying to build a big
brand that relies more heavilyon organic.
Todd Chambers (24:31):
What about, sorry to just kind of segue here I was
thinking about like activation.
Seems like you guys are reallygood on the acquisition and
getting people to maybe you signup for a free trial. But have
you guys tested different waysto get people to activate kind
of more of a human-led approach,like a product-led approach?
Like have you tested differentthings?
Chris Ronzio (24:48):
Yeah, so initially, it was all
product-led because we didn'thave any humans to lead them
through that. So it was likesign up, totally do it yourself.
There's no demos. There's nosales calls. There's no
onboarding like, there's no oneto one, we had one customer
support rep for 3000 companies,you know, so we just didn't
(25:10):
have the bandwidth to beproactive. Now that's entirely
changed.
So being kind of a leader inthis SOPs and training,
management onboarding, we have aalmost a responsibility to help
people get started with theproduct. And so we've we've
really doubled down and buildingthat team. So we've got a whole
customer success, customerexperience division now where
(25:34):
we, you know, from from thetheir first entry point, we're
teaching them like contentdesign principles, we've got
dozens of pre- built templatesthat are just plug and play to
get started and they customisedbased on your company. We've
got, you know, one to one, setupsessions for people, we give
them credits in their accountthat they can cash in for, like
(25:54):
consulting sessions. And so it'sbecome more people-supported,
even though it's still thefoundation is product led for
that do-it-yourselfer.
Todd Chambers (26:03):
So do you mind if I ask how many people you have
in the company?
Chris Ronzio (26:07):
As of this recording 43.
Todd Chambers (26:09):
That must have been some challenge. So, how do
you structure the people in away that kind of facilitates the
best outcome for the company?
Like yeah, do you have kind ofquarterly objectives? Like how
is the structure of thebusiness? Yeah, anything you can
share on that?
Chris Ronzio (26:25):
Yeah, I think, so early on, we were really nimble.
We were those first five peoplefor the first whole year. So we
weren't hiring at all.The nextperson we added is for anyone,
it's going to be the the areathat is the weighs the heaviest
on you. And so for us, it wasinbound chat and demo requests
(26:46):
and people that wanted to get onthe phone or said, Can you send
me some collateral.
So we brought in kind of acatch-all sales account manager
type person to handle thoseconversations. Even though the
numbers didn't support that thatwas like a positive ROI. At the
beginning, it's just like, whocan take the most work off all
of our plate you know? So thenwe started building out the
(27:07):
product team. So we brought in auser experience designer,
director of product moreengineers, because you have to
have a strong product. We didthat sort of in tandem with
building the the marketing team.
So we don't have any kind ofoutbound sales, we're 100%
inbound traffic. And so wedecided we wanted to build like
(27:28):
a marketing agency withinTrainual where, you know, we
could speak to the product andthe need and the pain better
than anyone. And so we builtthat as a core, you know, kind
of like, core skill of ours. Sowe invested heavily in that. But
hen it circles back to yoursupport your customer success,
(27:50):
you get all these customers, butif they're not getting activated
in the tool, or they're notsticking around that long, now
you've got a hole in the bucketto fix, and you should invest in
that. And so it's it goes inwaves, where now those things
are, are kind of happening atthe same time. But that was our
approach.
Todd Chambers (28:06):
Yeah. Where do you spend most of your time? Do
you spend a lot of time onmanagement? Or do you have
someone that sits directly toyou? I mean, you're doing this
podcast right now, which isreally cool. Like, what where do
you spend most of your time?
Chris Ronzio (28:21):
So most of my time is on on the strategy for the
company, the vision for wherewe're heading, coaching - I have
six direct reports, so coachingthem, working with them on on
their teams. And then just thecontent, the marketing side,
because I think the closer I canbe to the customer, and doing
(28:41):
calls like this, doing callswith investors doing calls with
partners, you know, I'munderstanding the market the
ecosystem more clearly everyday. And then I translate that
understanding into the visionthat drives the rest of the
departments. And so that's what,where I spend most of my time.
And then we've got amazingleaders that at the top of each
(29:02):
department that, you know, leadthose initiatives.
Todd Chambers (29:04):
It seems like you've learned really, really
well, from you know, your ownmistakes. How do you think other
SaaS founders should approachcustomer feedback? You just
mentioned that getting as closeto the customer as possible, but
let's let's take a more simpleexample. You know, a SaaS
company that has limitedtraction, maybe a 510 K and MRR.
How much time do you think theyshould really be investing in,
(29:26):
you know, getting feedback andlearning?
Chris Ronzio (29:29):
Almost all of it.
At five to 10 K, I was doingevery demo, I was you know, I
was physically going to thebusinesses that were in town
that I could go to to watch themuse the product. I was
developing personalrelationships so that even if
they like hated the product,they wouldn't cancel and they
were just hold on because theyknew it was going to get better.
(29:50):
You know, like that's reallyimportant at the early days. So
I think you should spend allyour time there and if someone
had limited resources to grow,but still five to 10 K in MRR I
would say like, there's got tobe someone that's getting value.
Who's getting the most value outof all your customers? Go figure
out what they're doing, what'sthe pain point that you're
(30:10):
solving for them? Why is itworking so well for them and
compare and contrast that to thepeople that are going out the
back door. And so that'ssomething we're constantly
revisiting. And as we gotbigger, we would look at all the
review sites and basically justuse the language customers put
on the review sites, in our ads,and on our website, because
they're, they're speaking theterms, you just need to be able
(30:33):
to flip that around into salescopy. I think that was crucial
for us to get past that point.
Todd Chambers (30:41):
That's really, really nice advice. I love the,
if you have enough reviews goingthrough it and using the same
terminology that your customersuse, that's, that's really,
really good advice, especiallyin our text. We spoke like, so
important to get customerfeedback, but one super critical
and very, very hard thing inrunning any businesses hiring
and getting, you know, reallygood people. So how has your How
(31:05):
do you approach hiring and kindof has that changed as the
business has grown?
Chris Ronzio (31:10):
It's changed a lot. So initially, you know, the
first five came through myconsulting practice. And so that
was they just kind of were, theydidn't have a choice, they kind
of came, came into thisbusiness. The next handful, you
know, I didn't have too muchexperience in in hiring. And so
there was a lot of trial anderror. And we had people that
(31:32):
didn't work out. But I thinkthat the big lesson was making
very fast decisions, like wehired one person and let them go
on day three, because it wasapparent that they weren't the
right fit for the role. And so Ithink early on, you're trying to
figure out what you need. And,and people can promise things in
the hiring process. But ifyou're moving quickly, you're
probably going to make mistakes.
And it's okay. We got much moreintentional about our hiring
(31:55):
process in our second year. Soour 13th hire was ahead of
people, which I think is reallyearly. But we knew that we were
going to grow headcount. And weneeded someone that all they did
was focus on recruiting, hiring,onboarding, performance and
engagement, you know, andthere's like this employee
lifecycle, that you've got totake care of your people at
(32:17):
every stage, you've got toattract the best people, you've
got to screen them, you've gotto test them, make sure that
they have the skills that theysay they have, you've got to run
an amazing interview process andget your other team members to
collaborate. And then you've gotto treat people right with the
right compensation, the rightbenefits, the right performance
reviews, and so we built thatout really early.
Todd Chambers (32:41):
Yeah, to steal a word from Gary Vaynerchuk. And
what you just said about actingfast, I think you said, hiring
is guessing and firing isknowing, which is a nice segue
on to Gary Vaynerchuk. And it'sreally funny because I was on
your website, I think I got aremarketing ad of you doing one
of your video ads, and you weretalking about your experience
(33:03):
meeting Gary Vaynerchuk. Somaybe you could actually funnily
enough, I think you were on oneof the four DS daily digital
deep dive. I think that's whathe calls it. There.
Chris Ronzio (33:13):
Every deep dive.
Yeah, digital discovery and deepdive. Yeah,
Todd Chambers (33:16):
yeah, he, I think I'd already seen you on that
video. And then I saw the ad. Somaybe, maybe you can explain how
that came about
Chris Ronzio (33:25):
It's like inception, like so many people
saw that that the video becausehe posted it on his YouTube
channel. And I had the the shirton with our logo. And then he
actually released this big deckof all these marketing tips on
his birthday last year. And oneof the screenshots was me and
him sitting at the table at histhing. So it's like really cool
exposure. But that was such acool experience. So my brother,
(33:48):
Jonathan, I mentioned is ourCMO. And he's followed Gary for
years. And so I've known about,you know, Gary Vee, and I've
seen some of his stuff scrollingthrough through social, but
never really followed him didn'tlisten to his podcast wasn't
wasn't sure, like what he wasall about. And so in the spring
of last year, my brother startedlike, every day sending me you
(34:11):
got to listen to this, you gotto listen to this started
listening to this guy. And thethe, his content is, is so
people first You know, there'slike an empathy and a level of
caring and and just authenticitythat he has, that really
resonated with me. And so I juststarted to love this guy. And,
and the the four DS thing. I hada friend that went through that
(34:33):
process. And, and so I knew whatit was. And so my brother and I
were brainstorming one day andwe thought, you know, maybe if
if maybe if we just fly to NewYork and we do his thing and we
invest the money, then we wewill be able to use some of that
experience for marketingcontent. And so we justified it
based on saying like, that's itscontent, its content, like if we
(34:55):
can shoot some videos, and he'llgive us a clip or something then
And the cost of paying for thatsession will be more than paid
for by the reduction in CAC onour ads. And so again, it was
like a calculated bet. So webooked the session, we flew out
to New York, sat in the officespend the whole day with his
(35:17):
team got some great feedbackfrom him, it happened to be on
the day that they were launchingthe empathy wines as well. So we
got invited to the the launchparty for that, such a cool
experience, but then our betpaid off. So him coaching us
about our target market, turnedinto clips that we were able to
put in our ads is just advicefrom him. And people love him.
(35:37):
He's got a huge following. Andso attaching your brand to some
authority, like Gary, is areally smart thing to do.
Todd Chambers (35:45):
Did that ad perform particularly well?
Chris Ronzio (35:47):
Oh, yeah, it was like that, like millions of
views. So so you know, and theneverything kind of runs its
course. But it opened our eyesto the fact that we can do that
with other influencers andcelebrities. So our newest ad is
a few of the actors from theoffice, the American comedy
show. And same thing, we've got,you know, five, 6 million views
(36:11):
on that ad, because there's somethere's some sense of authority
that you attach, you know, theactors you might not know train
you will you watch the ad now,you know, train, you'll, you
know, there's like this, it's aneasy one to step into selling
something.
Todd Chambers (36:25):
I think it's really, really good advice there
as well leveraging otherpeople's audiences. Like if you
don't already have an audience,try and get you know, a guest
podcast guest post or try andget a speaker on that podcast.
You know, like, I assume youhave a similar philosophy,
because you're speaking to meright now, I guess, the power of
leveraging other people'saudiences? Yeah, is really,
(36:45):
really valuable. Yeah. How doyou approach culture? You
mentioned that you had, I thinkyou said the 13th hire you had
like a head of people? Is thatperson also responsible for
culture as well? Or is thatsomething that kind of comes top
down from you?
Chris Ronzio (37:15):
it was, like two days ago on Instagram, and it
said, "the best part abouttelling the truth is, you don't
have to remember what you said."And I loved that quote, when I
saw it. And, you know, I thinkit relates to this relates to
culture, because if your cultureis just the authentic
representation of how thingsactually are, there's nothing
(37:37):
really to do, you're just kindof fostering that and finding
creative ways to continue to getit out among your people. But if
you make it up, and it's thiskind of manufactured thing, then
your people don't buy into it.
And so culture for me was just,you know, it's it's like, what
do we believe in? What are thepillars of this business? What
(37:58):
what type of environment? WouldI want to be in in five years
that we could start to lay thegroundwork for today? And so
are, you know, we've got somereally cool core values and, you
know, best places to worktowards, and that stuff's really
important to me.
Todd Chambers (38:17):
Yeah. Nice. So to maybe talk about something a bit
negative, but I think it'ssomething that everyone is
experiencing, we're in this, youknow, worldwide pandemic and
recording this now. It's Augustin 2020. We're based in
Amsterdam, and you're based inthe States, I believe you're
you're in Boston right now, howis COVID affected you from from
(38:39):
a business perspective? And howhave you done things to combat
that?
Chris Ronzio (38:44):
Yeah, so fortunately, Trainual is a tool
that empowers remote teams toshare the ways they work. And so
you know, that was just luck ofthe draw, I think that we are a
tool that we were able to stillgrow and perform well
financially during this time.
And so the business metricshaven't been too impacted beyond
the fact that, you know, subsetof our customers are really
(39:05):
struggling with their business.
And so our initial reaction tothis when it when it all
happened was how do we take careof our customers? And how do we
take care of our employees? Andso you know, that that's what it
was all about. So we wentremote, midway through March,
you know, fortunately, again, weuse all all remote tools, we had
(39:26):
a really flexible work from homeand remote policy to begin with.
So we were able to just flip theswitch. And our first went, you
know, thing went out to all ofour employees, like how do we
support you we understand thisis a tough time, you might have
spouses that are beingfurloughed or laid off, you
might have kids that are homefrom school, and we need to
accommodate that.
So first and foremost, it wasabout supporting the team. And
(39:48):
then early April, we put out a,I guess a mandate where any
customer that couldn't pay theirbill, it was okay. We would just
like let them let them go. Andso for a few months, we did that
and this summer now we'vestarted to see those
subscriptions coming back. Andwhat's amazing is that 84% of
the people that took advantageof those free months, those free
(40:09):
coupons have come back into evenpaying customers. And you know,
you the support that the thanksthat we got from the customers,
I think just really deepenedtheir, you know, their
relationship with with us withour brand it they felt they felt
supported. So that was reallyimportant to do. And we gave
accounts away to nonprofits andto schools and people that
(40:32):
needed them the most.
So really, it's been more of astory of just being supportive,
I think, then then necessarilychanging any big strategy. I
guess that the only other thingwe did from a business
standpoint, is we saw a 300%increase of traffic to our
website, as people werescrambling to finish to figure
(40:53):
this out. And so we lifted therequirement to put a credit card
in to start a trial, because wefelt that be the environment
made more people want to try theproduct. And we finally had the
the capacity, the bandwidth tofollow up with those people and
close them into payingcustomers. And so that was one
thing we shifted.
Todd Chambers (41:16):
How do you how do you protect your own time? So
I'm sure you get so manyopportunities, so many requests,
so many people pulling you frompillar to post? How do you?
Yeah, how do you protect yourtime and only work on the things
that matter? Most?
Chris Ronzio (41:34):
Yeah, so I have an amazing chief of staff who is my
first employee and my consultingfirm. She's been there since the
beginning. And so we talk everyday, she helps organise my
schedule, she coordinateseverything, and, and putting
that that type of person inplace is really crucial to being
able to, to not say yes toeverything. So that's been a
(41:56):
huge help. The next thing isI've tried my best to repurpose
content. So I get you know, Iput my cell phone number out
there, I get Instagram andLinkedIn direct messages all
day, every day. And and as muchas I can I try to send people
recordings of me answering aquestion that I've gotten
before. So so just, you know,kind of eating our own dog food,
(42:16):
documenting the things that youdon't want to be repeating. I do
that with, with questions aswell. And then it's, you know,
you've got to have hard lineswith with family time. So I've
been married for 10 years, butwith my wife for 17. I have two
kids, a six year old two and ahalf year old. And so you've got
to just shut it off sometimes.
And so when when, when I reallyneed to escape, I just give my
(42:40):
phone to my wife. Just say likeput this somewhere. I don't want
to look at it. But But you know,try to be intentional about
every day having time to playwith the kids and do family
dinner and hang out at night.
And my wife and I have beenreligious about a weekly date
(43:00):
night and and making thathappen. So you just got to, you
know, draw some lines and stickto them.
Todd Chambers (43:07):
Yeah. Is there anybody in particular that you
look up to and aspire to be morelike?
Chris Ronzio (43:16):
Oh, wow.
Todd Chambers (43:17):
Tough question.
Yeah.
Chris Ronzio (43:21):
A lot of people...so, you know, recently
I've been just reaching out to abunch of different founders, b2b
type founders. And so DavidHauser at grasshopper Dan
Martell, who's had clarity FMClate Mask from Infusionsoft.
(43:42):
There's so many great peoplethat have that are a few steps
ahead of the the path that I'mon. And I think if you know
where you're trying to get to,it becomes easy to spot who
those people are that havewalked that path before. And so
I've never been shy aboutreaching out to people that I
want to build a relationshipwith. And you know, for me and
this, like b2b SaaS, smallbusiness, that you know, that's
(44:06):
that's a great criteria forfinding some mentors, and I've
had a bunch of them.
Todd Chambers (44:11):
Cool. What about any passions outside of work? Is
there anything that you'rereally into outside of work?
Chris Ronzio (44:19):
Yeah, I started doing triathlons. Last year, I
did a half Iron man, which washuge accomplish. Training. Oh m
gosh, it was like, it was one othose things that like I coul
never imagine doing. So thamade me want to try it. Like
I've done that since I waskid. I think anytime I'm like,
could never imagine that. Likwhen I was in seventh grade.
(44:42):
played one year of footballbecause I thought, I'm proud
I've never played my whole lifeI'm too old to do it. It fel
weird. I was like, I'll jussign up. I'll try it and then
got the crap kicked out of mand decided now I'm good wit
that. And so this the Iron Mawas similar. It was a Like,
can't imagine running that racseems impossible. So let me jus
(45:04):
sign up and will it happen? Syeah, and they are in Arizona,
live near a lot of mountainsAnd so I do a lot of trai
running and biking and that sorof thing
Todd Chambers (45:13):
Yeah, that's really nice. Okay, so last
question. This is a little bitabstract and and never asked
this question before, it justkind of came to my mind. But
we'll see how it goes. Why? Why?
Why do you do all of thesethings? Like why do you try and
build a company? Why do you? Isthere something inherently
within you? That's kind ofambitious and kind of goal
orientated? But yeah, why do youdo all this stuff?
Chris Ronzio (45:36):
Yes, there is. So.
So for me, it's, you know, I,like I mentioned, I've had my
own company since I was 14. Andin all of the conferences I've
been to, in books I've read andmastermind groups, I've went to,
I've always looked up to theseexperts that are generations
before me, you know, and thepeople that are writing the
(45:57):
books that everyone buys, orspeaking at the conferences,
they're, they're not, they'renot young, you know, kind of
people like me, that are thatare, you know, up and coming,
people and so I realised, like,there's an opportunity to, to do
what they've done for the nextgeneration. And I really want to
(46:18):
train people to make adifference for small growing
businesses around the world, youknow, to help people create the
playbook for their companies sothat they don't have to do it in
this fragmented all over theplace kind of way. And so it's
that larger calling of of being,you know, being the guide
(46:38):
through that is reallymotivating to me. So that's,
that's, I think, what gets meup.
Todd Chambers (46:46):
Cool. I got some really, really nice way to
finish you've been reallygenerous with your time and
yeah, I really appreciate youdoing this. So what can we do
that cliche thing at the end ofpodcasts now Where Where? Where
can people find you? or How canpeople follow you?
Chris Ronzio (47:00):
You can find me on all the normal places. So
LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube,just search Chris Ron CO, and
I'll come up. You can also textme if you want. If you're in the
US. It's a 480-531-8411 I replyto everything just might take me
a couple days. But yeah, I'dlove to connect.
Todd Chambers (47:21):
Thank you so much, Chris. Really appreciate
you taking the time. Have a goodday. You too. Take it easy.
Thanks for listening to thepodcast. Guys. If you want to
get links to any of theresources we discussed in the
interview, head over to ourpromedia.com forward slash
podcast. Until next time, takeit easy
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