September 2022 Updates

Andrew Pierno -

I don't know about you guys but September felt weird. Between all the rate hikes, inflation data, stock market drops, and crypto chills it was a tough month for sales. Also feels like nobody in tech is around August and September (myself included this year!).

TLDR;

September sucked. SaaS is seasonal (come at me). Nobody is around in the summer and the larger the deal, the larger the summer delay. October is already looking better.

Highlights:

  • 💰 Total MRR: ~$25,500

New Acquisitions:

SBA Update:

  • We're in our 3rd week going through the SBA process and the slowest process by far is getting all the financials in order. We've already lost two weeks to financials and will likely not close this year if the deal goes through. On the upside, we're still pumped on this company and can't wait to get further into the process.
  • This SBA process has forced me to start thinking in millions. I heard somewhere the easiest way to make a million dollars is to start with a million dollars. That's true. or $10M. In acquisition land, I think the equivalent is to buy something for $10M and sell it for $11M. $1M used to feel like a lot of money. and it sort of is. But if you think about it, we have 3 partners. $1M split 3 ways is roughly the equivalent of an all in salary at a MAANG (FAANG was so much better) company. If this deal goes through, XO will be at ~$75k MRR ( $100k+ MRR if you include Cold Email Studio). That's ~$900,000 a year. On the one hand, amazing. On the other hand, after expenses that's roughly $600k. We're not doing this but split 3 ways is still just not that much money a year relative to getting a high paying job in the US (which is what we're comparing XO to). And of course, every time we have extra cash, we hire our parts we were doing ourselves. Anyways. think in millions.
  • This deal we're looking at after paying off the loan would gross about $15k a month. That's 1 US based person. This game was tough doing micro acquisitions. Looks like it's also tough doing not so micro acquisitions with a lot of leverage.

Screenshot API

  • $3257 MRR
  • Closed a 4 figure deal this month (go Danny!)
  • Starting to get some very well known companies as customers :)

Sheet Best

  • $4,306 MRR
  • God I love this product so much. So do our customers. It just keeps humming. I hope we never sell this.

Inlytics

  • $6,269 MRR
  • First up month in 4 months. Churn has been kicking our ass. We've also got a lot of annual subscriptions that we never saw the revenue for so our cash collections on this one are even lower.

Work  Clout

  • $11,668 MRR
  • no news is good news.
  • I will never use Hasura on another project ever again. Feels like trying to snowboard on a wet towel or hang on to a fist full of sand. Bless our dude Diego for his work on the product.

Cold Email Studio:

  • $25,194.00 Revenue
  • I think we're through CES's first near death experience. We've got a larger team now, with lots of mouths to feed. Even though the revenue number is high, our margins are not, so we need a solid influx of new customers each month. The good news is we've fired some tough customers that were clogging up our process and have continued to narrow in on our ICP and say not to people that we could help, but it would be too operationally complex for us.

Super Send (New!)

  • $150 MRR
  • Always a blast launching something new :) This email sending tool got a lot of interest in its first few weeks. This is the fastest I've ever gone from 0 to 7 paying customers for a net new SaaS product.
  • Down side - I built this myself and with customers comes feature requests!

Personal Growth

I took a break from the 30 minute shoot-the-shit meetings and my zoom fatigue went down drastically. I've also been more aggressive about cancelling meetings if I think I can answer via text or write a blog post or shoot a loom video. Living my life in 30 minute zoom call chunks was starting to get to me after however long it's been.

I've also been rethinking my feelings on remote work. On the one hand I love waking up at 6 am and hammering uninterrupted until 9 or 10. That is my deep work time, and I've long said those hours are not for sale. BUT after those deep work hours, I think it would be fun (and was fun) going into an office and celebrating wins and losses with the team. Shouting at my window in my underwear when something cool happened felt good for like 6 months but I'm pretty over it now. I think one day XO will have offices and local employees that also can go to the office when they want to.

Going back to an office (or having the option to) for me is not about efficiency, and it's not about collaboration. At the moment it's about joy and quality of life.