Paris Childress on Nathan Latka’s Podcast: “The Most Successful SaaS Ads Story?”
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Paris Childress, founder and CEO of Hop Online, was on Nathan Latka’s podcast in November 2020 to talk about the extremely successful SaaS paid ads story of one of our clients, Output.com.
We were already working with Output when they launched their first SaaS product – Arcade. Within the first 18 months, they reached 100,000 subscribers.
Today, our teams drive roughly 1,000 new trials per day, of which about 60% convert to paying customers. We’ve scaled the ad spend to well over 6 figures/month distributed between Google, YouTube, and Facebook ads.
This SaaS Growth formula has been so successful that Output recently raised 45$ million in Series A financing from Summit Partners to help drive extra growth.
In the podcast, you’ll hear:
- How we got the first 1,000 subscribers.
- What were some of the break-through moments while scaling.
- How we preserved strict unit economics for profitably.
- How we plan to 3X current growth, while still preserving LTV: CAC
“I think getting 3x bigger is possible within the next 1 to 3 years,” Paris said on the podcast.
He believes that one of the untapped territories is programmatic advertising. “There is massively more ad inventory out there for us to reach people who want to use this tool to make music”.
Continuous geographic expansion, finding international partners, and advertising in China on Baidu and WeChat are other ways we can reach new audiences for this SaaS product.
Yet another solution is to move away from target CPA bidding to target ROAS bidding. “This is about training the algorithms to bid on Return on Ad Spend as in an e-commerce model, as opposed to bidding on target Cost Per Acquisition for new trial users. This way we can eliminate wasted spend on users who will churn after the free trial,” Paris added.
He believes the SaaS product will evolve, too. “Right now Arcade is geared for professional music makers, and I believe the founders’ vision is to move the product downstream and make it accessible for hobbyists and people who are brand new to making music. If now it is like the Adobe of music making, in the future this could be the Instagram of music making. If that happens, our addressable audience becomes massive.”
Find out more about the questions the investors asked, and how we plan to continue finding new channels to keep the same unit economics.
