In the latest episode of the SaaS Revolution Show Alex Theuma is joined by Ronan Perceval, CEO and founder of Phorest, a Dublin-based SaaS company providing solutions for salons. They talk about how to navigate and grow revenues in the SMB market, what is an acceptable churn rate and how to make customers happy in order to maintain it.

Building and selling software to the enterprise was never Ronan Perceval’s thing. He did it through his previous startup, Demonware, one of Ireland’s early success stories. It brought him very little satisfaction, not being able to see the end result to the customer. He was much more interested in building solutions for the smaller companies, where he would personally know the owner.

A short term gig in the salon business, opened his eyes to the opportunity that laid in the industry made up of 5 million salons worldwide. That was 10 years ago. It took him the following 7 years to reach $1 million ARR, bootstrapping most of the way. For the past 3 years, Phorest has been growing 40-50% each year and has just reached $10 million ARR.

To get there Ronan has had to learn just how different the SMB market is from the Enterprise. Acquiring customers can be much more difficult all the while the revenue each brings is much less. However, working with many SMBs rather than just a few key clients, makes SaaS companies more resilient as losing accounts doesn’t have as detrimental of an effect. In those 10 years, he has gained a significant experience in figuring out how to acquire customers and keep them on board, a subject he and the rest of Phorest often write about on their blog, NothingVentured.rocks

Listen on to hear a preview of what Ronan will cover at SaaStock and learn about:

– How Phorest is organised internally to serve its customers best

– How to do Customer Success in the SMB space where you cannot afford account managers

– What is a good churn rate to have and how to maintain it?

– Why focusing on ACV in the SMB space is not a good idea as it leads to lower revenues in the end

– How Phorest is scaling globally from Dublin in both English speaking countries and non-English speaking ones

Get your ticket for SaaStock while you still can and come meet Ronan and many other successful Irish SaaS founders. You can use the code saasrevolution for a 20% discount.