AppDirect Hit $60M With 49 Salespeople Because Comcast and Bell Do the Selling
Nathan cited $9M in 2013 and $18M in 2014, then asked whether AppDirect had passed $100M. Daniel Saks would not say — but a $60M dataset row dated the same month as the interview, and a 49-person sales team, explain how the number got there.
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Nathan had a number. Daniel Saks had a policy.
“There’s a pretty reliable source that said in ’13 you passed 9 million, and then in ’14 you’d more than doubled up to 18,” Nathan said. “Have you guys passed the 100 million dollar mark yet?”
Like I said, I can’t say. We’ve definitely grown tremendously since then.
Daniel Saks, president and co-CEO, AppDirect
The GetLatka dataset holds the answer he declined to give: a revenue row for AppDirect reading $60M, dated 15 May 2018, with no estimate flag on it. That date matters, because it is almost certainly the month of this conversation.
The interview itself is filed in the database under March 2014, which cannot be right. Three things on the tape put it in the middle of 2018 instead:
- $245M raised — Saks confirms the figure, and AppDirect’s cumulative funding only crosses it with the $140M Series E of October 2015.
- “About six hundred and fifty people” — the dataset’s headcount row for 15 May 2018 reads exactly 650.
- He gives his age as 33 — and mentions meeting Four Seasons founder Isadore Sharp “earlier this year.”
None of it was sold door to door. Saks decided in 2011 that AppDirect would never chase small businesses one at a time. It would sell the plumbing to the brands small businesses already trust — Bell Canada, Comcast, telcos, managed service providers — and take a platform fee plus a slice of every subscription that ran through them. The revenue curve is really a distribution curve.
The first customer was a phone company
Saks grew up in his family’s furniture store in Niagara Falls, Ontario, a business his great-grandparents started and the 2009 recession closed. What stuck with him was not the closure but the buying: software was a major purchase, and the person who sold it to them was someone they knew by name. That is the gap he built into a company — the developer of an application on one end, the small business on the other, and a trusted intermediary in between.
So the first customer, sold out of a two-person apartment in San Francisco, was Bell Canada. Not a small business at all. Bell had over half a million business customers in Canada, and AppDirect aggregated a portfolio of cloud services relevant to that market and let Bell put its own brand on the storefront. Comcast Business came later on the same logic: a company that already sells internet and telecom to businesses is a company those businesses will also buy collaboration, email and backup from.
“One of the opportunities that’s emerged over the last several years with the growth in cloud,” Saks said, “is that businesses want to be able to access cloud services from people they trust.”
The price of that leverage was time and a bruised assumption. The Bell deal ran a nine-month sales cycle, and the budget was nothing like what two founders had penciled in. “We went in with this idea that, okay, we’re gonna propose this, we’re gonna get budget, and it’s gonna be millions of dollars,” Saks said — and then discovered that while the partner had earmarked serious money for the project overall, very little of it was for AppDirect itself. They had to help build the business case instead of invoicing against one.
What the deal did buy was the company’s first outside money. AppDirect bootstrapped as long as it could; the letter of intent from Bell is what unlocked the seed round. “Once we had the letter of intent from the company, then the investor said, okay, well, we’ll give you the first seed money to make this happen.” The dataset dates that round to April 2011: $3.3M.
Seven years on, Saks put partner reach at “over 35 million customers around the world,” then corrected the framing himself when Nathan pushed — that is reach, the customers of AppDirect’s customers, not logos on AppDirect’s own books. “We do have millions of business users,” he said. Nathan set the floor at a million; the GetLatka profile records one million customers.
What the platform actually charges
Two revenue lines, and on the tape they were moving in opposite directions.
What a Bell or a Comcast pays to run a white-labeled marketplace and billing layer. “Definitely the lion’s share of the initial product,” Saks said — the predictable base.
A cut of every cloud subscription sold through the storefront. “We see a really, really high growth of the transaction fees as well” — the line that compounds with the partner’s own success.
Pricing spans a wide range, and the entry figure is inaudible on the recording. Nathan’s read-back is the usable version: entry-level deployments in the “many, many thousands” range, running “all the way up to the hundreds of thousands for more complex deployments.” Then came the correction that reframes the whole scale — Nathan assumed those were annual contract values, and Saks said they were monthly ARPU. A mid-range channel partner is a low-seven-figure account before a single upsell. (If the distinction is fuzzy, our annual contract value explainer covers it.)
Saks placed AppDirect against the suite vendors rather than the point tools: “What HubSpot is for marketing and sales, or what NetSuite is for back-office, we are for commerce.” Each of the four product areas has its own giant competing in it; the argument is that nobody else sells all four together to a channel.
The verticals ladder outward from that first telco beachhead:
- Telco — where it started, and still the marquee logos: Bell Canada first, Comcast and other major carriers after.
- Managed service providers — the resellers who already sit between software vendors and small business buyers.
- Manufacturing — the one Saks called fascinating and unexpected. Firms digitizing through IoT find “the value’s not necessarily the hardware itself, it’s around the connectivity and the software and the ecosystem you can provide.”
A small elephant-hunting team
Asked what AppDirect pays to acquire a customer, Saks answered with headcount instead of dollars: “We have a really kind of small, elephant-hunting type team. For the revenue scale that we have, we’ve traditionally had a relatively smaller enterprise sales team, which really gives us an effective cost of acquisition.”
The dataset puts a number on “relatively smaller.”
49salespeople recorded 1 December 2018, against 557 employees — under one in ten of the company
Marketing, in the same December 2018 rows, was 16 people. Engineering was 243. For a business whose product is other companies’ distribution, that ratio is the whole strategy rendered as an org chart: build the platform, let the partner’s brand do the demand generation, and keep a handful of senior sellers for the nine-month enterprise cycles. Saks noted the second-order benefit — tenure compounds on a team that small, because reps who stay get better at the only kind of deal the company does.
He would not name a payback period. Nathan pushed hard, offering 18 months, 12, or 6 as options, and got a hedge back about internal targets that vary by cohort. The reasoning behind the hedge was more useful than a number would have been: “If we pay more upfront from a compensation perspective, or cost-of-sales perspective, over time we make that back pretty significantly.” His advice to anyone setting comp was to anchor on the behaviors that happen regardless — if customers sign up, stay a long time and expand, you can afford to be flexible on the front end. Where that sits against the rest of the market is in our SaaS CAC benchmarks.
Retention above 100%, and no number after it
The churn answer was the most confident moment on the tape and still contained no figure. AppDirect’s net dollar retention across customer cohorts is above 100% — Saks confirmed the threshold when Nathan asked directly, and volunteered the reason: “Our customers stick with us and buy more, which is super exciting.” Pressed on whether that meant 110% or 140%, he gave only that expansion runs “north of double digits” and varies by customer size, pricing and product mix.
The mechanism he described for driving it is not a pricing lever at all. Rather than repackage, AppDirect kept its pricing framework constant and attacked deployment cost: launches that once took “thousands of custom engineering hours” were automated down to “point and click.” Cheaper launches mean partners add more products, which means more transaction volume on the same contract — expansion bought with engineering rather than with a price increase.
On growth rate he offered a shape instead of a percentage: “If you can go triple, triple, double, double … for a while that was the trajectory that we’re on, and now we’re falling nicely into what you’d see in public comps in terms of growth rates.” Nathan translated that as just south of doubling. Saks would not confirm it.
The one place he broke from company-line answers was on lifetime value, where Nathan asked how he keeps himself honest about a metric that can be argued to infinity when churn is low. Saks did not pretend the model settles it: history informs the estimate, but “ultimately there has to be a call and comfort level made.” He then named the thing that actually moves the call — a large cash balance lets you take a bolder stand on customer lifetime value and spend to capture the market; a thinner one makes you conservative. The assumption follows the balance sheet, not the cohort data.
The funding ladder
Where the $245M came from
The episode was titled around the question of whether a company that has raised this much can ever go public, and Saks gave the careful version of the answer: long-term view, clean terms from investors, more opportunity than ever for enterprise companies of AppDirect’s profile to list — and no timeline. Asked point blank about the next 12 months: “I obviously can’t answer that, but I think we’re really excited about the position we’re in.”
- Apr 2011 · Seed $3.3M — unlocked by the Bell letter of intent.
- Jul 2012 · Series A $8.5M.
- Sep 2013 · Series B $9M.
- Apr 2014 · Series C $35M.
- Feb 2015 · Series D $50M.
- Oct 2015 · Series E $140M — the round that carries the total past the $245M Saks cites.
- Sep 2020 · Private equity $185M, recorded at a $1.5B valuation.
- Mar 2021 · Debt financing $43.2M.
- Dec 2021 · Venture round $78.9M.
Three more private raises after the interview, none of them an IPO, taking cumulative funding to roughly $553M in the dataset. The question the episode’s title asked got answered by default.
What the dataset shows since
The revenue Saks would not discuss kept moving. The next recorded figure after May 2018 is $227M, dated 1 December 2024, and it is not flagged as an estimate. Headcount tells the same story with more texture: 557 in late 2018, down through 526 in 2019, then a jump to 1,165 by mid-2021 as the private equity money went to work, settling at 1,098 in the most recent row, from November 2025. Sales grew hardest of all — from 49 people to 153 by mid-2022, the elephant-hunting team finally scaled.
Current figures live on the AppDirect profile, which carries the $1.5B valuation from the 2020 round.
The last question of the episode was what Saks would tell his 20-year-old self — the version of him who had just watched the family furniture store close and was about to try selling a marketplace to a national phone company from an apartment.
Just have conviction. Keep going.
Daniel Saks, president and co-CEO, AppDirect
Sources Daniel Saks on the Latka podcast (YouTube video AATiyv_glc8, “Can a Company With $245m in Funding Actually Go Public?”), transcribed in full; GetLatka company record and dated metrics rows for AppDirect (revenue 15 May 2018 and 1 December 2024; headcount, sales, marketing and engineering rows 2018–2025; nine funding rounds 2011–2021). The 2013 and 2014 revenue figures are Nathan’s on-air citation of an unnamed third-party source and were never confirmed by Saks.
