How ClickDimensions Hit $40 Million in Revenue by Dominating the Microsoft Dynamics Channel
Mike Dickerson told Latka in December 2018 that ClickDimensions would close the year at about $40M ARR, sold almost entirely through 650 Microsoft Dynamics partners on a 21% margin. Here is the tape's math, what the old post got wrong, and what happened after Accel-KKR sold the company.
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ClickDimensions ended 2018 at about $40 million in annual recurring revenue, and almost all of it moved through a single channel: Microsoft Dynamics partners. CEO Mike Dickerson told Nathan Latka, in an interview published December 21, 2018, "We'll do about 40 million this year" — up from "almost 31 million" the year before — with between 3,600 and 3,700 customers paying just under $11,000 a year on average. The GetLatka profile for ClickDimensions corroborates the year-end number: it logs $40 million for 2018 and $44.4 million by 2020, its most recent figure (last updated July 2023).
A correction is owed here. The earlier version of this post dated those numbers a year late — it claimed ClickDimensions "achieved $31 million in 2018" and was "on track to hit $40 million by 2019." On the tape, $31 million is the prior year, 2017, and $40 million is the 2018 finish Dickerson was projecting weeks before year-end — a projection the GetLatka profile later records as met. This rewrite re-anchors every figure to who said it and when.
How ClickDimensions hit $40 million in revenue
Every dated revenue point traces to the December 2018 tape or to the company profile built from GetLatka's records:
| Date | Revenue | Source |
|---|---|---|
| January 2017 | ~$20M run rate | Dickerson on tape — the company's state when he joined |
| End of 2017 | Almost $31M, up 36% | Dickerson on tape ("we grew 36% last year to almost 31 million") |
| End of 2018 | ~$40M ARR | Dickerson's in-year projection on tape; GetLatka profile logs $40M for 2018 |
| 2020 | $44.4M ARR | GetLatka profile, last updated July 2023 |
One growth-rate label needs untangling: the episode's closing summary describes the company as "growing 36% year-over-year between 2017 and 2018." That is host arithmetic, and it misapplies Dickerson's own statement — the 36% was 2016-to-2017 growth. Going from $31 million to $40 million is roughly 29%.
A basement, a Tel Aviv apartment, and no venture capital
ClickDimensions launched in 2010. Dickerson tells the founding story without names: a small-business owner working out of his basement connected with a developer in Tel Aviv writing code in his parents' apartment, and the two built the company without ever having met and without taking venture capital. The public record fills in the names — John Gravely and Koren Tako founded the Atlanta-based company, per Crunchbase and Tracxn. By the time Dickerson arrived on January 23, 2017 (his own date on tape; Accel-KKR announced his appointment that March), the bootstrapped business had 2,800 customers and was doing almost $20 million in run-rate revenue.
What the founders got right, in Dickerson's telling, was picking a segment they could dominate rather than fighting the roughly 7,000 martech vendors head-on: they built natively on Microsoft Dynamics and, as Dickerson put it, "really understood the Microsoft Dynamics channel — they understood how they made money, they understood how to connect with them."
650 partners as the sales force
The distribution machine works like this. About 7,000 Microsoft Dynamics partners sell, install, and configure Dynamics. In the twelve months before the interview, 650 of them had done at least one ClickDimensions deal — and 60% of those 650 had ten consultants or fewer. A long tail of small systems integrators was effectively the company's sales force.
The incentive was not the commission. Partners earned a 21% margin on ClickDimensions software, but Dickerson's illustrative deal — he cautioned "my numbers may be a little bit off" — was 75 Dynamics seats: roughly $120,000 in Microsoft subscriptions, $120,000 in implementation fees, and $10,000 of ClickDimensions software.
"That $10,000 was the fuel accelerant that helped them win that much larger deal, including the $120,000 of services, which is really their main business."
ClickDimensions backed the channel with a "sell-with" motion: its own reps were the marketing-automation specialists in deals led by partners who, per Dickerson, "are not marketing people — they couldn't tell you what SEO is all about." Win rates were disproportionately high when a customer was first moving to Dynamics; much lower two years post-implementation. So the company spent its acquisition budget helping partners drive new Dynamics activity that pulled ClickDimensions along — a deliberately different model, Dickerson noted, from HubSpot, Marketo, or Act-On.
The unit economics, checked
Dickerson declined to give an absolute customer-acquisition cost but put the LTV:CAC ratio at about 7x, with payback "a good bit less than" twelve months. Average revenue per account, he said, would end 2018 "just under $11,000" a year. That arithmetic closes: roughly 3,650 customers times just under $11,000 is right at $40 million.
On tape, Latka back-solved a CAC of $7,000–8,000 against a lifetime value near $70,000 — host arithmetic, but arithmetic Dickerson accepted as "pretty damn close." Treat the ratio as the guest's claim and the dollar figures as an endorsed estimate.
Churn is the weak spot
Logo churn ran about 15% a year — "higher than I'd like it to be," Dickerson said. That implies an average customer lifetime around six years (a figure the host initially garbled as six months and corrected on air). The customer base ran from Fortune 500 firms down to 50-employee companies, all segmented on one dimension — they use Dynamics — and churn among the larger accounts was "much below 10%" on a logo basis.
Accel-KKR, bank debt, and a funding line that doesn't add up
In May 2016, ClickDimensions took its first outside capital: Dickerson describes the company as "sold to private equity firm Accel-KKR," which the firms announced on May 24, 2016 as a strategic equity partnership. Accel-KKR brought Dickerson in as CEO the following year. Growth was funded from cash flow plus fixed-rate term bank debt from Silicon Valley Bank — "a rare story," Dickerson said, "a company that grows at 36% in a SaaS business that's profitable enough to be able to use bank debt to grow."
Open flag: the GetLatka profile lists total funding of $550K and a 2016 valuation of $51 million. The $550K cannot describe the Accel-KKR transaction — CB Insights logs the May 2016 growth-equity round at roughly $33 million, and the tape describes a control-style private-equity deal. Until the profile is reconciled, treat its funding line as incomplete rather than wrong: $550K may reflect an earlier raise, but no figure on the tape supports it either.
What happened after the tape
At taping, ClickDimensions had just under 200 people including contractors — three US cities, The Hague, R&D in Tel Aviv, and a new Christchurch office — doing business in 61 countries. The GetLatka profile's last revenue mark is $44.4 million in 2020, growth of about 11% over the two years after the interview, a clear deceleration from the 29–36% of the Dickerson ramp.
In January 2023, Volaris Group, the software arm of Constellation Software, announced it had acquired ClickDimensions from Accel-KKR. A year later, on January 25, 2024, the company announced Dickerson's departure effective January 1 and appointed Andrew Jones, who had run its revenue organization, as general manager. The founders' channel thesis outlived three ownership structures: bootstrapped, private equity, and permanent-hold acquirer.
Sources: Nathan Latka's interview with Mike Dickerson (published December 21, 2018); the GetLatka ClickDimensions profile (revenue and valuation figures, last updated July 2023); PR Newswire, May 24, 2016 (Accel-KKR equity partnership); PRWeb, March 2017 (Dickerson named CEO); Volaris Group press release, January 2023 (acquisition from Accel-KKR); PR Newswire, January 25, 2024 (leadership transition).
