How Rokt CEO Bruce Buchanan grew Rokt to $178M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is bruce buchanan he's the co-founder ceo and chairperson of rocked founded in 2012 the company makes e-commerce smarter faster and better bruce you're ready to take the top ready to go nathan i'll tell you what you are in a hot space e-commerce plus marketing help us understand what you're doing for customers uh so i started this business eight years ago and we uh our objective is to make e-commerce smarter faster and better basically i'm trying to solve a problem i had from my previous business which was jetstar a cost airline in asia pacific which i built over 10 years to be the largest low fares airline and one of the problems we discovered local cell into one of the first director consumer businesses that we discovered the importance of this moment in time where consumers were transacting which we call the transaction moment and if we could get the right products and the right messages in front of uh our customers we could double the profitability airline and that's the problem we've been trying to solve at roc the last eight years i've got about three thousand clients now mostly enterprise we launched our shopify up recently but we specialize in enterprise level but the transaction moments are key business and what have you guys passed in terms of revenue at this point uh so we measured that in two ways there's a covered our revenue numbers this year will be about 170 million but we also measure our underlying distance that ticketing vertical and our travel vertical are still massively affected so we should surpass 200 million in the underlying business level uh this year but our actual realized revenue adjusted for what will happen with covert in those couple of verticals are still massively impacted with about 170. okay so just to be clear you think you'll break about 14 million dollars in december 2021 revenue which would put you on a run rate of being 170 million we'll do a total this year 170 million got it so you'll do more than 14 million in december yeah more than 14. and just be clear that's not like gmv that's not like gmb through your platform right that's actually your margin rocked takes correct no we our gross profit if you will it will be about uh just under 90 million um so we measure it's a slightly different way we measure it but yeah if you looked at it on a gross profit or gross contribution level it's about 90 million so explain that to folks i mean i think what you're building is the future of e-commerce sales those of you that haven't used rocked it's basically like let's say go on shopify and you check out i'm gonna make this up a flower pot the flower pot company at the end of the checkout process might then sell you fertilizer because the fertilizer brand pays rocks to put the fertilizer upsell at the end of that that transaction moment and so what you're saying bruce i believe is like what is that 170 million number is that that's not is that gmb through the platform or what does that mean it's a little bit complicated because we've got product sales and advertising that gets mixed together and product sales we book and the sas revenue as well sas revenues just gross in their product revenue we book at our margin which is typically about three percent which goes into that gross 170 number but advertising we booked a whole number uh and then our margin on that if you look at a contribution numbers less than that that's the difference between the 170 and nine years basically the way you treat the advertising revenue what is that contribution margin on advertising uh it depends on what we're doing but our gross contribution margin advertised about fifty percent fifth interesting so am i understand this correctly the difference between 170 million and 90 is basically there's 70 or 80 million bucks of advertising revenue going through your platform of which you only capture 50 percent of the spend that's that that's the amount that we pass on to our e-commerce partners effectively the delta between those two numbers so if you look at gross profit so if they're selling product you know they keep obviously around 97 of all the revenue and so we don't book the with the gross product sales but when we're talking about advertising we book the gross revenue and we clear the the transaction so disney's trying to acquire customers on our platform they might spend x million dollars we clear that with you know uh a thousand different e-commerce partners or whatever they thought that that out of clears and then you know the core part of our business is we made unlike a typical advertising value ecosystem where then this is slightly different from product and marketing um which is the other two sides of our business but on the advertising side we are a closed wall garden similar to like a google and so we clear everything and we deal directly with the advertiser directly with the economist company primarily because we're dealing with sensitive data um and in a world in in the last few years that's only becoming more important that we keep that very secure for our clients so since you own the marketplace if disney pays you 10 million dollars and they say go put it through your platform you'll basically effectively spend 5 million through the platform on ads keep 5 million as revenue for using the rox technology yeah they're all jv's i mean the way the economics work on the advertising is um they're contracts like jv's where we passed fifty percent of the transparent relationship we then where all the costs which is about forty three cents in a dollar so fifty cents goes to partner they see exactly what's happening we're very transparent we spend about 43 cents on technology and hosting and sales and commission and management of the platform and data costs and all sorts of weird wonderful things and we keep about seven cents on the dollar on the net advertising sites that's typically how the advertising business works and then in 2021 of the 90 million of gross revenue how much of that will be sas uh sas for us is relatively small the fastest growing part about sas for us will be probably you know around five six seven million dollars i think this year um the fastest growing part of our business is product what we call distributed commerce we're actually selling like parking or insurance or you know whatever name of product that gets bought when you're buying another product um and that on that product we're taking it's a marketplace cut as well it's a straight rev share effectively it's like a credit card merchant fee is effectively the way that looks uh from the pl perspective you don't understand how that p l works yeah just to make it easy for everyone listening to follow along if did if you helped disney sell a winnie the pooh stuffed animal right through your ecommerce checkout and that stuffed animal was 10 bucks you'll take essentially 30 cents of the 10 bucks or about 3 percent exactly that's exactly how it works you're not producing your own product and storing product you're just the cut we we sell nothing and that's really important actually because we want to be completely unbiased as a middleman we connect consumers and um and brands and providers in a way that makes the product more effective so if i if you sell insurance or whatever through rocked and a customer is buying an airline ticket you'll sell 60 more insurance because we get the right product the right price in front of that consumer when they're buying we can manage the the consumer relevancy and the contextual relevancy in real time in a transaction flow to optimize against lots of different variables but essentially your take rate on that product improves by about you know 50 60 so you pay us three percent but you sell 50 or 60 more products because you're putting them in the right transaction moments on related products yeah and getting the creative right the ux right so you know some people when they buy parking want to see how close the parking garage is someone to see uh the picture of the garage someone see a map you know and so everyone's got different buying parameters and the ux and the product and the pricing all changes dynamically to get the best outcome for the e-commerce provider and sometimes that's their own product by the way that's where the sas components come in it's much lower margin for us but whether it's their own product or their own marketing messages you know you've got anything on the review page or payment page or shipping page or confirmation page could be you know site download my app or you know buy the baggage product on my airline ticket you know there can be lots of those sorts of messages as well yeah essentially there are three arms of the the revenue stream it's still all the same thing which is a transaction moment it's all about optimizing actions and experiences but you've got a sas revenue stream which is an internal stuff you've got a product uh rev share which looks like a merchant service you like a credit card and then you got a an advertising revenue stream and advertising is where we started and so it's still the biggest but the fastest growing is a product piece of the puzzle you raised 80 million dollars last year what valuation were you able to raise that at we raised uh 80 million dollars it was a closed round so we didn't go out to market um and so we raised it at 450 uh pre-money um and uh you know that was right in the middle of was probably a couple months we were doing the negotiations right in the middle of covert which was kind of interesting so we went into covert with uh with about 50 or 60 percent of our volume centered in in verticals that were uh basically shut down cruise lines airlines hotels yeah you know entertainment sports ticketing they didn't do too well cinemas you know so our whole ticketing entertainment vertical dropped 97 our travel vertical dropped about 60 or 70 percent so they just got really badly hit and uh the great thing was we bought a business the year before in b2b which can be called off a logic which crew we create our b2b vertical and our retail vertical being really starting to fire beforehand and we've been working on a long time but then with the covert hit the retail uh vertical just took off not just natural organic growth but all about bd discussions and all of these incumbents that had to rely on e-commerce like now we really need to get our e-commerce proposition right so our new business pipeline went crazy we actually came out of covered like way way way stronger than we went into covert but at the starter code was kind of scary because some of our biggest verticals went completely offline effectively you know 97 decline so it's pretty much offline what what can you we try and capture that for a second so you're going to do 170 million this year what'd you finish 2020 at uh we finished 2020 just shy of 100 on actual basis but it would have been about 135 140 if you'd adjusted it for covert and the margin on a large gross margin basis gross profit it's about 55 percent if you adjust it all through something in that sort of range okay so like 65 million 70 million about about 55 million in gross profit last year yeah yeah yeah 55 just after 100. uh interesting and then take me back the year before co before that right so when you finished 2019 at before covet hit so we finished the year before without any covered impacts and we finished right just above 100. so what was interesting was our investors despite the covert impact they could see that the business was growing in an underlying basis really really fast and so the valuation lifted i think about 65 over about nine months and that wasn't because our actual results were lifting that way they could just see the underlying business getting stronger and stronger and stronger so actual revenue remained pretty flat yep um it looks flat but actually it wasn't flat really if it was like a roller coaster march april we got smashed when government started and our revenue tank 65 and then we came back with this you know retail and all these other businesses really were growing fast and so we finished the year really strong but if you look at the annual results year on year it looks relatively flat yep more like a roller coaster in the middle yeah just repeating back to you both in 2019 and 2020 you did on a top-line basis something a little over 100 million of which you made about 55 to 60 million in gross profit now the revenue mix was different because of covet impacts but this year you'll return to a growth profile yes yeah i mean our underlying business is still growing strong so we still did about 35 40 growth in 2020 an underlying basis you know if you take up the covet impacts and this year we'll do the same you know we'll go from that one 140th 130 late 131 40 million to about 200 million underlying basis so you know that's that the growth stills very strong and that's why we you can look at it at a net level and say okay you go from 100 to 170 the gross amazing but actually that overstates that this year's growth and understates last year's growth if you don't adjust for it so yeah but the underlying business tends to grow at about 40 every year that's pretty steady how are you growing where are you finding new customers lots of different areas um so some of its new verticals like the retail and b2b stuff that we just talked about so they've been two really good successes for us we're also expanding geographically so a japanese business starting to really take off we're in 16 countries now so it's been good we also only a few months ago launched our first smb product which is a shopify app which gives them a really slimmed down version of our product just gives them the advertising product and confirmation page this time but we're going to roll out a few more versions of that over the next six to 12 months and expand it beyond shopify so client type is another one vertical geography and product is the other one so as we get um you know into distributed commerce and we start selling more product and we go further up into the ecosystem we start handling more of the volume of the e-commerce or more value of the e-commerce transaction through our platform we also drive more revenue if disney writes a 10 million dollar check also if disney writes you 10 million checked with your advertising product or your product product do they is it required they have a sas license as well no no they can pick and choose and and lots of customers use different products and expand so we have lots of organic growth about 40 growth about 20 every year comes from existing customers growing into new products and just growing their footprint with us so um there's a bit of a combination of both but there's no requirement you can you can come in and use whatever you want we still have a very uh philosophy commercially it's played the long game deliver lots of value don't try and lock in clients with complicated contracts it just slows down the sales cycle and try and make it really easy for them to get up to speed and does that 20 expansion more than make up for gross revenue churn so your net net dollar returns over 100 it depends which way you look at it um but on the way that we find is most important as our e-commerce clients um uh so what we call the supply side of our business so when we're powering those actual transaction side our revenue turn on the gross level for those is low single digits so we are net negative churn if you will on our e-commerce clients but on our advertising or products our clients it's a bit more fickle like you know whatever products being sold and whatever but you know sort of like google adwords or amazon sponsored product listings people are coming in and out with different deals all the time and so the the movement in that marketplace month-to-month looks quite high on an annual or biannual basis it's it's fairly steady but you get a lot of movement by different seasons and months and that sort of stuff but we don't tend to think of that as and it's more the marketplace dynamics of who wants to acquire more customers this month and who's you know trying to launch a new product and who's got a big pro into something like we tend to focus on the e-commerce side which is a negative change for us you've got 80 million in fresh powder name a company you'd love to go acquire i don't think i'd say it here i mean you can look at the pattern that we've done before there's not too many businesses that actually in our space so you know the what i'd say is if you look at the businesses that focus on the transaction moment and we're sort of uh you know we're an ap we're an abstraction layer or a widget or an api to rule all the other widgets you know in a way to make them smarter to get into the e-commerce mode into the e-commerce environment or that transaction moment there's not a lot of other companies that specialize in that space and there's no one really working in that area so we have to really hunt hard to find businesses that are relevant to what we do so for instance we've looked at all the optimization plans they're just not relevant because they don't really focus on out on that transaction moment they're more up huge upside for everyone um so we look at that you know the smb or other clients and those sorts of things and we find someone else that's in the same space bruce if wunderkind files this year to ipo do they have a good ipo or a bad ipo sorry i lost you there you broke up for two seconds you're good if bouncex are now known as wunderkind decides to ipo this year does it pop on launch day or do they not go so well i don't know their business that well it seemed to be when i looked at them a long time ago and it seems to have changed a bit um it seemed to be a heavy consulting model um and so i don't know where it's gone from there and i don't know you know the current markets it'd be hard to guess the way they value anything i mean some of the valuations are just you know very very different i mean businesses that are somewhat have some analogies to us or businesses like catalytics that do it in you know closed marketplace for banks in their you know in their apps so you know looking at that sort of business and that's done incredibly well um you know in terms of its valuation so we look at businesses like that uh we also look at the marketing tech ecosystem which has also got some a lot of parallels with our business guys on that note there you have it bruce buchanan again made it through covet okay despite being you know heavily in the travel industry world going into code but this year they'll do 170 million sort of top line on a gross profit basis something like 90 million looking at 30 to 40 maybe even more 50 year-over-year growth they raised 80 million last year at a 450 million valuation as they continue to scale their brand into three specific revenue lines with their product selling revenue line growing the fastest and advertising play as well and then a sas revenue line that makes up call six to seven million of the 90 million in gross profit bruce thanks for making time for me thanks for coming on thanks nathan great to see you again one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have 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hello everyone today my guest is Bruce Buchanan he is the creator of a company called I rocked will jump into in a second but as an early entrepreneur he founded his first business at the right age of 16 he was leader in the consumer practice at Boston Consulting Group and then built Jetstar into the largest low-cost airline in Asia with 7,000 plus employees after Jetstar he revisited his roots and created another world cross company in rocked he expanded the company from a handful of employees working in Sydney in 2012 to a global team of more than a hundred across four continents Bruce are you ready to take us to the top ready all right Jeff you know look Jets is way sexier I think than most spaces why leave Jetstar well just was was a business that I didn't know I was a hired gun at the time working for effectively the ball in the share office which was primarily the main business owned by Qantas and I had a lovely time but you know when I could this took a philosophy when you wake up every morning and you know I energized an excited to go do that thing that you're doing and start do the next thing and that's what I got to with jet star it's been 10 years building a fantastic world-class airline and decided it was time to step out and follow my dreams and do the next thing all right what is the next thing tell us about rocked what's the business do and how do you make money so rocked is a marketing platform for e-commerce companies it basically helps them manage all the marketing messages in and around a transaction so they can be upsell messages they can be opt-in and marketing messages that can be charity they can be market research they can be a whole raft of things but we give them a tool set allows them to campaign make all of those things campaigns and be able to manage each individual consumer with the right messaging so that you know sort of whether to this old lady e-commerce platform you've got a modern cloud-based marketing platform that you can actually inject into your e-commerce flow and it's designed purely for e-commerce it's it's designed really to solve a whole raft of challenges a primarily e-commerce companies have and revenue models in a SAS model or transaction model what's that what's the model so there's four different products and each of the four products have different revenue models three readiness Bruce how do you stay focused well they're all linked to the same platform but depends on who's using it but and what the use case is so they've got to our products with a sass based so optimized product in our counter ply which is a calendaring SAS product we bought last year there SAS products we've got a monetized products effectively a JV product where we share revenue with them sort of like an adsense model and acquire product which is an acquisition product for new customers is a CPC type model like Adwords okay so there's revenue generally distributed 25 25 25 across these or is there one or two that make up their majority so two of the products that directly links are the same revenue flows for both if you imagine Adsense and AdWords in the Google model every dollar that comes rad since comes from Adwords and so we're the same every dollar that goes through acquire finds its way back to monetize so those two products are the dominant revenue streams at the moment probably about nice and about revenue flows for those two products there are so many companies I talked to bill Y sweet recently with media ocean there are so many companies kind of in this space ad ad management whether it's ecommerce offline etc that are trying to figure out how to go from this transaction kind of ad tech fee model to a sass play is that what drove your acquisition last year and if so how did you find the target okay it wasn't so much that what we've been looking for our primary focus is how to make e-commerce smarter and faster and better that's really what we're in business for and the calculation was the URL for that well what was it it's Cal reply you can still find out at Cal reply coms at CIL rtly comm and it's it's a calendar management company it's used by a whole bunch of businesses like ESPN so if you if you want to find out the load of sporting events you go to Cal reply sign up to a particular calendar that's interest you and all those major world sporting events that are fit into your calendar and you can click on them and turn em wherever you want so it's a effectively like ExactTarget or like the email platforms but it does that for calendars so if you imagine that as another communication channel and things that are more time-sensitive like sporting events to getting travel TV networks they tend to use it as a communication channel for those time sensitive things and what that we use that was a pure size play right it's pure size play and we bought it there's a lot of our companies in the ticketing and travel space are looking to diversify their owned media communication channels and so rather than just rely on an email which is fantastic or email and push notification they're looking for new ways to get people that are more relevant for that particular message and calendars a great one for time-sensitive messaging and had they've stagnated and you were able to get a great deal or did you pay a premium to get it we paid it wasn't a massive deal because of revenue numbers for them weren't massive so your sub 1 million would you say I know we paid 15 million for its one revenues of what though 11 you revenues of one and a half to two million sort of range on on a on a SAS basis and the primary reason we bought it as we saw real synergies with our existing clients there's a lot of businesses like airlines like Ticketmaster Live Nation of you work with they were looking for these types of solutions and the point that the the primary point of getting consent typically isn't around that is around the transaction so someone's just bought constant ticket that's a great time to say look can we put them in your calendar and that can be feed you know reminders to you and print out whatever the particular messages are you want to do that's a great time to actually have that communication with the customer and you made that acquisition I believe you said a year ago correct last February we finalized that yeah so not quite a year ago but almost okay um what has panned out exactly as your pro formas said they would and what surprises popped up once you started digging through the code that's a great question look the product integration has taken longer primarily because of focus issues on our side already prioritization issues you know we've got big clients which we drove you know that last three years of driven 100% revenue growth pretty much year on year and last year we did the same thing and it was just prioritizing what was going to drive revenue last year the major clients versus what was going to be next year the year after so that's probably the longest thing one of the big surprises is the talent where quiet and the impact that has on the broader business so that you know the owner and founder that business Brad joined the board and it's become a senior member of our team and was added a huge amount of value to the business playing above beyond what the Cal applied business you know we when we looked at it we were looking at it purely for the caroli business but we weren't looking at the impact that would have on rock well there are an out structure that made him stick around or was it all cash up front there wasn't a structure so - and now very keen to that miss Rock was growing so fast that they got 2/3 of their dealing in rock stock so that sort of dread a higher degree of alignment in making you know the success of the transaction and also driving longer-term success in Rock I think there's such a huge opportunity for smart entrepreneurs like you to go make acquisitions like this I mean you just saw this actually Brad Feld did this where he sold matter mark where he was on the board to full contact which is he's also on the board full contact is bigger and in order to make sure the lp's didn't have to take a right down on the in your case I think he they raised about 6 million bucks to avoid or right down they just say hey we got Rock stock now and we're really bullish on it so maybe he'll turn into something big one day right yeah I think they did well anyway because the funding on the business was relatively small I was mildly bootstrapped and so I think the investors are also pretty happy we had some common investors as well that were very happy to get more rock stock they raised I mean I think they raised up about 6 million didn't they know it's pretty significant for their size in terms of arr yeah I don't know if they don't it was probably there was some currency impact and a few other things there I think you know that would've raised all that money in Australia and Australian dollars but you know in the 15 million dollar deal that we paid them five in cash and I'm sure that they would have you know the near net of that probably would have been a nice return for the investors in terms of what they put in in cash got it okay that company you said you acquired are doing about 1.2 - millionaire are have you been able to upsell it like you thought you would in other words as that channel doubled or tripled year over year or no it's been slower it's it was a little slower in terms of the growth rate we we expected but it actually had a positive impact on our growth rate in our two other products what optimized which is our SAS base like that businesses by the marketing platform if you were just to do their own internal marketing so think about businesses doing their own Crossrail upsell messengers and not wanting to expose themselves to sort of broader marketplaces and that's definitely that's definitely been a bit much more positive impact than what we expected and sir and also it's helped drive monetize acquisitions as well so businesses that want to use a combination of products it's not just get into those those businesses as well tell me more about the rocked story so it sounds like you've raised capital what have you raised I we've raised thirty four million so faced a series a of just over eight million u.s. and a series B of 26 million the series B we raised we extended slightly and then we use five other Series B money to do the car plank position as well yep yep which which makes sense where those two things kind of tied together when you were pitching you know investors on the second round the acquisition wasn't that talk talking points it was yeah that was tied into the into the into the this is a small part of it you know is 526 but the primary thing for us was just feeding more growth we're a little unusual in the way we run the business we tend to run it quite conservative on cash so we're we're a cash flow and P no positive business and so we intend to invest the dollars we made back into long term product development but we're not sort of hungry for you know capital from the cash burn perspective we tend to be much more conservative on the cash flow but we used it to drive longer-term investment in product the acquisition and also to open up a couple markets that we weren't in like Japan Germany France that we wanted to get in and so they tend to have 12 to 24 months investment timeframes and what's your team size today we're 150 today 150 across how many offices or where's yours headquarters so across eight or nine officers now the big ones New York where we've got all of the commercial stuff centered see mo-cro myself are all in New York we've got about 60 people in New York we've got then all about engineering and I set a product engineering based in Sydney Australia I've got about 80 or 90 people there and then we've got small offices in other parts of the world so often Singapore Munich Tokyo London you know in different just basically doing client service in those markets and some regional headquarters what do you guys out today now in terms of total customers you're serving we serve about 2,000 customers a net across all your products correct across all our products mainly in the enterprise level we've just rolled out a small business product and and that's new for us but it's all it's very much focused big enterprise level you know the Expedia's of the world you're overs of the world Apple and those sorts of brands Ticketmaster Live Nation Groupon big e-commerce brands tend to be up a mainstay clients and you said you're growing fairly rapidly can you give us a sense of revenue today how big are you guys yeah we're doing a run rate of about 6 million a month at the moment and we're on track to do about 100 million next year now are you and you said you're growing a hundred percent you over here so December 2016 you're doing about three million a month then slightly less than that yes so the revenue the growth rates being bit fast in that but yeah so it's come from you know and the start of 2013 were a little tiny you know just in Australia doing you know 100,000 a month or they were about 200,000 months so there are very small and that's grown very quickly over there the last and the last few years now you you say that the way you say that revenue number you said about a six million dollar and kind of bump through recurring revenue so and you use the term run rate so when you use that it's a signal to me that you feel like even on the kind of ad spend percentage side of the business it's pretty stable and pretty growing and it's revenue you can count on right yeah we're not like we don't like I'd take businesses or when you're doing i/o to i/o DSPs or those sorts of businesses that are plugged into agencies or other worlds we have run a director brand model it's mainly marketing to its integrate directly in CRM we mainly work on the on The Barking tech side it's typically not IO driven but driven by driven by performance really is typically the primary driver of it that's you know most people just look over that and guys when Bruce says I oh he means insertion order which means you have a sales team trying to close deals every month to keep revenue predictable Bruce what you're saying is your thing is tied to some value utility metric which is very predictable over time yes yeah and and our clients has been most of our money had been spending money with us for five years continuously and they just spend you know more money each year based on performance so our sales team to give you a feel of 150 people I think we've got about eight or seven or eight in business development actually in sales so it's a relatively small half our team it's focused on product and engineering and building up the next way of a product and a lot of it is sort of helping clients actually get smarter about marketing tech so it's almost like leveraging their own media assets data how to send triggers at the right time what sort of signal should they be using we spend a lot of time helping businesses just get smarter and and really supporting I think what is happening which is an evolution from you know the ad tech world and the traditional meteor agency world to much more marketing tech and own media assets and tribe business is trying to control the destiny with their customers much more directly and that's that's what we're trying to support our clients to do it lassen last question here Bruce before we wrap up with a famous five what do you assume lifetime value is I know that's always a tricky number but what do you sumit is for your clients it's very hard I mean we have clients that go spend you know 20 million dollars with us this year and we got clients go spend hundred thousand dollars with this this year and everything everything in between so you've got big enterprise clients that look to so so you need to get problems and can be basically whatever you know there's businesses out there that are spending you know quarter of a billion dollars a year on on Google Adwords and so it's really about tapping into those sorts of markets and helping them solve that problem with innovative tools and creating you know it's virtual network where they can actually partner with other businesses and leverage their own assets so that they're actually creating revenue streams to fund their customer acquisition on staff that they were never doing before what do you like when you look at all the salaries of businesspeople sales people all that divided into the new customers you're adding each month what do you like to get in terms of your payback period fully weighted under how many months so typically the way we think about it's a cost of style the new business and you one cost us out typically sits around about 20% of the contract value of what they spend is delivered revenue year one versus cost of acquisition and new business is around 20% and obviously that falls away to very almost nothing in use two three four as they continue to go on words I turn rates on almost nothing so that's really different part I send less than 1% monthly less than 1% monthly on on most of our products on on the acquisition product this where people come in and out a little bit seasonality you get some if you look at a monthly you get some weird results because they may they may only spend in two or three months of the year but typically you know our generator if you look at it over a longer period even on that product a very low but on the monetized product on the optimized product and our current product churn rates would be less than 1% a month it's amazing yeah so if I take 6 million bucks a month right now divide it and your 2,000 customers right into that this is obviously a hard to look at it this way but an average is about 3 grand per month per customer and if you get it back and that's obviously $36,000 a CV and if you spend 20% of them on CAC you know you're spending you know six ish K on cackled covering it in just three months that's a healthy that's a healthy money velocity channel there yes awesome all right Bruce let's wrap up here with the famous five one-word answers number one what's your favorite business book favorite business book our books around diverse you know people that effectively had to come overcome adversity someone so like a long walk to freedom a fortunate life they're not really business books or they're the ones that I think you know in terms of an entrepreneur you need to have that stamina endurance and ability to come out versity so--that's they're probably the ones that I'd say talking my list in terms of mottos and things that I tend to carry with me day to day number to name a CEO that you're filing or studying that's not mainstream I don't tend to follow a lot of other CEOs that sounds a bit try I like people are actually taking risk and want to change the world you know so the standard people that tend to pop up in my newsfeed are the ones that actually doing something that's risky but let me ask you this man let me ask you differently who do you like to get dinner with in New York and brainstormed us about life and business with my wife is successful entrepreneur in their own right good answer out Paul secret out all right number three what's besides your own what's your favorite online tool Expensify I love it it's I hate expenses I hate anything that actually doesn't is not delivering value to clients or delivering value to sort of the end users and expenses are one of the worst things in the world I think to spend time on and it's just been one of those massive time-consuming tasks and a lot of big businesses yep but if it's the most expensive I try and use it it's a great David David was just on the show about two weeks ago they've just passed almost 60 million bucks in annual crying revenue so they're killing it number four Bruce how many hours of sleep to eat every night Luka I would love to say I get eight hours and when I'm training I ran my first marathon last year and I actually get up to eight or nine hours but typically it's normally six hours and then I'm a bit like a sleek camel and I save it up and store it up and then I catch up in holidays yeah I've been a friend friend of mine at J&J gave me a recommendation for product called wood which is a good tool that people want to track their sleep patterns it really helps you actually work out what actually disrupts your sleep and o'the actually got me get up to sort of seven or eight hours that's good I went out using that and what's your situation you said married you have any kids I have five kids by my way it's holy mackerel and how old are you I'm 45 ivory slat last questioned what do you wish your 20 year old self knew I wish that I can I would Spacek Elysees stay inpatient continue follow your dreams and never get trapped in something you feel you're obligated to do in terms of work that's the worst thing in the world if you feel like you've got to do something because you need that monthly paycheck then you're going to find yourself you know never actually able to follow the aspirations that you've got you never actually fulfill your full potential there are you guys have it from Bruce he goes from jets to marketing software to 15 million dollar acquisitions launch that rocked many years ago now as a team of about 150 people they've raised approximately 34 million bucks 2,000 customers doing about 6 million per month in terms of run rate that's up from just 3 million per month about 13 months ago hoping to break that hundred million dollar run right here in 2019 be next year healthy economics across all their product lines generally less than 1% churn they're spending about 20% of year one contract value on acquisition so math checks out there Bruce thank you so much for taking us to the top thanks a lot knight and cheese