Innovatemap revenue, CEO Mike Reynolds, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

I appreciate you all um uh this this slide title I have I have problems with because it's a little bit misrepresentative of of how I think about uh SAS but it is true so it's a credibility Builder worked with a lot of companies to help them raise a billion in capital but um the way that I think about this is a bit different than it than it may seem from that perspective and the reason why is because my background is in design so I was a product designer at Autodesk and a Primo which is a marketing tech company built a design team there um I I worked with agencies on the side to help with design and I hated my experience with pretty much all of them so I did maybe the best thing or the worst thing that I could have done would just co-founded an agency ourselves so uh what I found when we were working in software is the way to win uh this is 2014. the way to win and was really going to be in product the cost of software was cheaper and then from a customer standpoint the cost of switching was was lower so spinning up companies got cheap switching got easier it changed the competitive landscape for software companies and we thought at that time product was a way to do it so when I say product you often think of product management but it's more than that from our perspective it's really anything around what makes software easier to buy and what makes it easier to use so on the buy side we think about product marketing messaging and brand and the logo visual identity how you speak to your customers and on the usability side that's where product management comes in in ux design which is my background so with those sort of four areas we sort of form fractional product teams for scaling startups for pre-see through series a or those that are that are that are bootstrapped maybe under 10 million ARR pretty much anytime you might need help before you bring these roles in-house so what I want to talk about today is going to be a little bit out of the numbers because numbers is not my expertise I'm a designer by trade I oversee sales and marketing now but that has really sort of given me an elevated perspective on how I see product helping companies because as I've tried to sell innovate map Services I work a lot more with Founders who are also Fish Out of Water selling their own product in ways they weren't ever experienced to do that as well and there's some common things that I find people miss so even if you are drinking the product Kool-Aid and you understand the value of product there's there's little mindset shifts that I'm going to try to give you some backdrop today that hopefully ends in something tangible you can go think about with your own product or your own company as you're working on it and the three things that I think about when when we the innovate map talk about a product first approach is thinking about product as an investment uh product is design centered and products should also be Vision leg so I'm going to break those down a little bit using an example of a couple companies that we've worked with over the past three years but first let's lay the groundwork this is an overly simplified graph but a lot of times I feel like founding teams or the founders have three main buckets of work if you're raising Capital if you're not pitching maybe it doesn't become an issue but you're really just focusing on building the product selling it and pitching it to get investment but then there's this sliver of product that you put in there and even if you believe in product the reason why I put it in here is it feels like a Time suck for you something that I've got to do to get my vision out in the world but the reality is that product from my perspective should be thought of as an investment and not an expense so if I were to shift this graph around I would put product at the core of it and it's not just this pie this slice of the pie that you're worried about but it's something that's going to scale everything else that you're going to do and I think that this is the thing that gets lost so if you're a CTO in here you're working with ctOS products should be making your job easier it should scale what you do if you're selling I was talking to some sales people this morning I one of the first experiences I had as a designer working with clients through innovatemap was working with sales team and watching them click through sales demos of horribly designed products and how they would just excuse away all the bugs or all the poor navigation flows and I it dawned on me that great sales people often don't realize how bad their product is because their Charisma and just sales skills help them sell anything but the reality is If the product is designed well you're designing the right features and they're workflow oriented it's a lot easier to sell and then of course from the pitching perspective we'll get to that in a little bit but I know there's a lot of people bootstrapping and I'm not here to make any claim on what's better uh fundraising or not doesn't really matter from my perspective but I think at some point you will be pitching it even if it's not for investment you may be pitching it to executive that you want to hire so product also helps there so that's the first core shift that I hoped people to make is product is expensive but it's an investment and I'll show you a little bit more that means when we look at this company Authentics it's I'm pressing the palm tree sorry there we go there's a palm tree logo I don't know what that means um okay Authentics an indie based company uh working in healthcare technology they help Healthcare leaders analyze customer interaction data they have ai that that reads and helps uh you know create models that helps them handle customer support so I think like insurance companies payers anything involved in healthcare so I use this I've sort of simplified the numbers here to just make the point that I want to make here when we started working with Authentics in 2019 they were right around 500k in ARR when they started working with our team on the product side we were revamping their products so it was a this like pseudo low code solution but they had brought on the CTO to start revamping it and build a legitimate product so we were designing the product they also had a visual identity that was just cobbled together and it wasn't telling the right story so when they hired us 500k ARR when you look at 100K costs of working to fix all those it feels like a lot that's 20 of what you're going to make in a year that you're about to spend on something that may not give you demonstrable results it's really hard to resist getting some sdrs or investing in anything that doesn't give you Revenue right away but when we look out we've worked with Authentics I guess it's been about three and a half years now so they were preceded when we started uh they're now just raised their series b um and I think all told in the roles that I've described with product there's been more costs that I'm not covering on the product side on the customer support side or on the product engineering Side sales and marketing and all that but just on the product brand product marketing ux and product management they spent about 500k but they're about 10 million in ARR so when you look at the the scale in terms of Revenue versus the scale in terms of cost you can start to see that it's more of an investment and I don't again not a numbers guy I don't think in terms of valuations but I think it's the best sort of Hallmark to show the value of that type of work now I'm not going to say that product was the only reason they're 50x their valuation but you can see how when you take these numbers together what starts out feeling like a really painful cost for something is not going to give you immediate return over the course of years it starts to compound in terms of the value of your company so what do we mean when we talk about investing in product so when we look at Authentics visually you can look at the logo on the left and the one on the right and see obviously well hopefully it's obvious it's an improvement through this process we did a lot of things we threw out names I think Archer was one of the names we threw out and ultimately realized that the founders value of authenticity was Paramount and actually the name made sense the CX the customer experience side it all sort of flowed and we don't have any ego about what we do we didn't get get upset that they didn't pick any of the creative names we had this fit we lowercase the C because that's what people do and it's really cool and we did a new logo but the brand is bigger than just the logo redesign for this this was more I would say a rallying cry for the company to say that they're entering this new space that they're going to play but when you think about the brand it's bigger than just that you start looking at where does the brands help you sell the product product and for something like this and maybe you have experience like this too we often get caught up thinking about brand and the SAS digital space so how is it represented on a website we've done their website as well and you can look at it as well and see the brand reflected there but in this space they're selling in a am I on the no sorry I keep pressing a different green button I'm sorry there we go that's the slide I meant to be on um so when when we when we...