Watch: AlgoPix Hits $2.4m Revenue Helping CPG Brands Monitor Competitors PricingDecember 2020
AlgoPix Hits $2.4m Revenue Helping CPG Brands Monitor Competitors Pricing
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hello everyone my guest today is zory greenberg he is the ceo and co-founder of comic called algo picks the only place to understand ecommerce market share pricing and promotions of your competitors and categories in real time he's powering fortune 50 cpgs and marketplaces algopix gives you a window into now not weeks ago with 1p plus 3p coverage you can adjust your current market conditions boost sessions and conversions with more relevant merchandising and pricing all right are you ready to take to the top yeah now you say in this bio that you put in here the only place to understand e-commerce market share i mean there's a lot of players in this space why do you use the word the only place to understand this we're actually the only ones who provide market share insights into sales that occur on amazon.com as well as walmart ebay google shopping etc there are other players that do only one of these platforms usually it's amazon and they're basing their data on scraped kind of information we actually have transactional data so that that makes us unique in this that's a huge that's obviously a huge advantage so we want to understand this advantage how did you get access to such exclusive data that nobody else can get access to so we put it as obviously our goal to do that so we support more than 70 000 brands and online sellers that share data with us in return for using free e-commerce tools okay so you're not you're not getting a direct feed then from amazon or from walmart or from these ecommerce players you're getting them from brands that use you you then are using their data and selling it back to other people we're processing and anonymizing the data and then we're selling it yes that's correct okay got it uh why can't sorry i don't understand why can't somebody else do that well they can it's just a huge data set that requires a lot of data processing i see i see okay so give me more of the backstory we had you back on the show um earlier but for people that missed that what kinds of customers are are you know the average user of your data is mainly cpg brands so it would be the cpg brands as well as the um marketplaces themselves we have customers like google shopping facebook's marketplace walmart so both okay both and you founded the company in 2016 correct that's correct and walk me through sort of how you've grown over the past 12 months you know last time it came on i believe it was i think middle last year right wow i think was maybe two years ago something like that okay maybe two years ago even um you know obviously we're in the middle of pandemic there's a lot more happening on e-commerce over the past 18 to 24 months how's that impacted your business i think when you came on you said you were working with about 2000 customers how many are you working with today so a lot more we started by serving uh smbs uh we grew and went up market to kind of mid-level customers uh and we're now serving probably 1450 fortune 100 companies as enterprise large enterprise customers so i would say we have probably about five thousand smbs uh that we're working we're walking away from that business model we need to focus on the larger uh companies probably about a couple of dozens of meat size companies paying probably a thousand dollars a month on average yep um and we're now focusing on companies able to pay six seven figures to get tons of value and actually increase their market share and how many of those kinds of customers do you currently have probably about a dozen a dozen do they graduate up i mean can't they start as an smb then move to a grand a month then move to 10 grand a month well they can but now that our solution supports really the biggest companies we focus on getting to them initially and not kind of maturity existing customers it's just a different sales process different type of customer and and so how is this you know churning off grandfathered accounts is obviously sort of a delicate act you don't want negative word of mouth hitting the market um but you also don't want to force them into a plan that's 10 times what they're used to paying so how do you gracefully churn these folks off great question realizing that that's not our market but still supporting the product because it's the same kind of infrastructure for the enterprise product we're gonna give our product away for free that's our kind of way to thank the community so we're going to continue to support we have over 70 000 free users we're going to continue supporting them i see okay now those 5 000 smbs on your platform are they still paying that smaller rp about 20 a month yes yes we do encourage them to kind of walk away from that paying model to the data sharing model which would benefit them and us and in terms of your total monthly revenue right now how much of it is still smb focused uh less than less than 40 okay got it got it so 5 000 at 20 bucks a month is about 100 grand a month and if that's 40 of your revenue total revenue something closer to what 220 a month right now 230. i love your real-time calculations you're you're great we uh pay us average thirty four dollars a month so it's a little bit more but you got the number the down numbers uh about right okay got it so total business call 230 000 per month that's obviously up significantly since our interview a long time ago but what is that up you every year um i must tell you that these are the numbers that we're aiming to complete 2020 uh but it's it changed dramatically over the past 12 months since we started focusing on enterprise customers well i guess the a more clear question i should have asked was exactly 12 months ago how much were you doing per month uh we grew about 300 last year okay so over the past 12 months you've grown revenue about 300 percent that's great okay got it got it so that would you know again if you're doing about 230 uh per month right now 230 000 that would be up from 70 000 uh a month about a year ago something like that and and would you credit most of that it sounds like you would you'd credit most of that growth to onboarding these thousand dollar a month accounts or these dozen or so even bigger accounts than that the enterprise deals the enterprise deals are the biggest growth engine where i believe that by the end of 2021 will still stop supporting the medium-sized businesses yep and have them all enjoy your free plan obviously have you been able to do this without raising additional capital or did you do an additional raise no we didn't need to raise we generated more revenues than expected that's great so it's still only three million raised yes and last time you came on you were still burning to drive growth are you still burning company and you're comfortable with it or have you gotten back to break even um we're still burning but we're okay we have a decent runway and our existing investors are always there to back us up if we spend more than we planned on which haven't hasn't happened we're on the good side of coffee i'd say yeah why i mean most e-commerce friends right now if they've got capital they can access they want it so they can drive growth right now i mean e-commerce is the thing right now and people can't go out and shop i mean you haven't raised does that mean you're not quite sure where to spend money to get new enterprise customers no we plan on raising funds in q2 2021 we know probably grow our sales team and focus on that you're right why is that though you already have great growth 300 year over year why do you why wait to raise we're not ready organization wise in a healthy way the question is it makes sense just not the right timing for us so how many folks are on the team today i'd rather not talk about that if you're okay with it uh i'm i'm okay not pushing there i am curious why you feel like that's a competitive advantage to for people not to know your team size right why is that an advantage well if i tell you that then i'll tell you the theme size but i think we're very effective in terms of uh producing the product versus the number of you know the headcount um yeah i mean look one of my favorite things to measure is revenue per employee right teams that can do more with a less number of employees are obviously you know great businesses uh but that being said if i go to your website and and click on your linkedin link in the footer a linkedin profile we can go there and see it lists 17 employees so i'm just a little confused why they're listed on linkedin but you wouldn't want to reveal them in a podcast well i'd rather not say the number but you have right about the number it's it's plus or minus that number i see you you meant the reason i wanted to go here is because you mentioned your sales or getting in the right spot to be able to uh raise the right amount and not raise too quickly do you have quota carrying sales reps now are you still doing all the sales i'm doing most of the sales okay so i mean are you nervous about that how do you pass that playbook off to somebody else and trust them enough to execute i can't wait to learn from other people about that this is my first time doing enterprise sales i'm sure i'll learn a lot i wouldn't say nervous i'm excited about it i just feel like i am not in a position to give someone the handbook yet and i feel like when i hire it should come with a basic handbook so we're still learning we're good we have a good product market fit in the marketplace segment but we still need to finalize kind of make sure we have a good product market fit on the branded cpg space so that's something i focus on and what is that playbook look like today how are you adding new accounts so uh zoom info has been very helpful in kind of mapping the market sizing the market realizing all the relevant players and within the organization the buying persona it's just making people um react that's the playbook and making sure we do it in an automatic scalable way so when we reach out a new prospect delivering insights on that first cold email that's what we're building and you're saying zoom info is helping you find that prospect to reach out to right what are you you have to give zoom info input so they can sort what sort of inputs are you giving them company size categories it's very basic actually okay and so company size is what fortune 50 and what's the job title so over 25 million dollars in revenue would make them relevant okay you charge six seven figures that that should be their size um and the right categories you know retail e-commerce brick and mortar whatever it's about fourteen thousand companies uh that's our market and what's the job title of the person you're trying to reach it could be from a data team uh to a catalog team to a category manager brand manager it's different between marketplaces and brands but that's that's the titles if your tool helps people manage you know price sensitivity i mean why aren't why doesn't that fall under like a cro sort of role we would need that next year definitely okay got it so i mean you just mentioned data team catalog team brand manager um cro is related to marketing usually and right now we can tell you the market share for example and what changes in that market share and you can only act on it or mainly should have tonight as a brand manager or category manager these are insights that would help you play within the category as a cro you would need to kind of adjust marketing budget so you would need to measure how marketing campaign was effective and help you increase the market share versus um kind of the the actions that you do and we don't have that connection between the marketing spend and market share measurement directly yet so it's still working process i see i see interesting okay very good um what is your i mean next year when you scale your sales assuming do you are you how are you going to test i mean this is a moment that every sas founder goes through is how you test your first couple sales hires how are you going to go about that test you know some people say hire two so you get an a b test one say higher one invest all some say hire as many as you can then fire all the ones that don't hit quota what are you gonna do i hope i won't make that mistake and i'll get help from other founders who will help make the right choice but being realistic i will probably make that mistake and i suppose i'll hire a pod pot of three that is what we have in mind right now right a sales leader sales manager and an sdr and hopefully we'll get everyone right the first time probably not but aiming to get it right even if the sales team is great if churns too high doesn't matter how much folks you bring in the top of the funnel what does gross revenue churn like today oh we don't see any churn at all for the for the enterprise customers which is the focus i mean they continue building features and capabilities over our engine so i'm not concerned about churn uh sorry the reason i asked about gross revenue turn instead of gross logo churn is you just articulated you're intentionally turning off the revenue from these 5000 smbs which currently still makes up over 100 000 of your of your revenue so i think you will you do see churn that type of churn i'm not concerned about it i think if if we're talking about fundraising or company valuation-wise since this is not our focus we're stepping away from that model and no one is looking at that revenue or counting that revenue so i don't count it as churn well hold on hold on you can't have it both ways you just told me revenue was 230 000 a month and you said 40 of that revenue is the smb so you are counting it well we calculated the revenues but if we were to raise funds it would be based on the smbs i would discount that revenue so you would just say hey we're doing 130 000 a month in revenue you know money was that a better runway because we do have that revenue but it's not the business that anyone would invest in or anyone would acquire because of right yep got it okay it makes good sense what about cac so to land a new customer paying you a thousand dollars a month what are you gonna spend to get that excuse me can you please repeat the question sure to land a new customer paying you a thousand dollars per month what's your cac look like well we since the sales team is very thin right now it doesn't really cost us a lot of money it's just cold emailing as we scale up i assume that will just be an enterprise sales business model will the cost will probably be 20 well there there must be other things you include in the cost to acquire a customer besides literally fixed salary expenses associated with an account executive right now nothing what else you don't value your time aren't you doing all the sales right now i value my time it's probably 30 percent of my time is dedicated to sales but i didn't price it that way if you don't have a good idea of what cac is right now how do you know what to set quota at and things of this nature for the first sales hires you make um it's basically it's going to be based on my achievements in 2020 so i know what their goals should be should be better than me um but basically i know their goal and i know their expectations versus the base price uh base salary if that makes sense why do you expect that someone you hire and bring in that you know owns nowhere near as much of equity as you do they're not the founder they're just joining the company why do you expect that they're going to be better than you at selling aren't you going to be the best ever i'm a data person i'm an engineering character i'm not the pushiest salesperson i'm not that experienced in that that's my first time selling an enterprise product while being my third company um i do expect and that that's true about every manager that i bring they should be better than me and pretty much everything yeah no it's a lot of founders and make the first sales higher they make the assumption that that first sales hire should sell more than the founder and it's almost never the case because the founder knows the product the founder has an unfair advantage because customers always want to talk to the founder there's a little bit of a celebrity factor there but you're going in expecting that that first sales hire should sell more than you've sold in the past 12 months yeah i i might be wrong but that's my expectation i mean i i do spend 30 of my time doing it and they'll spend hopefully 120 of their time doing that i just hope that they'll get rich doing it and do that because it's their passion so i do i do expect that to come into play yeah what is a high i mean you're an engineer you know 120 of their time doesn't exist that's impossible you have 100 of the day yeah yeah uh so if an average person works for uh eight nine hours a day i expect them to enjoy their work so much and i i have the same feeling right people are excited about our product excited about our solution if uh i had more hours a day i would do that i would work more fair enough all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh uh i didn't prepare for that but i guess uh the hard thing about hard things by ben horowitz number two is there a ceo you're following or studying huh i'm keeping track of uh jonathan shirky i think it's pronounced from uh content square and uh i was there uh mclean uh he's the founder of tachometrics which is in our space and he's doing very well number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company i would say zoom zoom in for hubspot super helpful these days number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night about six six is enough and worry what's your situation married single kiddos happily married with two uh kids uh ben who's one year old ronnie who's three-year-old and uh we continue counting ben and ronnie and algo picks how old are you ori i'm i'm 36 already all right last question was something you wish you when you were 20 i would probably i spent about six years in academia becoming an engineer at the nba and i would probably choose to fill three setting up three companies and would learn more from doing that than than during the the time i did guys there you have it algo picks moving from working with 5000 smbs these are cpg brands merchandising brands you know doing a hundred thousand dollars in revenue to moving upstream you know mid market fortune 500 folks they've scaled revenue as they've made that transition up to call it a 2.6 million dollar run rate today up from called a million dollar run rate just a year ago it's almost 300 year-over-year growth as they look to scale still doing all this capital efficiently just off three million dollars raised looking to potentially raising q2 q3 after they make some key hires in their sales organization currently about caught between 15 and 17 folks on the team alright thanks for taking us to the top thanks for having me have a great day keep safe one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sass 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 p.m 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 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