How Ambition CEO Travis Truett grew to $5.1M revenue and 250 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is brian trout shoulder he's the co-founder of a company called ambition is now and is now serving as their ceo they're y combinator uh we uh winter 14 he's into startups seat upgrades brown dogs and age approach appropriate up basketball games brian you ready to take it to the top hey man what's up how are you doing nathan i'm glad i'm doing well thanks for joining man so look hey the sales performance space is really really tough and fragmented help us understand what ambition's doing and how you see yourself fitting in the market yeah we we do things very uh fragmented we don't think there's anyone who's really leading the charge and we believe that uh especially enterprise organizations with large sales teams they need a great solution to coach manage motivate their sales people and we're planning to do that we do that for companies around the world um from mid market enterprise create more effective better retention and more happy sales people and are you selling to the hr team for like you know sales people onboarding or your sales to the sales team because this helps them like close close more yeah so we're selling uh into the sales leadership and we're not helping them close more we're helping stick to whatever the sales process is and then have better management conversations more effective management that uh in our space it's about sending a better email or you know saying the right words on a call perspective free conversation with your manager it's about checking in on the metrics it's about checking in on uh your attainment proactively at a highly recurring basis okay and give me give me a general sense here pricing wise right so what are customers paying on average for this yeah on average there's a wide view in that uh mid market enterprise but on average 20 thousand to thirty thousand dollars per year okay and someone that's paying you let's just call it twenty thousand for ease of numbers what are they getting in terms of what's the team size typically things like that yeah you know you're probably at a about a fifty um person huge organization that could be across a few different roles uh other people inside sales account executives and sometimes folks that are maybe hybrid like account managers or even some light uh customer success or uh customer support type people on there got it that's super helpful all right put this stuff on a timeline for us when did you launch the company what year yeah so i think we started the company i say started we we got going with the idea in 2013 we're actually still working on another startup uh at the time and i think we launched our first customer right at the end of that year uh 2013 went through yc in early 2014 and then that was really when we realized oh this is a huge uh this is a huge space no one's doing it well there's so much more to be done than just um really the motivation or the give patient piece which is where we started it just started to chip away at you know all of these areas where managers could be more impactful we thought that technology was really failing providing them feedback and providing them clear ways to be more effective uh and so every year since really you know 2014 we figured out the secret sauces people what they want ask people what they need uh what they uh think could be better and we try to go build a better tool for specifically sellers sales managers and sales reps and so with kind of that focus and that learning process what have you been able to scale to over the past five years in terms of total customers on the platform yeah so we're approaching 250 you know easily 300 customers the middle of this year um and like i said from fortune 10 logos to you know to startups you've heard about that are growing rapidly um it's valid so we spend the game yeah well you know it's nice you have to have strong sales numbers because hopefully you're eating your own dog food right uh otherwise we'd be in trouble i mean that's probably one of the best things about the company is that we get to uh we get to talk to the most dynamic the smartest sales leaders in the in the world every single day who are buying our product and we get to ask what are you doing process you're running how are you coaching your reps how are you aligning on goals how do you create a great culture they tell us and then we just do those same things uh in our company yeah no that makes a lot of sense i mean and it seems like it's working we can kind of back into numbers right if you're if you have these folks doing call it twenty thousand dollar acvs or seventeen hundred bucks a month then you're north of 250 customers i mean you're cranking past 420 grand a month now in mrr right uh yeah i mean that's that's right that's good yeah that's good no no that's that's healthy stuff and then help us understand you know obviously once you're on the kind of the yc train and i don't know if you've taken more funding we'll talk about that later but growth becomes really really important so if you're out caught 420 today per month where were you about a year ago uh less than half of that okay good so i mean you're still doubling your i mean that's still healthy growth where's most that growth coming from expansion revenue we're adding new logos all together yeah that's a great question nathan uh we become i think part of it into the enterprise you realize you have so much more opportunity in your existing accounts to uh you know to go satisfied to go thrill them so we built you know internal process on selling and expanding our customers but i'd say you know 70 percent so new folks coming in the door first time they ever work with us but we know there's you know many millions more in that you know existing expansion of our current base yeah no that makes a lot of sense so you talk about 70 of your growth coming up kind of being net new uh the rest it sounds like probably coming from expansion peel back that kind of churn retention expansion onion for me so so when you look at gross turn across the base or like what does that look like and it sounds like you're more than making up with that with expansion to keep your your net revenue retention of 100 yeah that's right so it's net negative um but yeah it's i mean i think that's probably one of the things that we would i would advocate for their families you know listening to this show is depending on the customer base you have a really great opportunity for going into the the larger mid market and especially the enterprise you know you're not making a time decision to subscribe to some software where it's like oh it's 200 bucks a month it's 50 bucks a month who cares you know we're talking about strategic admission of these customers we're talking about you know how we can help them transform their business over the next two three five years um and that has a huge impact on insurance so you know we struggle with account uh you know goes through a big layoff or changes their sales structure for sure but the good thing is we're typically getting high enough that if we get in with 50 or 100 reps to begin with like you said we have a great um opportunity to go get 25 50 a thousand more reps over time um especially enterprise and so that's really driven that number to be net negative for us on the church time how negative are we talking negative five percent negative ten percent or more yeah so that's ten that's one percent yeah no i mean okay good i mean so so said differently net negative churn of negative ten percent is the same as you know net revenue retention of one north of 110. so i mean yeah those are healthy numbers now some of the most successful kind of sas companies brian they they upsell against as many axes as they possibly can whether it's not you mentioned number of seats already then there's kind of feature-based upselling then kind of utility-based upselling have you figured out your other two pricing axes yet or is it really seat driven right now c driven right now it is there's a little differentiation of the package to the enterprise but that's something we're doing right now we're actually going through the exercise with our team uh about four months ago we were probably six months we really figured out the strategic leadership team in ambition uh we're just a company of 37 today and so we're going through the exercise of how do we create a differentiation of package how do we sell um some different utilities to especially large organizations who to be honest you know use a product like ours in a company with 20 seats or 50 reps when you have 2 000 and 3 000 reps um everything you do is about is it about data it's about utilization it's about accountability or uh what i would say like uh you know probably sticking with the plan they have and making sure that 2 000 people are running so yeah i mean we're building out more diversity in our packages and learning like you said how can we upsell them more value the existing product or how can we small drastically improve their outcomes that's something we're doing every single day now and brian if you ignore your expansion revenue uh what is gross churn on our revenue basis look like annually are we kind of in the 10 20 range there are you better one more time what was the turn off yeah yeah what's gross revenue trend look like annually though past 12 months you're talking 10 20 or better yeah it's probably so it's probably 10 or just a little bit less okay again so that's healthy that you know so again if 10 is gross 22 is expansion 112 net that's obviously a healthy company as you explore another different pricing models talk to me about pricing relative to cac right so if you've got these folks coming on at 20 000 acvs how aggressive are you being an acquisition yeah i mean we're i think that we're still not being very aggressive to be honest i mean you know you're gonna ask about our financing i'll just like put the story together for you i mean we've only raised six and a half million dollars we've done a lot of the last you know two years of growth has all been driven at uh being break even and so we're very uh you know we're very thoughtful yeah maybe a little bit different than most without saying you know what can we really what do we really want to do right now and what can we afford to do and how do we think it's going to impact the bottom line so we haven't gone and said let's hire 15 people at once we haven't gone and said let's put boots on the ground in all of these cities we still have an inside sales model we're actually just standing up our sales development program right now internally i think we're really just in the first inning maybe the second inning of doing field marketing to uh to any real degree so our cac has been extremely low almost like irrelevantly low because we haven't spent a lot of money you know going out there and doing paid acquisition or a lot of field events um so i think right now we're almost in the first stage of figuring out as we put some more gas onto that fire you know what is it to really firm up that number and say yeah it took you know took this many touches from sdrs took this much good marketing or marketing paid acquisition to that opportunity that ultimately closed one for twenty or thirty thousand or forty thousand dollars yeah um we've not been driven by an attack before we've been driven by you know are our rep succeeding are reps hitting the number do we feel like we're putting them in a great situation to win i think what a lot of people do early on to kind of go on a little bit of attention they get that first inkling of prime market fit they throw um 8 12 15 bodies against it and they realize that it breaks down and unfortunately that typically uh really hurts the reps a lot more brian just sorry just a in though yeah i mean i totally understand you haven't you haven't figured out kind of field you're just getting into the kind of the higher touch model here but you do have sales reps i mean you have modeled this to some degree so when you say churn is what i'm getting a sense is your cac is so low it's not something that even really comes up a ton um i mean so is that fair to say you like pay back less than probably two or three months on most of these accounts yeah that's right i mean i think if max you know if it's a really small deal then we're doing maybe four or five months yeah well and again deal size is typically irrelevant because payback period is usually a ratio right between obviously cac and rpoo so it sounds like i mean it sounds like whether it's a big account pain you know right yeah you can typically though you can back into and say like well you know how much was all the you know if we're looking at a commission and we're looking at cost of um you know variable combo meeting set we're looking at what was the uh you know the genesis where this opportunity came from yeah we can do a pretty good job of saying yes to three months typically maybe four months and then uh you know if it's a if it's a much smaller deal deal you know maybe it gets a little bit longer yeah yeah yeah interesting very good all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh i think it's it's gotta be um horowitz uh the hard thing about yep num number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh i watch i watch uh aaron levy a lot i think he's a phenomenal uh person who's grown in the role he was in the early early 20s and now he's built such a great company with box i'm impressed by him every day number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business probably google sheets makes sense number four how many hours i sleep again every night uh about four o'clock damn okay and situation married single kids [Music] well yeah adds to it i'm married i have two kids i have a four-year-old and a one-year-old so that counts in the sleep a little bit yeah yeah all right and how old are you ryan uh 32 32. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh i would say have more fun a lot of fun in this company over the last five six years and the two startups beforehand i think we can get lost in the uh in the grind sometimes the stress and looking back this first world problem a lot of times it's a lot of fun the people we work with are incredible so i tell everyone to have more fun as ambition.com playing in the sales performance management space 37 people a rare case where a yc company is actually uh break even great only 6.5 million dollars raised uh 10 gross churn on a revenue basis 22 expansion 112 net expansion just now getting into growing his sales team in terms of the economics around field sales and things like that but they've got runway to do it doing about 420 grand per month in revenue across 250 customers paying on average 1700 per month brian congratulations thanks for taking us to the top yeah i appreciate it thanks