How Ambition CEO Travis Truett grew Ambition 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...