How Amplero CEO Jamie Miller grew Amplero to $1.8M revenue and 5 customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is jamie miller he's a ceo and entrepreneur with 20 years of experience building and managing high growth and mid-market internet and technology companies he's led nine private and public company m a transactions raised 85 million bucks of venture capital and four of us ventures were acquired by publicly traded companies jamie you ready to take us to the top i'd love to all right so talk to us through amplero what is the company doing and how do you guys make money sure at the heart of what we do is we help b2c marketers improve the value of their customer interactions so pretty straightforward and you probably would find lots of companies who say they do that and historically uh they do it all pretty much the same way um our platform targets our starts with the key performance indicator uh meaning that really the high level numbers that company cares about and sort of uses our our platform's goal seeking capabilities to generate sort of optimization for say revenue or net income or margins on a product or a retention cost or say a net promoter score takes your key into the thing that you're trying to get to um first and then you use our platform to drive towards those outcomes um we do it sort of automatically um and one of the really interesting things about what we do is that we create measurable improvements and value um from the customer's long tail which means we are focused on sort of what what happens after you acquire a customer um and obviously with cap being so important to so many online marketers um understanding how to market very precisely to those kinds of customers and get the highest value out of those customers is critically important um and so what we do is we allow you to take a long tail make it fatter or longer um and we do that in a very measurable way um so that's kind of the core of what we do and the value that our customers find and what we do we do it in a very unique way i can tell you a bit about the platform if you like is it pure sas jamie it is not and i don't think you find too many pure sass companies in the ml space these days there's still a lot of learning to do from a customer standpoint almost everybody needs help so what's your structure yeah so we have a sas product and we have consulting services that we sell along with our with our product the first thing they do is an integration into the data sources that customers have um and then we start to build the optimization engine that goes along with the customer data that's being imported and that's pretty much what this or the first customer interaction is and where we use consulting services first then an ongoing basis we help our customers understand how to use new forms of marketing technology like the one we bring to optimize their marketing environment so if you look at your total revenue over the past 12 months what percent is kind of coaching set up things like that versus pure sas about 20 percent of what we do 25 depends on the cost okay not a ton actually i mean you're really a sas company oh yeah we are yeah um less so now than we probably will be if you look at sort of uh how we spend our time and effort in five years from now yeah yeah i mean i think you might surprise yourself too now you have a lot more experience than i do but of all the ceos i've interviewed there's a ton that are you know pushing 100 million bucks in ar where you see them actually increasing and doing more professional services because it drives up retention um it was exactly that uh my last company we had probably 40 of our revenue ultimately wanted coming from professional services because there's no better retention tool especially you're in the enterprise business but your customers are large they actually acquire the time and attention they value it and it's nice when you get your customers to pay for onboarding which you need to do anyway yeah although you know investors you know it really doesn't help it dilutes multiples i think from the perception of a investor although if you don't have a thriving company with customers that love you who cares i was gonna say i bet you stupid vcs might say that but if you can tell the right story around your net revenue retention is higher on the cohort that paid for professional services they quickly realize we want more professional services even though the margins are lower yeah exactly all right talk me through um on average i want to go down every customer co-op but on average what's the company going to pay you per month to use the technology um it's between about 300 000 a year and a million dollars okay so very much kind of in the enterprise space what's the what's your team size today uh we've got about a little over 30 people okay and how many of those are sales uh we have in sales and marketing we have uh two three four five five okay so i'd love to learn i'd love to learn at that acv so 300 grand to a million how you have your sales team structured what's the ratio between kind of sdr to ae to consumer success customer success rep etc yeah so um metrics are interesting the company when you're shooting for 500 000 acvs you start to look at different things and maybe your typical sas company might um so we have one of the things that's you don't get as much learning when you're when you've got a thousand or 500 customers in the entire world that you can sell your product to right you don't have as many uh chances at the plate so one of the things you're always starting for is data so we actually have two bdrs that are just focused on having those interactions on sort of the velocity that the highest velocity we can but have actual personal interactions instead of relating relying upon say an abm system exclusively so we've got two folks that are just calling and interacting and getting feedback from the marketplace selling obviously and then we've got two aes that are doing sort of the handoff when we've got a sales qualified lead um we then uh activate sort of the sort of the seasoned professionals to step in and take over and then we've got two people in marketing that are driving sort of that abm system doing influence marketing um creating a brand for ourselves for the things we typically associate with so jimmy just make sure to misunderstand you you said you have one sdr that are that is getting and processing the leads for the two aes two so it's a one-to-one ratio between sdr and ae exactly but as i said they have a next responsibility of gathering information understanding the market because getting information when you're not selling 1000 or 2 000 sort of customers a year at least that's not what you're targeting is you get you start to value that that information in terms of help you sell and market to each opportunities yeah very interesting okay put this on a timeline for me when'd you launch the company uh company was launched about two and a half years ago was spun out of an erp company that was looking for brand extension and product extension um turned out there's a lot more to do than just simply the telco spaces which is where that erp company was in so the product itself has been it's about four and a half years old that's how much we've invested um in in the iep itself and then commercially we've been out for two and a half years did you lead the spin out from the teleco erp or no no that was someone much smarter way more steep than data science okay so since you've been there i guess since 2017 2018 how many customers have you guys been able to scale to so we actually prefer not to talk about sort of customer volumes but um we have a few customers let's just say it's less than 10. fair enough well no i mean by the way that's kind of what i was expecting right at this price point you can build a nice business on a dozen customers yeah um okay very good and then walk me through funding have you guys bootstrapped the company or i imagine you probably raised capital due to the initial spin out and maybe raised some more for operations we were very lucky so um we actually launched the company with a with a customer a large customer telco um so that helped us get funding quite early out of the gate and we've raised two rounds totaling 27 million dollars today but but just be clear that telco i wouldn't consider that funding i mean that's the best source of funding which is customer payments but you raised 27 million bucks in traditional kind of equity exactly and then we had and as a but it was we my point was we raised a lot of money for two years because we came out of gate i think more mature than most startups do um right so most most startups don't start with a large enterprise customer to launch their commercial activities yeah yeah that makes sense quickly so you measure year one 2017 year two 2018 just closed out i mean what was growth rate uh throughout 2018 are you i imagine you're way more than doubling year over year yeah so it's it you know uh one of the things that's really important is making sure that one retains their customers so we have selection i don't know that sort of year one year two was a good measure i think year two to year three is probably best better and we should double our revenues this year yeah that would be from 2018 to end of 2019 you think you'll double yeah what what is the most so you're one of the rare kind of companies because of your acvs where at some point you actually need to drive growth from driving expansion revenue not new customer ads right because you...