How Amplero CEO Jamie Miller grew 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 have such a small market you're playing in so what are they i lost the skype there this one that's okay i was just saying you're one of the rare cases because your acvs are so high where you have to have a really good plan for driving expansion revenue because eventually if you have 80 90 market penetration the only way to drive growth is to either go after a new customer segment or drive more wallet share on your current base so as you think about additional products to upsell additional axes to upsell against what are those looking like honestly we look at it differently i look at focus so the the thing that creates the most amount of growth for us is going to be having terrific references and customers that sell for us i'm having a you know a million dollar enterprise customer in the retail space talking to their cmo buddy saying hey this is great we've measured you know we've tripled the amount we invested this last year we're going to double that the year after um i i think is is the kind of thing that we care about right now so we care about reference ability and so and focus so we we are still we're stuck in four we're gonna stay in four um verticals um we're in retail we're in telco space um we are in the gaming space what does that mean so online gaming like give me an example company that would fall in that category ubisoft would be one that would get anything of any sort of online multiplayer gaming where you are trying to you are it's a premium model or you're trying to uh the mod the business model is that they're selling you know skins or virtual swords exactly um uh and then lastly uh the uh the retail banking space okay so retail telco gaming and retail banking yeah interesting and and how many customers do you think total are in that space uh there are in the u.s there are about 400 okay fair enough good so good you're 10 10 you know 10 on the way there right so you got plenty of room for growth um talk to me a little bit about economics right so um you maybe you don't have enough data for this yet but do you know what what churn looks like annually and and how do you cover that up with expansion um so we don't we have no we have no idea what and not i mean certainly we have a measure and we look at it because in the future it's going to be an important measure for us um our goal is to keep 100 of our customers so we want zero churn and we'd like to see lift and revenue from each one of our customers um the margins are getting dramatically better um as we get better at repeatability in our in our space but from a sales and marketing standpoint so the customer acquisition side but also simply delivering the consulting services that goes along and and delivering repeatable uh marketing campaigns um from customer to customer in the same vertical yeah so all those things to help us reduce reduce the cost and how aggressive are you being with your current team your current sdr to ae to cs kind of structure and your marketing folks how aggressive are you being on your fully weighted calc for what you know a new 300 000 a year plan will you spend first year acv or no i think we're conservative i think because because i i don't think traditional marketing is the thing that gets you to our first set of customers that matter our first 20 customers come as i said through referenceability by doing a great job with existing customers by having a brand in the market that people understand by doing things like this or getting our name out there um of course some marketing is important um and the kinds of things that you accomplish with abm where you're sort of nurturing customers um and messaging them to help them understand more in an educational way than anything else so we were pretty concerned you know as i said we've got two people in marketing and we're not doing a whole lot of traditional marketing acquisition so i mean when you say conservative though i mean you think your payback is like two three months maybe um so we we could easily acquire we could easily pay off our marketing and sales activities with two customers right so so you know it's it's it's a couple million bucks or less and which is a couple of customers so uh it's it's you know it is i don't i think we're being very aggressive but i think spending money on you know advertising online advertising or seo uh or you know uh so things that you think of with more with the traditional sas company really doesn't have a payoff for us so there's only so aggressive we can get i think very aggressive when it comes to those things that are that are appropriate for the smart marketplace yeah but really about getting in front of the buyers those are those are c-level buyers for us they're they're cheap marketing officers typically yep very good all right um healthy economics there uh makes a lot of sense um any plans to raise additional capital here in the next year yeah we'll we'll go out probably some time in the fall okay and why is that gonna be the right time for you you think um well because it's not august [Laughter] uh and it gives us it gives us uh you know we're not profitable so there is certainly an and and you know there is a time in which we run out of money this will give us plenty of time to get raised to the next round yeah um it also allows us to have um wait sorry jamie what buffer do you like to have there so other ceos listening always wonder this wench if you know right now you only have six months of runway in the bank is that when you should go start raising or you would never get underneath six months okay i wouldn't remember um it always takes longer even once you have the deal done it always takes money so what do you operate at like 12 months maybe well that's really sneaky way of asking how much money we have left in the bank no because i don't know your burn yes yeah so we we have a year left yeah yeah because i don't know your burn yeah so we've got a year left yeah so you'll you'll go out you're comfortable right i mean it sounds like if you wait a couple more months to raise you'll have you know eight nine something like that months giving you plenty of buffer plus the lovely holiday time frame to use the forcing functioning to get the deal done yeah plus we've done great you know our existing customers are super supportive our customers their existing investors are super supportive um and so i am confident that if we're making progress that um and we wanted by another six months or a year because we're there's a milestone we thought would be critical for us to achieve that we'd have no problem sort of going back to existing customers as long as we continue on our path that we're on yeah do you um do you how do you decide kind of message in the company how much you go out and raise in the fall yeah so um that is a function i'd say more constrained by investors i the number of times one has to go out there and just be distracted by raising money um is i think directly related to how difficult it is to sort of achieve new milestones in companies meaning the distraction of raising capital is is a burden yeah so i would like to raise the largest round possible that we can justify without creating dilution that's too painful for the company you know i i think in the next round is going to be 15 or 20 million dollars and will that more than buy you like call it 18 19 months of runway how much runway will you raise for oh yeah that will get us i think that'll get us several years okay very good i expect i expect we we're generating a lot of profits by that yeah at least less burn but you think by this fall you'll be break even or closer no because we're necessarily that's not one of the key apis we're optimizing for yeah yeah that makes sense i imagine your biggest expense is what head count at this at this point in time yes it's 70 of our costs seven oh wow 70 that's actually that's that's more than usual so you're really not spending a lot on sales and marketing and that kind of stuff at all no as i said it's uh and we're very focused on the us too so we're not you know it's it costs twice as much to try to go overseas a few years-based company market and there's all the startups so we're not doing that we're saying there's plenty of opportunity for us just to focus here and also concentration in the marketplace only helps our business yeah yeah yeah so so okay very good let's uh let's wrap up here jimmy with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um so there is a book called um leadership and self-deception i don't know if you've read it or not but it goes to sort of more about the interactions between a manager and people in the company and how it's so easy to sort of fool yourself into thinking you're a great manager which is a lesson i think probably maybe the biggest sin perpetrated on you know the young tech startup ceos on the people that they're leaving i like that one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh you know ceos are great because they've got ships on their shoulders and so each one sort of has this unique chip that makes them good at a thing so you know if you steve jobs amazing marketing so if i were you know product guy if i wanted to sort of that's my he's my inspirational product how to build a company you know andy grove so it depends on sort of what's the flavor of the of the time period but yeah i would say those two are my come top of mind number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company oh geez i mean the one i i would say i don't have one i would say there's nothing that i use every day that i feel it's a major influence over all the communication vehicles that we have that allow us to talk to our to our folks easier and present information zoom would be the thing i use most frequently and i find the most easy to use number four how many hours of sleep you get every night between six and seven okay so good and what's your situation married single kids uh i'm married with three kids three kiddos okay and how old are you i am 56 56 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh i think um not to be so premeditated on following uh what i thought was the right path and focus more on the things i'm passionate about across everything i love what i'm doing but there's things i should have spent time doing too that may not maybe not so business oriented guys miss out on there you have it focus on what you're passionate about amplero growing nicely start off as an erp spinout out of massive telco they launched with a big telco customer now under 10 customers but acvs are 300 000 bucks to a million bucks you can imagine the scale there is important they're servicing four specific markets retail telco gaming and retail banking currently a team of what do you say about 30 folks 27 million bucks raised obviously burning capital hoping to maybe go raise another round here and in the fall hoping to raise maybe around 20 million bucks likes to go out and raise when he's got uh you know well north of six months of runway left jamie thank you so much for taking us to the top nathan it's a pleasure thank you