How Amplify CEO Mahi De Silva grew Amplify to $7M revenue and 130 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is amani da silva he is a serial serial entrepreneur creating a multiple billion dollar exit he's the co-founder and ceo of amplify.ai today was previously chairman of noventis ceo of opera mediaworks ceo of ad marvel ceo of franco he's also on the founding team and gm of wireless services verisign and an engineering geek at apple he was named number 12 of the most important people in mobile advertising by business insider he's also known for pioneering off-deck premium mobile content the united states by convincing the top tier carriers to open up their walled garden for digital content maha are you ready to take us to the top sure that's a loaded bio man holy mackerel all right what's amplify doing and what's your guys's revenue model are you pure play sas uh yeah we're an enterprise sas platform um we are an artificial intelligence and machine learning platform that helps brands dry drive conversational engagement so customer acquisition engagement commerce with consumers around the world okay and can you maybe tell the story about one of your customers and how they do that yeah you know a great example um is tony robbins as a customer of ours and you know they do a lot of digital marketing um on the web in social media and we help bring those uh you know customer engagement events to life through ai-powered conversations so whether you see an ad that might be running on on facebook or instagram or see an ad that runs on the web on desktop or mobile when you click those ads you start a conversation as opposed to you know a self-guided tour with the click click to web experience yep that's interesting and and can you help me understand i don't want to go down to every customer cohort but on average what's the company going to pay you per year to use this technology so we start with a base price um uh you know we do year-long contracts but we start with um a thousand dollars a month uh to access our platform that comes with a set number of conversations and if you exceed those then you know you pay more you you move up to a higher tier are there any other pricing axis you price against besides number of conversations that's really our core metric because that's what ultimately moves the needle for our customers how can we drive engagement and how can that engagement you know map to something that's monetizable okay no perceived model um that's not something that we've uh we've contemplated uh but i tell you we're flexible you know we we have new customer inquiries every day we're working with um uh you know mobile operators around the world that are trying to streamline their uh marketing and their customer support so we never say never for for innovative new business models um but conversations is our our core no feature-based upsells either uh yeah so as we do as we come out with new features for example you know we support platforms like like facebook we support a web uh chat experience we're looking at new platforms like apple business chat um so when we have to do special integrations for customers there's an opportunity for us to you know price that as a as a new feature okay but you're not you're not actively doing that no yeah interesting okay tell me more about your story here where'd you launch the company what year um so we started at the end of 2017. we've been we spent most of 17 building the platform and proving out our scale in 2018 we started signing up customers um you know here we are in the middle of may we've driven more than 2.9 billion uh interactions with consumers for our brand does that mean a conversation does that include impressions yeah no it's this is all conversation based um and we have attracted more than 195 million consumers onto our platform and okay and across how many companies using you have these 2.9 billion conversations happen across um you know let's call it uh about 130 uh big brands around the world okay so let me repeat that back to you to make sure i get it right 130 customers use you by using you they've driven over 195 million engagements with consumers and those engagements have totaled over 2.9 billion total conversations over the past 12 months that's right that was pretty good am i hired you're hiring all right so 130 customers take me take me back to like the glory days so the first paying customer how'd you land them yeah the first paying customer we were able to show them you know we did a 30-day free trial we were able to show them how we could leverage kind of their nascent activity on social media to bring those people into a more monetizable engagement so you know something as simple as a comment that you left on a facebook post uh being able to understand that comment be able to turn that from a one-to-many experience like a feed-based experience into a messaging experience so that first customer you know today we've helped attract millions of new customers for them uh this is a media company in southeast asia um and you know that they're super happy with what we have been able to do and continue to do for them so what would a media company in southeast asia why would they want to pull a conversation on facebook into a one-to-one chat when usually a media's revenue model is based on advertiser spend not one-to-one conversations with consumers yeah so think about you know whether it's a media company here or a you know in indonesia or australia if you go to let's say cbs sports uh and and you're a new user you're perusing their web their web experience they're going to tell you very quickly hey sign up for my newsletter which is an email blast of cbs sports content that shows up in box well what we do is we don't sign up for a newsletter on email but we can help push that media company's content to that consumer on the social messaging platform of choice for the consumer so it could be whatsapp or facebook messenger or instagram or apple business chat google android messages the consumer decides where they want to consume that content and we help push that content to that consumer interesting what's your team size today how many people we have about 25 people around the world um and and we've got people you know here in silicon valley um folks in in europe and asia have you decided to raise or stay bootstrapped we raised a seed round back in uh 2017 that was led by a venture firm here in in palo alto called costano adventures and was that the only only capital n um yeah we have some some friends and family you know uh angels as well yep and so total total capital in the company today is about how much um i think what we raised so far is about a little over three million dollars okay and and how did you know i mean a lot of founders struggle if they do want to go the vc route with coming up with how much to raise especially at the start right so why was three million the right number for you yeah the the reason is that um convertible note um and that was kind of the sweet spot right if you if you go for more than vcs want to treat that as a price like a series a round um so that three million was like a a good number for uh for his four seed yeah that's a pretty large convertible note though yeah i i think that's maybe based on our our experience and and history yeah no fair enough uh talk you know turns critical in any sas company how do you think about your churn and getting it to a better place than where it's at today yeah we have extremely low churn you know we're we're looking at like you know less than one percent annually or monthly uh and forever you know since the inception of the company total um and the reason just to be clear is that logo turn or revenue churn um that's logo churn yeah um so what makes us sticky is that we are basically an ai investment a company makes from day one we start to amass huge amounts of data preferences profiles for these consumers that interact with that brand and no brand wants to just turn that off so you know we deliver a lot of value and that value has natural stickiness inside of a an enterprise is revenue churn about the same less than one percent annually yeah and again um you know because we start at such a low price point and we scale based on the value that we deliver to the enterprise um we've had no instances where you know revenue is actually coming down on a per customer base yeah that's what's going to ask you next it sounds like you have an expansion machine in place so what is that typically your kind of year on year you're looking at 40 expansion 20 percent more i i think today we're still in the nascent uh phase of really ai as a platform uh for enterprises so we're looking at you know 25 growth on a per customer basis annually but we've had some customers you know grow over 100 percent because yeah and some obviously are below that they don't grow at all exactly yeah yeah so if you assume one percent churn and 25 expansion that still puts obviously your net revenue retention it caught 124-ish it's still obviously a healthy place to be what's your current sales motion look like right so you told me about getting your first customer your team at 25 today are there kind of sdrs and aes and cs reps or how are you getting new customers yeah we're we're still a very small go-to-market team um you know we have three quota carrying sales people around the world um that you know between myself and those folks have been focused on bringing that you know those customers in we are in the process of hiring sdrs we have a customer success organization are they quota caring as well the cs folks no they're not...