How Appbuddy CEO Marc Aubin grew Appbuddy to $5.5M revenue and 550 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is mark alban he is the founder of a company called uh app buddy which helps simplifies complex crm processes all right mark are you ready to take us to the top yeah sure thing all right so tell us more about the company what do you guys focus on what are you doing what's your revenue model is that a pure sas play yeah it is a pure sas place so basically what we do is we help people manage a lot of data and enterprise systems where it's very difficult to do today so we've kind of taken reporting and data management merged into one thing one single user experience where people can edit very complex use cases all from one screen so we are a sas model we're per user per month we typically do annual contracts and we have a good swath of enterprise customers that uh work with us as well as small and mid-market customers if it sounds like you have obviously many different courses a customer share if i forced you though into an average what would you say kind of the average acv is across one of your customers um i prefer to kind of keep uh numbers not not necessarily i wouldn't really want to say anything about numbers specifically but uh we've got a pretty good average acv it's been doubling uh year over year for the enterprise segment yeah mark sorry just give me like a i'm trying to understand it's like 10 we're talking 10 bucks a year or 10 granny or 10 million a year just give me a general range that you're comfortable with uh we we definitely do uh five six six figure deals okay got it so you're at the point you're at the point where you're leveraging kind of an inside sales team at that scale then yeah we do have an inside sales team uh we also have uh a growing and more robust partner channel okay got it very good and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company uh 2009 we launched the product actually on the app exchange in 2010 uh salesforce yeah yeah yep so uh recently we actually got on the sap app center and started supporting um multiple platforms with our new product appbuddy cloud but grid buddy started in 2010. is the is the oracle kind of integration performing the same as or sorry the sap integration performing the same as you saw the salesforce integration perform in the early days uh as far as uh business-wise you mean well i mean in terms of you getting new customers from the channel uh i would say the salesforce channel is a lot better right so the problem with the sap accus sap app ecosystem is that they're not necessarily socialized to be an app ecosystem as much as sales forces salesforce has done a really good job uh socializing their customers that hey we have this platform but then you can tack on apps very easily on top of that and unfortunately i think the sap mindset is a lot more it's a lot more hey if i if i want to do some customization i'm going to engage in a two-year project that's just uh even for their sas products their customers are still thinking that way and get us in your brain a little bit what were you doing in 2009 where you said okay now is the right time for me to kind of go all in on this new idea yeah sure so um actually uh i'll even go further back than that okay uh so me and the co-founder uh leia pacquiao we actually uh helped to co-found a business in 2002 which was an app builder uh pretty similar to what we're doing right now we tried to bootstrap that company made a lot of mistakes you learn a lot from mistakes you make and uh one of the things that we saw after with that turned into a consulting company so i was consulting for the likes of um some salesforce consulting companies like some boutique consulting companies as well as uh bluewolf and and whatnot and um i was also working inside uh i worked inside salesforce itself as uh part of that consulting company as well and just worked on a lot of salesforce instances because i started picking up a salesforce consulting um after we became a consulting company and saw that the paradigm that we uh created back in our original company was actually um really useful but we needed to revise certain things for instance we were in that original company trying to get people to do their own a brand new system of record well a lot of people already have salesforce in order to have their system a record so our approach with that buddy was really just to be a thin layer on top of what they're already doing today i see and you um you now have obviously multiple product lines grid buddy for salesforce app buddy for sap but then you have kind of four i believe four different kind of solutions you layer on top of those do all the each of those four solutions layer on both of those two key products yeah yeah they're they're basically uh use cases for those products and we have some out of the box templates they get you going so any any fast growing sas company right you can't get to net negative revenue churn or sorry or net retention higher than 100 without some kind of upsells or pricing axes is it fair to say that your inside sales team are really using these four products to drive expansion and that's where most your expansion is coming from well they are using actually the single product to drive expansion some of those additional temp it's not we we have two products and then those additional use cases that you're seeing on our website are templates on top of those two products right uh primarily grid buddy is our best-selling one so what they're doing is they're saying pipeline management now you perhaps have a service use case that you can also use this for as well sometimes we have out-of-the-box templates that uh fulfill those additional use cases sometimes we don't and in those cases it's just as easy to customize our uh core product for the use cases where we don't have templates but just to be clear though if people are only driving if your inside sales team is only driving expansion based off those two key things let's use grid buddy for example what are the axes they use to drive up acv on that is it like a number of seats and then additional features and then some data metric what are the pricing axes if they're not selling those four additional modules on top yeah it's usually number of seats so that basically we're just getting more seats uh so we allow you in most cases we allow you to do unlimited grids so that encourages adoption and that's where people start to say hey i want to use it for this group or this group sometimes those those expansions a lot of times the expansions actually happen within the same use case but people are actually rolling out to different geographies so we have some uh customers who are multinational and they have a bunch of different groups they're rolling out us out to yeah so what do you what do you model i think you said this earlier but i missed it what do you model kind of year one to year two expansion at are they typically doubling in the first two years or tripling or less um you mean as far as uh we're tripling arr we're definitely not true yeah no that's not no no my question was expect expansion on a customer typically it really depends i mean we have individual account plans and we at the beginning we suss out the uh the expansion opportunity of course at the highest level that's driven by the amount of licenses they have in the core platform we support either sap or salesforce and then uh start to map out how those uh licenses are utilized across the account and whether they're a good match for our app or not because not 100 of the salesforce users are necessarily going to be a really good fit for app buddy who's responsible on your team in terms of the title for driving expansion does the ae stay with the account post sale or do you have a customer success team that handles expansion we do have a dedicated customer success team that handles expansion we we really believe in investing in customer success and has definitely paid dividends for us but when the expansion uh becomes a new opportunity the ae comes back into the account when does expansion become a new opportunity when we've qualified it according to uh what we need to say it's an opportunity so there's a project involved there's a certain amount of users we have budget we have authority there's a compelling event and timeline so basically uh those are our baseline qualification uh criteria in order to become an opportunity there's a lot of folks trying to trying to figure out whether cs folks that are really responsible for expansion and usage and adoption should also be quota carrying some people make them quota caring some people don't they just give bonuses based off expansion how do you handle incentive like incentivization around the kind of the cs role our main incentive is uh retention right for the cs world we don't actually uh make our cs roles quota carrying um we feel that we really first and foremost want the cs role to be um a trusted contact for the account that uh where they feel like they can give them both the good news and the bad news right because actually bad news is actually really good for us because what we do is we have a very tight integration between our cs team and our product team to go back to the product and actually uh make improvements to save accounts and then several cases we've actually done that there's a bonus that uh you know our bonuses and our incentives actually um are somewhat dependent on uh sales company-wide because there's a there's a component where the entire company needs to be successful in order for say that percentage...