Appify Revenue & Funding (2024)

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is jen grant she has a passion for building companies from the ground up and tackling multiple taking multiple companies to a billion dollar valuation plus she's been involved with companies such as google and box she led the google apps edu gmail and book search marketing teams and she received google's most prestigious award for her marketing leadership jen you ready to take us to the top i'm definitely ready that sounds like an interesting award give it context for us what's the marketing campaign you ran at google that helped you win that award got it so it's it's what's funny is it'll all seem very ancient time to most people it was when we took gmail out of beta so way back when it was invite only and we took uh we opened up gmail to the world and so we did a global campaign around that and the whole team uh received the founders award for for that work so it was uh cool you know back in the day back in the day okay so let's get to where you're at today which is appify app ify ifyfp.com if you want to follow along what's the company do jen so basically if you remember when it was when you built a website and you actually had people to code it and then along came squarespace and wix and it became super easy well that's what we're doing with business apps so it used to be you'd have to hire all sorts of developers now you can very easily create a business app for you know for whatever business process you want to make more efficient okay interesting so i mean one of my friends were close with um andrew gazdecki built businessapps.com and sold it last year are you sort of in the same space the buildfire.com sort of space a little bit although we are a no code platform so there's less work required the idea is that you can work with someone who is the actual person who's out there who needs a mobile app for something who can then build the app that makes them more efficient instead of trying to translate all the requirements through a developer and through the code and and building it from scratch in that way fair enough when did you launch the company so the company was launched in 2017 and i actually joined in february i met hari the the founder uh last summer uh and it was uh right after i was the cmo looker we sold looker to google and that was a big transition for me and then that's when i met hari who's the who's the founder of and we're thankful we're thankful for roses they were thankful for frank for coming on he came on about that's right six months prior it was a great it was a really good up and i even asked him i said are you inaccurate you see his face but i said are you an acquisition talks right now he said with a straight face we love building we're gonna keep pushing forward i'm like i'm like this guy's about to sell for a lot of money i don't know to do what he's about all right cmo looker so that is a brand by the way obviously you don't know look or massive multi-billion dollar acquisition you were the cmo there so you joined appify in february 2020 you could have done anything if you jen if you have this kind of background what do you see in amplify that get you so excited you know there are three reasons i joined the first was uh my relationship with the founder so it's so critical to me to work with a great executive team and hari had was the co-founder of servicemax brought that company to sold it to ge for a billion so we have this really great set of experiences that work really well together so that was probably the number one reason but i also saw and applify a number of customers that are actively using the product and actively championing they're very excited to tell other people about it that's another signal that i've seen multiple times in my career and then the third is i love platform products so even though we are focused on a go to market where we want to sell to a pain point which right now we're selling to you know mobile workforce so field sales and field service and people who are out there on customer sites the platform applifi can actually solve any mobile app issue or any even desktop app issue that you know you want to make an app out of so i love that that platform product uh strategy with covid why is that still your go to market field sales field services on customer sites that's just not happening right now well and that's the thing it actually is so when you take field service into consideration you start to think about all of the things that the machinery that has to keep running so there are still medical equipment that needs to continue to run there's still you know all of the uh construction needs to still have cranes they need to still have the tools so really a good portion of our customer base is in that essential worker space and the efficiency of them being able to get in and out of a job quickly becomes even more important because they don't want to be kind of hanging out on a job site they want to get in fix the things they need to fix and then get out yup interesting okay so you joined uh call three four years sort of after official launch um you're now running the company as ceo correct yes you're excited by what you saw is hari still on the team he is yeah he is the cto now and he's running product and engineering and i'm building the go to market team i love that what's the team size today how many folks total so we've got about 45 folks on the team we have a big engineering team in bangalore and then we have a smaller go to market team in the us how many engineers total i think we've got about 28 engineers oh Bootstrapped wow so it's a nice sized team and we're sort of at that point of hiring more sales hiring more marketing you know that that side of the building process that's what i want to dig into when i maybe i'll start with this question what's the average customer paying you guys per month like arpu right now yeah so our average selling price for enterprises is in the 12k range 12k arr but we do have a lot of smbs that are in the 1500 3000k range so we have kind of a a spread of size of company which is similar to what i saw at looker similar to what i saw at box it's sort of that typical start small but then grow into these larger companies it's an unfair question because you're clearly tracking cohorts and you have very different motions for each of these cohorts but if i did force you into an average it sounds like it could be something like 200 or 300 bucks a month if you take your full customer base total revenue divided yeah that's probably fair yeah yeah i'm obviously we're pushing pushing but i'd say we're probably average around 5k a year so that's yeah that gets you to about that yeah 400 500 bucks a month okay so the reason i asked that is because you mentioned sales people obviously you can't put touch on a low arpu account the economics don't work unless you do super high volume you're going to start it sounds like introduce touch to these 12 24 000 acv sorts of accounts walk me through how you set quota for your first couple sales hires got it yeah you know we started in the beginning so we just started selling last year q4 of 2019 and so a lot of the initial quota that we set was at the team level largely because we didn't know what our conversion rates would be what it's going to look like it was just get out there team sell it now we're starting to put together more structured sales comps uh sales compensation strategies and we're now looking at okay is the inside team going to sell at the you know smb or mid-market level or are they you know or do we want to push them into the enterprise so we don't really have that kind of big enterprise comp so we're still at the 50 60 k you know we're still at the small range for our for our sales compensation what do you anticipate i mean one of the ratios you want to get right early on on building a sales team is the ratio of full on target earnings relative to the quota target are you optimizing for sort of the four or 5x multiple there yeah so what what we're really looking for right now is and again we're at that early stage we don't know all of the numbers we were looking for that repeatable motion so like is this what an inside sales reps will continue to do every month so we don't quite know but what we want to optimize for is how do we make them neutral so that we can say okay now we're at the neutral point now we can start adjusting and saying okay let's raise the quota let's figure out what are the other sort of levers we need to pull in order to make each of our sales reps uh more than just neutral to the business how many quota uh carrying folks on the team today so we have four right now plus the the leader so we have three inside sales reps plus we just hired um what we're calling a strategic account executive because our land and expand model really does require you know we're landing very small so okay we need someone who's kind of a little bit more of a heavy hitter to get in there and make the relationships and that longer-term upsell of some of these bigger customers we have what does your expansion percentage look like right now and how's that tied to your net revenue retention overall so it's our potential is huge we're still so i'd say in queue three uh so our third quarter ends uh we're actually slightly off we're on a fiscal calendar so our q3 ends october 31st i think in this quarter and in last quarter q2 quarters the first time we really saw some of this these upsell numbers start to get there because we had to deploy them first they had to be happy and then we had to dig in so we've seen four of our companies expand but we have a large number of companies that have expansion potential and so we're looking at q4 to really kind of show us that this model works effectively is what we're looking at so that's great you know from a you know we we have also we have the Currently serving 45 customers again the early stage where those first you know 30 customers or so some of them probably are not product market fit yep yep is that where you're at right now about 30 30 30 customers at the end of the year yeah whoops sorry jen you were cutting out is that where is that where you at right now about 30 customers you're testing on yeah we we started with about 30 we're just at about 45 customers right now but i'd say that first that first cohort of customers had a a bunch that will turn out at the end of the year because they just weren't a product market fit yes you're getting here Monthly recurring revenue you're getting in here though fairly early then i mean this means you guys are doing something like what 10 15 000 bucks a month you're recurring revenue you must see you so how are they 45 45 people on the team you guys must have you must have raised a bunch of money we did we raised our series a and then we just did an extension on the round this summer so we ended up with uh eight before and then we added 3.45 this summer partly because we started to see this kind of opportunity present itself where we needed to put more sales reps we needed the quota capacity to actually have the conversations and to push the pipeline forward to see you know what are those moments where we can get that repeatable motion and and get that data really working for us so yeah we're still at the figuring out stage for sure do you think you can get up past call like a quarter million dollar aor run rate by december this year two three more months that's our hope i mean that when you look at the pipeline we're in this you know very typical where that q4 pipeline is big yeah and we're sort of you know looking at it going like all right like we have enough people to actually close it all and to continue to bring in the folks there and and we'll see i think it'll be an important part of the growth of the company to see what we can do by the end of this year jen as we wrap up there's a lot of founders listening right now who are like uh you're now cto that are looking to recruit talent like you and they never know sort of like what they they love you they find someone like you they go well what should this thing look like i mean obviously it's a big combination i imagine of their salary but there's also real equity upside in incentive you've already done well so you don't need to make a bunch of cash you want to maybe be invested in the company how should be people we think about structuring comp plans if they're bringing in a new ceo like you to lead yeah i think that's important so the you know at this stage at the post series a when you're looking for you know typically it's a product engineering founder looking for a go to market type ceo which is you know where i would fit in every time the the conversation to have is with your board and with your main series a vc investor so that was the conversation that hari had rajiv is from mayfield as our main guy and um and so the conversation was between the three of us and figuring out okay we're early what you know what's the typical market percent of a ceo coming in at this time you know it's it's a it's a fairly motivating percent um but it is fairly standard like there is there's you know here's the band and here's here's what you get what is the don't talk about i won't force you to tell me what you've personally got but what is the band like what what i mean are we talking like 10 to 20 to the company sort of range what is the band you see post series a it's usually between six and nine so it's in that range okay yeah so it's still you know it's not like a huge it's not a founder percent for sure um but it is large enough to to be motivating yeah and and no no like accelerated investor is still one year clear cliff for your investing typically yeah interesting okay very cool very interesting story let's let's wrap up here with the famous five gen number one what's your favorite business book uh start with why or anything by simon sinek number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i still follow aaron levy he was a great person to work for and still a great person to follow he's also very funny on twitter number three what's your favorite online tool for building applify uh for for online tool for building applify i think i don't know how to answer that my favorite tool is appify where i can build tools um but i'd say the the the actual mobile app that i use the most is calendar calendar very good number number that's okay number four how many hours i sleep to get every night oh that's a good question i still get seven i go to bed early i wake up early and what's your situation jen married single kiddos i have four kids i'm married and uh it's a it's a circus of a family and two two dogs two cats holy cow can i ask how old you are i am 47 47 last question what's something you wish you knew back when you were 20 oh that not everything matters guys there you have it from jen not everything matters from appify.com the company doing call between 10 and 20 000 a month in revenue really getting going with her first 45 customers here they raised 11.3 million bucks jen just brought in as the ceo boy was she a powerhouse at looker another thing she's done in her past she was a semi-look rubbishy multi-billion dollar exit there frank came on and shared more of that story but jen we're rooting for you and thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube 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