How Appify CEO Hari Subramanian grew Appify to $1.6M revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is jen grant she's the ceo and has led appify an enterprise rapid app development platform since february of 2020 previously she spent 15 years in enterprise software as cmo of looker you guys remember we had those guys on back before the sale elastic and box all billion dollar outcomes she's also spent four years at google leading marketing teams and holds degrees from wharton and princeton jan you're ready to take us to the top i'm i'm ready to go we were just reminiscing because we had it had you on back in october of 2020 at 45 customers 200 grand in arr you were just getting going what's the update is the product changed yeah so it it almost everything has changed so i'd say the first thing that changed and you know i think this is really great for your audience because this is exactly how a startup early stage kind of growth happens where we sort of started out saying yes this is for smbs this makes sense let's do volume let's get inside 400 bucks a month was your average rpu back then right our arpu is pretty low but oh we were going to get the volume and what we realized in the last two years is that the product itself really speaks more to an enterprise play and as we started really digging in and finding that product market fit it was much more useful for larger enterprises so now we're our average selling price is 125k we're you know we closed a big 336k deal you know this is that your biggest annual contract right now 300k something like that yeah yeah exactly so we've got these big big contracts and of course you have to change your entire uh the way you run the business because instead of this sort of fast volume like get them up running you have these longer sales cycles there's like 10 15 people at the company you're meeting multiple times to sort of get everybody on board you sometimes have to work with procurement and you know legal and contract negotiations so it's a complete like it is a different business from what it was two years ago so exciting and it's absolutely the right thing but it was funny when i listened to the podcast again i was like yeah crap this is wild i mean i don't think i've ever interviewed someone wearing a two-year span they've gone from an average rpu monthly rp 400 to 10 000 right yeah that's right so how do you turn off all the small companies without pissing them off and getting negative g2 reviews yeah no and that's that's been one of the challenges and i think i would give us maybe like a b plus so we have a couple of of our smaller customers they're up and running they're super happy we continue to support them you know when they have a bug or they have a question we're there um but there were plenty of and one of the reasons we shifted to enterprise there were plenty of s b customers that didn't really have the resources for an app building platform like they just didn't have time to build apps and so in some cases it was very easy to say like hey guys you know you never really built an app so let's be friends and and in some cases we pointed them to other products that we actually thought were better fitted for an smb a simpler solution which would be what my audience will help understand what you do based off that analog like a web flow or something some some of the ones we think about are go forms is a great example so it's a much simpler kind of app and but is faster to get going i believe you can even upload a pdf and all of a sudden you have an app so and and that's the kind of thing that many of our smb customers that's all they need they they just wanted to go from paper to an app that does a whole lot of great for their business and for us what we started to realize is the the some of the value that we were offering is that we can um from a technical standpoint we can integrate into multiple data systems and we can create apps that have data from oracle and sap and salesforce and zendesk and the minute you say that you realize like no smb gives a crap they just want their one thing but every enterprise has that issue with these data silos everywhere and you know they we often hear from uh companies that they say oh you know my hr onboarding first i have to log into workday and then i log into this specialized onboarding system and i filled things out and then they have to log into this other system and so this idea of like great build an app that makes it really easy for the user and the in the background where nobody can see it'll deal with the fact that that data goes to this system that data goes to that system and all of this sort of complexity that typical enterprises have in their technology stacks so that was really the like insight was like holy crap we have that's a shift oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview how many now how many if you do ignore smb how many enterprises would you say you're working with now it's paying customers we've got about 15 enterprises so it's still you know that's the other change is that when you're uh when i was at box for example we were constantly saying like you know fifteen thousand customers and then we had a hundred thousand customers and then we had eight million you know it's like you have these really big numbers of all these customers and you're in the enterprise and you're like 15. 40 customers that pay you a million a year is a great business exactly right and so you have to kind of reset your expectations and what you count and you start saying okay well what's our average selling price like when we have 15 and our average selling price is somewhere between 150 and then expanding to these 350k deals like that's not so bad we'll be okay with that yeah that makes a ton of sense i mean now you know can i take those 15 customers times 13 grand a month i mean you guys are north of a two million run rate at that point just in your enterprise cohort we're not quite there because we're a little landlocked we're actually right just about at the one million error which we're really excited okay like literally we're like just about to go ding and get we're having you on at the right moment then so you're still expanding some of these accounts maybe more so what is that expansion look like why would someone pay you 10 grand a year versus 350 is it seat based expansion feature based expansion something else it's seat based so what we're seeing is one great example one of our older customers they started they built one app and they had about 250 people using it and then they built their second app and they added additional 300 and there was some overlap of app users and then they added now they're at five apps and they're just shy of a thousand users so that was one where we landed small and then grew over time nowadays i'd say in the last six months i hired an enterprise vp of sales so that also changed our selling motion so we're landing a lot bigger in the last couple months the deals that we're looking at we would land more at the hundred thousand range and then the expansion is like oh and then we'll get to 400 000 or those though that kind of range where we're like okay 1500 users or our biggest deal right now is 8 000 users so that when we were like okay very cool you mentioned you mentioned the recent higher enterprise sales how many folks are full time on the team today uh we're still pretty small that's one and you know as you i'm sure i've heard from other entrepreneurs and you're everybody's reading in the news this is not the market to go crazy and we're sort of feeling a little lucky that we've kept it tight so we're at 35 people today and we kept our sales team to two sdrs and we have an ae and then our vp of sales he actually sells so we just have those four and then two sdrs one ae and then one ahead of enterprise sales then the head of sales yeah the other reason for that is we found this whole and this is really rare for a startup but we found this channel to use so the second thing that's interesting that we sort of discovered about abbify over the last two years is this ability to connect into any data source works in kind of a white labeled powered by appify way so we did we announced it in april we did a deal with a software company called csg to stick appify on top of their software and give them a mobile app like a well-formed mobile app that they can build and then long-term they want to build other apps and they want to have this sort of platform capability connected into this sort of robust data source that they've built over the last 20 years so that's your go to market that's your unique channel this partnership right and so then we kind of white label it give it to them they do a lot of the work and they have the sales reps that are out there selling and so that also allows us to to stay lean um which in today's market turns out is a really good thing yes no that makes tons of sense now you raised eight nine ten eleven eleven and a half million ish right nothing else raised since 2020 right that's right yeah so we're still kind of running on that and like every other startup we're looking at her road or runway and saying okay are we okay and well what do you optimize for right now right now where we're at are you trying to plan for 24 months to run away 36 months something else we're planning for a year runway because okay oem deals we don't actually need to hire any more sales because of the um the kind of awesome expansion effect of the channel so we're we're able to kind of grow the way we want to grow without actually adding head count and so like we need that year to sort of say okay let's sell the crap out of this um and that gives us some of our engineering innovation will continue but we also are sort of like okay let's just go sell the crap out of this yeah you know say jen so with 35 employees i don't know where you're based in the states or maybe not even in the states but if you if you have an average i mean it's an average seller 120 000 per year for 35 employees that's a 4.2 million dollar expense so you you feel like you've got yeah you're not that high though yeah most of our folks are in bangalore india so we have a large that's where engineering is so it's also very efficient um yeah cut that in cut that in half then your your annual head count is probably more like million two million something like that not four right yeah so we're so we're able to get a lot of efficiencies as well since our customer success and our um engineering and support are all out of india we have two minutes left teach me about that how did you find the anchor point in india to hire that first engineer and customer support rep yeah and i and i think that's a great great point it's hard i would say not for the faint of heart if you don't know someone in india already who has been there done that it's not a good strategy as even though you look at the financing and you're like wow that would be great because it turns out it's actually really hard to hire in india um it takes three months so even when someone accepts a job offer in india they have to stay in their current job for three months and very often they shop your offer so they accept your offer they shop it they may find a better offer and three months later when you're dying for this head count to start they're like just kidding i'm going somewhere else so it's very painful um and hard and what makes it work is those anchor people so in our case our founder our cto is originally from india he spends you know maybe six months three months a year out there he's wonderfully charismatic so he goes out and everybody gets excited and you know pumped up and and so he is able to bring in people from his network as well as excite the team we have and so that's been that's been able and even then we we still have people that don't show up on their first day of work yeah that's that's an art crazy yeah it's an art form yeah it's a good strategy but it is not you know you can't walk into it thinking oh just hire people in india and it'll be fine you've got to have those anchor leadership there to make it work guys jen on that no let's wrap up here with the famous five number one last business book you read oh it's still simon sinek so okay latest start with why yeah start with when i was the first and the the leadership ones we're the next one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh that's a really good point it's so hard nowadays they're making documentaries about everybody and how they're all crazy and so i like hesitate to give you an answer on that one i can't even say anyone right now what would the title if aaron levy has a video made about him on netflix what would the title likely be oh my god crazy young people here you go number three what's your favorite online tool for building applify um i you mean as far as the apps that are built no no sorry sorry tools you use to build the business oh to build a business absolutely calendly so useful yep good one number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i'm good i get eight hours oh wow that's a great what's your situation married single kids married four kids wow you're busy okay and uh do you want me asking how old you are i am not 50. i'm 49. very cool very cool very that's a big exciting birthday that'll be fun help you celebrate women all right jen uh take us home here last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um i think i wish i knew not to take everything so seriously i think when we're 20 years old everything is like the world is ending it's not it's things are good things are bad it's all gonna be fine guys really impressive story here applify helps enterprises launch apps manage them data in and out all of that stuff i've never had an interview where over two years span i interviewed jen two years ago she was doing 400 average rpoo across 45 customers she's now doing well north of that so now i'll call it 30 40 customers but they're paying much much higher rp she's more than 10x the average contract value moving the enterprise and her total revenue's gone from about a quarter million up to about a million run rate today she's celebrating passing that metric which is a big one very exciting without raising new capital between that period which is really fantastic so jen we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top great great to meet see you again 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 every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

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 every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan laca dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got gotta push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya