Appify Revenue & Funding (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 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