How Apptimize CEO Nancy Hua grew Apptimize to $6M revenue and 100 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Nancy Aquash she's a CEO of optimize and they're probably installing your phone right now because they work with over ten they work with ten apps in every category in over a hundred plus countries those were the top ten apps prior to co-founding the company she led the fixed-income quantitative strategies team at get Co after studying math and see us at MIT Nancy are you ready to take us to the top yeah definitely all right tell us about the company what are you doing how do you make money okay so what apptimize is all about is we work with mobile teams anyone with an app and we let them do a be testing and feature flagging for their products so they can make different versions of their apps and send them to different users to measure what's gonna do better and let's see our monetization monetization strategy is pretty straight forward in terms of being a SAS company so we charge based on like two axes of monthly active users and the features and service that you get with our products so it's a yearly contract and it's like pretty straightforward in terms of building out our enterprise sales team which has been the main focus for at least the last few years I want to talk more about that we know you're at forty people or forty seven I think you said today we'll talk about the growth there give me a sense of average size so like what would you say the average customer pays you per year um it's our a CD has gone up to a little more than 35 K now per year and they're our biggest customers are paying more than 300 K per year and we have customers that pay us like sub-point a per year too but a lot of those are on the website and what axis is a is a higher leverage point for you for driving additional kind of expansion revenue a number of monthly visits or them adding additional feature sets um both of them because oh definitely the monthly active users our biggest monthly active users are like like we're in some of the top apps in the world like viber that's one of the top ten apps in the world and they have more that I mean I don't know how public eight it like you know they have you know hundreds of millions of monthly active users so that's huge and to support that kind of scale we've had to do a lot of things in our infrastructure at the same time that like massively can grow as well but I'm the like services side there's not that much more that that can grow yeah sorry to interrupt II know it's okay other companies though that are tied to some variable like that when customers originally sign up they're always nervous because they don't want their fit they want the cost to be fixed not to scale with their growth did you have that objection when you're signing up customers and if so how do you overcome that objection especially via your enterprise sales team yeah we definitely don't just scale linearly so the more they the more they add on monthly active users the like more economical to get her monthly active user and then I think for a lot of the big ones like if you're if you're a Viper's scale like it is hard for them to buy a lot of products so they will find pricing for a lot of company is prohibitive so it has to make sense in terms of how you are Kate architected your products so that you're not like each additional month active user is that much more expensive so you can still like do a lot of the processing yep I want to get more the back story here on the growth but let's start from where you are today how many customers have you scaled to a few hundred couple and yeah where it feels like it's a grind you know like he's always like oh it's always getting harder like the Calvary is coming I've like talked with the team about the that blog post a lot where he talks about how eventually it'll feel like there's this when you're at like Julian a or whatever like then there's this end in sight or something like that and when you guys know in terms of scale um you mean in terms of AR yeah we're very close are you close to ten we're getting there but it's still like I don't feel like it's that much easier it's I think a lot of it is that the market has evolved too because with when we first started very few people had apps that they were that strategic about and very few people were doing any kind of AV testing I think that it was something that everyone aspired to but not something that people viewed as really normal and now it's like really normal so the the landscape has totally changed now we're selling into companies like I mean our customers are now Starbucks and like the Wall Street Journal and stuff whereas our early customers we're mobile first companies like hotel tonight and Strava so that's a pretty different sale on profile so I think that caused this like have a lot of learning and just it's not like it becomes it's not like the same sale as the earlier sales you know like we had of all the time what currently growing at year-over-year well we're always targeting into XT over your growth rate okay that would be great great like what you had in 2017 I don't know if I can say like well our year ends tomorrow actually because our fiscal year is it ends at the end of January so everything depends on like these two deals that are literally getting approved right now so if you're working then that'll be great that'll be great for our growth rate but if they slip a little bit I mean obviously it's not that big of it like I'm not gonna discount or anything to get it in a week early but it is it does always just come down to the wire somehow it's like the last day of the quarter the last day of the year that's an answer fair to say if these two deals closed you'll be at your 2x target if they don't you'll be a little below is that fair to say we'll be a lot below it's like wow so like if you close these two deals I mean do you have any customers that make up more than ten percent of your revenue no we're still pretty balanced in terms of like still having a bunch of a bunch of like diversity in the customer set but I think that's our goal though like for the next year we do want to close a million dollar deal and stuff like that and that'll that's pretty aspirational for us right now because it's like it's already in the pipeline basically right so we know we'll have to close one of these deals for that in money that's not I mean that's great I love it and is it fair to say I mean you said a hundred you said hundreds of customers but just take a minimum of a hundred and then take your ACV that you mentioned earlier 35 I mean you guys are north of 300 grand a month right on revenue yeah yeah how do you broken 500 um yeah we're very close to like we're right around there right now and then they'll be like it really depends on the I think thanks thanks for sharing that I know a lot of people sometimes they do sometimes they don't but it helps my audience better gauge kind of where you're at so good so about 500 about 500 right now a couple hundred customers some big deals and pipeline scaling the enterprise sales team you've dealt with this the past 12 months give us where you are today in terms of your total team size how many are they sales people and what's been the challenge in getting them up to speed there's five sales people there's actually now there's six sales people there's also six STRs and the rest of team is like you know embrace my company has customer success in marketing and engineering sizes what it's 40 something like it fluctuates a little bit I think like what this is everything the sales team is really new I think that's a lot of it we have two people who are a pretty experienced in sales but a lot of it is people who are moving into sales from other areas that they were in and learning to do sales for the first time at optimize so I think you know they're like super smart and hardworking but we need a lot of training in terms of the basics of sales so like objection handling things like that yeah and just like pushing and what the arkad the deal is like and I think we've had we had a lot of success with generating Enterprise pipeline earlier this year I think it was just a market shift where there were a lot more like I described there was a lot more interest from established companies that are not mobile-first in making sure that their digital strategy is really solid so a lot of them just came to us and a lot of our content just started generating a lot of pipeline around there so then we had to give Enterprise deals to a lot of salespeople who had never done any sales before you know and that's like a lot of work and then they're kind of just thrown in there so I think a lot of it was this is nice um a little bit in some ways I think it's more I want to make sure that the salespeople feel like motivated to do it and don't feel like they're just in over their head you know because I think that's the whole sales team like just runs on morale I guess the whole company does to some extent so we see how seem has to feel like they're gonna kill it you know and if they don't know what they're doing at all or they just feel like it's very confusing and they're not a control of the deal then I think that's hard...