How Artesian CEO Andrew Yates grew Artesian to $27.4M revenue and 240 customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs to our number one our number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you learnt how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per Tov I haven't expired kids have been on global domination we just bloke on a hundred thousand roll mark and I'm your host Nathan Laska I just finished traveling in Southeast Asia for 41 days and I usually always get sick when I travel and quite frankly eating it's difficult for me it's hard to find a restaurant and I'm spoiled in Austin with my personal chef well I took these little package with me to time 30 of them in my carry-on suitcase they kept me totally healthy with 11 different secret ingredients you can see them at Nathan Lancome /qs I'll tell you more later on in the show that's Nathan lock accom forward gosh juice this is episode 675 coming up tomorrow morning's Mike Wynn joined us they raced thirty million dollars and I asked them a simple question I said Mike will drone deployed be and create and make you the first trillionaire soon in the see what he says good morning everybody my guest this morning is Andrew y8p the CEO and founder of our Tegan and they want to make sellers more effective at engaging with buyers using smart data and new techniques to create the right impact he has been involved in sales and marketing for the past 25 years and is aiming to make a difference people by creating software companies who make a meaningful dent in the universe will cover a bunch of those companies and much much more with anger today Andrew are you ready to take it to the top ready all right so tell us first what is artesian do and how do you make money with the business model so we provide a sales acceleration platform and it's all about providing deep contextual insight on companies and the people inside them with our seasoned you can track every single customer prospect competitor every day spa business opportunities and critically manage your pipeline risk so we help businesses that we we have a phrase which is customer curious businesses and we help those businesses increase their credibility competitiveness and drive customer satisfaction so an ultimately revenue and so I'm a sales person and maybe an SDR one of these companies I'm using our dumping rtz and to basically look at signals in my pipeline to see which of the pipeline I should tackle tomorrow morning based based off interests yeah I mean it might start by addressing you know your your market opportunity pipeline building in a building smart list what we do this a little bit different is we combine thermographic data with real-time contextual intelligence so you know you can you can you can ask artesian to find you a company that fits a certain profile in terms of revenue sales number of employees location market sector but then lay it on top of that you can say that it's that are in the news because they're growing expanding hiring in M&A discussions winning deals signing contracts entering into partnerships whatever it is you you you regard as being a sales trigger we've got some pretty cool natural language processing science that allows us to scan over 10 million sources of structured and unstructured data and hopefully we'll find the killer insight that you need on that company that marketplace or that person awesome Andrea let me wrap up let me let me jump into something here about the market so this is obviously a space I think it's super fragmented we've had some folks on in the space before tell me where you guys are at in terms of first off when did you launch the company and that'll tell us how old it is today so we started providing service around 2010 and just to give you an idea on scale we're at about 30,000 paying subscribers got over a hundred large enterprise customers and companies like Cisco hewlett-packard enterprise now American Express Lloyd's Barclays HSBC as the young KPMG there's quite a broad sector coverage and but one thing that's pretty common about all of those customers is that they are in high-value relationship-oriented sales engagement so launched in 2010 today you're at 30,000 customers with your team size today so it's 60 people a run later shell being around about at 10 15 million dollar range now we're established in the US which expect that to accelerate and grow and that gingers that way around right now sorry that we are right now our that's our goal what you want hit by December 2009 goal for this year yeah got it got it and you know our subscribers are paying anything from ten thousand dollars a year to to over two million dollars annually so our largest contract and we license the software on a per user per month basis contracts are annual and about 68% of our AR our goal for next year or this year that we're in is currently already contracted and so if I used to a minimum so you have use of 30 dozen customers now you give a big range for our pues you said you know between 10 and although it's two million dollars annually if I divide that out and kind of do a monthly and get about $1,000 per month per customer most five times of 30,000 customers is that math right can I get about a 30 well that's not right because it's too high but that comes out to about 30 million in m RR which is wrong so how about after also so after 30,000 we've got we've got we basically had two services in the early days we provided trigger base news as a service on its own and that is a relatively low cost per seat type service that we license in the thousands to large enterprises that company like Barclays Bank with you know 10,000 users in their enterprise and get market news alert every morning push to their blackberry or their iPhone so Angela mutates 30 thousand customers you mean is total businesses or are those seats in all the businesses Bessie's in those businesses it's about a hundred and twenty enterprise customers got it okay so how many enterprise customers that and of those companies they add up to about thirty thirty thousand unique seats that's right okay that makes good sense and what were you well obviously our goal is ten to fifteen million a are by the end of 2017 it's what now March 2017 what'd you do last year until Mr R or sorry last month until M R so that'll be about that'll be about forty percent growth but our on our runway our exit run rate for last year we made a conscious decision around about September or so the last year to take down the cash turn in terms of in terms of investments so we're actually striving towards profitability and cash flow positive acidity which we should hit roundabout maybe this year how bad did that get what was your largest mantra in terms of cash burn we would regularly you know seeing off between three and four hundred thousand dollars a month in the early days we you know we've raised about forty million of equity and debt as a funder and that helps us you know drive growth in the fifty to seventy percent range and organically we can hit thirty to forty percent so we made a decision that we were going to you know just slow down the acceleration a little bit in terms of you know using VC money to drive that growth artificially inseminating that market now it makes good sense if I'm doing the math correctly you've got if your goal is kind of a ten to fifteen million dollar a are run right by the end of 2017 and you want to get a healthy growth rate over last year's numbers I mean I assume you're probably doing around seven hundred K per month right now about it okay got it good so and then again if I divide seven hundred thousand by the by the hundred twenty enterprise customers at start to say the average enterprise is paying about six grand per month but most of our annual contracts that right yeah that's right and they give very I mean our largest largest customer with with you know at the higher end of the tariff scale would be one of the banks in the UK that has about four and a half thousand seats deployed I think I think the thing that makes us a little bit different is and you know our custom extensions running it around about 93% gross and 120 percent of net and we know revenue and ER that revenue or a retention or actual customer number retention and so that the gross number is is the like for like dollar for dollar year-on-year and then the net is plus ourselves okay so what was the gross again sorry 93 and your language will 20 okay got it it's a 93 percent annual retention and 129 and instant is net and you know we also run a Net Promoter Score programs to check in on how and satisfied our customers are and that's running at an average as last government surplus 43 and I was like I was delighted to see that you know we're now we're now number two in their GT proud ranking in terms of most popular sales Intelligence Platform just just behind the guys at discover all yeah Andrew so this is we had the discover org guys on he know he shared with me I'm Henry in that episode that they're doing about five million ish per month in a revenue but they're also very they have kind of a very very much kind of vertical integration right there very sector focused you guys are anything are taking a different approach I mean how do you win this space and the reason I asked that the reason I ask that is because it seems like when I talk to Bart a full-contact Henry discover world I talk to all the clear but everyone seems to buy access to everyone else's data on the back end but no one wants to admit it but they'll eventually admit it and then they say we have our feet right there with us we have...