How Clatter CEO Josh Newman grew Clatter to $2M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Josh Newman he's an Innovative product marketing technology leader and Enthusiast he's the founder today of clatter a creative automation SAS platform enabling large businesses to create branded PowerPoint presentations microsites and marketing collateral in minutes the Clutter Suite is made up of productivity tools including presentation maker collateral maker and a bunch of other products currently used by 5 000 users across 10 Enterprise customers Josh you already takes to the top yeah let's do it all right 10 Enterprise customers and 5 000 users to me screams net dollar retention of 150. so it net dollar attention is good it's um and it's it's probably is around 150 but not for necessarily the reasons you would think a lot of it's going to be around that will add on Professional Services to it so some of it is mrr but it's a lot of it's around the Professional Services kind of arm of what we do so break that down for me you know last last month let's just use August first first you know last most recent full month of data what percent of your revenue is Professional Services versus recurring Revenue so it's going to be it's going to be probably and it's it's grown over the the life of of collateral kind of the four years that we've been doing this right now it's going to be probably 70 72 is going to be in the range of mrr and the rest is going to be uh additional Services I love this split because when you put service on a customer they tend to stick longer so um I guess tell me about tell me about one of these customers if you can what how's the customer using you today and how many seats like how what teams are you going in the dev team the engineering do you know the marketing team the sales team who's using you so the our our day-to-day customers are going to be the marketing team the users of this though are going to be split between the marketing team and the sales teams and so think of it these are this is these are Big organizations so one of them and when I say 10 Enterprise customers if we're being totally transparent two of them are actually split where think about an Enterprise think about a a fortune 25 company we have a few different customers within that same company but these are groups that are totally independent they don't even know each other so it's the same logo but I I'll split it up as different customers because they're totally unrelated to each other yeah yeah I mean this is all I mean I'm seeing sort of a comp this it's almost like a it's like a Content management system right you have a branded slide deck you want everyone to have access at all times so that they can create their own iterations of the master brand guide right and you need to do that across many languages countries and brand styles and colors oh yeah would you agree yeah that's exactly right and and that's for the presentation maker tool and then of course collateral maker for brochures microsite maker for landing pages and microsites summary maker for data heavy kind of upload Excel Json XML and we'll build you a beautiful on-brand looking table chart whatever you need very cool okay so what are these customers paying on average per month to use the technology okay so from uh from a monthly standpoint the the average per month is going to be somewhere around probably five thousand dollars and you're going to have some customers who are going to be lower where those might be folks who just use one of the one of the products you might have some that are going to be higher where they might use three or four of the different products and then what we'll do is if you've got one product that's going to be around 2500 a month but if you're using three or four it's going to be around six thousand a month because we discount kind of in from a bundling standpoint and do you have power laws in your custom rates what is your largest customer pay per month a large customer pays uh they're 10 grand a month and what what they're doing though is they're they're using us so using the PowerPoint Builder example they're using this from a full service model they'll email one of our project managers and just say here are all the side they'll do it a few times a week here A bunch of slides put them up for us we've got other customers where it's self-serve if you want it to be this particular client they're just they're busy they've got a ton of content some of the others they'll manage it all themselves we don't even know what they're doing on the system 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 the 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 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share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path 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 that's very cool okay when did this all get going what year so it started in 2019 and actually started with a bespoke model where we super long story short Chief marketing officer of one of the the largest divisions of this particular customer came to me and just said Josh we've got thousands of PowerPoint slides we don't know how to organize them the sales team is struggling there's no consistent messaging no consistent branding help us with my very rudimentary PHP skills I'm not a developer put together just a really rough proof of concept sold it through they said we love this we want to build this they gave us 250 000 to build out this solution so I think it was kind of a Professional Services piece at the time wait but hold on we can't just glance over that that's huge I mean some people go sell 20 their business and that's their angel check how'd you convince one of your first customers to write that kind of check up front sure so my my background is I've been I've been running an agency for since two thousand to and so it had been a customer of ours for years so we had built the trust but they saw what this could do and treated it like a project and so when when that kind of funding came in it gave us the opportunity to build it our cost to build it was half that so 125k this launched within just a few months of it launching they said we love this thing it took off people were huge fans of it so they said we want to make some big improvements to this at the same time sold it through to another customer so I was able to take that 125 plus another 125 and went to the group that built the bespoke model and said can you build an Enterprise version they said yes they weren't actually able to so we ended up kind of hitting a little bit of a you know of an oil slick this was 20 20. this was in 20 end of 2020 beginning at 2021 is when we found out that that so how much how much money did you lose on that so we actually we didn't lose any money we actually we just lost a lot of opportunity cost there was no real money loss because what we had working was was good but we had one very understanding customer who even though we were six months late on delivering a product they understood they weren't under a real-time crunch a little bit of luck there uh but...