How Cleeng CEO Dominik Załuski grew Cleeng to $32.7M revenue with a 135 person team in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording to give a bit of context of what we've been trying to achieve so uh we started in 2011 as an ization we've been uh going fairly slow up until 1819 uh building the product carefully trying to shape it you know to serve the client that uh we want to serve I'll just cover this in in a sec and then from uh 2021 started to accelerate and now we really see the acceleration so that's in Revenue um but of course to sustain that acceleration and we are focusing on the Enterprise B2B space we were more longtail historically but now we focus more on the Enterprise B to be we had also to recruit quite some staff so that's part of the challenges that we were facing you know how to organize this properly and to continue to manage the engagement of the team and manage the proper throughput of the organization wh cling very briefly um so cling we specialized in uh subscriber retention for video platforms uh we work with the likes of well you see some of the clients here our largest client is actually the NFL in the US so you guys here I'm sure you know uh some are in the Telco industry some are more like traditional broadcasters um so we help sell uh video subscriptions we are kind of CRM platform for Video subscription but what we do um we manage about 35 million account half a billion in Gross billing so we became quite sizable nowadays um and so what are some of these key learnings and I'm sure you've been hearing some of his learnings in the past uh past day in the past few hours um some people are repeating kind of the same but there are also a few nuances so I was happy that I could share maybe things that are a bit different so one thing um and it's often a dilemma especially with uh investors are there investors in that group here okay there's a few investors um so investors especially in the early days we always look at what's your time you know what's your time what's your Su uh and you need to expand very fast and it needs to be sufficiently large otherwise it's not worth investing so you have the tendency quite quickly to go maybe a bit too far on what you can Target um it's easy to stretch a software um but actually it's hard to stretch the sales uh and to stretch the experience and and the marketing and these type of activities so one thing I think that we've been doing pretty well is to continue to focus very much on our vertical so the media and entertainment vertical um and not to try over verticals you know often we we speak about gaming for example it's very similar you know at the end it's subscription type of business um we speak about some form of iot that would be also fairly similar but we really refrain from going there and we doubl down on the vertical that we are in and I think it was a very good choice the second um important learning is uh ad adapting your uh pricing policy there one thing that uh we've learned uh over the years is that pricing is never exactly right um uh we we started as a as a long tail platform we used to sell licenses at 99 a month that's how we really started 10 years ago um and then we started to charge for certain components so in our case we charge per user here um so on top of the license you would say okay how many subscribers do you have and then you pay a small fee per subscriber that that's the only metric that we use um we use a tiered model uh so you commit at a certain level and then you have various tiers big benefit of this is that you don't need to renegotiate a contract if your client is overperforming this is always a huge amount of uh um time and and a bit of frustration frustration also for the client because is overperforming and now he saying oh but I'm paying too much you know let's say you've committed at 100,000 and you achiev 200,000 so of course you want to uh reali uh your Fe accordingly but if you haven't embedded this in your contract you need to renegotiate the contract if you work on a tearing base then it's way easier uh you just get to the next year and then you don't need to renegotiate anything Market focus of course um now we are uh Enterprise uh sales we are really like tier one and and to my surprise we can continue to claim um larger fees uh for for our clients so even though we work still on a per user basis since we go after clients with potentially millions of users you end up with an AR of a million or more with certain clients uh and and of course when you start to charge a million per year as software you feel like wow uh holy we we make it um um you have to adapt your your strategy um I'm sure well some of you guys may be familiar with uh so lost leader you basically you you become extremely aggressive um um scheming you try to get the most out out of all of this scor sh is that you feel like okay I'm going to be aggressive for a certain time until I penetrate the market get market share and then I will reincrease it or premium which is more the positioning that we have today you feel okay I have high margin I'll try to maintain them while it last and then uh my drop later and then some other consideration so i' I've been sharing a few um few parameters uh related to pricing but I really feel that pricing is important that you constantly optimize it for the Target group of users that you want to go after uh and it was definitely a key learning uh from selling 200k of ACV to a million plus of ACV of course uh it's a very different type of pricing the third element uh that was a big learning and um it's been a learning I think for the past 10 years to be honest um we always neglected a little bit the um the customer success aspect and the retention aspect um we we tend to always chase the new clients and and you organize yourself you know you you spend a lot of effort about acquisition uh and uh growth strategies of marketing um you invest in customer success but you may not invest at the same level of attention as you would do um uh for for the acquisition part but you quickly realize that once you get at 5 to 10 million of Revenue I mean if you have a leaky bucket you know I love this image of the Leaky bucket if you sign five million a year but you lose like two or three every year I mean there's no way you can get to 10 15 or 20 million um so very important to um to invest in customer success um to to structure well that team it's maybe the most complex I've learned that it's maybe the most complex role in an organization why is it the most complex role because I simulate that a good account manager is like a CEO you need to know about sales um you need to be able to negotiate with a client you need to know very well your product because your client is asking okay but how do I use this product how do I generate the right value from it you may need to be able to answer some technical questions from these clients once in a while um and you need to well sell properly you know the value propositions marketing and so on so very difficult to uh develop the right profiles there so start early in my view to to get the right guys uh it's certainly one area where we we've been doing good from a net dollar retention we we are 120 130% um but from a staffing standpoint we still have high rotation and we still struggle a little bit uh to staff properly that uh that organization surprisingly uh especially after the the point number three is that as we uh as we grew we um we hired a specialist of customer success and customer retention coming from IBM she's been doing this for for very long and about two years ago we said okay now we need to become customer Centric and you guys are cling you are not enough customer Centric you are product Centric you are uh well to some extent Financial Centric and these type of things but you are not sufficiently customer Centric well guess what by becoming customer Centric we were moving to my liking at least way too much as a um solution integrator system Intec Creator type of company uh you start to get the account management team coming to you and say hey yeah but you know this client is really looking for that service or they are looking for that kind of extension it's not exactly what we want um but if we don't do this we may lose them so it's very important you start to develop it and then you are like torn in between to feel like oh uh what shall we do you know shall we really pay attention to everything that the client is asking for or do we keep our course um of course we listen to to their requirements but we need to adapt a little bit let's say our messaging toward that client to say sure dear clients let's work together um uh let's figure out a solution um I love the Amazon web services uh work backward I don't know if you guys are familiar with the work backward uh model so basically they ask clients okay what do you want us to do so clients will say well I'd love to develop...