How Clockify CEO Nenad Milanovic grew Clockify to $26.4M revenue and 10K customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is melanova he is an entrepreneur with 15 years of managerial experience in engineering and software development the founder of a clockify a time tracking software with over a million users worldwide his company's uh cohen develops software service solutions but also it's it has its own products as well as invest in technology startups all right nana you ready to take us to the top yeah thanks thanks for having me so so let me just be clear cohen c-o-i-n-g is that like an agency that holds all your sas projects pretty much yes yeah that's the holding company and clockify.me is your biggest one well yeah yeah i mean clockify is currently the only successful product that we have in portfolio well um we should either talk about all the failures or we could just focus on the one success i let me just ask the ratio then we'll focus on clockify how many ones failed versus this one success eight fail to success i love that all right let's talk about clockify what's company do and how do you make money well it's a i mean it's time tracking software right pretty uh pretty known concept and uh we make money by uh charging subscription per workspace it's 10 and 30 bucks a month in the cloud and we also have a self-hosted enterprise edition that costs significantly more because uh each time you have when we have a big customer they have some special needs that we have to uh customize so uh so that's where we make 80 of our revenue interesting so if you took it if you looked at kind of what the average customer is paying you per month or per year on a logo basis like the company basis not a seat basis but the company what would that number be so in the cloud the average customer is nineteen nineteen dollars so one nine per month and uh yeah yeah and when it when it comes to uh when it comes to enterprise edition that goes too significantly more so uh so i'm not going to pull that one into uh into this average so but you said 80 of your revenue comes from the enterprise cohort correct yeah so what is the enterprise code let's just talk about that for a second the enterprise core on average is paying about what per month well it starts at 450 that's the minimum that you have to pay to have your company use clockify on your own server but like i said average average amount is a lot bigger than that so okay um well so i need i need a little help understand this so i can frame my questions right you're either selling 19 per month plans to smbs or you're selling 450 per month kind of on their own server plans or you're selling something way more expensive than that to much much bigger enterprises which one is it well i mean you're your main cohort yeah so so i'm if you define a main cohort by where the biggest revenue is coming from that's the big enterprise companies like hp and so forth okay and on average what are those enterprises paying you per year for clockify well it's it's typically hundreds of thousands of dollars oh okay so what is a hundred thousand bucks a fair average uh it's it's more than that so i i can't really go into specifics of that but i don't wanna talk about any specific customers but i wanna understand if it's a hundred grand or nine hundred grand right i mean generally speaking it can be it can be 900 grand we have that and or it can be 150 grand we also have what is the average that's why i don't want to go on every customer card because we don't have time the average in the enterprise is what is it 200 300 400 sorry i'm sorry i can't disclose that information why can't you disclose an average in your enterprise cohort we're not talking about any specific customer well typically i'm i'm not communicating that uh data so i uh i mean typically i know what i can say and what i cannot so so this is unfortunately one of the things that that i cannot give you the exact number i'm not okay you've already told me though it's between 100 and 900 right so i mean i'm asking you for a little bit more specificity around that you've already shared the basics why would you not show the average well like i said i just have a i just have a list of things that that i know that i can say and some other things that i'm not oh are you so are you working for are you working for somebody is this not your company well it's my company i'm 100 owner of the company okay listen i'll just i'll just do my best to ask questions without knowing what kind of that ever that that cohort is so tell us more about the back story here when did you launch the company what year so it was uh i guess the real launch was august 2017 and we started building it in uh march so let's say yeah it took us four months to uh release the initial version so i would say that august 2017 is the birthday when we actually uh posted the product on product hunt okay and what's your team size today how many folks on the product well in clockify there's around 70 people now 7-0 yeah and what's the breakdown how many are engineers uh around half so around 30 something people are engineering that can be quality insurance or front-end and do you have g are the price points it sounds like if you have an enterprise price point you have some sort of sales motion built do you have kind of the sdr to ae to cs rep kind of system built out or no well we don't we don't get that many uh inquiries for the enterprise edition so uh typically if that goes through our support team i'm the one who is going to be uh doing all the sales so uh so i'm pretty much the uh the only the only person that someone will discuss uh enterprise uh deals with so okay well just because then with that in mind uh you can't be processing a ton of hundred thousand dollar plus acv accounts those all require touch and if you're the only guy handling them you have a limit how many can handle per month well uh like i said i mean i maybe do one call a week that that that can be considered a qualified lead an enterprise an enterprise-level lead yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah typic on average it's one call a week that i that i do that i demo the product and show it to people that are actually considering investing into uh on-premise time tracking solution and so since 2017 what you've closed a couple of handful those two three four something like that well we typically close one enterprise account a month so you're having five calls and you're closing one of those so you have a 20 close rate on a demo of a hundred thousand dollar plus level i wouldn't i wouldn't say say that because we get a lot of inquiries that go to our support email and sales email so i would say that one out of the 100 comes to uh talk to me right so uh so no it's not it's not that closure rate that's only what i discussed i'm only i asked you who's doing enterprise sales and you said you are the only person that do the enterprise sales is that accurate so how it works is that someone emails our email that it's on the website it goes to our support team that is also a sales team at the same time but in email manner right so they just they typically disclose uh starting points starting figures and typically people just don't move forward to that and then if they do uh and if if they're comfortable about talking about these kind of digits that require us that can actually make it viable for us to uh spend that much time on one account that's what comes to me and typically that's only uh that's only one one call a week and those are enterprise those that's your enterprise cohort big 100 000 plus acvs typically yeah yeah so that that was back to my point if you're doing one of those calls per week how how and i said you have closed you said you've closed one of those per month if you're doing five a month and you're closing one a month that's a 20 close rate on your enterprise cohort is that accurate if if we look at that part of the funnel and i'm pretty much the last part of the funnel that would be correct but we can't observe it in that way because there's a lot more leads that you know that don't you're misunderstanding meaning i'm only talking about your qualified leads for enterprise i i don't care about everything that hits support i don't care about the thousands of leads at your support that don't turn into anything i'm talking about the qualified enterprise leads which said you're the only one handling those and you're handling one of one a week so five a month and i'm just asking are you you said you're closing one of those a month out of the five that would be a 20 close rate on your enterprise qualified leads well if you if you like to observe it from that part of the funnel i guess that would be uh yes will do your enterprise leads go anywhere else except to your desk uh well yeah i mean if you close the deal it's gonna go to engineering and it's gonna go to the economy no no i mean before up to closing the deal you are the only guy close you don't have a inbound sales team focused on enterprise accounts where there's a base plus commission and an sdr to an ae to a cs rep no we do not have that yeah so it's you you're the guy you're you're you're you're the rainmaker well i i'm sure we can we could improve uh if someone better would be doing that but uh at the...