How Cloudkpi CEO Maeve Kneafsey grew to $3.3K revenue and 3 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is maven nissi she is the founder and uh sorry so she's the entrepreneur behind cloud kpi she which is her fourth startup her latest venture addresses the frustrations involved in setting up and maintaining cross business metrics for sas companies a segment growing to a multi-billion dollar market value cloud kpi which is raising a seed round has completed programs at plug and play tech and women's startup lab she previously founded a mosque ireland's first digital marketing analytics agency which exited in 2003 another one in 2015 and a fintech sas benchmarking solution called market finder all right maeve are you ready to take us to the top i certainly am all right you're raising a seed round how much are you trying to raise and then tell us what the company does okay so we're trying we're raising a million um and what the company does is okay so if you you know sas companies i mean that's what you guys are all about okay and the really hard part about sas is that it re you have to keep going fast all the time you got to continue to grow fast to get to the level of revenues that's going to give you your profitability and and to do that you can't just look at your data in silence look at your revenue and your positions and your sales and your marketing you've got to join them together so there are tools out there that allow you to build those integrations and allow you to try and build your metrics but if you use cloud kpi all of that is done automatically for you it's specifically designed for sas so you literally plug into your existing systems pull the data visualize it and then use predictive insights to say hey you know what's going to happen tomorrow in relation to your churn or your sales of your marketing so you mean like you plug into like stripe or the payment gateway whatever yeah and quickbooks and google analytics and your product and your crm okay very interesting and and you're raising a million are you doing a convertible note or a priced equity round we're we're open about that at the moment we're you know we're obviously we're negotiating with people and we looks like we've got a lead investor already and that will probably be equity that's great okay good and so is this you've obviously exited a few companies is the company currently pre-revenue or do you have revenue we've just literally released our first version of the product in june and we already have revenue we already have customers and we have two big proof of concepts they're working on with some of those outsourced cfo services that serves the sas business oh that's great okay so how many customers you have one or two we have three customers and we have two proof of concepts which are separate customers and how much revenue does three customers make up oh they in total if we were to calculate them across the year we it would be ten thousand so we really are early stage great so 10 you basically have 10 000 an arr right now exactly oh i love it we're right at the beginning the baby is just popping out this is beautiful yes and if you knew how painful that is you'd know that it's not good i i will not even admit to try and empathize with you because i have no idea what that is like um but walk me through what they're paying for so how are you pricing so our pricing would look we know like everybody else's we've struggled with this one and what we've come down to is the fairest way of doing it is we base it on their arr and and there's very good reasons for that because we learned very quickly we did a lot of discovery with companies in the us to find out exactly what's going on with sas businesses and what we discovered is that in the very early days your metrics are pretty damn simple right just survive know your run rate get as many customers as you can and then as you grow and grow and grow and grow that metrics become more complicated there's more data points so that's why we've based it on the ar because the two of them reflect one another and and how do you see this as being different than like a bear metrics kind of concept i suppose in a couple of ways um we would see it different because of the genuine plug-and-play self-service model that we are really chasing because we don't want to be selling a whole load of professional services to make this work for you we want you to literally be able to pop it in plug it in and use it i'm not familiar with barometrics do they have a big professional services thing or i thought you just connected with stripe and boom it works yeah of course of course they're they're integrations that work like that but ours are going across all of the different systems across the business um and we concentrate solely on on sas so there's there are some differentiations around what we're doing and tell me why you and it looks like you're your best friend you guys have this great picture on your website uh well her name is brenda i believe right brenda jordan yeah why did you guys get into this why why sass why software okay because we had both separately completely had two different worlds i was working and building a digital marketing strategy company with a lot of analytics work that i was doing on behalf of clients and separately brenda was she had a big management accountancy firm and she was doing the same around revenue metrics and both of us were using existing platforms that allow you build dashboards and we said this is really frustrating which ones what were you using i don't think i'm gonna i'm not gonna diss them because they're the very well-known names that you guys all know right okay and but they're not designed for they are dashboard builders they're not intelligent tools and we said why can't you have intelligence built into the solution so that the metrics that you need to calculate are already built in i think there's a reason they haven't done that i think because their strategy is to go for a much broader market to start with whereas we think it's better strategies to go for a vertical that's a very fast growth one and then move into other similar verticals so it's a different strategy therefore it's a different kind of product yeah and also you know our the whole premise is let's build in ai and predictive analytics so that we can look at a whole industry and start giving far bigger insights and you can't do that if you're broad-based platform it's too hard how have you gotten these first three customers um basically we we got them in a kind of an odd way we got them from pitching at different events that we were going to because we were very lucky we got into some of the accelerators in silicon valley early on and when we were there we'd meet people and they'd say hey i've invested in a sas company you should talk to them or somebody would approach us at the end of the day and say hey listen i need your product so now we're really beginning to start working on our acquisitions so it's going to be different i'm sure than the way we originally got the first customers and but a lot of companies you know have started out with outsourced cfo services to help them generate metrics and those companies are desperate to find an automated way of doing that so that certainly looks like a good route to market for us who are some of the largest kind of outsourced cfo firms that sas ceos are using well there's early growth financial services which should be a very respected company in you know it's in the states but it's very big early growth financial services okay another one would be a company called escalam escalan yeah interesting so these are again like fractional cfos that you can hire exactly but they're they're they're pretty sophisticated in what they offer you you know they're doing financial planning and analytics you know so they're actually getting stuck into the business and really looking at the metrics and they don't see you as a threat this is a tool that they can use great question no because what's happening is they're getting pressure from their clients to say hey look why do we have to wait till the month then to get what's happening with the company we need things live we have to make fast decisions so that's that's pushing them they're also being asked for far more visualization in terms of how the information is presented so that's pushing them and then from their own side of things in reality those companies really want to be delivering higher end services and consultancy and they can't do that if they're stuck down in in the kind of dirty work of trying to get the metrics um you know up to the top so it may not seem intuitive but actually it is quite intuitive when you think about where the future is going anyway with automation security i imagine if you're a software ceo and and i go to your site and it says connect your stripe account or quickbooks i'm going oh do i trust these people how do you make sure that you communicate hey we're not to data is not going to leak we're not going to be hacked it's totally safe with us i mean you know our whole business relies on security so we're very very careful about how we built the platform to ensure that we cordon off access to information and make sure it's secure but in reality we found nobody's questioned that and i know we're very early that things will change over time but if you're desperate enough for an answer in a way i don't think it's a barrier to using a solution and of course we have to provide information that gives them that confidence about how we secure the data and i suppose being originally from europe where there's very very strict laws around security of data we've built a platform with those in mind and of course that that's going to happen everywhere it's just starting in europe i think it's going to everywhere when did you launch the company officially this year this year okay so what how launched this year and how much have you put into it so far in terms of money and we have put in about 200 000 so far we got some early age investment originally okay and and that 200 000 what's it being spent on is it developers mainly mainly developers but actually we did something which is painful but very worthwhile doing at the beginning we decided to really learn about the market because both of us have done products before and if you go out you know with something that doesn't have a good match not a perfect match but a good match you're just not going to get anywhere so we did a lot of work of researching with sas companies in in silicon valley in particular to start with and then so obviously we spent money on that and then the product the last question remain before we wrap up with the famous five you're just starting you have some proof of concepts you're going to have to use all the negotiation power you have to get a valuation on this million that you're raising to make sure you guys don't get like deluded a ton what valuation are you aiming for and when you get pushed on it how do you defend it oh we are aiming for five i think in reality we're going to get pushed down to three point five money or post right me pre money money okay and walk through again what does that negotiation sound like how are you you know they're gonna say you have no revenue you're not worth 3.5 and you say yeah we're worth 3.5 here's why what's it sound like okay so this is what it sounds like firstly when we've got our first investment we are valuing the company 1.6 million and at that stage we have absolutely nothing we had an idea so that gives you a base since then we've got a product the product works it's got customers and they're paying for it but on top of that we have had some investment from the accelerators that we've got part of in silicon valley and that's valued the company at the price we're looking at today that's interesting and so what do you see yourself doing in four or five years i mean if someone came to you today and offered you a million bucks to buy the company do you sell and go work on another idea or where do you see yourself uh no because a million bucks is this is a great opportunity you know so there's no way we're going to be selling at a million bucks we do think what's really going to happen is we're going to have a trade sale in about five years and you know if we could go to ipo we'd keep going but i think in reality for what's happening in the market now it's probably a trade sale what is that what's a trade sale i've never heard that well sorry that's probably a term that we use over here it means that we'll be bought by one of the the companies that we integrate with or that we add value to i see a strategic buyer exactly a strategic buyer very we're crossing the ocean here mate it's working i'm feeling the energy all right let's i thought i had managed to cross over that chat i'm spending two years in silicon valley but i you know you can't take the iris with me i hear you let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh it's got to be the mom test the mount the mom mom test which is a book to how you convince people early on to tell you the truth about your product not actually what you want they think you want to hear fascinating number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now oh i i always watch amazon i mean that's just the the guru i just follow them all the time number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business oh god that's a very good question i think probably i use things like serving monkey a lot to try and get feedback yeah that's good one number four how many hours of sleep to get every night oh god i wish i got eight but i probably get six and what's your situation married single kiddos i am with a long-term partner and i have lots of kids okay they're now not married and how many kiddos i have three kids three wow that's great and do you mind me asking how old you are maeve because my next question is take us back to your 20 year old self what do you wish that she knew oh i wish that she knew what i knew now which means don't worry about things too much if you have a good instinct and you know that you've got an idea follow it and keep going guys don't worry too much there you have it she's sold multiple agencies she now she's now going into sas analytics with her company cloud kpi launched just recently 2018 raised an early seed round at a 1.6 million valuation currently raising a million bucks aiming for a 5 million pre-money evaluation she thinks it'll probably be 3.5 million which is fine she's got three customers that are paying they're doing about 10 grand per month in arr i hope she comes back on in a year and says nathan we're doing a million bucks a month and i'm giving you five percent because you got so much customers from the podcast right maybe that's how it's going to work that's exactly it maeve thank you for taking us to the top no problem take care