How Cremeglobal CEO Cronan Mcnamara grew Cremeglobal to $3.5M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is cronin mcnamara he his passion is in applying data and predictive models to solve problems to help people to make better decisions his vision is a world where everyone makes better decisions based on real data and expert models today he's building crem global we're going to jump into it today cronin you're ready to taste the top sure thing nathan all right so what is creme global doing if you want to follow along at home at c-r-e-m-e-global.com sure well global is a data science technology company that i founded over 10 years ago it was a spin out from trinity college in dublin and what we do as a company is we create and deploy data science models and data structures we we have a platform for deploying those on the web in a user-friendly way and we deliver those to uh big companies and government agencies all over the world from here in ireland okay and um is this specific to any industry like life sciences or no yeah yeah well our core area has been in food nutrition chemical personal care and cosmetics so all around the life sciences space so we do a lot of scientific modeling for those industry groups looking at the chemicals and nutrients and products and how that can have an impact either beneficial or potential safety issues for consumers i suppose the unique thing about crem is that we deliver all of that through a data science technology platform as well as with kind of expert services to back that up so so cronin let's seven of the ten top cosmetics companies let's just and this is gonna be horrible because we're way more sophisticated than i'm about to say but just because my audience will know it let's say the kardashian clan use you and all their makeup products what kind of what kind of data will you be giving kylie jenner about her lip gloss sure well the basics can be all about the potential safety of those products and making sure that consumers will not be exposed to any ingredients that could cause you know harmful effects even rashes or potential more long-term effects and then secondly it can be all about the benefits of those products so and when those products are used in combination with all of the other products that people use on a daily basis we have a lot of data on all of that and the benefits of the aggregate how did you get that data what are your inputs yeah good questions so we've collaborated with industry over the last 10 years or so to put together these data sets and they come from various sources some of the data is open data that we can curate from the web other data sets come from market research companies and those data sets were gathered more for marketing purposes and we've repurposed them for scientific modeling around these product formulations and then thirdly we've actually created data portals that industry have been uploading data to for the last number of years how do you incentivize that um we well the industry has got together through a trade organization that and they want this data to be available industry-wide but this is very proprietary data so we've created secure data portals where everyone can upload data in a structured way we anonymize that data and make it available in a scientific model for the industry groups to then use to make better decisions interesting okay and help me get a sense here i mean you're working with it sounds like big companies on average what's what's the company going to pay you per year per month for access to your tools yeah we generally work on an annual um fee um and it's delivered as a web service but it's more an enterprise business model in a sense in the way we do business it's a business-to-business kind of enterprise sale and that the license fees for our products can be anything from twenty thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars per annum for an organization just depending on which data sets they need which models of how many people etc need to access those models so what would you would you is it fair to say the average those closer to the lower end of that call at 20 30 000 bucks a year and i guess the average is around around the 40 market oh okay so okay so not not not so much there that's good so you're right in the middle and how why would someone pay you a hundred thousand a year versus twenty thousand a year is it based off like number of skus or just number of data sets or number of seats what axes do you use yeah it's not necessarily the number of seats because there may be only a small number of specialists within these organizations that need access to this type of information and also then whatever data sets so we could have us data european data south american data and different databases built uh that we curate and we've installed in those um systems for them so it just depends on the combination of models and data sets that they require okay and put this on a timeline for us when do you launch the company okay um 2005 we launched so we've been around a while that's a long time okay and have you from a capitalization perspective did you bootstrap a raise bootstrap okay still bootstrapped yeah we've been um organically funded through just customers and building up the products and services over the years customers are the best investors how many customers you have today um it's not like in the thousands it would be more in the um under 100 customers so it's actually kind of i was your model in the thousands you'd be a massive multi-billion dollar company you only need two or three customers to make this thing worth it so so you said how many do you have that's where we're trying to get to so we have in the in the order of 60 to 100 customers you know yeah and that's all you need and then and then kind of break down what your team looks like right now to service those 60 customers how many people on the team great question so we're a team a team of about 35 people all based here in dublin ireland although um 90 percent of our businesses outside of ireland but we can support that through um online support and then travel to uh meetings and conferences so it's it's quite a unique team and that we have the software engineering team which um are responsible for the engineering around all of our platform and data science cloud services and we have a data science team specifically who build out these models and and design the models and data sets that are required now we have a specialized food nutrition and chemical and toxicity team where scientists with phds and masters in those fields who really understand the main very well so those three groups collaborating together is quite a unique proposition and i think that's what our clients really value so 35 people based in dublin right now churn's critical in a sas company what's your churn look like today yeah that's a good question as well but um we're not purely sas so um about a third of our businesses sas and the rest is services and those services break down as two different things actually one we have those lot models we can license which is the sas part of the business secondly clients might say to us you know what we're not going to license that but can you run some number crunching projects for us and give us a report so that's the services part of the business and the third part is quite interesting now and that is um that the clients are asking us can you build us a new model that looks at a slightly different angle our requirement around our own business operations our own product development so the third part of our services are just the third part which is the services business is actually putting together new models and data sets for clients and then deploying them on the cloud so same question on churn right so you can still have services churn we we tend to have fairly low churn uh we have long-term kind of relationships with our clients how low i mean are we talking four percent a month one percent a month because um annually it's in the low single-digit percentages and and we could have three-year license agreements with clients so it doesn't go month by month in or like a normal sas business we tend to tend to sign up clients for annual licenses by the way there are plenty of sas companies that do annual licenses yeah now are they paying for three years all up front not necessarily yeah so it's a three-year contract they pay it each 12 months exactly yeah okay do you have meaningful pricing do you have meaningful pricing levers where you can drive real expansion revenue and if so what do you expect a year one customer to expand to in year two and we don't really have the metrics to back that up because we're not dealing with the hundreds of customers so uh they're quite unique in their requirements some will stay more or less the same for every year on year others might double year on year and then some might cut back again so of your team of 35 is there anyone dedicated to kind of customer success and upselling exactly yeah we've we've set up our business team to be um on account management um focus so um we do a lot of outreach for new business but of course um i guess the vast majority of our business comes from retaining those clients and customers that are already here yeah so sorry chronometer the question is so how many of your 35 are based on account management or customer success yeah yeah okay we have a team of about seven or eight in a purely on customer success okay and are they quota carrying on based on expansion revenue um a smaller number would be quote carrying about three people in our team at the moment are are purely based on you know um commission typed uh business mike my question my question though is are you...