How Crispthinking CEO Adam Hildreth grew to $20.5M revenue and 100 customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is Adam a hildreth he's one of the foremost global experts on how to keep people safe from the dangers resulting from user-generated content posted online he's worked with global brands governments and law enforcement for the past twelve years on issues including child grooming security threats and reputational issues Adam are you ready to take it to the top I haven't ate yeah okay good so tell us first I mean kind of what the company does and this is the b2c player or b2b player mom's buying this correct their kids or a business perspective mister protect from you know foreign hackers so we're so b2b play generally dealing with large and surprised global blue chip companies helping them manage the risks of user-generated content on social media so everything from people posting offensive content on their Facebook pages onto social PR crisis to threats to their executives and staff okay and so let's go with the first example you gave which are you know posts images posted on Facebook Facebook has enough issue trying to figure out what's you know you know not an appropriate picture on Facebook or not I mean how do you help them more who do you work with that face me I'll figure that out so we've spent 12 years developing some very sophisticated at our a I that understands a brand's nuanced requirements around images text posts video and the thing that's unique about our service versus anything else that's out those we actually apply a human wrapper so that's so AI does all the heavy lifting for 99 percent of the content and sometimes we just very fight with a human to make sure that a is and making those mistakes of course AI learns from that feedback loop as well can you give me a specific example actually name a company you're working with and tell me how they're using you yes also we work with coca-cola we work with Disney we work with Chanel so you had a large global brand okay so and women go deep on coca-cola so coca-cola we help them manage all of their own social media channels so they do a lot of outbound marketing a lot of outbound communication with that consumers and through those channels they receive a huge amount of inbound user-generated content all of that content flows through our services in real time is check to make sure it's appropriate for the Brown for that audience what if it's not what if the Joanne 1-3-1 on Twitter tweets her holding a Coca Cola beverage - the Coca Cola Twitter account and you daemon not an appropriate message who cares like what do you do about that so Twitter's slightly different and that we can't remove things on Twitter all we'd be doing is making sure that that wouldn't be used in any brand communications um where you'd probably be is a good example is a brand's own Facebook page so a brand will put out their Terms of Service to say what's acceptable and what isn't and if it falls out of those acceptable criteria then it will be moderated and removed hosting on the page versus if I post assassin on my profile exactly and then the other side of our business is a monitoring side of a business where we can actually we would have potentially be alerting their PR and their digital teams to a risk that was happening and just keeping them in the loop but we do that 24 hours a day 365 within minutes and our job is to get someone out of that at 3:00 in the morning if a crisis is happening on social media okay yeah sorry I had to something you were kind like a security firm you're not a security from you're more of like a an analytics and AI driven kind of social media analytics software where you know responses and responding to threats yeah so we're more dealing with we still consider ourselves in the risk protection space but more from a marketing risk protection rather than a security risk protection space a ton of CMO is buying us to making sure that their their brand reputation their brand image is maintained and if there is something happening if if something's trending that's mentioning their brand or a celebrity they work with they need to know about that yeah the sooner that they're forewarned about is the sooner they can do something about it yeah tell me about what you know I don't know but on every customer cohort but on average what's a customer paying you per month or per year for this sort of service I'm very dependent on every one it it's thousands of months at starting point and that can move up as they take different services there's in different languages okay but but generally speaking you said five Fiza you could have you said five thousand a month it's thousands of months that we charge and it varies it depends on customer to system okay got it yeah I mean again that's why I try and get it on an average are you generally know going after Midmark enterprise the enterprise is pretty much our entire customer base is large global enterprises okay so every ACV is I mean are most of them pushing or north of six figures yes all right Georgie okay great all right give me more the backstory here when did you launch the company so company's been going for 12 years the background was Iran ones first virtual worlds and social networks back in to be found at that in 2000 2001 there's a company called double and we employed more human moderators that were doing this job to make sure that our social network was safe for advertisers than anything else so I left that company in 2005 to found crisp so we could focus a hundred percent on developing technology they could do all the heavy lifting and analysis rather than people got it okay so as 2006 interview bootstrap the company have you raised we bootstraps and then we did high net-worth individuals and today we are essentially profitable albeit that we push our profits back into the growth as you'd expect yeah you're operating a break-even yeah how much total have you raised we did in the region of 7 million UK ok got it and again the where those boat was that a note from individuals or did you ever do inequity around a series a we didn't do a formal equity round we did high net worth funding an angel type funding okay got it but again a debt convertible debt or equity no all equity all equity okay great that's good it's interesting to me by the way when was that last Ron you said it was Oh 8 it's four years ago was all a strong concede on't really have your pulse in terms of the funding you know the current state of funding in London and Europe ah we do because there's a ton of people that engage with us all the time and it seems to be on the up to be honest from our perspective we're not you know that's not so and actively engaged in but it sounds good and that we can't put anything in terms of writing in there in terms of where we are but yeah it sounds good and and walk me through scale your I'd say so how many customers have you scaled to so we work for thousands of brands across the world and we probably have in the region of a hundred core billion customers and then work throughout all of their global organization and business-wise we are 7580 core people R&D headquartered in Leeds in the UK sales teams in London New York San Francisco okay got it so so UK us kind of remote seventy five people you said a hundred kind of build customers but they represent many many more brands worldwide is it accurate that's correct yeah okay and then I mean we can generally if each of you said earlier you're a CVS are north of six figures each one coming can I take you know a six figure called a hundred grand a CV times a hundred billed customers and assume you're north of 800 grand per month right now in mr are you could assume definitely okay I mean are those numbers generally IRR you way above that on my way underestimate we will be above ten million oh that's realized yeah you're past that already or you'll pass it this year we're already past that oh you already passed that good well yeah just just and just to be clear 800 grand per month is is ten million annually yeah absolutely and we messed up what do you think you'll grow to I mean how aggressively are you growing where were you 12 months ago I'm so we're growing at circa 70 percent year-on-year we expect to be growing further than that going to the hundred percent plus so about a year ago you were doing what call it six nine and air are yes after that yep and then and then you think you'll you'll be able to get up to call it 17-inch by the end of this year we will be yeah where's most that growth coming from all direct sales at the moment so going out with a new brand customers I mean this space is absolutely on fire if anyone looking at social media how toxic and illegal content is being dealt with how they're managing the content that's there and the space is absolutely huge we've spent 12 years educating the market now sort of the media's done the education for us so it's it's inbound it everyone's on top of this yep but in terms of like actual revenue growth would you say it's more coming from expansion revenue across your current customer base or bringing on net new customers so mixture place okay there's no there's no one core strategy you're driving harder sorry two seconds yeah key repeat that yeah Adam there's no one core that you're driving harder no absolute he's both equal okay great and then of the 75 people you were breaking on Rd but how many of them are salespeople I run full even less than that so we are now in a big sales and marketing expansion exercise so we have like five so far and your your plan work absolutely so everything else was in engineering and support side okay churn is critical in a business like this talk to me about your turn I'm tiny very very tiny amount of chin are you talking gross are you talking logo turn a revenue turn or both or what no kitchen is tiny and a nasty odd in terms of net net tune which we gots to upsell than anything else it's positive okay so if I asked you a different question which is annually your your kind of net revenue retention it sounds like it's over a hundred percent how far over a hundred percent let's say hundred ten percent okay so that's pretty healthy that's good so your your expansion revenue more than makes up I could basically you know ten points your your any gross kind of revenue you lost that's correct yes and and when people do cancer your service why typically are they cancelling or downgrading so generally speaking when we look at Jen it's because they've done singular campaigns or UGC based campaigns where we haven't necessarily rolled out globally for their brands in questions got it alright last few economics questions here before we wrap up with the famous five a cat what are you willing to spend to acquire one of these six-figure first year ACB customers we don't give out that information right okay well let me ask it differently I mean how aggressive are you being with payback period how quickly do you like to get paid back oh yeah a year okay good so if it's a hundred being off as a six-figure a CEO you're totally comfortable spending first year a cv on acquisition yeah but it's a lot less than that at the moment okay so so your way south of a 12-month payback period wick correct yeah that's our maximum period that we've half yet got it and in articulate kind of the market conditions that would make you say I'll be more aggressive with payback in other words you'll be more patient in terms of getting paid back versus getting it down to one month what market conditions would judge that I don't know because we haven't really had that trouble to be honest you know this is a this is a market is pretty self-explanatory it works well and we we charge you know it's it's a high-end ticket that's there so I'm not sure what would really affect that from our perspective well if you if you want to beat out some of your other competitors in terms of acquisition and you and your half and you can afford to wait long or get paid back you might be able to grow faster for example that might be one condition yeah sure I think it would be more on actually expansion capital into our business so more sales heads that we'd actually be adding on versus what we'd be doing with regards to the payback time for that it'd be more their overall headcount that we did be increasing well just to be clear payback period is is a fully diluted metric so you would include payback and Sal you'd include salaries of salespeople in that metric we would yeah but we'd be we'd also be expecting to be increasing on the same level if that makes sense sure we didn't I wouldn't say that you being affected it what it would though I mean if unless you're saying people ramp up to quota immediately of usually there's a pro forma you put together you have six-month ramp up period or something like that right we do we have a six-month ramp up period absolutely you know yes sorry I'm just going anyway around here so Adam wrapping up here with the last economics question then well then one the interview talking about lifetime value it can be dangerous because it can get really big very quickly but what do you soon lifetime value is minimum [Music] [Applause] we don't have that number at the moment that we would be prepared to to give that it's not something you used to guide you we down at the moment because our churn is so low and its annualized and they're occurring and it's not a part of the tends to leave it so it said it's a it would be a bad number for us to be looking at yeah all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one with your favorite business book I don't have one I don't read those books okay number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now absolutely all over Zuckerberg okay number three with your ever online tool for building the business all Google sheets anything to do without that we can track KPIs and number for how many hours of sleep you get every night eight and what's your situation married single you have kids I've got a partner and we've got three kids okay three kiddos good and how old are you I'm 33 and last question what he was your 20 year old self knew [Music] that to pick the right people around you interest them to run the business guys there you have a picture right people around you he's helping folks Brant large brands manage social media especially when things start trending or there's risks associated with user-generated content 7 million dollars raised team of 75 people based in the UK US another remote location serving over 100 paying customers first year ACB is north of six figures so 6 million and there are about a year ago now up to 10 million hoping to go about above 17 million by the end of the year this year 110% net revenue retention annually thank you so much for taking us to the top Adam preciate it