How Dashlane CEO John Bennett grew Dashlane to $113.4M revenue and 500K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is emmanuel chalitis the ceo of a company called dashlane the world's best password manager he's over 20 years of management experience across the tech and media sectors before dashlane he was ceo of cbs outdoor friends evp of universal games and the founder of ce and ceo of flipside.com he began his career focused on navigation algorithms for the mars exploration rover emmanuel are you ready to take us to the top i am all the way to mars no offense but i think like mars exploration is a little bit cooler than password management why did you decrease your cool factor and go into password management um because i think at the end of the day uh short term i can have more impact on mankind by focusing on this good good answer good answer all right so you came on back in october uh last year 2017 told us a lot about the business give us a quick update uh for those that did not hear that interview what's the company do and what's your revenue model how do you make money so we are very focused on getting revenue from the right place which is from our users why because that allows us to be very transparent about our business model and to earn their trust we make money because they pay us for the services we provide not because we do anything with their data yeah and so we are um a few days away from uh passing the 10 million user milestone and um a large portion of these users are paying subscribers yep i think you told when you were last on the show you told me you had about 500 folks 500 000 folks minimum paying three bucks a month minimum and so minimum you're doing 1.5 million a month at that point but those were all minimums so you could be way bigger um we are bigger now i think uh you know we're getting closer to uh to uh very close actually to two million a month oh great um and and continuing to grow uh our revenue overall uh grew by uh more than eighty percent last year and could grow by even uh higher percentage this year sorry you say over 80 percent yes so i mean if you're doing if you're about to hit 24 million in ar you're saying about a month about a year ago in march 2017 you were called somewhere around 14 15 million that's a reasonable assumption okay great and just to be clear you're not selling data all that revenue is coming from a number of paying subscribers paying three bucks a month exclusively whether they are individuals or whether they are companies that buy uh the business version of our product for their employees i see so whether the consumer buys it or the or the person buys it directly on their own credit card or you're selling a team plan the average seat price still comes out to about three bucks uh three bucks on the individual side uh more like four bucks on the business side i see so many features i see so if i divide three bucks into two million in monthly revenue you're about to hit and what you have about 650 000 paying customers something like that uh directionally correct okay uh because it depends on on the mix between the two but you're in the rough ballpark and and one thing that really impressed me and emanuel i want to dive deeper on this about last time became on the show typically churn is through the roof on companies like this this low arpu high volume but yours you told me was less than one percent gross logo churn per month is that still accurate today and how have you gotten it so low no it's actually significantly lower what's what's probably unique uh manual how the hell do you go significantly lower than one percent of gross logo churn per month well because you look at it annually and if i depending on the courts i look at for some courts we have annual churn that is in the uh you know zero point three zero point four percent so that's how you perform but in reality our net churn is actually negative let me explain why because that's not coming from any upsell that's coming from the fact that we are in a business where there is a very long tale of conversion to give you an example we have people today that started using dashlane in 2013 that have used the free version for the last five years and because of gdpr because of facebook and cambridge and rtc i say you know what i gotta get serious about this i'm gonna get the paid version and so we add more people uh to our supreme subscriber accords every month or every year than we lose which are we effectively have net negative chart let me ask that differently it's a little easier to understand annually what is net revenue retention how far over 100 uh you could think about 105. okay that's pretty healthy at this kind of volume so good 105 percent annually and have you have you made any additional tweaks i mean you have a huge user base 10 million people you know converting 500 600 700 000 to paid is obviously a healthy rate but if you can add or eat out an additional percentage point it's huge for your business are there any tests or leverage you're pulling to try and do that constantly but our focus um and and it's gonna be more and more the case is on engagement rather than revenue we see revenue as a direct consequence of engagement another way to think about that is the ratio between let's say for instance mostly active users and paying subscribers is one of the most stable metrics in our business and so our focus is how can we get more engagement because we know by product of that is an increase in retention and in revenue so so you because you have a huge cohort you probably know the one or two things you've got to get a new sign up to do in the first two hours to make sure they're sticky what are one or two of those things the the two clearest indicator of future engagements are uh you know people that have added 10 or more passwords in their app very soon um and even more so people that have installed dashlane on two devices your phone your laptop the moment you've done that the likelihood that you stay for a very long time and that you end up becoming a premium subscriber is very very high so let's talk about the first how do you drive and make like what do you do in the interface or how do you drive 10 passwords added in the first you know five hours well one great example of a feature you talked about things we released uh we released in q1 um is a feature that aimed at mobile first users which are today the majority you know today we now advertise on national tv in the us which means a lot of people hear about us on their couch they take their phone they go to the app store they download dashing and what we've added is an experience where when you add when you start your journey with dashlane we just ask you to connect dashlane to your inbox to your mailbox to your gmail account to your hotmail account and we scan that directly on your phone purely client base and we identify because of the emails you've received all of the accounts you have we we can tell you which one are at risk which ones may have been breached and we allow you to import those accounts directly in dashlane that's one of the ways you drive more engagement with minimal effort from the user does someone actually have to sit on their phone and let's say you say hey nathan i've identified that you have a hundred applications with passwords like start verifying them on the mobile app and i click you know freshbooks i have to manually type in my phone for each one that password is there any way you can port them from online so great uh great question there are there are two things we can do the first one is that and that's actually a driver we use a lot we tell people if you now connect dashing app on your phone to your desktop will be able to import all those passwords from your browser because nobody wants to type in although right no that's the biggest friction point exactly so that's one of the ways we drive that engagement is to tell them now you can go get these passwords because they sit in your browser and actually it's a good opportunity to remove them from that browser where they're not secured interesting uh each month how many new users are you adding free users total um think about um a quarter million okay and what percentage of those are coming from mobile first versus desktop installs today think about uh 50 50. okay that's pretty healthy and how aggressive are you being in terms of like you know tv promotions direct paid spend well more and more uh because the challenge we have to address is very simple today the vast majority of individuals know about the problem the pain points related to digital identity but they don't even know that there are solutions yeah you know people our biggest competition is do nothing or it's an excel file or an evernote note which is a terrible id most people don't know that there is a solution that is why as the leader in this market we have to invest more and more aggressively to educate consumers to educate businesses about the fact that there is actually a solution that makes good sense i mean tell me what more is though i mean are you talking like you're spending a million a month five million a month how aggressive are you being on direct paid monthly um today you can think of us as spending uh we are below a million a month but that number is is quickly growing got it yeah north north north of 500k a month absolutely yes it's closer to a million than 500k okay and you've raised capital how much have you raised...