How Enplug CEO Nanxi Liu grew to $131.5M revenue and 1K customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is Nancy loo shoe is named Forbes 30 under 30 and his founder of a company called in plug she's also founder of and Natalie bioscience which develops polymers and eliminates refrigeration for vaccines she's a UC Berkeley a num alum and Nancy received an Emmy for producing the Amazon TV show the VAE and ANSI are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right biotech TV Emmys what don't you do I can't board very easily so I gotta keep things interesting okay so tell us about in plug what's the business do and how do you make money yeah so in plug is a digital display software company so what that really means is for all the different screens and TVs you have in your office and you want to show custom content we are the software that allows you to control and show different types of content like social media your sales metrics your employee of the month and then you can easily manage all of it in our online dashboard so this is kind of like when I go into any building where there's a we work the elevator TV has one thing on it when I get off the elevator that's you guys how are those screens we love we work as a client got it so this is not a hey consumer who lives in the three bedroom home with three TVs in each bedroom use us to put things up on the TVs this is a hey b2b play hey company buy us to manage your support dashboard wait time to manage your events schedule on the TV above the kitchen that kind of stuff exactly it's all about improving your internal communications or your communication with customers got it and it's a business model of pure sass play your sass play although we do have hardware and that's our customers also purchased but our plan starts out at 143 dollars per month or one screen and then there's the optional device that you can buy for $1.99 okay and are most of your folks like was what the average customers you say pay you per month is that 143 for one screen typically our average customers pay against 400 dollars per month so on average they have call it three ish screens yes something like that okay nice pretty big it's like a lot of customers with one or two screens and then a lot of customers with over a hundred screens really so there's a huge gap in the middle yeah it's just how do you manage that dual focus yeah you don't need to beta a lot in our team to which way we prefer the larger customers but we get tons of leave everything we do is inbound so we actually don't even do external sales call all of our sales folks are inside sales so it's an interesting entrant so for the smaller businesses they actually typically take just as much time to close the larger businesses interesting yeah that's usually the case it's funny how it's usually the case and most times when I hear people tell your story that didn't say we decided to kill this business to only focus on this side of the business but you're still managing both we are okay okay good give me more the backstory here what did you launch the company started in the end of 2012 totally accidentally how we started the business at the time I'm serving as CEO for the biotech company which I had started my senior year in college and so I had gotten funding and I'm not a biochemist how much did you raise for that biotech company so today we've raised a couple million dollars and most of it actually non diluted funding it's a beautiful brilliant thing that you know is it by grants yeah grant so we were able to pave the first three years just from all these different grants and not give any equity away which is pretty cool friends like and for software company typically don't really qualify for these you know state grants that are about saving lives and whatnot maybe employed when they will save lives but most the time we're just helping optimize there's an EM plug bootstrap drove you raise capital we've raised money so we've raised a total five million dollars price taurah or equity era convertible note I just stayed convertible notes although we did do one amount that was the last one was this what do you mean by the last one was priced so we did we did we did converts one I was gonna say that is a heck of a lot of money to do only on a convertible note so you did a small around and then you have done a priced around since then altogether of five million differently how I'm also for Natalie we actually raised venture money so we took in a VC and so the second time I was raising money I was like okay you know I don't want to deal with schooling different investors in criminal notes I just want to raise one round one investor and very clean cap table yep and it's much cleaner today obviously than be the biotech company yeah so how is that I mean so you're wearing an EM puck sweatshirt which I'm gonna guess that means you're more into end plug than you are in the biotech company I mean are you still are you managing both companies at once I am okay how does that work it's interesting I said I come to the office or implied but on the weekends and then the non-core employed work hours I'm working on Natalie interesting and what's the team size a temp ugh today so employed here in our us office we've got 20 people okay and where are their where are the other offices and our other offices we run a franchise model so we have offices in Sao Paulo Brazil Melbourne Australia took care of Japan and you came and when you see of a franchise model does that mean you take your core tech white label it charges set up fee and then a cut of sales yes but your core team is 20 based in San Fran I Los Angeles Oh Los Angeles okay who came up with the white label model it was very accidental basically I spoke at the global YPO conference where I was on the main stage there was three to four thousand CEOs around the world very very large companies in the audience nobody actually wanted to hear what I was saying but I was going on stage right before Magic Johnson so you know people were kind of stuck hearing my story so I showed my story and then the former head for DHL the logistics company or in Europe and Africa came up to me it was like hey I didn't I didn't running to eat y'all for a long time now and I want to go into tech I want to do something different let me open your office in Europe and I thought he was joking but he wasn't and that a year later we had a office in actually person Bratislava Slovakia and the model that we found was going to be the easiest was he's going to invest all the money for putting together the sales team in Slovakia and then he was just licensed our branding and licensed our technology and it's been a beautiful model since then what about the fixed costs who is that is that is the office rents it on your balance sheet or his uh who's got or his P&L okay interesting that's great so literally it's just the technology yep how do you how do you deal with people in different areas wanting pieces of the tech customized certain ways yeah so we actually built a lot of enterprise features that were both for our customers there's a lot of our customers want to have these enterprise features that are you know instead of staying powered by employed which most of our screens say you can have the option of saying you know powered by we work or powered by Mariette and so because we already built that in it was actually easy to then extend those features to our distributors got it so you don't have a lot of inbound requests that would require a significant dev time to change your core tech yeah we had definitely a long conversation with the engineering team Salem an engineer sales like we really want this to close these deals at yours do you understand how not scalable that is so we try to make all of our features highly applicable for all of our clients and now what do you add today in terms of total customers paying for the platform yes we have over a thousand companies 2-0 software okay and is that are those obviously the the model what you make is very different if you're selling to them direct versus through a partner are those a thousand all direct yes those are all direct okay got it so you're not even including in those so how many partners do you have around the world yeah around the world we've got ten partners got and on average how many customers do they typically sell yeah I would say they average around 150 companies okay under 50 companies so if we I'm just gonna for a second just to make it simpler to talk about I'm gonna ignore all your partner channels which if they're listening they're gonna throw eggs at me but that's okay there's Twitter so you can throw them there you directly though a thousand customers paying you said earlier you have a are prove around 400 bucks I mean you guys are doing north or 400 grand a month right yep yep that's great now what's the revenue model like with your partners what do you take what cut yeah so it depends on the region so some regions because like Brazil things are just cheaper so we charge a different pricing to Brazil and then for our Japan partner Australia partner they're much closer to our own pricing and so it's tiered so for the early early batches a license they sell it's more expensive for done and then it gets cheaper as they sell more licenses yep economies of scale right yeah and is this generally a flick stay fixed flat fee per screen or per company you charge or is a percentage of sales typically it is a both depending on the company but typically it's a fixed fee per license fixed fee per license okay good that makes sense and what about growth so obviously we know we're gonna you're doing about 400 grand per month today in revenue take me back twelve thirteen months in December 2016 what we do and then about yeah we were doing yeah wow so you've doubled you over here that's great yeah that's amazing and where are you getting most your customer I mean how are they finding you or what's your CAC where are you spending the money yes so actually most Americans respond with a sales commission for all of our inbound sales reps but the other pieces of SEO and content creation so again all of our leads are inbound and I credit our head of marketing Colin Bobe of doing just a fantastic job of building that platform so we spend maybe only like now five hundred dollars on Google Adwords per month and then but we spend most of the other marketing resources on creating content good blog entries of writing about our industry writing guest posts so do you care about is that some do you measure fully weighted CAC so take the salaries of all your content and sales people divided by new customers per month and if so if you do care about that what is that number yeah so the CAC ends up being around eleven hundred dollars per customer new customer and that means you recover that and you know three months which is pretty healthy at four hundreds of months yeah that's great so do you get pressure at board meetings from these folks that have given you money to say hey be more aggressive with your spend get customers faster or you're getting Europe your payback super super low it's super good yeah so it's kind of interesting because so we raise this one round of funding and then we became cashflow positive two years ago and so the board is actually just myself with my two co-founders so whoever did the series a didn't require a board seat we did do a series a iceiceice raised angel rounds the the biotech company raised venture capital I thought you said you did I thought you said if you did a convertible no and then a price to equity around oh we did want but not all of them are converted ok got it so whoever gave you did you have a lead investor on the price round yeah this is so nobody there who set the terms so we just negotiated with the investor with with oh it was a single investor yeah got it okay so it was a single investor what was the seed how much did you have in before the second round what was the seed round 4.5 okay wait I'm concede round the one before the big one so you had you raise 500k first and kind of like this ongoing rolling basis okay got it so you you did it essentially a rolling convertible note and at some point one person wrote you go ahead was we want equity okay god the one guy or girl said we want equity now here's a 4.5 million dollar check how much equity would give me for that actually yeah okay wait I'm confused and it's not because it's me it's not you you the first money into the company was five hundred thousand via angels on a note there's no phone without we just raised basically everything on notes like the first I think check we ever took in this twenty five thousand dollars from a dentist okay and then we took in like $50,000 know that one hundred two fifty so a lot of our still unconverted okay but not from the same dent they're all from different people yes okay that's right like a fee because you just said you took most the money from one person no okay so you just you kept raising on convertible notes until somebody said we want equity yes what equity person but the other notes haven't converted I see so so which is tricky and I would not recommend it for other folks which is why when I raise my my for the biotech company afterwards we only took in one investor I get it I think I get it so let me repeat it back to you just to make sure I understand clearly you got a 10,000 and 20,000 a $30,000 check you negotiate it everyone was the same kind of cap and the same discount or you negotiated a different note every single time I got a $20,000 check there's like probably six different oh my gosh Nancy you you are brave okay got it so each one was a different negotiation and eventually maybe someone said I want to write you a bigger check but I want equity for it you negotiated whatever you know our value is X so you're gonna get this percent of the company but everyone else even after that was still just one-off notes we just didn't take any notes after that got it everyone had to do equity at the terms of your first equity around yeah and we actually just didn't need to take more money in it's something that we even debated ourselves but we're pretty just happy with how things are now that's great no that makes a lot of sense okay good churn is obviously critical in a SAS company what's your turn today it's about 1.2 percent per month and that's logo or revenue that is revenue okay revenue turn is 1.2 percent per month now when you add on expansion revenue at the end of a year are you into the net negative turn range yet or no [Music] yeah meaning and maybe you know what this means so I'm not talking down at all but your expansion what do whatever you upsell customers that is included so that is you're doing you're doing net net or revenue churn is 1.2 percent per month right okay so you're not negative yet but still healthy company okay good that's helpful and is your logo turn about the same logo turn is going to be uh ya know it would be higher okay significant hair like two three percent per month or okay that's that's all full understand but pretty similar interesting so what do you I mean what do you do with what you want to do with the company right do you ever like go oh I should sell the bio thing to only do this or sell this one to only do biotech or no no I think for me it's all about maximizing my time and often times I don't think there are more than really like 40 or 50 hours of productive hours per week for a single company and so I don't actually need to sleep that much so I have a lot of extra hours that I can just divide between multiple things and a last economics question here before we wrap up with the famous five how long do you assume or what do you assume lifetime value is on one of these customers uh yes so the average lifetime customer value and so typically if the customer will stay according just based on churn about four to five years no more and so the item ends up being what is that like 25k yeah at four hundred bucks a month across you know fifty six six thousand six thousand a year ends up being about twenty-five thirty thousand yep that's really really healthy economics let's wrap up here Nancy with the famous five one-word answers here number one what is your favorite business book favorite business book I have to say I love the hard thing about hard things that's a good one number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now I am really I I like everything that Bill Gates has done and it's still doing and Jeff Davis of course yep number three is there a favorite online tool you have besides your own well all of our team communication we use is slack so we like slack and you like comes back number four how many hours of sleep to get every night four to five I'd like to do more that's it that's important from your biotech company that makes you not have to sleep yeah right all right and what's your situation Nancy married single you have kiddos single no kids yeah that's good cuz if he's listening we don't you don't to need bad notes all right so no kid is getting do my me asking how old you are I'm 27 that's great last question take us back seven years what he was your 20 year old self no I wish my 20 year old self go and buy Bitcoin immediately are you do you have exposure there now I do yeah that's good all right there you guys have it from Nancy she would have bought Bitcoin earlier on even though Warren Buffett is saying it's gonna end badly we'll see what happens it's up for debate but anyways she's managing multiple companies launched her current company in plugged back in 2012 happen it helping companies control the many many screens throughout their buildings or their workplace for a variety of different things like we work or Marriott things of the elevators or anything like that they've got a team of 20 based in LA they raise five million dollars total currently serving about a thousand customers that pay about 400 bucks a month so 400 grand a month recurring revenue or about four point eight million bucks a year run rate right now that is up from about half that just 12 months ago so about 2.4 million run right back in December of 2016 two percent gross monthly churn so healthy their revenue turn is even healthier than that CAC is about eleven hundred bucks out to be is twenty grands to hoop super-healthy ratio there Nancy thank you so much for taking us to the top absolutely thanks for having me