How Fotoware CEO Anne Gretland grew Fotoware to $6M revenue and 4K customers in 2018.

hello everybody my guest today is an gret 'land and before joining her current company photo where she held the position of CEO at Campello group she spent 17 years at Microsoft and held several leadership positions in Microsoft Norway and Western Europe headquarters she's one of the founders of Oda the largest network for women in tech in the Nordics with 8,000 members she's educated in the USA and Norway and communications marketing and leadership and in 2017 she was named one of Norway's 50 leading IT women and are you ready to take us to the top I am alright photo where it's not your company it sounds like it sounds like you joined is that true yes I joined just before Christmas and I'm very excited about it okay so I want to dive into what it does here in a second but first how long had it existed before you joined a CEO well the company has existed actually for twenty years it was one of the first companies who invented something that they know now called software management or asset management it was founded by two photojournalists who worked in Norway and they wanted to have an easier way to get the pictures that they took into a database so they could share it with a newspaper and other journalists so they were one of the first in the world to actually make such a system and it turned out to be so popular that they thought hey let's let's stop being a journalist and start to making a software company so this is 20 years ago so this would have been 1997 then yeah Wow okay so 1997 so were they running it all the way up to just before Christmas when you joined a CEO they they were running it until up until four years ago when they have another CEO and then now they switch because you know they wanted to think a little bit differently they've been selling on-premise solutions mostly and growing organically selling big heavy high-end solutions and of course now as we know it's it's a digital transformation you're the cloud CEO you're the cloud transition CEO that's pretty funny so now that really was behind the CEO change it was going from on you're making annual corn revenue based off SLA agreements and service agreements you're trying to now transition doubt to a pure cloud model of maybe a pure place ass well at least a high very high percentage cloud we certainly will have as anybody some on premise solutions because some some customers just have that name security reasons I mean we have an amazing product and we have customers all over the world so we want to reach out to those markets where we don't have to have a partner it doesn't have to be in a city we don't have to talk with them they can buy online and you know we can help them the other cloud okay so this is curious I love this because there's a lot of CEOs thinking just like you that they're taking on Prem old solutions and trying to remember the cloud so this is gonna be a great interview let's understand where you are today so you join a year ago the transformation starts what is your revenue split today in terms of on Prem Revenue verse cloud revenue [Laughter] and we have been selling infrastructure as a service solutions and as you know we only just moved in our solutions into a cloud but it's not really platform as a service so it's not really cloud and so this bit though I say would be about 80 80 % premise in 2000 that's pretty good for two months of work well you know like I said they've been working on it for a while and then you know selling cloud but not real cloud so now what we're doing is having a completely self-service platform service where a customer can go in choose how they want to buy how many users do they have and then just basically do it online and if they want a special made solution them then they can contact us and they can contact our partners so on the set just the SAS Parker nor all the legacy revenue just the SAS product give me a general sense of size of customer on average what are they paying in a month are we talking 10 bucks a month 100 bucks a thousand 10 thousand because we have some small customers but we also have some large customers I mean we have some customers in the US and we have some customers in Asia and we have some customers in Norway there are buying our soul solutions so it would be anything from $500 a month to you know up to twenty twenty thousand dollars a month okay I mean it's it's it all varies because it all depends also how much storage you need yeah so you might be a small customer but you need a lot of storage because we have videos you have pictures and that means that you you need to buy extra storage yep so you don't include the storage in the monthly plans it's an upsell we do it we do include storage but if you have millions of mice that means that we're gonna have to buy extra storage so that means that you have to pay a little bit extra got it so so if I so you give me a range 500 to 20,000 a month if I forced you though into an average would I mean would you say somewhere like 3 4 5 K range somewhere in there is fair or no yeah like that okay right now yeah and who who is who are these buyers are they big publishers with huge assets on hard drives in their storage closet they want to move it to the cloud yes we have a wide range a variety of customers some of them are the big publishing houses and some of them are more marketing departments all over the world and we're seeing as I'm sure you know the damn solution sell a lot in the marketing space but what we have is we also have customers outside let's say the normal we have police customers we have evidence-based customers we have customers who are using our systems to to find and locate pictures that not only have been taken because they want to use them but but they have been taken because they're part of a criminal investigation for example how interesting very interesting so okay good so and what have you scaled this part of the business to how many customers are you serving now we're talking hundreds or thousands in general we have about 10,000 users worldwide okay and like I said some customers have many users and some I just have a few but yeah but but sickly why we want to go 100% into club is that we want to be able to scale yep yep because right now we're doing like a lot of customers were talking one-to-one we're selling one-to-one that we basically want to have a self-service platform where customers that don't require a special specially made system they can just buy it themselves so just to be clear there there are 10,000 seats across some amount of paying customers how many how many yeah good about four thousand four thousand okay got it so you've got on average call it two-and-a-half seats per customer yeah is that you and who is that what's their position typically inside that company it's well well it's also we don't vary in in terms of what the customer is so certain at certain times it's those who work directly on for example we have some museums so it will be the people who store and categorize typical librarians or or those who have responsibility for the pictures in other companies it will be the marketing managers in other companies it will be it will be the police where it will become typical photo journalists and journalists making you know and the huge newspapers making a story I'm making sure that they can get the pictures quickly and then the right size into the newspaper okay now and I think this math is wrong here and I know you're gonna correct me if I take those four thousand customers times a monthly ARPU average of three grand that puts you at 12 million a month which means you owe me a steak dinner I don't think you're that big though where's my math wrong and so yeah it's we we also have because we wanted the customers to get used to having the subscription way of thinking and so we have a lot of customers who have on-premise solution if we actually are giving us subscription revenue so yeah I think that I'm doing the wrong that's okay so generally I don't want to push to Aria but generally speaking are you guys doing north or south have caught three or four million a month today um I actually can't say because in my head I'm thinking Norwegian kroner but you are thinking you as dollars away sorry what what metric are you in I'm in the Norwegian kroner okay so how many of those I have no idea what they are but how many of those how many of those a month on average average I guess we would say if we'd say well I guess you would say a little bit more than yeah I guess it will be 400,000 and Norwegian kroner yellowcake got it and so that's kind of where revenue is today how do you think your business will grow as you shift to cloud well I know from experience that because I I was really shaped when I worked in Microsoft when Microsoft went from office to office 365 and when we went from on-premise server solutions uh sure I know that we will see a little bit of a dip in revenue but an increase in customers because we're getting more customers but they're paying less per license right because they're using a huge upfront amount but now they're paying a lot less and they're paying as they go and ask the use yeah so we will see in this year and and probably the next year as well in revenue but a huge increase in customers interesting because that yes exactly and so so also that's what I discussed with the board when I was taking on this...