How Fresh Relevance by Dotdigital CEO Mike Austin grew Fresh Relevance by Dotdigital to $550K revenue and 500 customers in 2025.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is mike austin he's the co-founder and ceo at fresh relevance a serial entrepreneur he found that his first software business owner is 16 and has been developing software and software businesses for more than two decades mike you're aging yourself yeah a little better give it away sometimes all right you ready to take us to the top uh yeah sure okay tell us about the company so what's fresh relevance do so we're marketing technology platform um we work with online website so mainly uh retailers at the moment um and we help them to to maximize the number of uh people who come to the website who will then um convert buy stuff we do behavioral marketing for that um that can be on the website itself or in emails or in other channels okay and how do you price this thing what's the average customer pay per month or per year to use the technology so it's um it's a subscription model um so and it the pricing varies depending on the size of the company um and how much of the functionality they use so they have different modules um the average is somewhere around twenty thousand dollars annual okay got so it's called something like maybe fifteen hundred dollars per month something like that you know as i said there's a big range you know a small website using little functionality will play a lot less big big big big company with big websites lots of functionalities you can pay a lot more how do you measure big or small and you price against it like for example never number of monthly impressions right or mayu's or things like that yeah um exactly so so so we use um monthly page impressions on the client's website or websites okay and what else do you upsell against features seats um yeah primarily features so we have module advising so we have a core then we have different modules you can add on which add on different functionality different types of label marketing and um different channels as well so we do email personalization we do web personalization at two of the very popular channels to be handled okay that's good now put this on a timeline for me when'd you launch uh so we laughed in 2013 um so i've been running about uh just about six and a half years now congratulations most don't make it past the first so 2013 was launch date and how many customers are you serving now today um you cut out there mike how many and that's um just coming up to 500 now about 700 yeah and about two-thirds of those are in the uk um but we're expanding pretty fast in uh northern europe and in north america take me back we're getting some deja vu here for a second your first 10 customers do you remember how you got them um yeah so i mean myself and the co-founder have been in the marketing um industry physical digital marketing industry for quite a long time since really before there's digital marketing industry um you know we set up an esp back about 10 years before this business and we built that um grew it out eventually sold it and so we have a lot of contacts in the uh the kind of client base particularly in the uk so um quite quite simply we started pitching some of our existing contacts okay and when you sold the company how did you make sure that you still had the ability to contact those customers even though you sold the company to somebody else um well i mean it's it's really um from a legal point of view we had a non-compete period which was about six months and that wasn't really a problem because it took us um you know a year or so to build even the very first version of fresh relevance so you know there wasn't any legal difficulty and beyond that it's just a matter of personal contacts there's no saying that people buy from people and that's that was the way we got started between between 2012 your first line of code in 2013 how much total did you sink into the building mvp before your first dollar of revenue well faced in that way um i mean we had a team of uh basically four of us to start with um so over that period it must have been it must have been north of a hundred thousand dollars but i don't know exactly yeah okay so hundred thousand dollars now did you guys uh bootstrap are you bootstrapped today or if you raise capital so the mature so in the early days we um the founders put in um sort of founder finance um which we did partly from the side of the previous business so you know we're in a fortunate position in that sense and that's allowed us to do things that typical bootstrap startup like our previous one actually which was fully bootstrapped um you know you just can't do so so this time we're able to do things faster we're able to engineer things better as well from day one which was kind of luxury you know because um a lot of startups you know have to build things in the the quickest cheapest simplest way in order to get it to get it right whereas we were able to say okay so this is going to be a thousand times bigger in in a couple of years time what do we need to do in order to get that right so we're able to make some some good decisions at the start um you know and that was really very helpful yep now did you when you say founder money at the beginning are you talking like you know half a million into the company guys put in what did the founders contribute early on um it was it was a little bit less than half a million dollars okay and then have you raised anything today or you know you're still going to that 500 grand yeah so um we we grew organically with that for quite a long time actually so um we took our first round of outside investment which is essentially a series a 2.15 million pounds what's that two and a half million dollars roughly um in uh 2017 so about um two and a half years ago now okay and what's the team look like today how many people so we're just about 50 people now 50. okay how many engineers uh broad definition of engineers um about 20. 20. okay and now do you have do you have a strong kind of sales motion how many how many sales reps that are actually carrying a quota uh so we have about um 12 sales at the moment so i think in that sense it's it's kind of a typical b2b sas business where you know you have quite a lot of sales engagement before companies will put down a revised fairly big check for an annual contract so yeah so about about about a quarter of the company of sales and and what had you garner revenue to prior like before you know bringing on your first sales person well um one of my co-founders actually is is a sales person besides a co-founder so he starts with that um so we took our first sales person uh about nine months in and at that point i think from then we were at about 20 clients again 20 clients and can you give me a general sense of revenue scale back then that first year oh um tiny um i mean the first year i i i don't know fifty thousand dollars or something it was um it was very very small you know and obviously that was growing something like the first month which was about a thousand dollars it was just uh you know from like one client yep and what do you think you'll break this year uh so we're on track to about five million dollars this year okay that's good now can i take the 500 customers number you gave me earlier times 1500 a month which is the 20 000 acv that would put you at about 750 000 a month right now on revenue i think that might be a slightly high um it is yeah it's slightly high because our client base um is that that that 20kcv is really what we're selling now so we've got quite a few clients who have grandfathered in on simpler plans or on sort of no no scale subscriptions so which is kind of what we were setting up to maybe a couple of two or three years ago yep well if you look at what uh just your mrr was last month what did that coming out about 400 grand 500 uh yeah yeah it's about uh in terms of dollars about um 350 400k got it and what's that up from a year prior um so we're going about um 30 to 35 percent and in late okay so you were doing about call 275 thousand dollars about a year ago something that will yeah yeah that's good growth um so you raised that money back in i think you said 2017. those investors i imagine are expecting faster growth right as a vc funded startup right with just 30 year over year growth how do you manage board expectations um so our investors are relatively patient i mean they're um one of the differences we see between pes in the uk and those in the us is the uh the scale of investment and the expectation on growth so you know in in if you get money in the valley then you can get a phenomenal multiple but you're...