How GeoSpiza CEO Sarah Tuneberg grew GeoSpiza to $468K revenue and 3 customers in 2019.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is sarah toomberg she's the co-founder and ceo of a company called geospisa which she founded after more than a decade in emergency management and public health in order to transform the way climate risk decisions are made she leads the team's the interdisciplinary team at geospisa on developing data-driven evidence-based solutions models and processes that reduce risk and enhance resilience all right so are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay very cool so just be clear yeah you are co-founder you are leading the company when did you launch the company what year correct uh in january 2018. okay so fairly new yeah yeah it's just about our second birthday and explain to us maybe give us a customer story how's the customer using you sure absolutely so um an example would be one of our customers is a large multinational brewer and they face huge climate pressures on several fronts first grain requires a lot of water it's very intensive and then their transportation processes require uh shipping on for example the rhine river which is highly in flux unpredictable things happening as a result of climate change so in the case of this brewer they would uh look at all of their various complex supply chain elements evaluate them in the context of various hazards drought sea level rise unpredictable flooding and then make a plan within the application about what they could do to reduce that risk and then evaluate in real time if those strategies are meeting their revenue targets their emissions targets their service targets whatever those might be interesting okay and what do they pay i mean what's your average customer pay per year to use this yeah so we have two products we went to market originally with a gov tech product this is where you go oh gov tech but it worked out great we have uh lots of government customers who really love us uh right about fifteen thousand dollars a year and then starting in august we went to market with an enterprise sas product serving two thousand companies benchmarking right 160 000 a year okay sorry you cut out right when you said that how many sorry 160 000 a year across how many folks in the enterprise uh it what how many customers do we have sorry i think you so you said another number before the 160. ah so govtech about 15 000 a year enterprise 160. so our move from govteck to enterprise global 2000 companies 10xing our revenue interesting i wonder why you move though so give me a sense of kind of what you moved away from so on that gov tech product are we talking like five customers or 500 or what was the size there 11. uh so still pretty modest but uh as you can imagine that that sales cycle is a tough one um and we started getting huge amounts of cold inbound from very large corporations asking us to help them with their climate risk management and uh we we explored that and then went to market in august and we have three customers at that 160 000 point uh 28 global 2000s in our sales pipeline after a net new so either in demo or sales negotiation stages really making progress interesting okay so let's let's unpack all this real quick yeah 11 customers on gov tech product at 11 or 1500 per year that's like call it 16 to 20 grand in arr you made the decision said you know what well hold on did you make this and you want to move away from that or you started getting inbound and you said we should switch to this new thing that people are asking us for correct we we really heard the market signal and we got just a ton of inbound a ton of asks we did a really structured exploration i talked to 25 ceos and cfos and risk managers and said what exactly are you missing what is it that you need and it was clear that we had a start to that and we we could meet that need so we really shifted to to meet the opportunity who was the first one that cold emailed you which company uh japanese deloitte i think was the first one okay and what did the emails say like what was the subject line do you remember uh we're working with a property and casualty insurer what can you do to help them with their sea level rise risk and they actually turned out to be our first customer do you wrote back and said did you ask how did you hear about us and what they say correct uh so we've we've found out that there's three primary ways that people have have found us one just a straight google search which baffles my mind that huge enterprise companies are searching for uh innovation through google but cool when they search what term do you rank for uh climate risk flooding risk disaster lots of disaster um and then the other two ways are bloomberg did a piece on us in the spring which just generated huge amounts of inbound and then also i spoke at the economist in london over the summer and that also has been incredibly powerful um how did you land the bloomberg piece they reached out to us and they must i mean do you know how they found you or why they asked you i think one of our competitors suggested us competition and then that reporter was like oh cool what are you guys doing and then [Music] i'm always happy to talk to a reporter so uh sure yeah let's let's chat that's interesting okay so the bloomberg piece and the economist piece in the summer of 2019 you think generated some of this inbound like the one from japanese delayed correct and and europe and all sorts of companies okay so now three customers 13 grand a month uh or 160 a year so what is that like 5 600 grand in arr uh so we're right about 12 000 in uh no sorry 60k uh a monthly recurring will hit about 500k this year with sites set on on 1.5 million next so just to be clear like this month basically you're at 60 000 a month forward-looking that would put you obviously at 720 000 in run rate ar run rate exactly that's great okay then those three customers are paying more than 160 000 per year right well we have our old ones that come along too oh god i got it fair enough we still service them they're wonderful that's great okay now did you just to calculate growth rate did you have any revenue exactly a year ago oh i think we maybe had like i don't know 30 000 an annual recurring an annual interesting okay so yeah basically enough call it two grand a month now you're doing now you're doing 60 grand a month a little different correct huge difference bootstrapped or raised no we raised so we did techstars boulder raised a little bit on that note and then in total over the lifetime of the company we've raised a million um and we also have been really successful at non-dilutive uh so we've gotten through pitch competitions you can see this check back here how much does it say i can't remember 4 000 or 40. i think it's 4 000. that's good but in total we've raised 500 000 in non-dilutive we have 3 million under consideration now we've really leveraged uh grants prizes pitch competitions all of those things they should not be underestimated yeah okay so just be clear a million in equity raised correct 500 000 on top of that non-dilutive grants correct and looking right now at 3 million in new grants right now all non-dilutive correct fascinating which government or entity uh so we've done well with national science foundation um also just i pitched a lot for a year so whether it's south by southwest or female pitch competitions they come with a lot i won a hundred thousand dollars in the chloe capital competition yeah interesting okay uh fill out the team for me how many folks on the team seven okay how many engineers five okay any quota carrying sales reps or just you uh i have no i have a sales team mate neither of us carry a quota we measure our net on net new meetings but uh not quota at this point so what i mean what do you set that at right you said 28 folks in the pipeline i mean what do you set you and your sales buddy how many demos you want to do per month how much inbound do you need to get that demo target yeah so we measure via net new meetings and we target 40 net news a month we feel like that's a flow we can handle um and then that's yielding the results we want i would say since we've only been at this new enterprise scenario since august we don't yet know exactly how the metrics are going to shake out um we're seeing it working i think q1 will be a real inflection point for us interesting any plans to raise additional capital besides the grants we'll see yeah i think again q1 seeing how it goes seeing how much revenue we can get and then what we service a global customer base and so i think there might be a need to fundraise to fund some global expansion uh yeah are you guys profitable right now are burning cash to grow no burning cash to grow how do you mind me asking how much how much can you sleep with uh oh i can sleep with a lot as long as i can raise it i can spend it as long as it's sufficient but uh we're burning about 50k a month...