GetAcceptrevenue & funding

hello everyone my guest today is samir smite she is the ceo and founder of get accept and believes that great companies are built by passionate individuals who focus on execution and team building he's a husband and father of two kids who's convinced of the day that each day has 28 hours you can sleep when you die samir are you ready to take us to the top yeah let's go nathan i'm gonna see you again how many hours of sleep you get every day oh no if you asked me yesterday i would say one because the kids were up playing with me no no but normally i try to get at least five but five five to eight is good i don't know how you guys do it you know i am a ten hours a night kind of guy i take a nap it's a beautiful thing and i always feel great yeah that's that's because you don't have kids maybe you have but i don't know listen i learned i don't have any kids that i know of some here unless you have news you want to deliver to me all right nothing that you need to care about at least yeah all right very good so tell us about get accept um you know we had you on a year ago well in november 2016 when you were on last you shared you were doing about 520 grand in annual revenue 1100 customers where are you at today so we're just about 1.7 million today in arr great uh we have about four thousand seven hundred customers uh running on get except paying customers who also have the trials and and and uh like the free free freebies that i call them running on get accept and continuing using it but that's that's the core data that's great so 1.7 means you're doing about 140 grand a month right now 4 700 customers paying on average about 30 bucks a month yeah that's correct something like that okay good so that's significant growth right since when you last came on the show how have you driven most that growth and actually before you do that tell people what get accept is in case they didn't hear the first interview yeah so get accept is the e-sign and document track platform made for made for sales people so we help sales sales reps close more deals by controlling documents that they send that by helping them to take the next step by automating the next step and yeah by helping them to get that signature on to that contract all right so tell me how you went from again a year and a half ago doing 500 grand a year to now doing 1.7 so much focus has been like growing growing the sales team both inbound outbound sales team uh growing marketing and and as i said to you last time i think like the virality of get accept is our best like source of new customers every cent document is a marketplace for get accept and as we can get our customers to use our tool in the right way with the full like set of features with video with chat and so on everyone else will want to use it who is a recipient so that's where we get our customers that's great and talk to me about churn what's your turn today and how do you manage it it's still super low we've been focusing on that quite much uh during the autumn here it's still just below one percent uh on monthly and that's the logo churn per month yeah that's that's logo chart gross or net gross gross okay very good and is revenue basically the same revenue churn yeah okay exactly that's great big over over-handed this is really i mean i want to give a credit here assuming that you know you're calculating it the right way i'm sure you are i mean it's very rare i i see someone selling at a 30 month price point to smbs and their churn is so low i mean how have you kept it so low but churn has always been focused for us so onboarding has been something that we spend a lot of time in uh both like in the beginning very personal onboarding i even hold hand on the on the two user deals just to let get to know how they work and so on but on on top of that we also of course like develop the product uh and just helping them understand how they can use the product in order to close more deals and i mean if we help a sales rep close quota um they will not churn so so and and the good thing with r2 it's so close to the money uh and with that i mean it's the very end of the sales funnel so i think that's that has prevented churn a lot because they they see really like okay this works i close more right now if you compare it to lead generation tool they they get bunch of leads but if they don't work with the leads in a good way they will never close more anyway so that's harder to like really defend like okay it's it's this helping me close more and then i get more leads but yeah you get the drill is there any channel or partner that's driving you kind of a significant amount of customers for example i know you work closely with hubspot yeah so i mean all the crms hubspot pipedrive microsoft dynamics we have some local here in the nordic region that are grabbing a lot of a lot of leads to us so partners has always been focused for us it took a while to get there and to get their like um interest in us but now when we have it it drives a lot of leads well so tell me about the microsoft deal right what what what do you get from it what do they get for from it and how did you kick off that partnership microsoft is to be honest like a a bad one to look into because that's one of our latest ones so we are really not into like that partnership so well uh so so to be honest that that's not a good tell me a different one to talk about well let's let's talk about like hubspot and pipedrive they are selling to the same kind of customers as we are uh we have a tool that helps their product get more sticky and also helps their product to get get better uh so that of course drives driver's engagement from their part what do they do though like will they will they email their user base about your tool or is it more like they build your product into their interface somehow discussions be both they we have built the product into their interface through through extension chrome extensions to be honest uh and i mean what we do together with them as as they see that we have similar customers that we can help them we have done webinars we have done co co like newsletters together and and sending out blog posts and and so on so it's a combination of course we want them to do more but they are bigger than us so we need to work a little bit extra for it of course yep yep that's interesting so so do you pay them a kickback when they drive your channels or it's all kind of soft co-marketing no it's softco marketing today we've been uh discussing that especially with with some of the other firms that that are a little bit more local for example here in the nordics uh we have been discussing like how to bundle like your tool plus our tool to get get a better like product out to our users yeah what's your what's your cap today when you do pay to acquire customers what are you paying typically 220 oh god you knew that right away yeah why is that top of your head all the time no not top but we are we're we're crunching numbers right now so i preparing for things preparing for things what what uh what kinds of things are you preparing for are you are you raising no we're not like super hurry uh because our as i don't remember i said last time but we we mainly do my annual contracts uh the last number is like 80 is on annual contracts and we take everything upfront making us cash flow positive uh on the month-to-month basis um so as long as we don't fill up with more people and so on we will be cash flow positive what's your team size today sameer 26 26 okay all in sweden no no so we are six in six in u.s uh i'm right now in sweden to build the dev team but normally i'm in u.s uh and then and then we are the rest are the rest are here so 20 here in in sweden then we have some consultants uh we also have a french guy selling for us uh being more of a reseller partnership that's great and remind us all again what you're launched company in is sorry i didn't hear it what year did you launch the company in uh we year uh 2016 january oh 20 good so i had you on fairly early then when you came on last you were i guess 11 months old yeah yeah interesting and what about funding have you raised or are you still bootstraps no but we raised like after yc so we went through yc's winter 16 raised money in march um we did we did a little bit of a bridge round because our existing investors saw that we had something fun going on so they wanted to push in some more money so we're raised in total 1.8 a little bit above that and tell people on a bridge around sometimes people do it as debt sometimes as equity how would you choose to do your bridge we we continue on the y combinator safe so you just let it roll yeah yeah interesting um okay very good uh and then uh to walk me through you know as you're running numbers it sounds like you're in the middle of doing this right now how do you think about lifetime value yeah it's really interesting because we have so low churn i've always been discussing that as as hard to set and we we did run our attention and so on and we see that we have a net negative mrr retention uh of how many how negative 100 fam uh 105 okay got it so as i said differently samir sorry i just understand make sure i get that clear so each year you've got about 105 net revenue retention meaning your expansion revenue exceeds your churn revenue by a five percent margin exactly yeah uh that's great yeah that this is why i always ask the lifetime value question because a guy like you you could actually rationally argue your ltv is infinite but if you make decisions around that then you get in trouble yeah yeah yeah i mean that was what i we had some discussions with with some i mean vcs are always following all these y combinator companies so we have these discussions like and i said like but the churn is so low so i i can put any number on the ltv there and they were like no you can't and now in the end the numbers actually say that i can't so we're actually calculating with the 24 months even if even if we should calculate with more yeah that makes a lot of sense so 24 months at about again 30 bucks a month you put ltv somewhere around 700 800 bucks yeah yeah interesting and then um i i knew obviously what you did back in november of 2016 but take me back a year from today so in june of 2017. do you remember what you were doing revenue wise then oh june 17. i can check i love when i have a c on and they have their metrics right in front of them samir you were ready man june 17th so about uh 670 670. okay good yeah so you've you've more than you've more than doubled year over year yeah so yeah absolutely we almost tripled so we've since since january we have had the 75 percent growth yeah that's that's on the on the arr so what do you see i mean how do you take this from where you're at today and go from 1.7 year to 10 is it just doing more of the same thing or do you it bring out new products and do enterprise plans what's the next step so the next step for us is is developing more into the sales enablement space we have been very like centric into the e-sign at the end of the process so what we've tried to do now is more yeah get get it a little bit earlier in the funnel uh but also like i mean gdpr has been one big thing and that has put europe into digitalization phase so you see that coming up a lot uh and in the same time we see sales enablement growing a lot over here so i just talked to hubspot like two weeks ago they're actually growing their business more in europe right now new sales than than in than in the us meaning something is happening in europe so we will focus a lot in europe uh the next coming year to to just grab more market here uh are you right now in any acquisition talks with anybody no you don't want to sell and i i said that to you last time no we're not selling hey look i always ask i could easily see someone like a hub spot coming in and offering you something you know yeah no we've been we've been poked but uh no not interested yeah what are you waiting for like what what do you want to see or is that just something you don't even think about no we don't i mean we don't think about it i love bringing building i built i love building the company i love getting new people educating them get educated by them building teams grow this culture i mean arriving here in sweden like a couple of weeks ago was so fantastic seeing the team being exactly what i want the team to be sharing sharing knowledge working together as a team in a very sales oriented organization is is cool to see all right samir let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh good uh right now i read steve jobs biography so that's not a business book but it's something i can recommend to everyone to read number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now no not really okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own oh right now i just love hubspot they release so much nice new things uh so i love them number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night i would say six then okay take an average that's good and what's your situation married single kiddos married and two kids two kids all right fantastic and how old are you uh i'm 32. 32. all right last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew oh uh good question uh yeah to be more aggressive and to be more uh not focusing on analyzing things but just doing things guys be more aggressive just do things don't analyze so much coming from samir launched get accepted in 2016 in the first 11 months screwed about 500 grand in ar now fast forward to 2017 and june was doing about 670k in ar and now today doing over 1.7 million dollars in ar serving over 4 700 customers paying 30 bucks a month again helping them sign contracts and get deals closed faster he's figured out something remarkable with churn under one percent logo churn per month uh that's on a gross basis is just incredible cac is 220. so payback seven months again building this with this team of 26 based between sweden the us and the nordics thank you so much samir for taking us to the top thank you nathan for having me