How Getmintent CEO Matt Dion grew to $1.5M revenue and 130 customers in 2024.

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 matt dion he's the ceo of mintend it's a technology and he's a technology industry veteran with 24 years of experience ushering early stage companies through the tricky early adopter and early majority market phases the company's focused on making the best marketers better matt you ready to take us to you bet yes why are you in software you need to be like you know kisses you know roadie or something just be on the road with them 24 7. well you know what i i'm a drummer i started drumming in high school and uh i guess um i had to make a calculation back then could i make more money being a drummer or uh going into into technology and well i you know that's where it took me but uh yeah i'm a big kiss fan though so give us more detail what what is mint helping marketers do yeah so there's two aspects of it um one is we provide a sas platform to get marketers on the same page around the uh you know the planning the production the distribution and the measurement of all of their digital content and then we also have a set of complementary services digital marketing services that complement that so we can actually help marketers uh figuring out their personas and and creating their content and distributing their content and all of that and so just to clarify if you look at the past 12 months and you and you break total revenue into two buckets one is true sas and one is consulting professional services the extra things you offer what percentage you say is pure sas uh pure sas without customers using any services from us it's probably it's it's about 75 oh okay okay yeah and then the other 25 is people using our software and our services together yep that's great not not a bad thing to have all because you obviously some extra touch drives drives deeper uh usage and hopefully higher retention which can be all positive things yeah absolutely so how do you structure your team then so how many of them are focused on services exclusively versus the tech side um it's about the same i i would so we've got a little bit more on services just because it's uh more labor intensive right so my team's 17 people and there's uh six full-time and about three or four contractors that we use and they're they're just purely in the software with the customers every day doing it for them and then uh i've got a dev team of uh six and then i've got sales marketing customer success is the rest how many quota carrying reps do you have um three three okay three okay so so let's get some of the back story here now for people that missed your first episode it was back in episode seven it was episode 714. we did that matt are you ready for this we did that back in september of 2018. i mean that was that a year and a half ago wow it was a while ago yeah so you you told me back then you had about a hundred customers where are you at today um we're slightly higher than that um you know the services side of things um [Music] it grows it grows quite slowly you know because it's it's you know you need people behind that so we've increased that by a few and then the software side since we spoke we probably added 20 or 30 uh clients from the mix there so commonly 130 customers total right now yeah i mean the the uh since we spoke like when we spoke we were just uh i hadn't even completed the acquisition uh of that other company and so oh sorry which other company well so i bought another company out of toronto uh called g-shift and so you were right in the middle of i was right in the middle of acquiring that customer or sorry that company when we last spoke so that closed in october and really a lot of uh that year was spent sort of bringing the two companies together merging the platforms the people the systems and so you know we weren't necessarily focused on aggressive growth we were focused on making everything work together well so um now end of the day the company doubled in size and got to cash flow positive so it was a really good move that acquisition and now we're you know focusing on the sales and marketing required to get growth what what was g-shift doing in terms of revenue run rate when you decided to purchase it um they were doing uh about a million and a half so and we were doing about a million and so we brought the companies together we decided to sunset uh some of the technology and merge the other piece into our piece and then uh roll the software services together so it was a sort of a bit of a reshuffling so that that was back in again october 2018 you're at a million there at 1.5 2.5 total plus some growth over the past year and a half so i mean are you guys past three yet three million run rate no is so so we actually rationalized some stuff so we like i said we sunset some product uh that we had that we just sort of let that sort of you know disappear and then um we you know we were investing in merging the platform so where i would say that from the acquisition to now if you just look at the top line we're flat okay got it so about so about 2 million 2.5 million in terms of run rate yeah but yeah yeah yeah okay and and then so so help me understand when you buy a company how do you decide what to sunset and what to double down on um yeah well basically we looked at the uh basically we looked at what customer usage right and what and what people wanted and so what we decided to sunset is we had a um uh legacy well what we think of as legacy seo products so the traditional seo uh analytics platform and we actually decided that uh we wanted to there were two parts to g shift one was this sdo platform and one was this tracking capability so the ability to put a unique url on every piece of content that goes out through every channel so that you can see the engagement um we felt that seo was just changing so quickly that we actually morphed that into another product that we're going to be launching this year which is using more machine learning to actually proactively optimize the content before publishing it versus the traditional seo is to publish let google crawl it see how you show up in the search results tweak it you know it's a very slow manual iterative process and so we actually we sunseted the traditional uh platform but we actually took the know-how and the technology and morphed it into a new product that we're going to be launching this year so it was really just where things are going and where we saw our customers getting value and that's what we decided uh where to invest and where to sunset okay and so how's that impacting things like churn what's gross annual revenue trend look like these days well so on the core platform that we invested in our we got the churn like i think i told you when uh last we spoke when i took the company over three years ago we had a 57 churn rate it was just a completely unsustainable situation and we brought that churn rate down to less than five percent so on the core content marketing platform you know the calendar the workflows the tracking uh that churn rate is very very low on the traditional seo product the churn um [Music] probably like 40 so still really high but sort of done done intentionally and you know we're giving those you know we're still supporting those customers fully in fact what we've done with that product is we've included um some concierge services because we found with seo um it's it's a tricky process and you need some expertise to do it so we actually folded it some services for those clients so we've that churn rate has come down a lot because we're doing a lot more hand holding on that and then when the new products ready we'll be going back out to all of the those existing clients previous clients and uh obviously new clients yeah if you just look at revenue so ignore which product the revenue is coming from but if you looked at monthly revenue exactly a year ago and let's say it was again about a hundred and twenty hundred thirty hundred forty thousand dollars that cohort that was paying you then if you just look at a revenue churn what what what were they paying you know exactly one year later maybe last month were they at like 120 000 so there's 20k of revenue churn there or how would you quantify that yeah uh if i look at it that way then it's it's about flat it's about flat so we've had we've had look so if you look at the cohorts the legacy stuff high churn the the stuff we're investing in our current product low churn and then we've had some growth so the growth is probably compensated for the churn of the legacy products so i'd say overall our sort of pure software staff has been flat so net revenue retention 100 percent no that's not bad by the way uh at this price point but but i still i'm curious so you're basically taking your churn plus your expansion they're netting zero but i'm still curious how aggressive both those things are so like are you saying you said five percent and 40 churn across your two products what i'm asking is for essentially a blended average the actual revenue lost not customer logos so i mean do you think it's 20 churn and 20 expansion to get you back to that baseline or what are those numbers yeah that's about right that's about right it would be about 20 um because our ar net new last year was you know call it 300 000 and then that's about what the term would have been so that's why you're flat as a business totally yeah yeah yeah okay and have you so last time you came on you said you're spending about fifteen thousand dollars uh in terms of cash you had about a 15 16 month payback period which is fairly aggressive uh but manageable of course well has your cap changed drastically today no it's about the same i mean we're we're about about a one year cap payback and where are you spending that 10 or 15 000 when you're looking to get new customers um so it's it's across the board i mean we're it's it's not a huge amount of money so we have to be very focused we've we've actually found some um um events that have been quite good for us so one of our target verticals is municipalities and we found some really cost effective shows for uh communicators of municipalities and that's given us a good roi we've also participate in content marketing world you know the content marketing institute they've got a couple of events um and the roi on those has been good so so events has been a part of it we also do some you know g2 crowd and captera and some paid advertising and of course our our own expertise with seo so a lot of it because we have a full digital marketing agency in-house we we do a lot of our own marketing that way um yeah so so that that would be the bulk of where we where we spend it yeah you don't do a ton of seo though i mean i was looking at some of your on ahrefs rankings wise i mean you don't really you don't really rank for many i've had any organic keywords so you're not really doing seo aggressively no no we're not i mean it's it's a it's a hard uh you know we're in kind of a blood red ocean there on the content marketing uh platform space and so we uh you know we do some of it but uh we're we're kind of targeted in in what we're going after um and you know really like i said the the focus has been more on bringing the platforms together and focusing on churn with our core customers and uh this is the year 2020 where um you know actually i'm i'm in the process of uh doing an equity round to uh to ramp the marketing up but it's it's been you know we didn't want to drive a ton of traffic to our existing uh software products just because we were you know we were at the point where we were bringing them together though yeah last time we came on you said you'd raise about 3.8 million how much more are you looking to raise now 500k okay 500 grand and where do you think you'll spend most that money purely uh purely marketing okay got it so raising 500k now and what i mean what are the equity markets like right now considering considering the virus and kind of the macro economy well you know it's very interesting question so i had my agm uh what's an agm our annual general meeting uh with my existing shareholders and i had that uh back at in january at the end of january and uh i thought that uh i would be able to raise this round pretty quickly just with existing investors so i'm mostly funded by local vancouver angels and um everybody was really happy you know i hadn't raised any money for about two and a half years uh we went from losing you know million and losing a million to you know where we're at now break even so everybody's pretty happy you're exactly break even today yeah oh great in fact slightly slightly positive okay everybody was pretty happy with that i said like you know now if we put 500k in it purely on marketing um we'll be able to you know go for it so it i thought it would be a relatively straightforward round now with the you know coronavirus um things have changed obviously very quickly in the last three weeks now i haven't had anybody say no i'm out but again i i haven't officially opened the round yet so i guess time will tell i should know in the next few weeks how uh how things have changed well we'll see on that note matt let's wrap up with a famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh boy uh um leadership right now number two is there a ceo you're following or studying [Music] yeah i'm in a i'm actually in a round table of ceos and there's sort of seven other folks that i meet with regularly and uh really that's who i'm paying close attention to is my business um shannon susco with which company uh she's a metronome growth systems okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business uh actually so it's the same tool that uh shannon her company she has a tool called metronome growth systems and that's the tool that i use to put all my kpis and my metrics and my priorities and and all of that number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night i try hard for uh seven that's going all the way at that but that's my that's my goal and matt what's your situation married single kiddos i am uh married with uh two teenage daughters one's in university one's in grade 11. that's great how are you i am 50 years old 50 years old last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh uh take time uh slow down slow down guys gitmint helping folks and customers with their content marketing he acquired one of his uh someone else in a space in toronto that was about 1.5 million in revenue back in late 2018 he was doing a million revenue at the time now the company doing about 2.5 million a year in revenue across 130 customers founded in 2012 3.8 million rates looking to raise another 500 grand right now to fuel some of this growth net revenue retention about 100 thousand uh sorry a hundred percent and their uh cac payback period call in the 12 to 15 month range matt thanks for taking us to the top awesome thank you nathan these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now