How Getvenga CEO Sam Pollaro grew Getvenga to $3.6M revenue and 2K customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is sam polaro uh he's the ceo of a company called venga a washington dc based technology company that uses big data to help restaurants and fitness companies better understand and engage with their guests before venga sam was the founder of petals of for the people a business that revolutionized the sale and distribution of fresh cut flour sam are you ready to take us to the top let's do it you're a flower guy you must be very sweet huh actually once you uh once you see like the business side of flowers it kind of ruins the the experience for you it's like watching the sausage get made totally understand tell me more about your current company venga what's company do and how do you make money yeah sure so we are a customer relationship management system for uh businesses we work right now in the restaurant and fitness verticals meaning we help those companies to use their data to better understand and engage with their customers in a much more personalized manner that's very cool and and help me understand kind of general price points what's the average customer pay per month between two and three hundred dollars per month per location so if you're a restaurant group and you've got 10 locations you're paying you know 2500 bucks a month is the location paying or or corporate restaurant the corporate is paying most of the times of the corporate we do work with some franchise locations where they have uh you know the franchisee will pay for the the software but most of the time we we prefer to sell to the corporate and get all the locations and when you sell to one your your typical deal you settle one corporate i mean how many locations are they signing up typically uh we work primarily with groups that have three up to 100 locations is our kind of sweet spot okay interesting and how many locations are you across today we're about 2000 locations oh wow okay so that's a lot across how many brands um probably between 150 and 200 brands okay that's great now i mean can i take 2000 locations times that 200 price point you guys are doing about 400 grand a month right now in revenue yeah a little bit less than that because uh some have like smaller packages like if they're paying for uh you know some partial plan kind of thing but we're doing about 300 000 in uh monthly recurring revenue okay that's great thanks for sharing that and um most of that you're talking like legacy accounts maybe that's signed up at lower price points um or they're using uh you know a fraction of our tool set so the the kind of 200 to 300 per month is if they're using all our features but some are using you know a 99 price point that only covers one aspect of our tool i see so 2 000 locations about 150 bucks a month you multiply those you get about 300 grand a month in revenue yep and what's growth look like where were we at a year ago we're going about 35 percent a year that's great so call it what is that 2 50 240 k in october last year um yeah we did about for the calendar year we did just under 2 million in revenue but ended a little bit under 3 million in ar that's great and this year yo what you'll close out at like 3.8 3.9 um something around there yeah 3 5 and 4. that's great now this will be really impressive i hope you tell me your boots drop but i have a feeling you might not be are you bootstrapped or be raised we've raised uh 2.7 million today okay not actually you know you still get a little street cred not a ton you haven't raised a ton though which is nice yeah all right and why make the decision to raise why not stay you know stay bootstrapped uh well i think you know if i were to do it all over again i might take a different uh path i would certainly wait uh much longer to raise money but at the time you know i i i'm a technical guy but i'm not really a a programmer so you know we need to hire engineers and uh a team to help us build the initial product so that was the reason now not saying it's the right reason but um that's why we did it originally yep no and you invest in design i know that i've seen the animations on your homepage on dribble before so you go and get the right kinds of designers and you do things the right way it makes sense there um put this on a timeline for us when did you launch uh so we actually launched in 2011 with a product that's slightly different from what we do now as like most companies you know we pivoted uh a couple times along the way we realized within probably six months that our first product wasn't going to work and we pivoted to something else that worked a little bit and then finally probably in 2014 uh we really found that kind of product market fit and then have been kind of growing consistently since then interesting um uh when was the last pivot you said it you said a year ago when was the last pivot was 2014. oh 2014. okay got it so 2011 2014 kind of figuring things out 2014 you kind of double down on the current space now you've scaled to 2000 locations yep yep and just added our new vertical basically within the last year so we started restaurants we're exclusively in restaurants for the first you know six years of our life then realized we could take that product and bring it over to the fitness market and have done that in the last year interesting how did you make that transition how did you know it'd be a good fit for fitness as well versus going into some other you know you know you know mechanic shops that's a great question yeah we actually had a lot of the same market dynamics so we have partnerships on the restaurant side with opentable which is the dominant booking platform if you want to go out to dinner and there's a similar company called mind body which if you ever booked a yoga class or a spin class you probably use mind body whether or not you know it and they both have about the same number of businesses they both have about the same market share which is like over you know 80 of the market and so by going to market with a really strong partner and the same sort of market dynamics where there was a platform that was really good at the booking but they didn't do so much crm we knew there was an opportunity for us sam mindbody great company they just bought friends in your area at booker why didn't they buy you instead well i think actually booker came with a company that does a little bit of what we do called frederick but really they were looking to expand their capabilities on the appointment side so mind body does a lot in class-based fitness but they didn't have a very strong offering on the appointment side like spa salon and so that's why they bought booker booker had acquired frederick about a year before that so they sort of got a two for one there were you in talks with with uh with booker before they went with frederick we weren't again this is all the the fitness space is very new to us it's only we've only been in it for about a year interesting um so walk me through some other economics so churn is critical in a sas company what's your turn today yeah we actually have on a revenue basis we have negative net churn in other words our clients are paying us more today than they were uh you know six months or a year ago and that's because they're either adding locations or uh moving up to a higher price point um than than they had at the beginning of the year yeah so let's talk about that cohort let's peel back that onion so before you add back expansion revenue what was gross revenue churn uh gross revenue turn was probably about five percent okay and then expansion was how much ten percent twenty percent no probably closer to you know uh seven to ten percent okay so seven percent expansion and then five percent loss puts you at about 102 net revenue retention annually it sounds about right that sounds great that's great congrats on that um what pricing axes besides number of seats the number of locations are you using to drive expansion uh it's the basically the feature set uh and then kind of services revenue so we have a pro product that works really well for small to mid-size businesses when you get up into some of the enterprise customers they want um some uh what we sell like a business intelligence package that includes some higher level reporting some more customized reporting as well as some services on top of that okay now just be clear 300 grand in mrr you told me earlier that's all pure sas right that's all services yeah we have a very or sorry it's all pure sas we have a very small actual professional services we don't even have a professional services team what is your team today how many people 21. and and what's kind of the breakdown between marketing sales engineering we have six engineers uh we have uh four people on the client services team uh we've got a product manager uh four people on the sales and marketing team um we've got a business intelligence person who also does our is also kind of our director of finance and then myself and my co-founder got it hopefully that's up to 21. yeah yeah or somewhere around there right and where are you where are you guys all based everyone in dc uh we're predominantly based in dc we have three remote employees but the rest of us are here okay dc and remote and then talk to me about you know as you look to onboard a new 150 a month location what are you willing to spend to get that...