How Getvero CEO Chris Hexton grew Getvero to $1.8M revenue and 300 customers in 2020.

hello everybody my guest today is chris hexton he's the co-founder and ceo of vero they help companies collect and organize data so they can create better customer experiences and happy customers through email they're five years old and help hundreds of customers send hundreds of millions of emails every single month chris are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right you bet okay walk me through the platform you're not a typical email marketing platform what do you do and how do you make money yeah absolutely so uh we tend to well i'm probably that's going to explain this who we work with so we tend to work with large consumer facings for b2c companies who have hundreds of thousands up to tens of millions of their own customers uh those sorts of companies generally have either engineers on the marketing team or you know strong strongly technical marketing teams and they're looking for tools that help them you know collect data ideally collect that data in real time uh give meaning to that data to store it with some structure and then and then like have a workflow tool to actually deploy both automated campaigns and ad hoc broadcasts to their customers so uh a lot of it's around the technical side of how that data is collected and stored that goes beyond your typical mailchimp or whatnot and is this more uh marketing platform or a transactional email platform on the like of like sendgrid or mandrill yeah definitely more on the marketing side of the you know those two descriptions so we um don't compete very heavily with sendgrid et cetera in fact you can plug bureau into cengrid and it sits on top and helps you do the data capture and automation layer okay and what's the business model is it a pure place sas company yeah exactly where sas company we charge based on volume so how much data how many customers you've got data each store uh and then how many amounts you send them up and give me a general sense i'm sure you have many cohorts you look at but on average what would you say a customer pays you per month uh so yeah it's shifted quite nicely over the last two years i would say and these days you know 500 plus really so reasonably large customers and uh but that depends here we've got outliers on both sides of that and when we started it was much smaller customers like us and then the platform's gotten more sophisticated more stable so we uh we attract larger customers and it makes sense i mean if you if you've got a lot of your own customers and data you know automation is a very powerful and useful tool so it's piece what year did you launch the company uh 2012 okay 2012 and up to today have you been bootstrapped or did you raise uh so we've been strapped up until last june so june 2017 and yeah i think we're really happy with that decision and then we've taken on a bunch of bc money in here in australia mid uh last year how much total have you raised uh four million dollars ah chris you went to the dark side man i suppose so i mean it hasn't been too dark so far i think uh yeah but yeah bootstrapping first uh was it gave us a lot of confidence in what we built you know where we're going the roadmap sorts of customers we work with uh obviously good unit economics to be able to bootstrap for so long so uh raising money was a very considered decision and we felt there were things we could do both on a product and growth axes that we couldn't do without some more money and that's that's how we ended up on the doctor name one of those things you feel like you couldn't do without additional capital i think yeah growing as a leader uh every year you know my co-founder and i we would sit down and say okay what do we want to do next year and uh coming coming into 2017 we felt that we had to build you've always got to build things in your product to stay to keep product market fit to stay with the market stay with custom with customers expectations and we've always been really good at doing that and we had a very very word of mouth driven growth uh cycle or project or you have been pricing today and so we wanted to start we knew we were getting a scale where we we need to be adding on more than just relying on that we want to have more consistent approach to driving that word of mouth i suppose so we knew we needed to hire a bigger marketing team than we had we felt we couldn't do that without taking capital and then we also have some ideas for uh how we might extend what vero does so you know going on going beyond just um improving the features we've got if you will and uh and we definitely felt we wouldn't be able to do that without building a larger engineering team over time you're talking about fusion and some other kind of api related things yeah exactly so i think a big deal for us has always been that angle of saying like um we don't sell beer to customers and say hey just throw this snippet on your site and magically your marketing team will be able to do everything you know i personally think that that's that's not reality uh the truth is the best companies marketing engineering product everyone works together and sending emails is an extension or just part of the customer experience right like it's an extension of your product experience and so you know we've always been big on saying we want to give um i think the engineering component of that has been overlooked off and we want to give these guys good tools to load data load load data cleanly um and actually use what the customers have told them so things like fusion you know we want to extend that product fusion allows customers to load data from an api just for the email sent and that's kind of flipping the traditional data load on its head that means you don't push data to vero it means bureau pulls data from your apis or data stores at send time that's been really really popular so absolutely you know that's like a totally different angle or new tooling on top of what we've already got and really plays nicely with that like holistic team that we have and why is kind of your verticalized solution more powerful than someone just using uh zapier or segment to connect apis with their plumbing yeah i think a lot of it just come uh comes down to the sort of automation you can do uh and you know the at the moment for example like i assume you're saying could you just use zapier and connect it to mailchimp or something like that it's about having that or a mixed panel or mix panel and mailchimp through zapier yeah i think it's really got to do with um we built from the ground up to sit on top of that like raw rich event stream that segment sends so you're not really it's just less cobbled together and if you're a serious mid-market plus company um you know you want robustness you want to be able to send all the raw data somewhere maybe you have to store all that raw data capture all in real time attach it all to single user profiles you know deduplicate those profiles all that sort of stuff that i guess could seem sort of rudimentary but if you don't want to screw things up it's really pretty cool to get right and so i think if you're plugging those tools together for a lot of our customers that would be seen as a bit janky maybe yeah would be the word idea so at the um at the most basic level can i give an example you know you could you basically use vera aware and say someone if this user id hasn't logged on in this amount of time send them an email to try and re-engage them something like that exactly yeah you know i think the big two buckets of emails people the automation side of things big two buckets to be activating customers so someone's expressed interest in your product signed up for trial um done something but then hasn't converted to actually buy that's activation the other big buckets retention so what you're talking about which is you know target people when they haven't returned or if you're trying to drive them to use new features or if you want to announce you know your specific new things you build or new products you've got an offer or whatever personalizing all those sorts of emails as well got it now what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you um yeah we're probably around somewhere between 250 and 300 now and uh yeah that's it's growing nicely i think this year will be i mean obviously haven't taken the vc money it's going to be an interesting year you know we've got a pedal to the metal so i'm excited yeah i mean fair to say 300 customers times a 500 rp you're north of or about 150 grand a month right now yeah and uh well more than that yeah okay significantly more yeah uh not i wouldn't say significantly more because then i'd be that'd be like yeah can we say south of 200 but north of 150 is that fair oh that's fair okay good and what's growth rate look like year over year what were we at 13 months ago um we don't disclose our growth rate if that's cool with you but we i mean we we tended to um like our goal this year would be to do more than 100 basically probably the best way to answer that and really try and do 150 plus yep yep and generally speaking i mean if you're raising capital at these numbers you know you're not doing you know a million a month yet i mean you've more than doubled since your founding date up to this point correct each year yeah like you know we to raise the money we raised we've obviously...