How Glympse CEO Chris Ruff grew Glympse to $13.5M revenue and 30 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is chris ruff he's an entrepreneur with a passion for new technology and disruptive business opportunities his executive leadership career spans over 25 years in software mobile and iot industries focused in the areas of management business development marketing operations and finance today he's building glimpse to provide last mile visibility chris you ready to take us to the top i am all right talk to us about glimpse what's the company doing how do you guys make money what's the revenue model yeah so glimpse historically was a consumer application company we still have millions of users who use our app but we were unable to monetize those those consumer app users so we took the platform and are now monetizing it by helping customers provide better services in last mile for example visibility on when your cable service tech uh person will actually arrive instead of just a four minute window yeah or a four hour window yeah excuse me that's what i say four minutes i would be okay with that but it's like stay sit at your house for six hours and wait for us to maybe appear yeah we take all the discomfort away from that transaction because even if you're having to wait you actually might be able to run to the store take a shower any of those any of those activities that you're now nervous you're going to miss your appointment yeah be productive in some degree right all right very very good and so so is this um is there any a hardware component to this or it's all like online software it's all software um we have a standalone solution that works on a mobile phone that the service tech or the the package delivery person will use to share their location and then we provide all of the notifications and alerts and trigger the updates along the journey to the customer okay and how are you making money you're selling directly to me or through a partner no we sell directly to the enterprise and they'll either pay on a per truck basis um but a lot of our new business models are on a per job a lot of businesses like grocery delivery are in their infancy and so they want to pay as uh pay up the scale as uh trap their volumes increase so just be clear our instacart's your customer or whole foods your customer or the person using instacart at whole foods is your customer so our customer i would more likely be the retailer and we would be helping them provide their own service they may still use instacart for some but a lot of retailers and grocery and of course all of the field service and home service tech companies all provide their own fleets i see so this is like if you don't want to pay instacart their fee whole foods just use this directly we can be your internal white label solution correct i see okay so what might a whole foods pay you on average per year for this what's your average customer pay per year well so it really depends on the industry and we have the model varies between uh 15 to 20 cents a transaction for us um because we're just software we're not actually we're not actually providing the labor uh they're still handling that all themselves so we're really just the cx consumer engagement tool okay you said 15 to 25 cents per transaction right okay um so you're almost like a payment gateway then well that's not the right way to look look at it it's just it's we're providing uh the transactional benefit we're tracking the uh we're tracking the product and the delivery all the way through the solution it's not really a gateway for payment okay how many retailers are you working with right now uh i can't disclose that i uh today we're uh we've got several but we haven't announced them yet okay i'm just giving i mean you don't have to be specific are we talking like five or five thousand no no no we're we're we're dealing with the largest of enterprises glim state only has about 30 customers too oh perfect got it that's what i want to know so you you are a you're a high-touch high-volume business yeah yeah yes we are yeah we are we are not uh smb at this point we are purely focused on the largest companies in the world the ones i can disclose in field services like charter communications true green we've announced a partnership with aaa that's great we deal with high volumes and big and big opportunities that's really helpful okay so so what would you say like the you are not valuable unless someone calls you as a potential customer and they're doing at least x amount of transactions per month well it would so so that's there is high transactional volume uh probably a minimum of a million okay but we've recently gotten involved in yeah million a month but um we've recently got involved in businesses with uh with uh let's say higher touch where missing an appointment uh would be valuable maybe you're like a celebrity i mean i know you're doing thousand dollars worth of furniture that needs to be assembled and you want to make sure that the the crew to assemble it is there on time otherwise there's penalty or the the the furniture doesn't get there when the people are there there could be huge penalties and so in those areas we can do low volumes but at very high value okay got it all right put this all in a timeline for me when did you launch this company what year well the company is 11 years old uh started out for the first eight years of its life as primarily a consumer uh company so just be clear this was launched in the middle of a financial recession 2008 correct okay and then basically it's not it's not a pivot it was an expansion of the platform into enterprise four years ago okay and is this your baby or did you come in at some later time no i i came in a year and a half ago to sort of accelerate the enterprise side okay the founder moved into a chair the chairman's role um and uh and i'm taking it the next phase of enterprise growth did you come in as like you were an eir to vc the vc led whatever round you did last and you came in that way or no well no the the the founder and i were colleagues and i was doing some consulting work for him in the board and we all just came to an agreement that working together would be better uh given my expertise in enterprise and telecom and things like that so have you guys bootstrapped or have you raised a date we've raised uh we've raised capital to date okay how much have you raised um trying to think what's been disclosed well i can just look it up on crunchbase if it's easier yeah about 30 million okay all equity or is that equity in debt okay that's great now was any of that raised while you kind of led those rounds or that was all raised prior to you all prior to it okay so how did that make you feel joining a company with kind of 30 million bucks you obviously knew the board dynamic because you were consulting there yeah so it's um so i love uh so i'm a capital efficient entrepreneur um and so i built a previous company during the recession it was a company called ui evolution which is now called xevo okay uh and we built that company uh raising less than 15 million dollars and it's uh it's now a leader in automotive technology so i actually love a challenge of uh being pretty capital efficient which makes me the right person to sort of get this to the next level yeah we'll need more capital but after 11 years it's it's it's really time for the company to prove its business model yep no that makes sense we just you remind me yesterday we just had a guy on that's running moggio and he's raised about kind of 40 million and they're doing kind of car telematics thing and they've driven all the costs out of there oh good yeah yeah i mean they've driven all their costs out of there out of their model it sounds like you're potentially thinking about you know how do you do the same thing increase margin yeah and just and really and really learn to scale it right because we have a really compelling business offering but as you probably know most uh most small businesses struggle with getting scale working you can have a great idea but if you can't figure out how to get it into the market in an efficient uh uh cost-effective way uh it doesn't matter how good your mousetrap is so how have you landed i mean what is your mouse trap today how have you landed your first call at 30 customers well i mean basically by focusing on where consumers where where our customers consumers get the most benefit so obviously we launched in things like cable because that four-hour weight window is just painful and and and given the cable companies today are experiencing customers you know leaving for other over-the-top solutions yeah they want to be the best they can be at delivering service so we become a really valuable component uh on the way we've expanded the product to actually provide a significant more value so today if a customer if a consumer opts in for notifications they get a great glimpse experience but if somebody doesn't want their their service provider to send them text messages they can still call into a call center oh so it's not an app you're delivering these things you're you're by text text or email or in-app notifications it's all web-based so integration is super simple yeah we're now integrating you know giving eta to an ivr system so somebody called a call center instead of having to talk to a human they could say hey i bet you're calling about today's appointment your your your service will be there in one hour right so we can still add a ton of value to the enterprise and and provide what's most important a really great solution when did sorry what's...