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 the team size today how many people a little over 30. okay and the last round how many years ago was that before i got here so over two over two so i mean look the reason i ask is anyone that's like on the venture path you're like on the venture path and there's kind of expectations and if you're hitting those expectations usually it means you're raising capital to some degree every two or so years are you guys raising right now uh we will be raising capital this year okay and why is now the right year for you guys specifically to do it well we've hit we've hit the point where um for the most part all of the uh the team dynamics restructuring getting the team in place that was my number one objective is all fully in place number two uh we've expanded beyond cable and servtec which are i always say those are the appointments nobody wants to have as opposed to the you know the appointments you actually want to have like grocery and food which we haven't announced yet but we're in those categories those are going to give us a much higher sex appeal in the market because those are daily or weekly transactions yep and what do you think you will be valued on the the total transaction volume or appointments going through you or your cut your actually kind of gross revenue that you take per transaction yeah i think today it's about our transaction growth we're doing um almost uh 250 000 transactions a day um as a company and so um and so we're getting tons of scale out of that um and also when we because our customers are enterprise we're really solidly enterprise great at this point relative to a lot of competitors yeah so so just to go back to earlier what you said you said really people need to be doing a million in terms of transaction vol you know number of transactions with you per month earlier right that's our average customer size that's so that's where the sort of the min not average sort of it's sort of the call to 25th percentile yeah yeah but it's it's you know it to get a ton of benefit out of us at a minimum it's three million a year and an average is probably six million a year yeah to 12 million a year yeah and then we've got customers who are going to be in the in the 25 plus yeah i know that's great i mean look if you're doing 250 000 in transact well first off that's incred i assume that's great growth otherwise you want to set it so if you're doing 250 today right cape today what were you doing a year ago uh it's it's double so you've doubled your okay that's fantastic all right so you've doubled you over a year so if you're doing 250 000 sorry 250 000 transactions today right daily uh across 30 sorry and if you multiply that obviously out and get up get a get a month you're doing about 7.5 million transactions per month across your 30 customers right yeah that's great okay and minimum you said 15 cents per transaction earlier so 15 cents times 7.5 million it's about 1.1 million a month minimum that you guys are doing and you're above that right sure yeah okay it's pretty close yeah okay that's good that's that's good is there anything else you're i mean i know a lot of times in these businesses their other kind of revenue streams pop up because you realize oh we have this data that's interesting or no are you really pure play per transaction 15 to 25 cents that's it yeah today we are staying really pure play my belief is focus is best the other thing is we've been very cautious in fact on our consumer side of our business on location we basically wipe out any identifiable location data from our consumers okay and so we've been we've taken a really strong stance on privacy and we think that's going to also serve us well long term as we get into to enterprise businesses and things like that interesting so we're not going to sell our data we're not going to sell our data and i'm approached almost daily now that some of the wireless operators are reducing their data data sales to sell mine and we won't do it yep um that okay look that makes sense um talk to me more about how you measure things like churn and retention and expansion opportunities so most of our customers are on multi-year contracts i haven't uh i haven't had to deal with much churn okay so our customers are two to three year contracts because they're a large enterprise nobody wants to jump into a relationship invest in getting the integration everything working great and then opt out the next month what about like what about like gross what about like gross revenue turns so you also capture like if someone does less volume on you now these days do you have any gross revenue churn or no no at this point a lot of our service businesses if it's if there's any gross loss it's it's it's under five percent uh seepage and then a lot of our new businesses in last mile in retail grocery and others are our growth businesses so as as the markets are evolving they're doing more transactions every month over month um so we have we haven't experienced that and it's part of what i love about where our company is is we're the consumer expectation around how goods and services are going to be delivered is becoming way more omni-channel the other thing the other thing that we've launched and and is in pilot our first customer is uh buy online pickup in store so this concept of i can track the consumer coming to the store and uh and you could imagine the grocery business that gives you the at the last minute a chance to go pick up the hot chicken or the cold ice cream not just groceries but like i'm in sweet green in new york like every i'm always trying to order and the mobile ordering there is so dependent on when the consumers walk in so like i could see even even the sweet greens that need to figure out you know like how do they balance the meals they're making for the in-person line versus the online line yep and we're we're going to be a leader in that space yeah that's great um it makes it it seems to me that make perfect sense for you to obviously get into that so um so okay good so no it's no no gross revenue churn talk to me about the opposite of turn which is expansion what are you expanding contracts at usually year over year um on a per customer yeah like on a cohort basis yeah yeah it's um trying to think how to think about that or do well don't tell me something that you don't measure yourself because i don't want to like force you to tell me data that you don't care about i mean do you care about net revenue retention not not yet no okay guys so maybe it's too early for that stuff so let's let's go so when you have when you have a density of customers you're you're really modeling uh you know capturing new large customers as the number one now over time we're gonna see that our base is not large enterprise customers and we'll be pushing down into mid market once we start pushing down to mid market more sas metrics are going to drive our business so today it's it's it's kind of binary you win or lose yeah and what do you spend now to like sign up one of these new like 30 partners you have i mean do you do you know what like fully weighted cac is on that or no no because we don't we don't track it like a sas metric because it's pure biz dev at this point yeah you know i've got my my sales team does six to eight deals a year yeah it's not a so you know so my cost of sales is travel and well that's fully weighted that's fully that's what i mean by fully weighted yeah yeah i mean so it's like it cost you like a million to sign up a new a new partner or what nowhere nor even close to that okay no we're even close to that it's it's it's probably 40 to 50k so if you go raise i mean it sounds like this business doesn't need a lot of money so you're gonna go raise this year why raise what do you spend the money on well we've got i mean we've got some product development needs in curbside and the things that we want to expand into um and and as you know hiring technical talent is uh my costs there are growing where are you based uh seattle washington oh okay yeah yeah so we're we pay about as high outside the valley we pay about as high for human cap human uh capital as anywhere in the world yeah all 30 folks are in seattle uh no i have i have uh business okay okay and last question tech is here last question before we wrap up are you are you prepping the company to raise so that you have the most leverage what i mean by that is are you getting to break even before you go out and start to raise are you still burning a bunch of cash uh the part of the goal of before raising was to get the company in uh you know in managing its cash and i don't know that i'll get it pure to break even yeah we'll we will be in a strong position managing our cash at that point yeah so i'm going to try and quantify this without making you uncomfortable i mean if you're burning less than a hundred grand per month net burning cash is that a point where you say okay we're close enough to break even we have leverage yeah absolutely because growth businesses i i would argue you never actually want to break even until you hit scale well you do when you want to when you're having raising conversations around valuation you don't want the investors to feel like they've got leverage on you because you're about to go out of cash but 100k is you're you're in the ballpark of break even that's easily controllable right yeah yeah well i i mean i don't know about that i don't know if all your costs are fixed or variable yeah you can see you can slow market expanding slow hiring you can do all kinds of stuff and because we have cut you know we have transactional growth you know a quarter of holding caustics you know flat we'll actually probably be able to exceed through it yeah we had to do that if we had to do that and what um i mean again i'm asking you because you've done this a couple times at this point don't tell me obviously what you think you're going to end up at but just for you at a personal level what valuation would make you really happy if you're able to raise at it obviously say something way higher than what you'd want but i'm just curious what make you happy yeah i think i think given our our growth and our and our our monthly forward you know we're we'd be we'd be really happy at just north of 100 yeah like like some like 105 pre something like that and you're and it sounds like you're running right now is like 12 or 13 million something yeah that's good so and and because we're you know because we're growing on a month-over-month basis we can project 12 forward and pretty soon you get into not not even aggressive multiple to get there yeah no no that makes sense to me all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book ooh um favorite business book no no we can we can pass if you don't have one on the top of your head oh keep going all right number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i like watching um uh microsoft's new ceo he's done an amazing job pivoting that company around so being and being in seattle that it went through a pretty pretty dark time and and now it's it's really humming yeah see number three what billing tool do you guys use say a billing tool yeah uh we don't i mean we're basically uh a quickbooks accounting shop yeah because they just passed their customers it's not hard to do number four how many hours of sleep to get every night six and what's your situation married single kids uh married with three kids okay wow you're a busy guy and how old are you uh 47. well you had to think about it 47 last question what do you wish i tried not to ever think about it yeah yeah what do you wish your 20 year old self knew one of my 20 year old self knew um interesting that it the the hard work does pay off but it takes longer than you think guys hard work does pay off takes longer than you think building glimpse founded in 2008 he came in about a year and a half ago after consulting with the board for a while what they do is again they help you they help up these brands right like a whole foods or like cable uh companies like spectrum make sure that they give consumers a more accurate vantage point in terms of when that service prior is going to show up to the house to do the repair the way that they make money is they take between 15 and 25 cents per transaction there are spanning 30 kind of enterprise brands they work with right now doing over 7.5 million uh transactions per month right now that's 100 up 100 last 12 months so doing about one point north of 1.1 million bucks per month right now in terms of revenue again 100 year-over-year growth there they raised 30 million bucks to do it 30 people in seattle burning call it and trying to work towards basically getting to break evens then go out and raise additional capital hopefully maybe at 105 ish million dollar premium evaluation but we will see all right thank you so much for taking us to the top chris appreciate it thank you