How GoldMine CEO richie neale grew GoldMine to $2.7M revenue and 5.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is paul peterson he is a former developer and big eight consultant on selecting emerging technologies for use in sales and marketing for companies like mcdonald's allied van lines united airlines and others he led the enterprise sales team at dell arena which is win facts and symantec now form flow and now as general manager of the gold mine business unit of avanti inc paul you ready to take us to the top sure now is ivanti your baby are you the founder there are you working for the founder inside avanti is a very large enterprise it's a combination of land desk and a few other entities that are focused on i.t security networks remote users so that's uh but part of a gold mine was founded in 1988 and i started in 1999 so think about what the technology looked like it was before al gore had invented the internet and things like that so i've been with him 22 years that the founder sold out and he's running another product called nimble right now so i'm sort of the caretaker or steward as it were of goldmine over the years nimble are you talking about john ferreira yeah exactly he was goldmines ferrara with a lawn yeah so he was leading gold mine before you came in that's right so i i came in as a regional manager i i i worked for symantec selling uh you know anti-virus software when people thought it was optional fun uh win facts i don't know you'd be probably too young to remember when faxing was a big deal out of the computers and so we had oem and so i got the gold mine because i was a good at a good sales person at taking package software winfact symantec and selling it to large corporations and that's great look the reason i the reason i invited you on is because i always like folks doing something a little unique and right so there are right now many multi-billion dollar tools that are crm sort of sas tools vista got behind pipedrive at a plus billion dollar evaluation close.i o hubspot free crm obviously salesforce a bunch of folks you're doing something different you're actually selling a one-time sort of license to theorem software help me understand how you're competing in the space well so it's a little bit of a legacy that we uh you know inherited the perpetual license and windows on premise uh you know so we were one it was goldmine act and maximizer then siebel came along and uh and then later on salesforce you know you know came about we stuck with our architecture you know windows windows based and we do things a little bit differently we we didn't expand to do everything like salesforce sugar microsoft you can find every bell and whistle you have architectural but with that comes some complexity so we kind of what they call stick to the knitting that we were liked by individuals for productivity and so we stuck with that over the years and that said be available on their pcs not not in the in the cloud and a lot of our audience likes to own the data they like to own the software so i'd say we're a niche product today we're not you know salesforce is the probably the you know the leading go to um but but we have a niche product where people want that and it takes advantage of some of the windows uh uh you know multiple windows can be open it's very fast when it's running on your local systems local keep their data these are all the reasons people buy this from you now what do you charge what do you charge on average for this so you know when you said we you were charging a one-time fee so it's a one-time fee you buy it and uh we we actually uh pricing's a big issue for me and we've done a number of things around to make pricing part of the value prop uh we're not necessarily the cheapest but we're you know strong value for what's the one prime fee well the list price is 6.95 but we have a couple of ways to get in uh you we have a front we're kind of a reverse discount it's front loaded the first three or five you buy are heavily discounted and then we hope to get a little bit more when you add seeds down the road uh but that to make it easy so we did a bundle sort of like so it's 700 700 bucks to get started as a single user uh we typically start out with a three user bundle which is about nineteen hundred dollars and that includes a year of support and three users and then in year two like subscription you buy the product again and often with an uplift they're adding seven percent every year uh whereas with our product you buy it up front and then in year two you pay about twenty percent maintenance for software updates and access the technical support if you need it so uh the long time cost of ownership with gold mine is very very um you know strong in our favor what is the average customer paying per year just for the maintenance contract it's about 140 to 150 a user per year so times that by five 750. 750 a year whereas whereas if you go with you know a subscription service then you paid eighty dollars a month or whatever you're paying 80 plus a month every year thereafter so yeah i like that look this is an interesting model there's still a recurring element here which is the service and maintenance right we're going back to real og times back in the 80s right um most of these folks have obviously moved over you said we're going to stay on prem installation one time up front sale front loaded then 20 maintenance fee over time give us a sense of scale what year did you join the business i i joined in 1999 1999 now do you remember in 99 when you joined what sales were uh they were they were probably uh 20 million 20 million okay and that's a combination of the one time plus the service fee no there was no maintenance it was all shrink wrap and it was retail cdw's and comp usa's i mean uh you know people that are you have disappeared from the same office depots uh max it was all it was all retail and and then and then the retail price was probably about 300 bucks so it was the heyday uh people in 2000 were replacing everything because of they thought planes and their businesses were going to fall out of the sky because of y2k yeah so we had a huge year things sort of tailed off after that and we shifted uh goldmine shifted from where we were using borland database engine so this is technology that goes way back but it was the first database that people touched on at the time and so we shifted the sql when it was coming out sql seven it was a affordable database we were an oem we were a large uh uh oem product for that and uh that became one of the first database and shared applications that many many businesses used and in fact we were often a network tester goldmine because it was sending data over the network would find uh you know kinks in your network that didn't exist that you didn't know exist but over time that uh you know app accounting applications and other things got up on the network but now paul in 2020 how many customers do you have actively sort of paying this maintenance fee it's about five thousand uh and we probably we estimate we probably have one or two who don't 2 000 who don't pay the fee so you do have that option so then okay with regards to pricing we've got to have it get current upgrade so it's a definitely an older model but you own the software uh it's a perpetual license one of the other elements is we're concurrent and this is actually an important you know hold on concurrent stuff so just be clear 5 000 actively paying the maintenance fee and another 2 000 who choose not to pay it correct estimated yeah estimated yeah okay got it i mean so can i do the math right 5 000 bucks times a what you said of service fee on average of 62 bucks a month or 750 a year i mean what that's like 310 000 bucks a month something like that yeah yeah right around there yeah we're yep and okay so now tell me about you we're going to continue on with another product well so we we used and our motto is concurrent which means shared licenses uh you you subscribe you're paying per login per named user well within goldmine uh the idea is to create an id for everybody in your company and we deal mostly with small businesses smbs but let's say i can put in 20 names so that the people from accounting or sales administration can log in and use it occasionally but they don't have to pay for a license you're just managing the number of people who are logged in at once yeah whereas if you were to go to salesforce or some other subscriptions you've got to pay for everybody who wants access and so we're affordable in that in that sense you can get going you can give everybody in the company access to the features and functionality which are heavy on contact management and you know managing your personal productivity and schedule uh email marketing so we're a good list manager get all your prospects in that list and then a traditional one sales forecasting uh for first size businesses with this kind of feature set how many new customers joined the program in 2020 purchasing you know the 700 or 1900 upfront thing so it's it's it's about a hundred uh new names a quarter oh wow okay so call it 400 ish even during cove about 400 new customers last year yeah uh so so code you know as you scaled back marketing there was a little bit less on the new but there was a strong investment from existing businesses because they had to support remote users yeah um so...