How Greenrope CEO Lars Helgeson grew Greenrope to $2.1M revenue and 3K customers in 2020.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is lars helgeson he is the ceo and founder of a company called green rope a complete crm and marketing automation platform started in the internet marketing space back in 2000 when he co-founded one of the world's first email service providers called cooler email as a pioneer in respon and responsible email marketing they grew that company to over a software company specializing in marketing communication with over 500 clients in 2010 after spending several years designing and implementing a more comprehensive way to meet the needs of small and mid-sized businesses he launched the current company green rope a cloud-based platform that simplifies and consolidates companies sales marketing and operation the company currently serves over 3 000 companies worldwide large is ready to take us to the top i'm ready all right those 3 000 folks those aren't just like you know free users dancing around those are that's cold hard cash right paying customers well some of them are so we reduce we do some trades and uh you know we help especially now we actually have a program we just launched that's been really successful going after or helping non-profits specifically for the kind of virus relief yeah well actually any non-profit because you know in times like now when things are really stressful people get really scared and when they get really scared they don't give money to non-profits and so we want to help non-profits get their word out and so we've actually taken on a good number of non-profits work we offer our platform for free for them so that they can use our crm our email marketing our fundraising all of those things that are built into the platform for free well okay so you came on last time this would have been back i believe in november of 2018 uh and you shared that you'd founded the company in 2010 right and so walk me through since then scaling up to today have you any product updates what have you released i need any pivot yeah it's it we've done a lot of um a lot of things to kind of change the way we we do business so when we originally launched we were focused on the micro business and because that was kind of where we came from with cooler email the email marketing days we were going after very very small businesses and the idea that we came to pivot to more of a more comprehensive approach to running a business with the crm was that every every small business needs to have a crm they needed the the but the problem that we found was that at the really micro business level a lot of businesses don't they're okay with using excel they're okay with using something free like mailchimp to do their email marketing and they kind of cobble these systems together our model was to create a unified platform where everything's all together and what we found was that at the micro business level a lot of those businesses just didn't have the wherewithal of the time to really take on a crm sure so we've gradually been moving more and more up market and we've actually we've we've gone after now government you know higher level universities and kind of some bigger customers and in the process we've churned out a lot of those really small businesses as clients i wish more people would talk about this because it doesn't get talked about enough because so many ceos like you see it as a weakness that their total customer account is now lower potentially than it was in the past but it is when you look at the most successful sas companies many like 50 of them go through this process and never talk about it right so how many so you've narrowed down your customer base because you have more customers you have less customers paying more how many customers are you serving today so the total is actually still around three thousand oh okay so the but what's what's happened is we've lost a lot of the smaller businesses and we've replaced them with bigger with bigger businesses we've also expanded our bar program our with what we call our complete crm or our reseller program so they've all grown over time as well so it's it's an interesting shift in how we've changed away from micro business we still have small businesses that use what we do but we don't we don't market towards them we don't really you know we're not we're not really actively pursuing the entrepreneur necessarily we're going people who are either in growth stage or are a little bit more established people that are little companies that are a little more price sensitive um with an integrated platform we can save especially a mid-size business a lot of money over over 90 total cost of ownership because we remove all those integration costs so it sounds like your average revenue per customer has probably increased over the past couple years you said 75 dollars a month on average about a year and a half ago what did that now today it's now 250. okay yeah so that's a significant increase obviously and how many just so we can understand that the value out of reseller network you've built better how many of those vars have sent you at least one paying customer over the past year oh well yeah so how many are there um so we have about 1200 of our direct clients and then on top of that we have another i i'd have to look at the numbers again i think it's about four or five hundred non-profits okay and then we also and then we have another the remainder of that another 1500 come through our partners through our reseller channel okay so hold on just so i make sure i understand this there are 1500 resellers that sold one customer each or there's like 30 resellers that brought you 1500. exactly that's it i see so how many resellers is it about 30 uh 25. oh wow okay i guess pretty close actually 25 resellers and can you paint like put a face on one of those what do they look like what's the website of one of them they're all over the place so um so some because we do a white label program we're pretty sensitive about that if you were to look at a company like kodama c-r-e-d-e-m-a dot e-u they're based in switzerland um and they do a lot of they they work a lot in the manufacturing and logistics um and trade um types of organizations so they're pretty they're they're an example of one and the idea is that we completely private label the entire experience for them and for their customers so they and their customers don't know that they're using green rope um they are using as far as they know um the credema platform interesting so and that's how it works with all of our resellers we have a reseller that targets shipping and logistics another one that targets churches and things more regional in texas we've got another one that targets law firms another one that goes after real estate another one that does janitorial services so i mean it's all over all over the place but typically we work with companies that are are really good at managing a channel so um and so yeah and each of them is various different sizes you know some of them are small a few people working together and some of them are bigger companies that have whole staffs and agencies like marketing agencies and sales consulting firms one of the challenges with managing a bunch of white label platforms across 25 different value resellers is you now have kind of you have multiple tech stacks that you have to stay on top of right and sometimes like a bug in one isn't a bug in the other or you release something on one and it impacts another how do you compartmentalize all these things so your dev team doesn't go crazy so we wrote the system to be extremely flexible and that's something that we did from the very beginning we actually don't really impact things that way because every time we add a new feature we make it something configurable so we're not going to force a change down anybody's throat around any particular industry because if we were going to say like you know we you're going to be forced to treat contacts or accounts or or appeals or something in a certain way that might impact everybody else then we say okay we'll make sure that we can make this available as an option for you and your customers but we're never going to force something down a configuration or the way the system works down that particular channel so it's worked really well and they appreciate that kind of flexibility and that's part of being value added is that they can go in and they can say we have this really flexible open crm platform but we can then go in and without having to hire developers or do anything expect they can go in and they can say we're going to customize this so it exactly matches our workflow so what's team size today how many people we're still small we're still 20 people 20 people how many engineers um let's see four if you count me five four okay okay so um okay and what is the do you have any at this price point can you afford quota carrying sales reps or is it all more like no touch uh no no so we we have our sales process is is very touch because crm isn't the kind of thing where i at least i think in my opinion i don't think you can go and set up a crm without having a detailed conversation without having a consultative sale it's so...