How Gummicube CEO Dave Bell grew Gummicube to $4.8M revenue and 150 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is dave bell he's an entrepreneur and recognized pioneer in the fields of mobile entertainment and digital content distribution he's been featured in and is a frequent contributor to inc magazine newsweek venture beat website magazine mobile marketer and many others he's currently the co-founder and ceo of gummy cube the leading global provider of data technology and services for app store optimization dave are you ready to take us to the top right all right what does app store optimization mean so app store optimization essentially means understanding how to acquire users and grow your app um across all channels using the best data possible focusing on things like building organics understanding what users are searching for in the store understanding what influences conversion in the app store and also across your all of your channels and improving those metrics having a having a plan in place to systematically test and systematically uh expand your presence and improve your conversion interesting okay and what's your revenue model is it a pure place ass company yeah it is a it is a sas company so uh we have a platform called datacube and a platform called split cube those platforms uh one uh data cube is used for keyword metadata optimization and market intelligence inside the store split cube is a platform kind of like optimizely for apps that's used for an av testing solution particularly for like apple app store for example where you can't run live a b testing um and what we can do is we can literally emulate apps to our pages or search results allow you to drive some traffic in and heat map what users are doing when they uh when they hit those pages so before you even go live in a store with changes you can understand uh how they might impact your conversion and what variants of creative work better and when you combine that together with kind of targeting the right keywords and understanding what users intend to download when they search for example you end up with a much better funnel and of course a lot of this activity when you understand what converts really well when you understand the way users search and what they hope to find that also translates into optimization of any of your other marketing channels because at the end of the day you're trying to create one big pipe or one big funnel that gets the right users to your app and maximizes your growth and so by leveraging aso not just for typical things like search optimization or conversion but also leveraging that data to impact your other channels you can have a much bigger impact and that's what our technology allows people to do and dave with that in mind i know you have a bunch of different customer profiles i imagine but um what does the average customer pay you per month would you say um so i mean it can vary so our our business model uh is dependent on the number of apps that you have live it's dependent on the number of territories that you that you want to address um you know typically for like an enterprise model for example uh you know we could uh we could range anywhere from you know 1049 a month for pure self-service uh all the way up to fifteen hundred dollars a month per application if you're looking for some help too so gummy cube is unique uh in that uh we understand that one of the biggest problems with sas is that a team might sign up use it once and then other priorities might come up and you never use it again some people address that through customer success kind of light touch we actually have a team that can go in and kind of help helping form and educate and kind of help almost drive the next steps of the optimization process to ensure that our customers are getting the best or the the best results from our technology so jake and dave just to focus the rest the interview because we were short on time would you say like the appropriate average might be you know a thousand bucks a month typically or is it less than that no it's it's more than that so most most people that we work with are kind of at the 2500 per app per month level okay got it that's fair enough that that's helpful to understand and so with that in mind i'd love to learn you know kind of put all this on a timeline so when did you launch the company what year so gummy cube has been around for almost a decade we launched gummy cube in 2010 uh we are actually the oldest aso company in north america we were founded three years before you know sensor tower for example even existed as a technology or a tool um so we've been doing this for a long time and friends annie in your space uh kind of so apparently has one function inside of a broader tool that lets you understand uh what some of the keywords that your app ranks for but the reality is that app store optimization is very nuanced um it's not the same thing as chart boosting in the stores uh the data that you get in terms of how you understand search volumes uh can vary depending on the tool that you're using some very accurate some not accurate and one of the things that gummy cube really set out to do was create technology that from the ground up was mobile so not just importing the google keyword planner into mobile but looking at how the algorithms worked kind of reverse engineering them okay so app annie is not a competitor uh some people view them as a competitor some people try to use them for the purpose of aso but the features and functionality aren't really a perfect replica of what we have with datacube okay interesting what's your team size today how many people yeah so we have 35 to 40 people in san jose we also have offices in berlin uh in tokyo and uh in portland where we do a lot of our technology development oh great okay so san jose remote locations 35 folks and over the past decade how many customers have you scaled to yeah so we uh you know we have a lot of customers generally our customers range from what i call kind of startups that are very serious about their business so they're investing in growth all the way up to uh to enterprise right now you know we serve upwards of 150 enterprise customers um so you know uh you know folks like your news corp for example uh you know uh and their subsidiary so uh we also work with you know great startups like you know limebike and folks like that so um that's the type of company that uh that we typically work with so dave can i take kind of that 150 enterprise times the average enterprise you know monthly payment you said earlier 2500 you guys are doing about 370 per month right now something like that um it so it's not that straightforward uh it's it's uh it's a it might actually be a little higher than that i don't reveal revenue numbers publicly uh however you know what i can say well dave one of those by the way one of those has to be wrong because i'm just taking i'm just multiplying so either your arp is lower or higher or your customer account is higher or lower yeah so here's here's where the variable is the variable is we don't charge per customer we charge per app or per territory that they want to uh that they want to target so it's a little bit higher than what you said okay uh and that's because most of our customers have more than one app got it fair enough and then take me back you know if you're doing north of that today you know what's growth look like year over year what were you doing a year ago yeah so we've uh we've almost doubled since last year oh great or realistically in the last 18 months we've almost doubled that's great so call maybe november 2017 doing half of 400k per month maybe 200k per month or something like that where's most like growth coming from is it adding new apps to the same customers or is it brand new customers all together uh it's it's both so we've we've added uh we've added a lot of new customers but a lot of a lot of folks uh have also been adding apps so like when you work with game publishers for example they have an entire portfolio and you kind of uh will land one and then have good results and other product managers will come to you so there's been some land and expand but there's also a lot of business development that goes on and we have a lot of a lot of great inbound we have a great business development team that we built and have you been able to resist the temptation to raise and bootstrap the company or did you decide to raise no we bootstrapped the company so great i love that yeah so this is our this is my third mobile start fourth mobile startup actually my last one uh i was a co-founder of play phone where we raised 60 or 70 million dollars uh this one we decided that we were going to you know we already had a lot of great relationships and a lot of great developers that we knew so um we built the product we did a lot of the the data aggregation machine learning in the first few years completely bootstrapped it uh and then you know we funded the rest with revenue from our from our customers i love look that's the best investor right we we call vc vested customers there right that's bootstrapped for you um talk to me you know in any sas company churn is really critical what is your churn today and how do you make sure it stays low yeah absolutely well and you know you have to look at churn in a few different ways when you're in a business like ours right you have you know smart development sign up but they really want kind of a balanced approach to their aso and they want the...