How Handshake (acquired by Shopify) CEO Glen Coates grew Handshake (acquired by Shopify) to $20M revenue and 1K customers in 2020.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per top 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top drive this week's winner of 100 bucks is Rick segman Rick segman he is stuck brick and mortar business that is his Focus so congratulations Rick if you guys want to win 100 bucks every Monday on the show in order to enter simply subscribe to the show on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 again text the word Nathan to 33444 folks many of you reach out to me and you say Nathan so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching but whenever I try and batch you tell me this you go Nathan they don't book back toback times so you or they don't show up after they book it's frustrating the answer is guys you have to use Smart Tools I use a tool called AE scheduling at Nathan lat.com I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode Nathan La here this is episode 547 coming up tomorrow morning I dive into the fin Tech space with Manuel Silva who's a partner at Santander innoventures it's a $200 million fintech fund they're very bullish on one of their Investments cabbage will break down why and where he sees fintech going all right guys Nathan lka here our guest today is Glenn coats he is the co-founder and CEO of a company called handshake they focus on putting the right product on every shelf in every story goes between Sydney San Diego and New York City Glenn are you ready to take us to the top totally all right man thanks for having me on the show than for jumping on so it's not going to be easy you know that right it's going to be tough oh I'm I'm well aware I've been out this for long enough to know that um I get to choose what's that quip from the Evernote guy I get to pick any 23 hours a day that I'd like to work there you go all right so so tell us what handshake does and what's your business model how do you make money great so uh as you kind of just pointed out um handshake is about getting the right product to every shelf uh in the world um and so that's you know think about every store you've ever gone into whether it was a shoe store or a grocery store or the hardware store all the products on those shelves that we buy as consumers how did they get there well the way they get there is that the Upstream suppliers have to sell them into those stores and the thing that most people don't know is that even though for you and I Nathan the world of buying things ordering things has become the world of Amazon you know if I want to order a car I pick up my phone and I order an Uber if I want to order food I pick up my phone and I order seamless the world that you and I are in where we get to order things really easily that world one step back in the supply chain is totally broken and it's all pen and paper and phone facts email imagine if we went back to the 80s and instead of ordering something from Amazon I had to pick up a mail order catalog and send in a form to order a pair of shoes from you know the place that I wanted to buy it so that's the world that those businesses are still in and so what handshake does is we basically bring that Amazon like uh modern technology powerered um buying and selling experience to businesses so that when the shoe store wants to order um 100 pairs of shoes from their supplier they get the same experience that you and I would get if we were ordering one pair of shoes from you know zapo or amazon.com and so um we really have two lines of business that we that we uh that we go to market with um one is handshake rep which is primarily mobile apps used by um sales reps who are working on behalf of the BRS the manufacturers the Distributors to sell that product into the stores and so we're replacing their paper cataloges their order forms all that kind of old school stuff with a modern mobile app uh for selling and then the flip side of the coin is um we make handshake direct which is a mobile and web-based um e-commerce uh product for B2B and so um you know when the sales reps not around and that um convenience store has sold out of hershy bars and they want to reorder the Hershey bars from the distributor um instead of picking up the phone and calling their rep or faxing the order form into the into the warehouse they can pick up their mobile phone scan the product from the shelf and just reorder it from the distributor the same way that you and I would order an Uber and what's your what's your business model so how do you make money who who's paying for what right so we're we're a SAS business um uh we sell to the manufacturers and Distributors and so we really have two sets of users we have the the manufacturers and Distributors and then we have their customers who are logging into our products but we uh we work with the manufactur and distri Distributors to um to sell to them so we we have in many ways a similar business model to a Salesforce where we're selling you know per year um per user or per website in the case of our e-commerce product um licensing you know the same as most SAS so what is kind of for so how what year did you launch the business then uh we got going uh you know I started working on handshake in about 2010 we got our first customers in 2011 okay and what was first year Revenue how embarrassing remember yeah it was it wasn't much I'll put it that way uh he was in the he was in probably in the thousands or tens of thousands you know 10,000 I I honestly can't even remember by the end of 2011 I I couldn't even tell you we were probably doing 10,000 20,000 a month something like that back in the day got it yeah and then if you fast forward us to where you're at today how many customers are you serving it's December 2016 yeah so we work with over a thousand companies today um out there in the market in in different Industries we have customers in you know food and beverage in you know apparel and Footwear in you know the outdoor sporting goods industry Glen is that thousand number though is that users or is that paying customers no that's companies okay that's actual companies they're paying you with their credit cards they're actively using you Etc right okay and it sounds like ways that you're kind of driving Mr expansion RP expansion is depending on number of seats are there any kind of value based other value based metrics you're using to charge more per company um so we the the pricing model for um our sales rep product is pretty straight forward it's it's very Salesforce like you know per seat per per year um on the e-commerce side look there's a lot of variables in um in the complexity of the of the of the experience that someone needs like all these industries work in very different ways um so the pricing on that is is kind of made to order I I guess you could say um but we don't have what you would think of as like um we're not inside the transaction if that if that's what you mean we don't charge a per transaction fee um we don't take a cut uh like that so on on average what what is one of these business paying you guys per month uh it varies we have um today we really have two kinds of customers we have like we have a small business kind of channel that is probably more the kind of QuickBooks based business or maybe they're running zero or something like that and those companies pay us you know there's a range but probably somewhere from sort of5 to $20,000 a year for the smaller businesses um and then the larger businesses that we work with pay us you know kind of go from there up right so kind of mid five figures up into kind of lower six figures um is is where our customer base goes for the kind of bigger companies so take take me through you said 2011 maybe you got up to 10K in Mr what will December 2016 Mr be uh I'm going to decline to answer that question or give give me give me a Range so we kind of know generally where you're at and be as vague as you want yeah so we're uh we're we are in the series B stage SAS company range so we are probably approaching what a um typical growth investor would consider the beginning of like a growth stage status company and what is that number I've talked to many folks that have raised a series B that have are pre-revenue right so most a lot of growth stage investors talk about like kind of 10 million in as being you know you know where they kind of find their sweet spot and um you know we're we're we're in that kind of scale right so I mean it's fair to say again be specific or general as you want fair to say 800 Grand in Mr plus or minus 100 Grand something like that uh without being specific you know we're in we're in the order of magnitud I thought you were gonna say without being specific yes I was going to say I was going to say I like this guy all right so good that's helpful to understand um so kind of big range is everything you're...