How Iamip CEO Dimitris Giannoccaro grew Iamip to $960K revenue and 100 customers in 2019.

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 $220,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan Latka this is a new episode for you guys episode 69 coming up tomorrow morning we talk to Scott wingo and he breaks down how how he personally guaranteed his first 1 million doll Loan in his business and that led to a $500 million IPO 15 years later he tells us how he did it good morning everybody what's going on my guest this morning is Demetrius J aaro he founded IM amip in 2013 after an extensive career in engineering and intellectual property together with some of the strongest leaders and inventors of some something at ABB which we'll talk about here in a second the urgent need for digitalizing the intellectual property world and maximizing the potential of managing a company's intellectual property successfully has been felt every day during his work at his Company Catering to these needs have become the company's Primary Vision we're going to talk about it today Demetrius are you ready to take us to the top yes all right sure so tell us what you know that's a mouthful right so tell us what imip does and do you make money yeah imip is a typical assess company and we actually earn money by offering seats Demetrius that's such a bad way to start an interview why would you call your company typical you want to be special the best beating everybody why typical I didn't say that the service was typical I just said the typical SAS company a unique service though H all right so tell us what it does yeah and the basic it is just to create the platform where our users can collect collaborate in real time in order to access all patterns in the word and based on whatever they find they can take actionable insights you know they can find out what the competitors are doing who have the highed what type of technolog is about to come out have there been some acquisition so those are the questions that we can answer to our clients okay I'm not following so I'm launching a new company I have an idea and I want to make sure I don't infringe on someone else's patent so I use your service to search it could be yes but it could also be that want to investigate whether your solution is patentable because if no one else has filed a patent most likely you could go for a patent yourself okay also be the case okay and so is that your main kind of value metric you measure how many patents you've helped people filed every month and if that grows it means you're winning well I would say like this we have three type of Target groups we have small startups but the ones that you mentioned in the beginning we're also focusing on the medium companies but also large corporations and all of them have different needs for the small startups is of course identify Innovation so yes that's really what they can do but also to create the strategy how they should protect their unique solution because in the end of the day once you're about to get acquired by Google or whatever that might be the only actually um uh tool that they will have in the conversation will be how good IP they have of course but the medium and large one it's a little bit different because you know these companies they own a lot of money they want to be still at number one so they want to make sure that no one else is infringing on the rights they want they want as well to collaborate and create awareness within organization you know one of the most common problem within large corporations is that the the employees don't even know which type of patent the company have and that's actually the reality for do people I'm going to be provocative here for a second because cuz look I don't care about patents my general theory is copy the hell out of other people out execute them and take all their customers and make all their money so like and then I'll let the lawyers figure out the rest like there are many there are many companies that go big get acquired that have no patents why should people care about patents I think I mean actually they shouldn't care about patents you're totally right I mean they should really focus on creating money you're totally right there but if you want to be acquired later on for some huge amount of money you should make sure that you don't infringe on other rights because if you do that in particular in US you will not have a good end but like let's let's look an example right now right Snapchat just when public Facebook basically copies every specific thing they do no problem right like like patents are not what's going to make a business sell for a lot of money or like it's not going to be the determinant if they like win or lose so like give me a specific U case where a patent is very important I mean in most of the cases the patents are important for products you know when you when you develop a specific thing like Tesla car or let's say that you develop a win turbine or whatever then you need to protect it because you can look touch and feel on the thing that you offer but for the service though and that's I think where you're a little bit wrong you say that Facebook is copying I mean do you know how many patents are filing yearly they file a lot of patents and the reason why they do it is because they want to make sure that no one else will infringe on them or maybe stop them for offering a service yeah but as a consumer when I'm going do I use Snapchat today or do I use Facebook Messenger with SNAP like with filters I'm not thinking which one should I use because this one has more patents like it doesn't my point is it doesn't matter how many patents you have you have to out execute in the market to get users so like what are your thoughts on that no no you're right I mean as a consumer that I mean you should just focus on the usability I mean how good is my service that I'm using and so on and so forth but I mean in the end of the day if you want to make money you have to do it right yeah so then you have to make sure regardless whether you're Snapchat or let's say that you're uber you need to file patents because in the end of the day as long as you're small nobody will care if you do whatever they do but once you start to become the huge billion valuated company you have to create your IP well listen you could prove me wrong here because we know nothing speaks louder than money and customer so are you rich how much money are you making uh I don't make I mean come on we just a startup we are 14 people come on we are 4 Z or 14 14 14 14 people and what year did you launch in uh when when we launched the the software you mean y it was three years ago and uh today we have reached an MR of approximately $60,000 us a month okay so just to let me unpackage that for a second you launched in 201 14 you now have 14 people and you're doing 60 Grand per month in Mr Y and how many customers are using you uh we have approximately 500 users currently and we have a but we have a pure B2B business when now when you people always try and trick me but Nathan laca can't be tricked when you take when you say 500 when you say 500 C users do you mean customers or users no customers are 62 among them see look Dem that's that's a different a different question and I would say 30% of these customers are among the Fortune 500 companies okay got it so you got 500 users 62 paying customers those customers are paying on average about a grand per month to put you at 60 Grand per month in Mr yeah exactly what about funding have you raised Capital yeah we did it like uh two years ago we were bootstrapped the first three and a half years that's I would say the coolest thing I have done in my life I mean to don't have any money it's crazy how how old were you when you launched the company uh myself oh 37 and what was I was going to say what was your financial situation like did you have some in savings were you like broke was your wife going to divorce you like people thought I was crazy man come on I was I was about to become a father I still think you're crazy no I'm just kidding no you're right I mean I I would say like this an entrepreneur can't be a logic person that's sure because we don't see any problems on the road but nevertheless never nevertheless you have to make sure that you have at least bread and water you know on the table uh but what we did actually we managed to get our first client after six months so that we had a really business oriented mindset so we said okay let's be bootstrap so we can show that our you know product is is is wanted out there and once we have done it let's raise money and that's how we did it yeah but it wasn't easy it wasn't easy how many co-founders or just you uh two in myself and F and did you guys just decide to split 50/50 or how did you have the equity conversation very 50/50 and even when invited the two I think in the end in the end of the day Nathan it's about a team team playing I mean...