How Idealspot CEO Marc Smookler grew Idealspot to $804K revenue and 100 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Mark smoke lore he's founded six companies two of which have been acquired and three of which are market leaders in their respective spaces the leading brick-and-mortar retail analytics company ideal spot comm a leading online retailer sake social calm and a cutting-edge marketing services platform written dot-com Mark's companies have generated over three hundred million dollars in lifetime revenues and sold over 150,000 products worldwide mark are you ready to take it to the top yep all right so you you're doing so much the challenges I have to figure out one of these things to focus on so let's do it this way which one's making the most money top line ideal spots sake social or written well its sake social so we all go loud yeah cheffy thought the online store the largest online retailer of Japanese sake but no I mean ideal spot is the one that's rocking and rolling right now and that's where I spend most of my time okay let's focus on that but I'm curious now that I know it's sake how much do you sell annually in Japanese sake online well a lot I mean on a daily basis so we use Shopify in the front-end I'm a big fan of Shopify and essentially every day we sell thousands of dollars worth of sake all across the United States now there's some states that are obviously dry that we can't ship to but but again I mean we ship to most states and it's all outsourced I have no employees we have a third-party warehouse in Napa Valley that pick pick packs and shifts all of our brews and again Shopify in the front end and it's just yeah just a fully automated business okay we fun business that's great so a couple thousand a month so minimum two hundred sixty five grand a year have you guys I mean do you do a more than a million a year there we do not do a million but we got a million dollars you guys so between 365 and a million but no touch no - I mean yeah I mean it's it's just a you know it was a hobby business that became something more and interesting and again it's not that I'm a you know big drinker of sake it's you know an opportunity that I saw and that's a sort of a long-winded story in and of itself but again I mean if I just had you know five of those ID I'd be happy right the automated businesses that sort of print money on their own yep okay let's talk about ideal spot what's it do and when do you launch it yeah so we launched for the platform that's live today we launched roughly geez September of 16 so what is that 15 16 months ago and we essentially helped everybody within commercial real estate including retail restaurants etcetera better understand their local retail markets and we do that through the use of what we call better data okay so you know if you call it retail as it was was focused very much on the identity right what people look like sort of age ethnicity etc we focus more on intent right so people signaling that hey you know I want a cup of coffee right and so when and where is that happening and helping sort of be the coffee shop the brokers developers everybody's sort of within this retail ecosystem better understand where that demand is for that cup of coffee now your yeah your algorithm those only as good as the inputs that you put into it so you spend a lot of time trying to probably fine-tune inputs what inputs are you using to make these recommendations sure so we have all the the standard stuff that you would think of right we have all the census data right so the demographics again what people look like right we also have spending by retail category psychographics all of the basics we also have really good traffic data so the movement of a local park is actually physical traffic from a DMV about cars passing this intersection per day yeah we actually partnered up with a company called INRIX that maps and models all of the traffic across you know the United States they're well-known for it I would call them market leaders and we buy that data album spell thy name in Rix I and RI XCOM on it and so they're attracting hundreds of millions of vehicles from their navigation systems to partnerships with BMW and Ford and all of those so they buy all that data and then we buy from the sort of democratize it to our clients and the same thing with our with our demographic data we partnered up with a few companies to get that data and so again I mean we don't add value there right that's just sort of we're aggregating that data that's already been aggregated for us where we cut our teeth is basically so the demand side data that purchase intent data's ours we've been building up that model for over two years now and pulling that from search and social networks and we're marrying that to identity so we're taking the what people are and we're marrying it to sort of the who people are right so I'm a 41 year old white guy from Austin Texas right and so retailers make tons of assumptions based on what I am but they wouldn't they don't know who I am for instance they don't know that I'm gonna be again that I suck at all right I'm not a fan of yoga etc that's who I am but you wouldn't get that from my identity and so we're trying to do is we're trying to peel back a layer and try to help people better on to get those other data points well actually search and social search is more active intent that's somebody raised in their hand saying I want a cup of coffee who near me where I'm at right now and that could be from then typing into google map so how do you know that though that's my question like how do you have a partnership with Google where you know what they're searching location wise on their phone and you tie that back to the demo data that dude oh I'm sorry end of itself and that's some of our secret sauce but most anybody right now can go on to Google Trends and they can type in coffee in a specific area over a specific time and Google will tell you the average amount of searches that happen for that keyword now it's not just you know coffee but it's 800 related cousins where it's you know roasted and you know you know bulletproof coffee all of those things add your data up so we aggregate all those up and then we and then Google will tell you of course from a city-wide live level same with Facebook they'll tell you from a citywide level what the reach estimate is for a category but of course we take that down from the city level to the street level right so we top that all the way down any because if you think about it sorry if you think about it from retailers perspective you know if you were to tell you know an online you know company hey Austin has a hundred thousand searches for golf and golf related term that's fine for them right because it's just an online advertising campaign but when you're talking about a location that matters right is that pet you know aggregation north-south-east-west where are those people where is that density and we help them sort of locate that so they make a better decision and who and who is they I mean is it Starbucks they're trying to open a store in Austin they want to know where we they want your recommendation on which intersection to open to that yeah so we don't work with Starbucks today but an example yeah that's an example and so if you think about it you know again you know we can now help augment whatever Starbucks was doing we can tell them hey we definitively know there were whatever a hundred thousand people that were searching for coffee within a five minute drive some of this ads on it oh and by the way there's no coffee shops within that five minute drive time so we call that a market opportunity yeah that's unmet demand and we can definitively tell that what's your revenue model SAS or is it something else so it's fast today and but again people can come on and I mean it's SAS with no commitment right so you can come on and you can cancel at any time but we you know people subscribe and they give them the ability to pull reports math whatever it is that they need and what do they paint on average per month are we talking a hundred bucks a thousand a million ten thousand no I wish two million yeah so we started $100 today for just a basic report and we scale up from there what I would say is our average take right now per clients is anywhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars per month yeah and it really depends on what they want right and so if they want all-you-can-eat today that you know you know $2,500 for them to basically pull all-you-can-eat reports maps models full access to our days and are you Selvi utility metric you're selling around is what based off like line of data or like what are those is it you know I'm saying like is it data records what's the number I mean are you I'm sorry what are you asking well I'm asking it happen yeah no no not the deliverable when someone starts at a hundred our plan what utility based pricing metrics are enabling you and your sales team to upsell them to a five hundred or two grand per month plan is it additional feature sets additional lines of data records additional contacts what is it yeah so today we're a seed stage company and so right now at this point it's all about getting people sort of using the service trying it getting to appreciate it and find the value in the service I don't think he'd stage companies can really get that discerning when it comes to their features I think it's just right...