How Indicative CEO Jeremy Levy grew Indicative to $6M revenue and 83 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jeremy levy he's the ceo and co-founder of indicative indicative aims to put behavioral analytics in the hands of product managers empowering them to map analyze and optimize the customer journey across every customer touch point with up to a billion free events indicative removes the barriers from becoming data driven empowering anyone to perform sophisticated analysis jeremy are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so tell us about the company um you know the obviously customer journey and behavioral analytics is a really hot space there's companies like pendo we've had on and full story and some other folks where do you play in the space absolutely so you know our our solution is fairly unique we have three main areas where we differ from the companies that you mentioned one is that we are agnostic in terms of where customers data comes from so as opposed to like ga or pendo and so on we don't care if your data comes from your website from your app in fact we are unique in the sense that we allow you to connect directly to your data warehouse number two is we provide a analytics platform that is designed around essentially providing you unlimited power flexibility from an analysis perspective we don't have templates we don't have canned reports our tools are designed to allow people who aren't technicals in our case specifically product managers or marketers to be able to form perform the type of analysis that is typically in the realm of someone with greater data skills and nathan like you mentioned a moment ago we don't charge based on data volume we can see the writing on the wall with the way cloud services are moving more and more unlimited data volumes and the price of storage is rapidly moving to zero we offer a billion user actions per month for free that's great and how many actions across all your customers are you performing today per month that's a great question many multiples of billions i don't know the answer off head okay i'm curious so i want to get more into the product but give me a general sense first the customers you're targeting so i know you have a bunch of different cohorts i'm certain of it but on average what's the customer pay per year for this sure so historically we've have supported customers who are fortune 500s down to the two guys in the garage um our our starting um our starting pro plan is at 9.99 a month so about twelve hundred twelve thousand dollars a year and then that scale reference four historically as high as a couple hundred thousand dollars a year um from the average company um the average sort of mid market to startup you know you can get away with our free plan um and then it graduates nicely into the thousand dollar a month plan okay so would you say i mean would you say like your sales team and everyone else you're really built around maybe a 12 or 20 000 acv starting point is that fair that's correct that's our entry point okay got it makes a lot of sense um all right now now give me more the back story here so you know when you say that you're not pricing around data or data volume look a lot of reason these companies have a pricing axis around data volume is it's directly tied ideally to utility right and value of the output so and it allows them to drive incredible expansion revenue year over year so so what pricing axes do you price around sure so given our background of primarily focusing on the enterprise we have a suite of features that are targeted really that only really become a factor for you once you reach a certain level of scale so on the simple side everything from things like training to single sign-on to more advanced data integrations our goal is to provide the suite of behavioral tools that we offer to everybody and then only will only worry about monetization once you reach a certain level of scale and the same similar model to what slack and hootsuite do whereas the you know they want to give you something that is really really useful for free but then only become something that you need to pay for as you scale it out and and and and you become more dependent over time and we have pricing tiers that allow you to do that without making it prohibitively expensive or difficult for you okay and when you when you say until you reach a certain level you're talking about until once somebody hits that billion user actions per month sure that's one lever you know things like additional permissions um in our free tier for example everyone gets access to see the same data there's no notion of different roles there's no notion of enterprise single sign-on these things are not show stoppers for many businesses but once you reach a certain scale from a governance perspective from a permissions perspective from a privacy perspective these are things that become more and more important data retention for example where you collate co uh where you where you locate your data be it you know different regions of the world um once you start hitting those types of uh limits that's where our features come into play that's when our paid plans come into play so jeremy it sounds like to me what you're saying is really your your upsells come from kind of additional module add-ons whether it's single sign-on white labeling domains on-site training things like that not necessarily seat based or usage-based metrics you got it we want our free plan to be incredibly generous we want our free plan to be sufficient for ninety percent of our customers no i get that i mean i'm talking about i'm talking about upgrading it sounds like it's really a module approach not a data or usage model and not a seat model you got it exactly interesting okay so how effective has that been what what what does expansion look like usually from a year one customer to their year to renewal so we've only opened up this free plan notion within the last six months historically before that we were doing primarily enterprise sales so we're only really a few months in this plan and the growth has been really surprising for us we've doubled our acquisition month over month um from when we launched this back in june july okay so just be clear you launched the whole company here in 2018 in july no no the company is about four or five years old we launched the freemium version this free version um just in july of this past year 2018. okay but just looking at your enterprise account so like let's say someone signs up for year one they're paying a grand per month your middle tier what i'm asking is that's a 12 000 acv account what do you know based off what you know about usage and you know onboarding what do you know they're probably gonna grow to in year two sure um you know uh to be honest we haven't focused on um existing customer growth in that way so you know i'm just trying to think off the top of my head um okay don't don't make it up i mean if expansion revenue revenue hasn't been a focus we don't have to go down that line of questioning i was just curious yeah so it's not if that's really not a focus sorry it's no it's not going to focus yeah that's fine okay great so launch in 2014 uh good understanding of the products and the pricing how many customers have you scaled to today um we have um several hundred customers pushing you know pushing about a thousand oh okay that means yeah pretty healthy so call nine and just be clear those are all paying not your free people no no those are those are including the free customers okay come on jeremy just the paid how many how many paid we don't share those types of numbers i knew you were gonna ask that okay well well you know why i ask it right i assume you're trying to back into our revenue well no it's for this exact reason um it's easy to say we have 20 million users but guess what you can be broken losing a crap ton of venture capitalist money and have no company with a bunch of free users so um you said you watched i'll give you a roundabout way to get there which is the company is about 15 people and historically operated at or around breakeven okay 15 people and where's everyone based in new york city okay got it and these just be clear these are all full time correct okay i mean look so if you assume a base salary i've called five grand per month which is very conservative i would say for new york city that means you got to be doing about north of a million bucks per year to be break even i'm i'm not i'll i'll leave it to you and your audience to speculate but we don't comment on those numbers yeah that's fine by the way i'm going to ask because the the tactics you give us in terms of expansion and pricing axes and things like that will mean more if they're tied to real numbers i mean look i would say actually your pricing is fairly weak because there's only one access you can upsell against you have no seat model you have no usage model that's really just your sales people if there are sales people trying to sell additional modules what does your sales org look like today it's small we're really focused around growing this free tier if you think about sort of the stage of our business although we've been around for a number of years um with this free plan with this freemium model we're really focused on the growth aspect there today more so not to say revenue isn't a focus but um it's not the primary focus right now we're looking to leverage the mouth perspective um tweaking the paid tier the thousand dollar month tier is something that um you know we have on the near horizon but not a focus today and you know i go as far as to say um the way our...