How Introhive CEO Lee Blakemore grew Introhive to $10M revenue and 50 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is jody glidden he's been ceo of intro hive since it was founded seven years ago he's a frequent blogger and speaker on topics of sales acceleration especially among enterprises jody are you ready to take us to the top yes i am all right tell us about intro hive what's the company do and are you a pure play sas model yeah sure um yeah we are pure play sas um it's a system that um looks at all of the enterprise data sources uses machine learning and tries to make sense of it uses it it creates various different use cases and applications for helping to accelerate sales things like creating a searchable relationship graph that sales people can use and and a bunch of other things very cool and give us a general sense of kind of pricing what's the average customer pay per month or per year would you say um it depends on the size of deployments we have some customers that are 100 000 employees or more um they get better pricing obviously and then um and then there's smaller companies but somewhere in the uh you know 20 to 25 percent per month range and sorry do that out of actually a company like logo level so on average are you signing up like 30 seats 100 seats oh yeah most of our deployments are are pretty large um as far as normal what you'd normally see in sas we don't really do the normal smb model um we are primarily companies of 500 people uh or more okay we do have a few smaller customers that might have 100 or 200 seats but that would be that would be rare okay and so if the average is kind of 500 or more what would you i mean what does that look like in terms of acv uh yeah we're we're in uh we're kind of in the see the eight digits sort of size now so we're just just kind of we're tripling every year um sorry not you as a company i meant i meant the the annual contract value on on that kind of new logo signing up oh um for somebody of 500 suits yeah yeah um they they're usually you know depending on what products they choose because we have a number of products but uh a lot of companies start with us in around that hundred thousand dollar okay uh a year range cool yeah that's really that's really helpful to understand all right so about a hundred thousand bucks first year acv again huge range but that's kind of a good kind of average middle ballpark kind of thing put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company uh really at this at the end of 2011 start of 2012 that was when we raised our first money and kind of got more serious about things okay and uh where were you personally at that part in your life did you just quit corporate or what yeah i had just uh we had a pre me and my partner stuart had a previous startup we were acquired by blackberry and that was in 2008-2009 when when blackberry was was uh you know really the top really the only smartphone game in town back then we stayed with them for a couple years took different roles and then and then i left and uh it started this then we raised money shortly after that and stuart jumped over shortly after that's great so how much have you raised to date uh we've raised around 15 million or so and there was no there was never a thought to go on you know let me we we have the money let's just bootstrap this thing um no we did put some of our own money in as well um there's been you know some equity raised there's been some of our own money and there's also been uh we have a lot of our people in canada and the canadian government has also uh helped with some grant money and stuff like that so total financing in is probably closer to uh 20. total from vcs would be closer to 15. yep but my point was though again it sounds like you had some success in the past why raise vc at all why not just keep using your own money um yeah it's just it's a lot of risk you know i think i still believe that it's it's worth it to have a financial partner i'd have a friend who had a very very successful startup where he got i don't know 100 150 million personally and he's tried since then doing two or three startups and he lost most of the money that he you know that he got you can still do very very well getting some financial partners and if you pick the right people you know you you don't really lose a whole lot of um control in doing that yep so 2012 is kind of launch date 15 million raised today and what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using the platform uh so we're we're around 50 customers or so okay so this is very much kind of a super high acv kind of high touch longer sales cycle kind of process that's right yep yeah we have we have a lot of customers in the you know half a million dollar a year range but we have we've got some in the million dollar or more a year range so it's um yeah it's definitely at the higher end we're starting to move that down so a lot of people started smv and moved their way up we actually started a large enterprise and moved our way down and why is that why were we able to do that well because of what we do it's very very sensitive data so you know we're taking the most trusted assets of an enterprise and we're helping to make sense of it so you have to do if you if you want to do it properly you have to put a lot of time and energy into your security uh encryption all of the architecture of your system to make sure it will work properly and that there's there's no breaches so if once you do that um you know the the next you know i think a lot of people start at the at the smb because they can they can have a really simple minimal viable product and then move up over the years put more and more time into it with hours we couldn't really have a minimal viable product unless we already put a lot of work in so we thought at that point you might as well recoup it by selling into our jennifer yeah it's funny you know if i just view the website entrohive.com and i scroll down i scroll down i mean and don't don't take offense to this this looks like a company that could be from a crm that like just launched yesterday in other words there's there's nothing that i realize wow this enterprise until i get down to our customers and i see pwc and reed smith and i'm going maybe there's something else going on here but nowhere do i see like you know you know the only crm to protect against security breaches or handle your most like sensitive data why don't you lead with that yeah we talk about it a lot in our blogging and in our thought leadership stuff and conferences and stuff but we don't yeah we probably don't make it as front and center as we probably could because i just you know we onboarded a half dozen employees today and one of the things that i've just in the speech uh to them you know the kickoff thing with with the guys was um for a company of our size it's almost done our logos are almost unheard of you know and it's not we don't we're not one of those companies that has you know five seats at pwc you know we've got a hundred thousand seats at pwc and uh it's like that with a lot of our customers our customers are you know giant banks and the biggest law firms in the world and the biggest taxes they're the the most data sensitive uh companies in the world so it's uh yeah i think it's something that's unusual about us for sure just because of kind of how we had to build the solution yeah and you said you just recently passed 10 million bucks in arr uh yeah we're yeah that's that's about right now yeah and then we're and then we're tripling every year we have a goal to triple again in 2019. it's gonna be hard to keep that forever but that's yeah yeah yeah but i mean so if you're doing so you know 10 million run rate today means you're about 830 grand a month and if you just tripled that that means you were doing what about 250 grand just about a year ago per month yep it's been pretty consistently for the last three years we've been tripling almost on the dot um yeah no that's a it's an impressive that's obviously you know they say what is it you know triple three times or triple two times and then double double double and you set yourself up for kind of ipo if you want yeah yeah that's right i mean we have to watch all aspects of the funnel the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel to make sure that there's enough leads because if you look at the length of our sales cycles we have to think pretty far in advance in order to make sure there's enough pipeline to have it closed in time but so far i think the guys are doing a really good job what is that pipeline right now what's the what's the timeline uh oh our sales uh it's somewhere around six months uh actually we're just starting to get below six months now on the average so um but but really close to there which you know in the old days it would be like two years so so we've moved that in a lot yeah now it's not like you're starting contract value it's called maybe 100 grand it obviously goes up from there what are you willing to say how aggressive are you...