How Jangomail CEO Mark Richard grew Jangomail to $6M revenue and 5K customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is mark richard he is an engineer with over 20 years experience in high technology product development and business operations he spent the first part of his career in the medical device industry designing mri systems before transitioning to the sas world he's an m he has an ms and phd in electrical engineering both from case western university mark you ready to take us to the top i think so all right what is django mail and how do you guys make money so django mail is an email deployment platform we deal with opt-in emails for those who want to do broadcast or transaction emails and uh we make money by charging people for sending emails okay and so like how do you beat mailchimp well so mailchimp is really focused on the small customers um and those that are want to have small lists we really focus on those that are enterprise level customers um generally speaking 50 000 emails or more per month those that want to do large quantities of email and we have live support you can actually call someone and talk to someone to get the help you need it's very rare you see an enterprise sale lead with um copy on their home page that says try 10 000 emails free no credit card required that's a very kind of smb sort of approach why do you choose that wording on your homepage if you're selling enterprise accounts well it just works for us you know we want to give people the confidence that uh let's give them a shot and uh and let people try us out there's really no risk involved so you know give it a shot okay interesting but you don't think it says anything to the enterprise customer that says oh wait maybe this isn't meant for enterprise it's a small business tool it's a no credit card required trial yeah you know what i mean maybe it does but uh it you know it's worked for us so far and um so yeah yeah that's just right now okay so so help us understand an average customer what are they going to pay you per year to use your technology well it just depends on the quantity that they're using the quantity that they're sending so you know we have customers that are paying um small amounts you know 100 a month maybe and we have customers that are paying us tens of thousand dollars a month in order to spend massive quantity of emails so it really just depends upon the volume of send you know i totally understand that which is why i was curious about the average so are we talking maybe a grand a month is a good average i think yeah that would be a fair number to use as an average yes okay and what if i was paying a grand a month what would you i mean how many emails am i probably sending so for granted a month you know you're probably spending sending on the order of uh you know million million emails um maybe more maybe less it also depends on what types of emails that you're sending whether you're sending a transactional email or broadcast email but uh give or take you know he might be sending about a million or more and why would someone use you use you for transactional email versus like a sendgrid or a mandrill or these other tools well so yeah i mean we you know again we provide the support um we've also got a number of features that some of the others have struggled to do on some of the other features that you know whether it's attachments or some of um you know uh encrypted type of sending that they need to do secure email attachments um that might be some reasons um yeah okay interesting and put this on a timeline for us when did you launch we launched um i think it's been about uh 14 years ago um a entrepreneur aj goyle was the founder of django mail really when the email business was still very very young and uh grew the company and then it was sold about five or six years ago um and uh you know i've been working with the company since then well did you buy it or were you part of the investor group uh part of the investor group yeah okay you put in your own money or they tapped you to come run it um i was tapped to come run this yeah okay why why not go do your own thing um good question you know i've been with the investor group for um for that period of time and it's just one of the things that i do right now okay but but you're taking you're taking a lot of the risk that an entrepreneur who is starting from scratch would take you also are de-risked a little bit because the product already is i guess probably has customers and some revenue um right are you just saying you actually just enjoy that more you don't like going from zero to one you're more of a one to ten kind of guy well i mean i wouldn't necessarily say that right now at my you know that's what i'm doing and at my point in the career it's just um yeah i i would say that what i do now is the one to ten yes growing companies and uh and and you know seeing what we can do with them to make them uh profitable to grow the customer base and uh provide great service so have you been inside of evers group for a while and done this amongst many companies that they've acquired or invested in and you're kind of an eir yeah so i've been with everest group for that about five years and uh yes i've worked with you know many of the probably most of the portfolio companies that we have we have there about um i think it's eight different companies and i really worked with each of them to um to grow the sales there that's great now do you are you able do you participate kind of on that side of the thing as well in other words you know most of these firms if it's a true private equity fund there's kind of carry and things like that do you get some of that upside or no are you really just incentivized based off the equity you have on this part of the business yeah i'm incentivized basically by the by the businesses that i run and uh and and how they perform so just django yeah well actually django and then we have another company in columbus ohio that i'm participating in as well which one that is called us info search or martin data is it's martin data llc um us info search is the kind of the brand name that it goes under it is a company that provides information for um identity verification and risk management so you run a ceo there too yes how do you do both you split your time as necessary you know and uh you just do what needs to be done work a lot of hours i guess yeah um interesting okay good all right so uh launched in 2004 bought in 2013. you came in in about 20 1314 when everest came in and bought it what have you scaled the company to in terms of total customers today so total customers um you know we're probably at the um about five or six thousand range okay um and uh so yeah it and that that comes and goes it uh you know it goes up and down okay and then look i mean you know we said earlier an average of a thousand bucks a month times five thousand customers you can do the math i mean that puts about five million bucks a month is that right um that would uh that would be a bit high okay yeah i'd say it's okay we can correct one of the other two numbers is the average too high of a thousand a month or is the customer count of five thousand too high so the average um you know the the average if i looked at is um probably a little bit high okay uh i think the average enterprise you know and so we have a number of customers that are at the at the low end so if i'd say actual average yeah it's not going to be a thousand dollars a month you think it's closer to 100 yeah you know somewhere in there maybe i don't know exactly okay um many people listening like oh wait how does he not know this thing he's running the company this is like a critical thing this is how you get obviously back into kind of mrr yeah look um there's some aspects of this that we don't necessarily make public mm-hmm okay i mean but you already said average was a thousand and then you already i mean i'm just multiplying numbers you publicly gave me already right that's fair right yeah sure okay but but now we're realizing they're not accurate so i'm trying to give you a chance to correct them that's all i'm trying to do is correct what you what you already said right yeah so if we if we look at a true mathematical average of it you know maybe it's closer down it's not a hundred dollars a month but it's somewhere in there um uh somewhere between those two numbers and uh yeah i mean that's that's about where we'll go with this okay and are you have you helped me understand the kind of company growth over time you know most term companies once they're owned by private equity firms sometimes they can kind of flatten out as you go for operational efficiencies i mean are you guys flat or still growing um we um have not grown a lot over the last number of years but um you know our our focus is always to continue to grow the company why do you why do you phrase it like that i mean what if five percent growth is actually a good thing well i mean that's like what do you compare you're comparing yourself to something otherwise you wouldn't have said we're not growing that much your computer you know you have to compare yourself...