How Komiko CEO Hal Howard grew Komiko to $720K revenue and 2K customers in 2017.

launched this company guys back in 2015 after a long stint not a stint actually a tenure at Microsoft almost two decades he launched in a company called Kimiko which is helping folks enrich their CRM that the plug in a world it's an add-on to CRM is complimentary not competitive up to ten people now full time based up there in Seattle doing about 60 grand per month they get that number because they've got about two thousand employees across a large set of customers using their tool they charge about 30 bucks a seat that's about 60 grand and mor get about 120 grand last year hoping to hit that million dollar and you'll run right by the end of twenty seven this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs so our number one our number two in their industry in terms of revenue for customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have now it's $20,000 per Tov I haven't experienced he's had bent on global domination we just broke our hundred thousand unit so mark and I'm your host Nathan Laska business of 7:46 coming up tomorrow morning Derek joins us he is a six-figure poker player who quit to launch his own agency why'd he quit still lucrative poker game for a startup hello everyone might guess today at how Howard he is a founder of a company called Kimiko now before that he was a leader of the Microsoft Dynamics ERP development team from 2004 to 2014 so he's seen it he's been there he's done that how are you ready to take it to the top sounds great let's do it very cool so tell us it start from the beginning tell us first what a Kimiko does and let's hear about how you acted in Microsoft and got into it in the first place sure Kimiko is the sales intelligence tool that basically helps our customers understand what engagements with customers are working uses a combination with your data mining machine learning techniques to understand what patterns of engagement with a customer working and it does it by going directly to primary data sources not just your CRM but things like email calendar phone logs etc to understand what's going on do you do you pay for kind of other data sorta sources just to check that like full contact clear bit things like this we have integrations with all those kinds of services as well yeah yeah I know and and quickly what is your revenue model it's a subscription service it's cloud service classic when I use your usual broom looks like these sass yeah yeah all right take it back to the launch store here 2014 you're sound like you're killing it at Microsoft you're having a ton of fun there what was what was it like working now and then why'd you leave yeah well I mean if you look at my history of Microsoft and I was there for 20 years and worked on essentially four version one products and I like sort of building things and building things from crashing and 2014 we reached a point with Dynamics ERP business where I felt like I had a great team around me people who were capable of moving the business forward and keeping going forward and I was interested in starting over again and building something new so you know I looked at opportunities to do that within Microsoft felt like the best opportunities existed outside and so family-owned company and we went for it he could have done anything like use this concept well essentially you know my time in business applications I became convinced that there were a lot of new technologies that weren't being exploited very well in business apps and business applications typically or you know form in front of a database with some kind of a report being run at the end of the day and most users of business apps use them more as a burden than an actual benefit right now your sales person and you have to do a bunch of data entry in CRM you don't love your CRM system right and that's their stuff but it should be something that helps you day-to-day understand what's working with the customers and so oh I'm down again you know whole idea man Kimiko is to do that is to make it useful for people that actually use it and what's the average customer paying you average customer pays anywhere from 30 to 35 dollars per month per user and you know good customer for us is you know we have customers ranging from three years up to five hundred got it how many total users are there a chronic across all your paid accounts like are we talking ten thousand a hundred thousand a million two thousand at the moment and growing every day okay so so there's 2 tallis just to make sure we're concerned there's basicly 2000 seats is the term I two thousand seats across how many businesses around 50 businesses in code that's great and so it's obviously lunch done in 2014 you just tell me or your Percy price was on the low end kind of 30 30 bucks you have two thousand so what you're doing a minimum 60 grand per month right now I'm going like that right around there come tell me more about the team kind of makeup so you launched again back in you lost you right after you left Microsoft right in 2014 I took a few months off to consider various ideas and then basically founded coming to February 15 so yeah we've been at it for two and a half years now let's be on you convince yourself that when you left Microsoft you were going to just vacation the rest of your life and you're sitting in Boca and go okay I can only have so many Coronas and limes and I can only lay in the Sun so long I want to get back into it right it was minutes but yes but pretty much pretty much pretty impressive I can basically guess almost exactly without it right it's 2015 and what do you add today in terms of your team size and help me understand the makeup yeah the team is pretty small we're actually only ten people the advantage of you know cloud services today is you don't have to have huge infrastructure and use teams to actually build a significant product so it's we're we're ten people today and you know we'll grow a little bit over the coming year or whatever else is customer demand grows how many years okay so again and are you the kind of engineering co-founder or are you the business kind of co-founder but the reality is that my co-founder and I both do a lot on the sales side and we also do products engineering work as well are you actually writing writing out code each day not me the team does that it's been a while since I wrote code for a living but I do a lot of the design work and sort of ideation around the product that sort of thing this is a very very fragmented and competitive space right up you see company like tout app which just sold for a not so good number you you have other kind of companies that are raising money like pipedrive right 19 million I think deli with clothes I mean there's tons right do you see yourself playing in the crm space or you a customer of the CRM in other words you're just going to enrich the CRM yeah right now we CRF is complementary you see around we don't see ourselves replacing something like Salesforce for example we we actually partner with Salesforce and most of our companies most of our customers actually had Salesforce and we're complementary to it now we're driving a lot of value there will the value equation shift over time between what we charge for our app and what sports is able to punch or maybe you know that's not typical when you can authorize the platform layer or something as price does drop so we're going to drop maintaining the value when they're in their price point so but just to be clear will you ever have people coming to you like I see your customer your customers listed here like let's say Far East hospitality right when they when they come to you are they saying how help me understand why to use you instead of pipedrive like are they comparing you and their CRM decision or is a different decision set it's a it's a different decision says they've already pro we decided on the base serum system like how they're going to manage our activities message stuff what they're looking for is intelligence beyond right as what would actual being you know the in Far East case in particular their hospitality organization runs a big hotel group we're currently working with corporate locations routes there those those has all the relationships with corporate clients and so on and so managing the relationships those corporate clients what's working what isn't what patterns of engagement work that's what they're looking for got it makes it sense let's jump more into the kind of economics here so in a space like this churn can sometimes be high what do you guys that in terms of gross monthly turn we don't we we don't lose customers certainly where the pointer and our evolution where we don't lose customer we've lost in total over the history of our company for customers and one was acquired and therefore but wasn't a candidate anymore one had a huge management changeover and the other two were early days stuff where we were testing with them and decided to not support the scenario that they were they were calm what are you it's not easy to get 2,000 seats sold what are you doing to acquire new customers what's your kakak yeah up until the end of last year it was purely inbound like we were essentially listed in half exchange and down you know on our own website nicer stuff people were coming to find us you know fortunately my co-founder and I have a pretty good deal of the contacts from all the big businesses we've clashed over time and and so we we were able to drive a lot of business just by end down people referring reaching out to us that's everything earlier...