How Kountable CEO Chris Hale grew Kountable to $3.5M revenue and 9 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is chris hale he's the founder and ceo of countable a san francisco-based technology company actively solving the world's distribution problem by building a trust network for global trade that integrates digitizes and optimizing optimizes collaboration between qualified big and small players its cloud-based global trade platform delivers transparency governance and efficiency in trade chris you already take us to the top yeah thank you it was a great introduction what kind of trade um so we're focused on international trade primarily in sectors of healthcare technology and industrial equipment give me an example of an industrial equipment it's like really an x-ray machine going from china to the u.s yeah it could be we typically do a little bit smaller than those sizes that's uh usually a multi-million dollar machine but we do things with filters switches pumps solar panels um all across the board our primary um first markets we're in east africa and we're now expanding into the u.s tell me about that why they why the beach beach in east africa yeah it's a good question we we really learned the business there so my co-founder had relationships with some of the top entrepreneurs in rwanda and we worked with them and came to understand that these entrepreneurs played a critical role in in sort of super important supply chains in healthcare and industrial and started to explore where else this was the case and and found it was a global opportunity and there was no platform for these you know critical players to digitize their businesses and and plug into to global trade and um what year was this when did you launch 2015 2015 got it and um walk me through sort of how you got your first customers yeah so so catherine namura who's my co-founder had been working with an entrepreneurial coaching organization that has a global presence and they had exported their curriculum to rwanda to see how well it worked in that kind of market and so she already had great relationships with some of the country's top entrepreneurs and she said chris why don't you get on an airplane fly over to rwanda and pitch them and see what happens and that weekend we've got 10 million dollars in demand so we were kind of rushing to to meet it with with the platform from there i don't understand i understand how did the coaching program attract founders that participated in the global supply chain of pumps and water filters yeah so first of all the the entrepreneurs were recruited by um the ecosystem in rwanda so governments ministries um other you know entrepreneurial coaching groups all fed this program okay and you know a lot of those entrepreneurs run um you know businesses and infrastructure and ict consultancy you know they're former nurses and doctors that started um healthcare distribution platforms and that's who we ended up hooking up with um you know those entrepreneurs and they're you know we might call them small business owners here in the us instead of sort of the coveted entrepreneur silicon valley type that's building a tech platform um but they're running you know these businesses that that are the the lifeblood of an economy making things work building infrastructure building schools computer labs you know all of it and how do you make money today is it a sas product or is it a percentage gmv in a marketplace or something yeah it's actually a bit of both so more like shopify where we have um a platform that can be used independently and we have subscribers to that platform both small business and enterprise subscribers and then we also make money on gmb by by moving product through the platform and optimizing the the trade transaction in 2020 of total revenue what percent was gmv based first flat fee sas based yeah so 2020 was an interesting year for us but the majority of it was uh gmv based so george interesting yeah yeah interesting okay 80 gm based and and so what i mean is there any margin left on shipping physical goods internationally for you to take a small slice out of unfortunately nathan it's a massive margin it's good news from a business but bad news in terms of how you know these markets have to pay so much to get access to top quality goods so the goal for the platform is really to optimize that spread um we typically see spreads like in the health care sector for example buying critical equipment like malaria kits or covet tests of 40 plus because of all the friction wait can we walk through a malaria kit real quick so what does it cost to tran like break down all the margins sure yeah so you might you might acquire a malaria kit for say 4.50 in south korea where they're manufactured it's a subsidiary of habit and you know the cost to move the kit per unit might be a dollar fifty okay and they might sell in market for eight dollars fifty cents okay and where do you take your cut so it's you know we're taking the cut uh uh from both the the goods themselves and the services to move them from point a to point b and so the goal is really to create price transparency excuse me to optimize the market but what do you measure though are you measuring the 450 like when you look at total gmv through your platform last year do you calculate based on 450 the cost in south korea to manufacture or the 850 sale and market price yeah actually somewhere in the middle which is called landed costs right so it'd be the 450 plus the 150 which would be like six dollars got it okay so how much of that did you do last year how much volume did we do yeah like if you if you do landed costs you know total keep the platform in 2020 how much was it yeah we so we typically take about 15 percent of the value um the landed cost in 2020 was lower than than 2019 um it was only about 7 million okay got oh interesting so why did it go down i mean there should have been a lot of ppe going all over the place last year we don't touch ppe right now ah why not that feels like a very obvious thing that you should be touching yeah ppe is a tough market uh nathan a lot of people are ending up in jail and having their businesses shut down why quality but i mean can't you source i mean are you responsible for sourcing the malaria kit from south korea for 450 yes so can you just source better you know make sure you're sourcing the right ppv equipment yeah the real the real truth is like quality ppe from organizations like 3m aren't going to resale markets ah i see okay i understand got it okay so in 2020 7 million through the platform you're adding a blended cost of everything going through you're taking you know call it 15 so it's like a basically a million dollar revenue line currently yep interesting talk to me about this 2018 we did we did more like 26 million wow um yeah and we had some some changes in the business that that not only covered but some changes in the platform where we were focused on building out the membership model and so you know we're looking to scale up here in 2021 with those three new revenue streams turned on or too new and one as trading volume okay wait so break this down for me you've got the gmv model which we understand clearly let's talk about the sas model for a second what do folks pay on average per month jesus sas model so it's it's kind of an enterprise program so you know we we see anywhere from two thousand to four thousand okay a month yep and how many customers do you have on that um so we're a little bit private about that kind of data you're sort of reverse engineering the the math here we're not public about our customer data yeah well i mean that's on purpose uh so so you just articulated that the gmv business did 7 million you take 15 that's a million you also said earlier that's about 80 of your total business so it sounds like there's 20 percent of the business is about 200 grand on the sas side if we divide in you know by a 24 000 acb we can sort of back into customer account but why don't you just tell me the customer account instead of making me do all the math sorry i i think this is probably isn't the right interview for me okay guys did you do did you listen to the other three did you listen to any of the 3 000 other episodes we've published before agreeing to come on sorry our pr firm just just put this on and i didn't know i apologize nathan yeah it's no problem i didn't know i was gonna have to spill the beans on our on our natural data you don't have to spill them but i'm just going off what you've already shared like you already sh like i'm i'm just quote like you just said that it was a million dollar line and you already know that line of questioning either so i'm just i'm just kind of backing away from the whole thing oh i see you're saying well great well then let's end the interview all right thanks take care bye-bye bye one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 p.m central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes 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