How m3ter CEO Griff Parry grew m3ter to $6M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

guys uh Griff sold his last company to AWS and through that process said I've got a great idea which he launched in 2020 it's called meter and it helps companies that are generally doing more than $50 million of Revenue more accurately capture and and Bill based off usage you've got to capture the product usage data then bill against it resulting in billions of API calls per year in some cases today meter is working with between call 10 and 100 customers they've got 56 on the team with quote a majority being engineers and quote plenty of Runway as Griff and his team looks to invest in the longterm hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan Latka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview hey folks my guest today is Griff Perry his him and his co-founder John Griffin started meter after building and selling a backend as a service company for video games to AWS The Experience brought the challenges and opportunities of using usage based pricing into sharp Focus inspiring them to found meter an intelligent metering and pricing engine for SAS companies Griff you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely where would you like me to stop well it's great to have you I will say there's a lot of people that think the future of SAS is actually going to be pure usage-based pricing we saw charifi try and pivot into this it didn't really work that well they sold the SAS Optics we s we see sort of paddle and some others in the UK trying to capture this now stripee is a big player how do you fit into this ecosystem um I so taking a two things you said in turn I definitely don't think it's the case that everything is going to be usage based and everything is going to be um sort of an extreme variation of usage based but what creates the Tailwind um for our business is that there's been a rapid adoption of usage based pricing strategies often used in conjunction with more traditional subscription pricing so there's probably a minority concern as recently ago as you know three or four years um but now like the majority of B2B software companies are using some kind of usage based pricing you know and that's along a spectrum so you know you've got the aws's and the snowflakes of this world doing you know pretty pure usage based you've got a whole bunch of other players who are basically doing subscription 2.0 so it looks like a subscription but it's got usage based elements um it could be an allowance that you've got to track where you pay over is um if you exceed that allowance that kind of thing um and moving to your second point the reason that something like meter exists is that the the existing stack doesn't um anticipate the usage based pricing components um and so uh what they don't do is rate product usage when I say rate product usage I mean apply pricing to usage so you've got to capture the product usage and then you've got to apply pricing to it to work out how much you would pay and that's that's what meter does so meter comes along and we automate that bill calculation and so for the most part we integrate with those other logos that you're talking about because um we're doing the thing that they they haven't anticipated um and for for the most part our customers are already committed to Tooling in their Co to cash and we absolutely don't want them to rip it out we just want it to work the way it needs to now they're using these slightly different um pricing approaches and effectively we're helping then Mize they equ to cash that so I guess when I hear you say that in order for meter to work or for anyone to do you know metered pricing they first have to capture the product usage data and then sort of Bill against it those are two I mean pendo only does you know product usage and they're a multi-billion dollar company there's others that only do the billing and they're multi-billion dollar companies there you have to do both of them to sort of make this work give me an example of a customer using you today and a version of sort of usage based or product tracking that they would do in their specific business that then they bill against um so uh sift is a good example so if you know sift they used to be called sift Sciences Sciences they're they're a great business and they're doing um fraud detection for online retail effectively and the the core of um the core metric that they charge against is is based around apis so they have naturally usage based pricing um but you know they have big customers and they big customers want quite a high degree of predictability so a lot of their deals involve sort of minimum commitments which uh includes certain am allowances and sort of discounted rates above those allowances that kind of thing so that's that's that's a typical pattern that we would um we would C for and we need to as a meter as a business we need to um integrate with whatever their source of Truth for product usage data is and if it exists already we'll take from there if it doesn't then meter itself can act as that source of Truth um and we also need to integrate with the source of Truth for account data and for pricing data so again we integrate where wherever that currently sets and what we're doing is pulling the product usage the pricing and the account data together and processing it and what you're splitting out is Bill amounts and then we deliver those wherever they're needed across the stack so they're needed once a month for billing but they're also needed at any given moment so that customer success staff or sales staff know how much customers are using um the product team might want to build dashboards so that the End customer can see how much they're using and how it converts to spend at any given moment the um the fpna team might want to export it to the bi stack so that they can analyze the business effectively so that that's the key thing it's not just for billing it's actually it's actually to power a whole bunch of functions all around the business that makes a lot of sense so I guess today and we'll go back to your founding story here in a second I just want to snap shot today first and then we'll go get the story but today how many companies like SI SS actively use meter to do their their you know usage based billing um forgive me we don't disclose those numbers but um you know we're a a solid seriesa business um we've got great customers like sift or onfido or click house um who uh love our product has a transformative impact and they're happy to tell their friends about it can you give give a I understand you have to say slightly vague but can you put us at least in the right sort of world are we talking like five Enterprise customers or like 5 million low arpu high volume customers so okay so that provides okay for context our focus is definitely on scale up and above so what we're looking for is or our customers are looking for is um solutions to quite a high degree of complexity so our customers are typically of the size of those examples I gave the sifts and the alos meas you have an attached a number is it number of employees is it Revenue they're doing is a number of customers they're managing like what's the numerical value of the customer you're targeting so I would use the simplistically I would say revenues so it's $50 million AR and above okay got it got but what the better way to think about it is it's really about maturity so um a company in their early stages only has a few customers and they maybe only have one product and they might only operate in one GE but when they get more complicated they have lot lot of customers and multiple products and operate in multiple Goos and they will probably have an Enterprise sales team that has quite a high appetite to do custom pricing deals to win and retain key accounts it's when our customers get to that point that whatever solution that they had in place before to do what met does becomes overwhelmed you know that they would have had a um a manual based spreadsheet system or they would have built something themselves and it's when it's when they get overwhelmed that we come in so so we are at that you know our typical customer is $50 million an hour and above and the stage of our business is that we had tens of customers like that and growing fast that's thanks for that range it puts us at least in the right ballparks fair to say you guys sort of between 10 and 100 customers and you're focused on ones that are doing ideally north of 50 million of Revenue because it requires more complexity absolutely very well put let's go back to the back story here you were CEO of gamesparks uh did you guys build your own custom billing engine for like you know credits to get virtual swords in the games I mean how did you experience this problem directly yourself we we um we actually gave people the ability to do that so what so what gamees box was was I but I would call it Cloud infrastructure but given where you've come...