How Map My Customers CEO Matthew Sniff grew to $2.6M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is matt sniff he's a former software engineer from silicon valley turn startup ceo he's the author of two former top 10 weather apps on the apple app store and has over nine years experience building startups from the ground up he currently works in new york city with an amazing team redefining what sales execution and territory management means for teams all around the globe matt you ready to take us to the top absolutely glad to be here nathan all right so the company your building is called map my customers tell me what you guys do and what's your revenue model how do you make money yeah so mama customers is a productivity platform for sales teams who operate in the field right our platform gives them a more intuitive geospatial workflow that allows them to be in the right place with the right customers at the right time we're a traditional sas model so we charge on a per seat basis and you know our pricing has three different tiers currently which i can go into depth if you'd like well tell me more just because i want to get more of your story as opposed to going down to every one of your customer cohorts give me a general sense of your sweet spot so on average what's the customer going to pay you per month or per year to use your technology yeah so when we have individuals all the way up to the enterprise we have customers that have 200 plus seats uh right now our you know our company is transitioning from mostly small businesses into mid-market and we have a handful of enterprise customers as well so uh you know prefer not to disclose the per seat uh but we have customers that pay us five bucks a month we have customers that pay us a hundred thousand dollars a year yeah i mean but you obviously are building right now you're targeting obviously specific you know you're building your internal sales team et cetera your growth marketing channels all that around a certain segment of these things i'm just getting in general sense if you're trying to target you know hundred thousand dollar acv accounts or a thousand dollar your accounts yeah we our sales team will focus on let's say 50 to 100 000 per year accounts okay mid market and are most those are mo are they basically uh basically harvesting leads that start off on kind of bottoms up approach one sales person uses it at five bucks a month and before you know it you have you know 10 people on the team using it and then it's a sales call that's right it's it's um you know that that's pretty much our sales approach is to go bottom up we identify accounts that have a lot of existing users at them and you know then we we take it to the middle and upper levels of management and sell into from from top down after we have the the bottom support okay so put all this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company the first line of code yeah great question so first lines of code uh thanksgiving time frame of 2014 so very late 2014. was that you or someone else no that was just me um so founder of the company uh formally became a company at the end of 2015 launched the app uh beginning of 2015 onto the app store started out as an iphone and ipad application grew into a website by the end of 2015 and an android app by the middle of 2016 uh took a seat round of funding in early 2017 a bridge around early 2018 and uh proud to say that we have now closed on late seed early a round depending upon what part of the country you're in help me understand how much total you've raised three million dollars and why i mean so this doesn't strike me as something that's super capital intensive right why take the delusion at all yeah i mean for us we you know we prefer to take the market right i mean we prefer to to go quicker and for us that means having the best engineers our products pretty data intensive so we need a lot of folks really solid back-end focus on platform as well as integrations with big-name crms and erps um and then next year we you know plan to get into uh a little bit of intelligence work as well so for us um it's about taking the market it was the bridge around debtor equity it was debt who'd you choose to work with so our seed and bridge round was through the same firm uh the same venture capital firm co-founders capital out of raleigh north carolina and since we relocated to new york our next round of capital which was 2.6 million uh raised actually this past week it was officially closed was from rubicon ventures out of sf in new york as well as la solas in miami so what was the seed so there's 400 basically makes up the seed in the bridge yep 475 okay so how much was the seed and how much was the bridge uh the bridge was 275 or the bridge was 200 the bridge was 200 and the s the seed equity round was 275.75 yeah so help understand help people understand when and why to use a bridge around how to do it effectively so you don't you know take terms you don't like yeah we hadn't reached quite the growth we wanted to i mean if you take a late seed early around like a few million bucks like we just did it's uh it's going to delete you a whole lot it's going to be your most dilutive round um if you took a seed round that was you know you know smaller like we did right uh so for us i think when you're at the point where you want another 12 months of growth uh you've got you know a lot of product development left in the pipeline you've got a lot of customers you can line up i mean essentially uh you don't want to expand the team and below the top off of it you're not ready to like launch off the launch pad per se um but you need to keep running for another year or so uh so more or less you know that's why we did it if that makes sense yeah i know it makes perfect sense i'm just curious to get in your head a little bit there um walk me through what the team looks like today mentioned engineers are critical to the company how many are engineers and what's the total team size he has about eight engineers um split between raleigh north carolina st petersburg russia and a few in bangalore india as well um we also have account management and sales and marketing in our new york city office uh so we're sort of distributed across all four locations but most of our head count currently is in new york total size total team uh roughly 20. 20 folks and then look how obviously you just closed this round so i assume you're going to ramp up burn but how aggressive were you being prior to that in terms of driving growth in other words you're trying to stay at breakeven so you have leverage going to the seat or were you still burning at that point or what we were close to break even yes okay do you generally obviously that's obviously a good spot to be in going to raise did you intentionally raise the bridge so you could buy time to get to break even to have more leverage going into the seed we were at i mean you know when you take the round right if you take a bridge round you're probably not trying to press the gas as much right so yes i mean we were trying to you know essentially double our revenue in a year right which we did with three express last year in 2018. um so that really helped us i mean we're not hell-bent on valuation uh but for us i think it was the right time to to raise the bridge round because we weren't trying to really ramp up head count but we were trying to ramp up customers yeah so help me understand that right so first couple you know let's do first 10 customers where'd they come from you mentioned iphone app was a launch was it kind of just iphone app ranking basically metadata stuff it was a lot of app store optimization so you know first customer came inbound from a company called clarisonic uh you know and a classic field field wrap right it was selling spa products to spas in south florida um you know that the first time customers were individual consumers though they were to be very clear reps that bought this out of their own pocket so it was a consumer grade application for the first year or two of existence um so those first time customers weren't like huge companies how'd they find you i imagine there were other apps on the store like what did you do specifically with the title of the app or the metadata to make sure they you ranked well it helps to name your company after what you do um can't say it'll be like that forever but we have a lot of inherent uh you know page ranking in our in our name right did people search for map my customers in the iphone search kind of app store yeah they'll search for my customers they'll search for map customers customer mapping stuff like this it has helped a little bit yep interesting i didn't know that okay anything else that we should know if you want to launch an iphone app and want to rank hi anything else you optimize that might not be can you know traditional well if you want to shoot up the rankings a little bit you can play with your pricing uh which can get you onto some blogs that give you more notoriety especially if you keep your app paid for a couple of months and then drop it to free that hasn't been our approach but early on on a consumer basis uh it got us a lot of activity let me repeat that back to you start off paid then drop to free and you'll get essentially press coverage or drive downloads uh if that's what you're looking to do yes um okay interesting would you recommend that the b2b market or no that's more of a bdc kind of way yeah yeah yeah okay let's just say your background though it sounds like was weather applications which is i i imagine consumers using you correct it was completely consumer but for my customers yes yeah so um so 2015 you start working on this uh you scale your first couple how many what did you scale to before you said okay we got to get into the android and we got to get into uh into desktop i think i drove online at 100 paying licenses right so whether you call it accounts for customers or licenses i said to myself if i can get into 100 paying customers licenses that are not my family friends or my neighbor's dog then i should take this very seriously and start to you know if it's a real opportunity you know become you know be on every platform i possibly can be on and that was in 20 that was when you launched the website version in 2015. website was launched very end of 2015 early 2016 and android app came about six months after that okay so you'd hit essentially 100 logos using you at that point and call it early 2016. that's correct yes yeah yeah okay very good and then what have you scaled to today how many total i guess customers logos however you measure whatever your measurement is so we have 100 b2b accounts right which uh our company's actually using their products and we just measure that by is you know at least 80 of their sales team using this um or if they're an enterprise is at least like 100 people on their sales team using this at least a whole division right uh 3 000 or so licenses total today um across the board but about 100 business accounts if that makes sense that's interesting sorry how many likes you said three thousand yes yeah so i mean the average team size is about 30 folks if you've got 100 logos and 3 000 seats it's yeah it's still a smb mid-market type yep it's all field there's no use for this in in terms of unless your field sales correct uh we actually we use field market we see field marketing as well right but in the field for sure i guess what i'm saying is if there's a sales team that does that is sitting in an office to doing inbound only right they have no need for this only for people driving around actually meeting customers is there people that would use this app we've seen inside teams that prospect geographically as you can imagine uh can be a very common thing so if they want to consolidate everybody onto the same platform uh they'll use it across both inside and outside sales yeah okay that makes sense um very good um walk me through again you're going to obviously spend this money to drive growth but you know keeping customers and making sure they're sticky is critical in any sas company right how have you dealt with churn and how low have you been able to keep it yeah i mean you know i can't give specifics but you know more or less the consumer returns always higher um you know especially if you have a product that's uh you know a a plan that's a loss leader like we've had a loss leading plan that's like five bucks a month for about nine months or so um currently it's going back up in price because we didn't really find that as efficacious as we wanted to was more like a lead generation type thing um but bw churn is less than a half a percent per month uh we've been able to keep that low because you know we have a team of three csms that are managing uh our business you know and and more or less that's that's a pretty sweet spot are they quote carrying if they drive expansion revenue well we're currently stratifying it right to to be you know focusing on csm on like lesson 10 licenses focusing one on 10 to 50 and one from 50 to 200 licenses uh per account size right but right now the goal is to move them to you know be quoted caring but not currently no yeah okay it's interesting it's a trend i'm seeing when i interview founders that are more in the kind of 50 to 100 million dollar ar range there's a lot of them that are incentivizing csms like they would incentivize a sales rep but you can only do that when you know what your activation metrics are because that's what the csm then drives from a from a behavior perspective yeah we've been playing around with the different incentivization models for our cs team and you know the cs community in new york is pretty tight and we see people incentivizing office cs2ls you know leads pass from cs to sales uh you know spiffing the you know the csm off of that uh a team number right off of growth stuff like this i mean we're not at that stage to focus on that it's not the main thing for us of course um but of course we'd like to get to there yeah so if you i guess let me ask you a question in terms of acquisition today right so if you're kind of sweet spot right based off a hundred logos three thousand seats is signing up a new team on you know thirty person team right at five bucks a seat it's 150 bucks a month worth it to you basically how aggressive would be to get that sales team will you spend first your acb to get them for a 12 month payback period or more or less we won't spend the first uh you know year of eight of the lifetime value because of the value of the customer no um we'll try to keep it to about thirty percent of ltv perhaps um we'll ignore ltv because that can be really dangerous right because if your ltv is over ten years and you give it three percent you still have a three year payback period so what do you let's use the word payback like period in terms of months yeah so we try to target a payback of like maybe six to eight months right but to be honest with you we don't we track payback period um it's it's not it's not a key leading metric for us because if we go up by one sales person or down by one sales person right now um you could see our customer acquisition acquisition costs just go like you know spike up and down depending upon the month right so if we have a bad month it's like crazy hack we have a good month it's crazy low like 100 bucks right on average to to acquire a team um so we're still defining the best way to sort of approach that but it's not the main thing per se right now is focusing on um unit economics the main thing is driving growth currently yeah yeah well by the way unit economics so determine how aggressive you can be right if you if you say that whoever can spend the most to get the customers who gets the customer then obviously whoever has the strongest economics will win right so uh you know obviously your fluctuation point is accurate however a sales person is being onboarded should eventually get to the point where they're hitting ote right if you've hit a realistic ot and you're feeding them the right lead so it should flatten out and basically average out over time yeah we'd like to get the uh the sales reps to about five thousand more right uh for a senior rep right so about five x uh what we pay them is is what we'd like to get out of totally full ot four quarter full contract full quote 100 right so we're driving off that that model of uh of quota to pay and so you know for us um we're not quite there uh that's what we're trying to get to so we're focused on getting to that got it got it got it got it yeah so just to make those for those of you listening to make that really crystal clear there's a lot of people look at this the ratio of quarter to pay when they're figuring out their first pro forma for their first couple of sales hires and a lot of people say okay if our if our company or for reps are going to be paid 200 grand all in then their quota needs to be you know five to 10x that right so call it something like a million to you know whatever two million that's accurate correct that is i mean and i think if you um look at what early sas companies have done i mean we you oftentimes just you don't want to see that you can scale right we're not looking at our our company is like we have to get to 5x for every single one i mean that's certainly what you need to put in a model to to you know have a good operating model for for raising a round of money like a few million bucks but uh you're just trying to get to that point right so we're trying to get there very quickly um but for us it's you know it's more fundamental than that it's it's making sure that the first few sales hires uh the first really like five or six sales hires are really really really solid in terms of the training and getting all of our processes in place so that um you know if we have a good foundation uh we can just surround you know them with other people that they just kind of they get learned by osmosis kind of thing right matt when do you think before we wrap up with the famous five i mean what do you feel like is realistic maybe a little uncomfortable but at least realistic for you in terms of time frame to hitting call it you know a million bucks in terms of ar you think it can happen this year it'll have to happen next year um yeah i mean i haven't given specifics on revenue but we're past that mark okay so you gave me earlier you said basically per seat price was five bucks per seat right and you said mentioned three thousand seats were on you right so that would essentially be fifteen thousand dollars per month there which are those numbers not accurate yeah we have a plan that is five bucks a month but it's only been five bucks for like nine months and it's uh it's not something that's going to continue so there's probably only uh 100 or 200 people with that plan i see they're also higher churn because they're five bucks a month so you can't really look at that way per se what else are you upselling against besides like the um per seat price being higher with more feature sets is there any utility-based upsell you're going against like number of prospects mapped or anything like that so the the value tiering is basically based off a number of records right so for the first tier it's just you the basic data visualization and the route optimization for the next year you get 10 000 records per user right which could be accounts opportunities and contacts you get lead generation right you get crm syncing and reporting and then the next level up you know is the enterprise plan which gives you no record caps right you can import millions of pieces of data custom fields and activities so like more like crm type features white labeling account manage an account manager as well as a professional onboarding interesting okay and then look in terms of other founders looking to do what you just did which is read their series a or c to whatever you want to call it i mean most people would say you raised for 12 months of burn some say go up to 18 months of burn what did you decide to raise for 16 18 how much runway yeah 18 months runway you did 18. okay based off your current burn or what you project burn to grow to after you start you know scaling a bit projected burn projected burn interesting okay so you're happy then essentially to grow burned like 140 grand a month right which will give you 18 months of runway that's correct neck burn yeah interesting all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i really like the hard thing about hard things yup number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i really like stuart butterfield right he he you know found her flicker and then slack and you know he used to be in the photo space i used to be in the photo space and now we're both in the b2b space of course you know we're quite different but i really like following stuart you know you're only a couple years away from you know four or five eight ten billion dollar company right all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company we use google drive a lot and we use google drive every day um and then my customers of course right we use it inside our team for a simple lightweight crm number four how many hours of sleep to get every night usually about six six and a half seven if i'm privileged all right and how are you i'm 26. 26. all right um and then situation married single kids uh sorry repeat that one more time yeah what's your situation married single do you have any kids um i'm single okay no kiddos no kids all right three nephews though there you go all the enjoyment none of the work that's good that's the way to do it you're smart all right uh take us home here what do you wish your 20 year old self knew well i was in my 20s but i get the questions so uh i would say sometimes slowing down and speeding up right i i definitely um did not have that mindset per say you know when when i started the company four or five years ago but it would have helped us a lot with our product launch guys map my customers growing revenue 3x year over year launched in 2015 now serving over a thousand logos over three thousand seats ranging all paying well north of five dollars per month on average again north a million dollars a run rate in terms of today as they look to scale just close their 2.6 million dollar cedar series around whatever you want to call it happy to grow burn up to 120 000 or north per month they look to scale out some of their team currently 20 people six percent churn um on that smaller cohort again as they look to continue to drive growth payback period optimization somewhere between six and nine months as they look again to continue to scale matt thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan