How Map My Customers CEO Matthew Sniff grew Map My Customers 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...