How Map My Customers Surpassed $1M ARR with 100 B2B Accounts and a 20-Person Team (Interview with CEO Matt Sniff)

Host Introduction and Guest Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Matt Sniff. He's a former software engineer from Silicon Valley turned 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?

Matt Sniff

00:20Absolutely. Glad to be here, Nathan.

What Map My Customers Does and Its Revenue Model

Nathan Latka

00:22Alright. So the company you're building is called Map My Customers. Tell me what you guys do and what's your revenue model? How do make money?

Matt Sniff

00:27Yeah. So Map My 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 SaaS model, so we charge on a per seat basis. And our pricing has three different tiers currently, which I can go into depth if you'd like.

Customer Spend, Mid-Market Focus, and Bottom-Up Sales

Nathan Latka

00:50Well, tell me more just because I wanna 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 a customer gonna pay you per month or per year to use your technology?

Matt Sniff

01:00Yeah. So we have individuals all the way up to the enterprise. We have customers that have 200 plus seats. Right now our company is transitioning from mostly small businesses into mid market, and we have a handful of enterprise customers as well. So prefer not to disclose the per seat, but we have customers that pay us $5 a month. We have customers that pay us a $100,000 a year.

Nathan Latka

01:21Yeah. I mean, but you you obviously are building right now. You're targeting obviously specific... You're building your internal sales team, etcetera, your growth marketing channels, that around a certain segment of these things. I'm just getting a general sense if you're trying to target a $100,000 ACV accounts or a thousand dollar a year accounts.

Matt Sniff

01:36Yeah. Our sales team will focus on, let's say, to a 100,000 per year accounts.

Nathan Latka

01:36Okay.

Matt Sniff

01:36Mid market.

Nathan Latka

01:42And are most of those, are they basically harvesting leads that start off on kind of bottoms up approach? One salesperson uses it at $5 a month. And before you know it, you have 10 people on the team using it and then it's a sales call?

Matt Sniff

01:54That's right. It's it's... 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 we take it to the middle and upper levels of management and sell into from top down after we have the bottom support.

Company Timeline and Founding Story

Nathan Latka

02:10Okay. So put all this on a timeline for me. When did launch the company, the first line of code?

Matt Sniff

02:14Yeah, great question. So first lines of code, Thanksgiving timeframe of 2014. So very late twenty fourteen.

Nathan Latka

02:20Was that you or someone else?

Matt Sniff

02:22No. That was just me. So founder of the company, formally became a company at the end of twenty fifteen, launched the app beginning of twenty fifteen onto the App Store, started out as an iPhone and iPad application, grew into a website by the end of twenty fifteen and an Android app by the middle of twenty sixteen. Took a seed round of funding in early twenty seventeen, a bridge round early twenty eighteen, and proud to say that

02:46we've now closed on late seed early A round depending upon what part of the country you're in.

Total Funding Raised and Round History

Nathan Latka

02:50Help me understand how much total you've raised.

Matt Sniff

02:52$3,000,000.

Nathan Latka

02:53And why... I mean, so this isn't striking as something that's super capital intensive. Why take the dilution at all?

Matt Sniff

02:59Yeah. I mean, for us, we'd prefer to take the market. Mean, we prefer to go quicker. And for us, that means having the best engineers. Our product's pretty data intensive, so we need a lot of folks, really solid back end folks on platform, as well as integrations with big name CRMs and ERPs. And then next year, we plan to get into a little bit of intelligence work as well. So for us, it's about taking the market.

Nathan Latka

03:23Was the Bridge Round debt or equity?

Matt Sniff

03:24It was debt.

Nathan Latka

03:25Who did you choose to work with?

Matt Sniff

03:27So our seed and bridge round was through the same firm or the same venture capital firm, Cofounders Capital out of Raleigh, North Carolina. And since we've relocated to New York, our next round of capital, which was 2,600,000 raised actually this past week, it it was officially closed, was from Rubicon Ventures out of SF in New York as well as Los Olavos in Miami.

Nathan Latka

03:48So what was the seed? So there's 400 basically makes it the seed and the bridge?

Matt Sniff

03:52Yep. $475,000.

Nathan Latka

03:54Okay. So how much was the seed and how much was the bridge?

Matt Sniff

03:57The bridge was $275,000 or the bridge was 200. The bridge was 200 and the seed equity round was $275,000.

Nathan Latka

04:04$275,000, yeah. So help people understand when and why to use a bridge round, how to do it effectively so you don't take terms you don't like.

Matt Sniff

04:11Yeah, we hadn't reached quite the growth we wanted to. I mean, if you take a late seed early A round, like a few million bucks like we just did, it's going to dilute you a whole lot. It's gonna be your most dilutive round. If you took a seed round that was smaller like we did. So for us, I think when you're at the point where you want another twelve months of growth, you've got a lot of

04:31product development left in the pipeline, you've got a lot of customers you can line up. I mean, essentially, you don't wanna expand the team and blow the top off of it. You're not ready to launch off the launchpad per se, but you need to keep running for another year or so. So more or less, that's why we did it, if that makes sense.

Team Size, Breakeven, and Early App Store Growth

Nathan Latka

04:46Yeah. No. It makes perfect sense. I'm just curious to get in your head a little bit there. Walk me through what the team looks like today. You mentioned engineers are critical to the company. How many are engineers and what's the total team size?

Matt Sniff

04:55Yeah. It's about eight engineers split between Raleigh, North Carolina, Saint Petersburg, Russia, and a few in Bangalore, India as well. We also have account management and sales and marketing in our New York City office. So we're sort of distributed across all four locations, but most of our headcount currently is in New York.

Nathan Latka

05:12Total size, total team?

Matt Sniff

05:13Roughly 20.

Nathan Latka

05:1420 folks. And then look, obviously, you just closed this round. So I assume you're gonna ramp up burn, but how aggressive were you being prior to that in terms of driving growth? In other words, you trying to stay at breakeven so you had leverage going to the seed or were you still burning at that point or what?

Matt Sniff

05:28We were close to breakeven. Yes.

Nathan Latka

05:30Okay. 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 breakeven to have more leverage going into the seed?

Matt Sniff

05:39We were at... I mean, when you take that 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 essentially double our revenue in a year, right? Which we did. We had three extra spreads last year in 2018. So that really helped us. I mean, we're not hell bent on valuation, but for us, I think it was the right time to

06:00raise the bridge round because we weren't trying to really ramp up headcount, but we were trying to ramp up customers.

Nathan Latka

06:05Yeah, so help me understand Right? So first couple, you know, let's do first 10 customers. Where'd they come from? You mentioned iPhone app was the launch. Was it kind of just iPhone app ranking, basically metadata stuff?

Matt Sniff

06:15It was a lot of app store optimization. So, you know, first customer came inbound from a company called Clarisonic, a classic field rep, who was selling spa products to spas in South Florida.

06:29The first 10 customers were all 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. So those first time customers weren't like huge companies.

Nathan Latka

06:41How'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 that you ranked?

Matt Sniff

06:49Well, it helps to name your company after what you do. Can't say it'll be like that forever, but we have a lot of inherent, you know, page ranking in our in our name. Right? So

Nathan Latka

06:49Do people

06:58search for mapmycustomers in the iPhone search kind of app store?

Matt Sniff

07:02Yeah. They'll search for mapmycustomers. They'll search for mapcustomers, customer mapping, stuff like this. It has helped a little bit. Yep.

Nathan Latka

07:08Interesting. I didn't know that. Okay. Anything else that we should know if... So you wanna launch an iPhone app and wanna rank high? Anything else you optimize that might not be, you know, traditional?

Matt Sniff

07:16Well, if you want to shoot up the rankings a little bit, you can play with your pricing, 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, it got us a lot of activity.

Nathan Latka

07:31Let me repeat that back to you. Start off paid, then drop to free, and you'll get essentially press coverage, which will drive downloads?

Matt Sniff

07:38If that's what you're looking to do. Yes.

Nathan Latka

07:40Mhmm. Okay. Interesting. Would you recommend that the B2B market or no? That's more of a B2C

07:44kind

Matt Sniff

07:44Not

Nathan Latka

07:44of

Matt Sniff

07:44at all.

Nathan Latka

07:44That's interesting. Yeah. I was gonna say your background, though, it sounds like was weather applications, which is I imagine consumers using you. Correct?

Matt Sniff

07:52It was completely consumer before Map My Customers. Yes.

Nathan Latka

07:55Yeah, so twenty fifteen you start working on this, you scale your first couple... What did you scale to before you said, okay, we gotta get into the Android and we gotta get into desktop?

Matt Sniff

08:06I think I draw the line 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, my friends, or my neighbor's dog, then I should take this very seriously and start to, if it's a real opportunity, you know, become... You know, be on every platform I possibly can be on.

Nathan Latka

08:26And that was in '20... That was when you launched the website version in 2015?

Matt Sniff

08:30Website was launched very end of twenty fifteen, early twenty sixteen, and Android app came about six months after that.

Nathan Latka

08:35Okay. So you'd hit essentially a 100 logos using you at that that point and call it early twenty sixteen?

Matt Sniff

08:40That's correct.

Customer Count, Licenses, and How B2B Accounts Are Measured

Nathan Latka

08:41Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Very good. And then what have we scaled to today? How many total, I guess, customers, logos, however you measure or whatever your measurement is?

Matt Sniff

08:47So we have a 100 B2B accounts, right, which our company is actually using the products. And we just measure that by is at least 80% of their sales team using this. Or if they're an enterprise, it's at least like a 100 people on their sales team using this, at least a whole division. 3,000 or so licenses total today across the board, but about a 100 business accounts, if that makes sense.

Nathan Latka

09:07That's interesting. Sorry, how many licenses? You said 3,000?

Matt Sniff

09:10Yes.

Nathan Latka

09:10Yeah, so I mean, the average team size in is about 30 folks. If you've got a 100 logos and 3,000 seats.

Matt Sniff

09:15It's still SMB mid market type.

Nathan Latka

09:17Yep. It's all field. There's no use for this in terms of, unless you're field sales, correct?

Matt Sniff

09:22We actually, we use field mark, we see field marketing as well, right? But in the field for sure.

Nathan Latka

09:28I guess what I'm saying is if there's a sales team that does that is sitting in an office to doing inbound only, They have no need for this only for people driving around actually meeting customers is people that would use this app.

Matt Sniff

09:38We've seen inside teams that prospect geographically, as you can imagine, that can be a very common thing. So if they want to consolidate everybody onto the same platform, they'll use it across both inside and outside sales.

Churn Management and Customer Success Structure

Nathan Latka

09:49Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Very good. Walk me through, again, you're to obviously spend this money to drive growth, but keeping customers and making sure they're sticky is critical in any SaaS company. How have you dealt with churn and how low have you been able to keep it?

Matt Sniff

10:03Yeah, I mean, I can't give specifics, but more or less consumer churn is always higher, especially if you have a product that's a plan that's a loss leader. Like we've had a loss leading plan that's like $5 a month for about nine months or so. 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. But B2B churn is less than

10:28a half a percent per month. We've been able to keep that low because we have a team of three CSMs that are managing our business, more or less that's a pretty sweet spot to be able

Nathan Latka

10:28Are they quota

10:39carrying if they drive expansion revenue?

Matt Sniff

10:42Well, we're currently stratifying it to be focusing one CSM on less than 10 licenses, focusing one on 10 to fifty and one from 50 to 200 licenses per account size. But right now, the goal is to move them to be quota carrying, but not currently. No.

Nathan Latka

11:00Yeah. Okay. It's interesting. It's trend I'm seeing when I interview founders that are more in the 50 to $100,000,000 ARR range. There's a lot of them that are incentivizing CSMs like they would incentivize a sales rep. But you can only really do that when you know what your activation metrics are because that's what the CSM then drives from a behavior perspective.

Matt Sniff

11:15Yeah, we've been playing around with different incentivization models for our CS team. And the CS community in New York's pretty tight and we see people incentivizing off of CS2Ls, leads passed from CS to sales, spiffing the CSM off of that, a team number right off of growth, stuff like this. Mean, we're not at that stage to focus on that. It's not the main thing for us, of course, But of course, we'd like to get to there.

CAC Payback Period and Sales Rep Economics

Nathan Latka

11:39Yeah. 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 100 logos, 3,000 seats is signing up a new team, a 30 person team, right? At $5 a seat, it's a $150 a month it to you basically. How aggressive would you be to get that sales team? Will you spend first year ACV to get them for a twelve month

11:57payback period or more or less?

Matt Sniff

11:59We won't spend the first year of the lifetime value of the customer. Customer. No. We'll try to keep it to about 30% of LTV perhaps.

Nathan Latka

12:12Well, ignore LTV because that can be really dangerous. Because if your LTV is over ten years and you give it a 30%, you still have a three year payback period. So let's use the word payback period in terms of months.

Matt Sniff

12:22Yeah, so we try to target a payback of maybe six to eight months. But to be honest with you, we track payback period.

12:29It's not a key leading metric for us because if we go up by one salesperson or down by one salesperson right now, you can see our customer acquisition costs just go spike up and down depending upon the month. So if we have a bad month, it's crazy high. We have a good month, it's crazy low, like a $100 on average to acquire a team. So we're still defining the best way to sort of approach that, but

12:51it's not the main thing per se right now. It's focusing on unit economics. The main thing is driving growth currently.

Nathan Latka

12:57Yeah. Yeah. Well, by the way, unit economics, so determine how aggressive you can be. If you say that whoever can spend the most to get a customer is who gets the customer, obviously whoever has the strongest economics will win. Right? So, you know, obviously your fluctuation point is accurate. However, a salesperson is being onboarded should eventually get to the point where they're hitting OTE. Right? If you've hit a realistic OTE and you're feeding them the right

13:16leads. So it should flatten out and basically average out over time.

Matt Sniff

13:19Yeah, we'd like to get the sales reps to about 5,000 MRR for a senior rep. So about 5 x what we pay them is what we'd like to get out of the

Nathan Latka

13:28Full OTE, full quota, full comment.

Matt Sniff

13:30At full quota, 100%. So we're driving off that model of quota to pay. And so for us, we're not quite there. That's what we're trying to get to. So we're focused on getting to that.

Nathan Latka

13:41Got it. Got it. It. Got it. Yeah. So just to make those for those of you listening to make that really crystal clear, of people will look at this the ratio of quota pay when they're figuring out the first pro form a for their first couple sales hires. And a lot of people say, okay, if our company or for reps are going be paid $200,000 all in, then their quota needs to be, know, five to 10

13:58x that right. So call it something like a million to, you know, whatever 2,000,000 that's accurate, correct?

Matt Sniff

14:03That is. I mean, and I think if you look at what early SaaS companies have done, you

14:10just... You don't want to see that you can scale. We're not looking at our company as like, we have to get to 5x for every single one. Mean, that's certainly what you need to put in a model to have a good operating model for raising a round of money, like a few million bucks, but you're just trying to get to that point. So we're trying to get there very quickly, but for us, it's more fundamental than

14:30that. It's making sure that the first few sales hires, 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 if we have a good foundation, we can just surround them with other people that they can just kind of make it learn by osmosis kind of thing. Right?

Revenue Milestone and ARR Confirmation

Nathan Latka

14:47Matt, 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 ARR. You think it can happen this year or it'll have to happen next year?

Matt Sniff

15:01Yeah. I mean, I haven't given specifics on revenue, but we're past that mark.

Nathan Latka

15:04Okay. So you gave me... Earlier you said basically per seat price was $5 per seat. Right? And you said mentioned 3,000 seats were on you. Right? So that's... Would essentially be $15,000 per month there. What should those numbers not accurate?

Matt Sniff

15:14Yeah. We have a plan that is $5 a month, but it's only been $5 for, like, nine months, and it's it's not something that's going to continue. So there's probably only a 100 or 200 people with that plan.

Nathan Latka

15:14I see.

Matt Sniff

15:14They're also higher churn because they're $5 a month. So you you can't really look at that way per se.

Pricing Tiers and Value-Based Upsell Structure

Nathan Latka

15:29What else are you upselling against besides, like, the 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?

Matt Sniff

15:40So the the value tiering is basically based off a number of records. Right? So for the first tier, it's just you get the basic data visualization and the route optimization. For the next tier, you get 10,000 records per user, which could be accounts, opportunities, and contacts. You get lead generation, you get CRM syncing and reporting. And then the next level up is the enterprise plan, which gives you no record caps. You can import millions of pieces

16:05of data, custom fields and activities, so more like CRM type features, white labeling, account manage... An account manager, as well as a professional onboarding thing.

Runway and Burn Rate Planning After the Raise

Nathan Latka

16:13Interesting. Okay. And then look, in terms of other founders looking to do what you just did, which is raise their series A or seed, whatever you wanna call it. I mean, most people would say you raise for twelve months of burn. Some say go up to eighteen months of burn. What'd you decide to raise for? Sixteen, eighteen, how much runway?

Matt Sniff

16:26Yeah, eighteen months runway.

Nathan Latka

16:28You do eighteen. Okay, based off your current burn or what you project burn to grow to after you start scaling a bit?

Matt Sniff

16:34Projected burn.

Nathan Latka

16:35Projected burn. Interesting. Okay, so you're happy then essentially to grow burned to like $140,000 a month, right? Which would give you eighteen months of runway?

Famous Five: Books, CEOs, Tools, and Personal Life

Matt Sniff

16:41That's correct.

Nathan Latka

16:41Net burn. Yeah. Interesting. Alright. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Matt Sniff

16:47I really like The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Nathan Latka

16:49Yep.

16:50Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Matt Sniff

16:51I really like Stewart Butterfield. Right? He he, you know, founder of Flickr 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 b to b space. Of course, you know, we're quite different, but I really like following Stewart Butterfield.

Nathan Latka

17:03You know, you're only a couple years away from, you know, a $45.08, $10,000,000,000 company. Right? Alright. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company?

Matt Sniff

17:11We use Google Drive a lot. We use Google Drive every day. And then Map My Customers, of course. Right? We use it inside our team for a simple lightweight CRM.

Nathan Latka

17:20Number four, how many hours of sleep do

17:21you get every night?

Matt Sniff

17:22Usually about six, six and a half, seven if I'm privileged.

Nathan Latka

17:25Alright. And how old are you?

Matt Sniff

17:27I'm 26.

Nathan Latka

17:2826. Alright. And then situation, married, single, kids?

Matt Sniff

17:34Sorry. Repeat that one more time, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

17:36What's yeah. Yeah. What's your situation? Married, single, do you have any kids?

Matt Sniff

17:40I'm single.

Nathan Latka

17:40Okay. No kiddos?

Matt Sniff

17:42No kids. I have three nephews.

Nathan Latka

17:44There you go.

Matt Sniff

17:45All the all the enjoyment, none of the work.

Advice to Younger Self and Closing Thoughts

Nathan Latka

17:47That's good. That's the way to do it. You're smart. Alright. Take us home here. What do wish your 20 year old self knew?

Matt Sniff

17:53Well, I was in my twenties, but I get the question. So I would say sometimes slowing down is speeding up. Right? I I definitely did not have that mindset per se, 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.

Nathan Latka

18:08Guys, mapmycustomers growing revenue three x year over year launched in 2015, now serving over a thousand logos, over 3,000 seats ranging all paying well north of $5 per month on average. Again, north of a million dollars run rate in terms of today as they look to scale. Just close their $2,600,000 seed or Series A round, whatever you wanna call it. Happy to grow burn up to a $120,000 or north per month as they to scale out some

18:30of their team. Currently, 20 people, 6% churn 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.

Matt Sniff

18:43Hey. Thanks, Nathan.