How Mapware CEO Joe Sullivan grew Mapware to $3.6M revenue and 3 customers in 2024.

guys he called the email the thousand people at Comcast and said buy my drone mapping technology we can inspect your telephone lines faster than anyone else he got that contract on day one back in 2015 today he serves a lot of government agencies this is Air Force military Etc uh you know doing about three million bucks in Revenue today but highly concentrated looking to expand that to 9 million this year growing he's got 25 on the team to the 6 million series a back in 2019 in addition to a couple million bucks and convertible notes that transitioned over but again scaling nicely here team of 25 High Revenue per employee we'll see if he can triple this year hey folks my guest today is Joel Sullivan he's the founder and CEO of mapware he has previously at offer board which exited and has three little startups now at home he's homesteading a big flannel Aficionado and a Sick Beard game Joe you ready to take us to the top let's do it man all right so what what is what it you know drones are interesting right now you're seeing what's happening in Ukraine I don't know if there's a defense approach to anything you're building but walk us through what map Ware does yeah sure um so mapware is a software company what we do is we take photos and using a process called photogrammetry we transform them into a rich 3D maps right um so what we've uh what we've done is we've built that user workflow in parallel with a drone flight automation workflow to be able to rapidly capture data off of a commercial off-the-shelf drone and to be able to use that geospatial intelligence workflow rapidly in any context um it does have military applications and actually our largest customers tend to be the US U.S Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers those type of government customers are where we focus yeah that makes sense are you working with palantir at all we are not now yeah interesting yeah I watched a big interview that they did on how they're helping the ukrainians and a lot of it has to do with these drone operators Ukrainian drone operators in the middle of forest that go up they do reconnaissance they plot images they triangulate then they push a button they launch the missile and boom the Russians go uh and they seem to say that a lot of their a lot of what's enabling the ukrainians to stay on top of things is there this drone map this real-time sort of drone mapping sort of software um which is interesting but you're not yeah it's cool I mean well so we're oh you know we're open anyone can just go and and buy and so I don't know I see some traffic from Europe but we're also not yeah who knows all right walk to the business model what are customers paying on average per month or per year to use the technology yeah sure so it's a subscription model um so it's 199 a month for um for our software and uh then that's an annually recurring license that people can can grab onto um it's been it's been a bumpy road to be honest and with what's kind of unique about us is again we're finding that most of our traction is within the government space um and so we we wound up saying okay what's the what's the most that you can kind of put on a government credit card and then let's kind of price a package that matches that and now we have you know kind of government Personnel that will go and and swipe and transact that way so I took a lot of user Discovery to be able to realize this is where the product Market fit is and therefore we have to price and package accordingly in order to reach that market well but just you avoided my what's the average customer paying is it 200 per month or that per month per drone per head I know it's per month per user yeah so if one user could have 10 drones and and upload gigabytes and gigabytes of new new pictures but it's still just it's price per seat yeah exactly so it actually winds up being a pretty good deal for them um yeah yeah and so how do you are you typically signing up one person at one agency or are these you know whether it's government or anyone else buying agricultural companies are they buying you know 30 seats at once you know what's the average customer paying in terms of number of seats so it's a land and expand strategy and what we've seen within the the US um drone Marketplace is that it's mostly single owner operators so it's typically one guy buying one license um we're seeing that you know with within the government agencies we're getting like a thousand user orders or like several hundred users at a time which has been great but you know the commercial Market I feel like is still still feeling it around still still getting you know their hands on it oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path 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forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview I mean if you've got one group coming and buying a thousand seats at 200 bucks a pop I mean that's a 200 000 a month contract am I doing that math right yes yeah I mean is that I mean don't obviously name the customer but do you have people paying 200 Grand a month like one entity that's a yes yeah I mean so yeah if you're driving and you can't read Joe's body language that's a yes so it's it's a little bit tricky right because I you know I can sort of talk about some of my contracts um and I can I can go into some details on like the use cases that we've been doing in environmental monitoring um so that maybe is a little bit easier to kind of get our arms around I mean look let's just say let's just let's just ignore the government for a second let's say there was an environmental company right that that had a thousand seats right at 200 sorry 200 bucks a seat per month I mean that's 2.4 million bucks of ARR I don't know how big you are but that feels like a ton of customer concentration risk how do you manage that yeah it's I mean it's an issue it's a real problem um and the way we do that is by being very Hands-On and focused in a direct um outbound kind of sales process right so I'm meeting with the customers we have these this very high touch sales process for that customer segment yeah and then at the same time we have this like super low touch automated SAS thing so it's been a weird growth trajectory to try to do both of those yep um and what we're what we're finding is like sometimes we'll actually get that traction from the inbound and then go wait a minute I need to do this as like more of an outbound higher touch sales process put this on a timeline for us when did you launch the business what year 2015. okay yeah and were you like and we've been hobbyist in the space or how does this tie to your story so we've been in um yeah we went through some pretty serious pivots um I've always been interested in you know I've kind of like had that startup itch and so in college I actually like started this notebook that I aspirationally titled...