How Marianaiq CEO Venkat Nagaswamy grew to $960K revenue and 20 customers in 2017.

three years ago he launched the company did very little revenue his first year 2014 actually zero 2015 to 155 grand 2016 grew to 550 grand in sales he's now doing last month 80 grand and monthly recurring revenue each customer which there's 20 of them pays about 4 grand again he's helping these customers like Zendesk more effectively do account based marketing super healthy unit economics just at his pre series a raising two million dollars on a 10 million dollar post-money valuation this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs to our number one our number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what the marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every b2b SAS CEO that I've interviewed if you want to get access to the database I've created with your your growth rates customer counts margins and many many other data metrics and data points you can go to g ET le TK a.com here's the thing though and this is that database i keep it to myself it's so freakin valuable and to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage I'm only letting 10 companies on each month so we're full this month but you gotta get back to calm you get on the waiting list for next month and look there's big people on the waiting list I mean the biggest VC's you've ever heard of you've probably heard of them they're big private equity billions and billions under management so it's an impressive waiting let's go get on now it gets black accom this is episode 773 coming up tomorrow morning I talked to creative lives Chase Jarvis and I said if LinkedIn offered you two hundred million dollars youself creativeLIVE his answer will surprise you hello everyone my guest today is venkata naga swami he's the CEO of mariana i q-- he brings a long and diverse background in high technology to bear on applying artificial intelligence and deep learning to help marketers make the count based marketing and at scale reality big cat as he was nicknamed by his friends and colleagues has led his teams and creating analytics technology and business development solutions at McKinsey Juniper Networks and GE plastics among others he's worked with an enterprise and digital consumer hardware SAS corporate and business unit strategy market entry strategy proc development along with many many other spaces he's a proud graduate of University of Michigan and the Georgia Institute of Technology also has it holds an MBA and a master's in aerospace engineering Mankato are you ready to take it to the top yes okay so that was a that was a mouthful but thanks for joining [Music] let's find the specific people within those accounts and surround those individuals on various channels like Facebook Twitter Google Adwords and so on and that's what the software does people buy a subscription a monthly subscription to the software which allows you to run campaigns targeting the same set of individuals on all of these different business model okay and what do people pay on average per month got it and intake is give me more the back story here so what your jaw launched company in prior to that I used to run a base marketing for Juniper Networks and so I commit as a user of the technology not just from the technology side and back in the day I implemented what was the latest interesting marketing analytics which was allowed as engines and I felt that there was still a whole bunch of tools that marketers needed to start this to be successful right and my co-founder also felt the same thing having done product marketing and that's how that was 2014 about three years ago when you launched do you remember what your first year revenue was first revenues in late 2015 we were doing we did four months of for the year of 2015 we did 155 thousand 2016 we did about five fifty thousand and hopefully we'll do four times that this year are you on track to do two million this year and what is so I'm trying to do the mass in my head but it saved me at a time so what was monthly recurring revenue last month last month multiply by 12 gives you about a million hour run right got it so with a four thousand dollar ARPU and an 80 grand in an MRA you have one about twenty customers okay okay good so we just got cutting arriving numbers that's really really helpful you took us up you have 20 customers you can tell us a story about one of these customers like how they're actually using a real name for most customers as he knows that it is is a big player in SAS world and then well-known as a good b2b marketer especially inbound marketing he came to us saying hey we we doing create an import marketing but we need to target larger companies and go after a list of accounts which are larger than what we normally do and so the they gave us a whole bunch of the historical data we used on AI platform to find more companies like the ones that they were successful with and found more people within those companies that we found that they were such as forward and we created this audience for them on Facebook and they've been running campaigns on that for the past ten months or so and success right to put this in context these cases people who spend something like 50 bucks a click - all the way up to hundred bucks a click on Google AdWords for something like the software and they were able to increase the lead volume like four times based on Mariana while holding the cost while improving their success rate if now success rate improve by [Laughter] quality so we got better quality four times the volume while keeping the cost the same and have you bootstrap this company of you raise capital first we did a seed round in 2014 blumburtt capitals around and we also had angel investors like Bloomberg capital or Bloomberg like Michael Bloomberg who's behind that so David Bloomberg is the main guy Bruce target is a guy on my board he's my man gotta stash for behind dip in around for 34 years they were they were the original investors we had our say who's we great and was that as CEO it was like a convertible note or price equity round two million No was what we issued what was the cap okay six to two million or a six million dollar cap and what 8% interest 25 percentage standard and then that was a two million raised and it sounds like you've done around after that as well yes in mid last year about a year ago xfinity ventures from India which is made by leaders from Infosys and Wipro those guys left around it was a convoy it was an it priced around and we converted everything okay and how much did you raise you raised a total of four million dollars that second series that series a priced round you raise two million at $1,000,000 pre to the million dollar post got it very good and so that's actually I mean that's an impressive post-money valuation for a sub $1,000,000 run right I mean you basically got a 10x valuation that's pretty healthy do you ever get nervous about your ability like for example if Salesforce came to you Marc Benioff and pull out a checkbook and wrote you a check today for three million dollars that probably make you some good money you'd be tempted to maybe take that but you can't because of what you've raised right you have to sell for more than way more than 10 million dollars do you ever worry about growing into your valuation [Music] informally relatively speaking it's not that big of a valuation job based on where we are or even where we were so there's a lot of if you and we by the way the way we priced it was based on what we'll see being in the marketplace at that time and at that time a lot of people in outreach would go for you know converted it would have done something like at 12 million or 14 million post-money valuation are supposed to ten so we believe that we are actually relative to what what we were gotten at that time we are actually on the lower side so I'm not I don't feel too worried about the the valuation creep as people call it how did we done it at fifteen or fourteen then that would what do you mean especially when we go in for the CDs a the CDs a ministers to be more worried but si se which we are not ready for yet we'll be ready for it later this year so that two million on it's ten million purse that was like a pre series a priced round yeah so the actual we do this year okay your valuation is okay it start too low it's not - it seems to be around what people seem so worried about it but then you know it is yeah yeah it makes good sense take me into the first off it's impressive it's rare that I see a company that has your run rate with this isn't a bad thing so little customers in other words usually what I see in SAS is high volume low ARPU you have low volume high ARPU which is I'm curious how did you get those first 20 customers to pay so much when you had such little kind of background in historical data yes you know [Music] last year okay so may of 2016 16 yeah so for the first year that we're getting from people they were all beta customers based on the contacts that we had and the investors had and so on but since then we've attracted a lot of attention simply because of upon marketing that we've been doing all the tell me tell me about like tell me about like the really weird thing you did that if you admitted you did it people would go that's genius why does nobody else think of that so like what's something that's not conventional not inbound marketing I mean that's really not conventional that you did that landed customers in the shower and that video we put like a million or something fuse or something like that so from that can you track one of your new customers back to that something like 60% of the meetings that I've had or at least when that was running then people would say you know this is the first time I'm seeing some guy who actually sang on Jovie or whatever and filmed it ask you to sing so we could get a sense of it if you were like a rock star not [Laughter] okay last few questions here before we wrap up gross margin are you a typical SAS range 85 86 % okay so you don't have any weird kind of above the line expenses or costs customer churn per month okay that's not so bad and what if you did that in terms of revenue churn that we find really low numbers and some of it is by design so even so 3% on on a company basis but on a revenue basis it's more like one it's about half I would say of that I don't know the exact number but it's about half of that car and that's because you're upselling current customers and you're getting rid of lower or older customers okay what about what you spending to acquire a new customer do it fully wait and so include your content people take their salaries divided into new customers per month etc and what do you assume lifetime value of a customer is [Music] we assumed from modeling looking ahead we assume 20 percent return per year is the total number we doing slightly higher than that right now so that essentially translates to for five years of 250 grand lifetime value very cool okay now talk to me about payback grade real quick now obviously if you spend 22 grand you're making 4 grand per month your payback period is about 5 months do you like that would you spend more would you spend less and actually increase the customer acquisition cost to increase the volume right so on now until like February I was the only sales guy in the company we've since added a sales person we're gonna add two more sales people so any sales people listening to the comi will be increasing our sales and marketing expense almost doubling it over the next 6 to 1 6 months to a year so increase the scale right do we have what are you spending like last month what did you spend on just paid marketing so we just Mariano Mariano just doing the ads for ourselves beyond that we haven't done we didn't do any other way to start ok and what subtle team size today okay top drive I have to tell you many people go Nathan you came out of nowhere your website scrolling so fast how'd you do it the answer is simple so I use Hostgator are no fears no they gotta use Hostgator and the reason I do they have like about forty five hundred free templates I can use because I don't code they've got a great ecommerce plugin and guys I bug the heck out of their support they've got 24/7 support which I love so what I've done is I've worked with them you guys know I make great deals if you go to hostgator.com forward slash Nathan you can sign up get your own domain for 30% off and a 45 day money back guarantee okay again I make great deals for you guys go to hostgator.com forward slash Nathan to grab that now that's great let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now number three besides your own is their favorite online tool you have liked acuity scheduling [Music] number four how many hours of sleep to get every night and what's your situation married single you have kids Wow and how old are you you can sing in the shower but you can't tell me how old you are okay so 47 last question take us back twenty-seven years what do you wish your 20 year old self knew I love that being diligent is way more important than being smart and clever there you guys have it from venkata again founder of Mariana HQ or IQ back about three years ago he launched the company did very little revenue his first year 2014 actually 0 2015 to 155 grand 2016 grew to 550 grand in sales he's now doing last month 80 grand and monthly recurring revenue each customer which there's 20 of them pays about 4 grand again he's helping these customers like Zendesk more effectively do account based marketing super-healthy unit economics just in his pre series a raising two million dollars on a ten million dollar post-money valuation venkata I'm rooting for you man good luck and thanks for taking us to the top if you enjoyed today's episode with event on go back and listen to yesterday's episode with Jeremy Haines Jeremy is grant cardones of secret weapon many big influencers have spent a lot of money on Jeremy as they look to get more followers on social media