How Measured CEO Trevor Testwuide grew to $15.1M revenue and 45 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is trevor testweed he's the co-founder and ceo of measured an industry leader in cross-channel media incremental uh incrementally measurement portfolio investment decisions he spent 20 years building careers in enterprise technology companies he's a pioneer and expert in the cross-channel marketing measurement category having spent the last 10 years working with advertisers to deploy and benefit from advanced cross-channel measurement technologies trevor you ready to take it to the top yes let's do it that's quite awful there nathan a heck of a heck of a domain name what's the story on measure.com yeah that's great we we lucked out in lending that url uh so so measured exists to help marketers understand immediate incrementality what that is is is is what is the the true incremental marginal contribution driven by a media tactic against against your business the methodology is anchored in test and control experimentation so think of having an audience exposed to a media tactic another audience not exposed the media tactic uh what is the difference in the the two conversion rates and forms incremental marginal contribution uh and you can think of us as a portfolio management tool like a fidelity or a schwab or an e-trade for for marketing we live right between kind of finance and marketing this contribution incrementality language is really the language of finance and it's a concept that we apply to to marketing so we're this finance tool for for marketing and how do i mean how do you build for this is it or is it an agency or is it a pure sas play no it's a sas engagement uh complemented by uh customer success resources so if you read our contracts there's sas based contracts there's a service element to it uh as a thought partner and uh industry expert you know we pop on and weekly calls and monthly business reviews uh to help them make the most of our technology and tools it's sas complemented by ics and so i love this model right a lot of the sas companies with the highest net dollar retention complement it was some form of productized service on the back end even and they use their technology to make it a higher margin productized service last year if you add up your total revenue what percent was sas first what percent was service based revenue or products yeah we don't yeah we don't we don't break it out um if you read our contract uh we don't bill and and reconcile back on on hours but what i will tell you is is last year we were uh right around 80 gross margin business yeah that's great blended yeah and that that that factors in 100 of our our cs salaries that also facts factors in uh onboarding engineers uh when we kick off an engagement you have a director of customer success that that owns this the success the engagement we also have a solution architect that is responsible for getting engagement fully deployed and on board and aligned to you know each unique business that that we work with so both of those salaries are factored in and we still arrive at you know just just under uh 80 but you know at steady state i expect this business to be you know 80 slightly north of 80 gross margin business and what does this typically look like i mean the average customer that uses you were they going to pay you per month per year to use you plus the technology yeah i mean it it it varies you know on an entry point it could be 7 500 a month for a very simple engagement on a high end it could be you know 25 30 sometimes north of that is it a function of uh scope and and complexity so scope of experiments we're deploying scope of brands and and geos that we're deploying uh and then the service part of that as well interesting so your main ways to upsell someone from seven grand a month to 20 grand a month is based off it sounds like number of experiments are there any other usage-based upsell metrics you use to drive expansion revenue for the business yeah it's really a number of channels so as you look across a portfolio um we we seek to be the source of truth system of record for cross-channel media reporting right and some of these clients come to us and they've got you know two or three channels in play others come to us and they have 20 25 channels in play so how many channels are we integrated into and and presenting in this portfolio view how many experiments are we deploying to inform um in market incrementality for for these tactics uh we have a lot of international clients that have multiple brands so is this a single brand a single geo or is this you know a single brand across multiple geos and in those cases the contracts can get you know quite north of the highest number that that i gave you what's the back story here where'd you launch the company yeah my co-founder and i we met in 2011 uh at a company called visual iq is really the the pioneer of of user-level algorithmic multi-touch attribution uh madonna was my header product there i was out evangelizing uh the business and then leaving a revenue for the west coast madonna and i worked very closely together there from 2011 to 2014 and really found uh found a great partnership in madonne so we've been close friends of the last 10 years uh he reached out to me in the beginning of 2017 and with this this innovative idea around deploying experiments to solve this cross-channel media attribution problem statement which traditionally was done through building user level paths that was becoming more and more difficult has become now nearly impossible to do and that's mapping like a user's id nathan your your id from being exposed on let's say google media to facebook media to pinterest media to a conversion uh it is no longer possible within the realities of martech to to build these user level path of exposures to a conversion madon was seeing this back in 2015 working across a portfolio of of clients as the wall gardens were starting to really dominate the media mix and tap me on the shoulder and say i think the future of solving this attribution problem statement is is is incrementality measurement experimentation i've got a framework so so 2017 was launched that's right january and how did you guys you know equity conversation is really difficult with co-founders it sounds like maybe he was cto when you're on the other side how do you guys have the equity conversation or do you just split 50 50. yeah madonna and i have always been really great friends and i think we we it was a very simple conversation that we were going to be 50 50 partners there's so much that he brings to the table so much i do and and uh we're a very complimentary uh partnership so now four months before four years in uh it's proven to be a really outstanding still 50 50 or have you sold some to investors have you raised any capital we haven't brought on uh any any equity partners no i love that so 100 bootstrapped 100 bootstrap yeah congratulations yeah it's i mean it's it's it's a it's it's a hell of a journey um but very happy that we've taken that that approach and and we were both um of a strong mind that we wanted to bootstrap this company when when we started it uh and fund that fund the company through customer contracts be incredibly capital efficient one of our super powers how capital efficient we are we've got some great engineering resources overseas that how many people are full-time on the team full-time is 42 today and how many engineers do you have part-time and full-time of those 42 uh there are there's one full-time marketing person there's one marketing sales and then there's me on the business side there's three of us that are on the business side the other 39 are engineering product uh data science customer success yes and does the one sales person does the one sales person carry a quota um yes i mean we've got a target i i share the target with him i spend more than half of my time out evangelizing the company in in a in a sales capacity uh so we have a target that that we agree on and uh he is comped against that target yes what was that target you plus him for last year in terms of new new i guess ar added or wherever you measure it yeah the target i'll show the growth so last year we we wanted we plan on tripling the business last year but with the coveted lightning strike in march i adjusted that down to doubling the business last year we ended up growing the company by 250 percent so uh more than double the the business last year oh sorry i guess one of the critical first tires any founder makes is your sales higher and the quota you assign a sales higher you can kill yourself if you don't do it the right way right if the quota is too close to full-on target earnings and the ratios are out of whack usually at scale it's usually like 5x typically is that what you're doing inside your business about 5x quota relative to full ot yeah you know i've spent my career in enterprise sales i'm 22 years in i've always been in an enterprise sales role selling uh technology and so that's where i've spent quite a bit of my time here at measured and so the the the first time was not not sales uh that was with me uh and so i brought in uh a gentleman by the name of james bands who's just another veteran in in our industry uh to help me with marketing and taking all the leads that come in and so it hasn't it that that was not a problem that we had to wrestle with um or early on in the company well so sorry especially considering your background enterprise sales my question is even more relevant what ratio did you set quota to full ote for your first sales hire yeah so like i said i i don't have an exclusive sales hire right now right so here you plus him you plus him you plus him manage the quota right the growth that's correct yeah yeah yeah so he's not a founder you are founder so your first guy doing sales with a quote at target i'm just curious how you think through that yeah um so you know it's it's aligned to his incentives making sure that i put a comp plan in front of him uh that is very attractive what the ratio uh looks like i i i have to take a look at i'm not sure off the top of my head uh come on you're in enterprise sales and you don't know the quoted on target earnings ratio of your first guy doing sales directly come on yeah so it's us together uh own own own the number for the business so we we team up we team up in a in a blended way to uh hit that that growth goal fair performance yeah that's a that's a model that that i will figure out at some point this year is i build out a uh a sales engine uh but it is this point has been a blended effort take me back to your first two or three customers how did you land them yeah i'll tell you it's it's so i did an mba at usc uh the the two things they preach in mba school is number one fail forward and number two if you're going to start a company go out and and find a customer solve a really hard problem for them prove it and then start start the business and so we started the the company uh when we landed our first contract uh the brand is called uh johnny was uh we're very transparent with the brand on where we were with our technology and uh what the engagement and expectations uh we're gonna be four years later we still work with uh this brand johnny was and the ceo rob trauber is uh he's a big fan of ours uh so we landed this contract first contract i'll share was as a hundred and eighty five thousand dollars i called madonn and i said uh let's start this company and take your technology to market madonna had been you know working on the innovation here for quite a while and so we decided to with that contract incorporate the business and uh off we off we went great now how many of these guys are working today how many customers yeah today we have 45 45 customers so still pretty you can still do high touch high acv that's sort of the approach yes that's right that's right yeah the the plan the plan for this year is to grow to 100 but only if we can do so in a responsible way where you know you know csat is high everyone in this company is rallied around csat and we live and die on unhappy clients especially in this world of you know marketing analytics and uh decisioning yep and 45 customers at your minimum price point of 7 500 bucks a month which would choose somewhere right like 340 000 bucks an mrr definitely north of that right now yeah definitely north of that right now yeah do you think that would be that that would be a minimum entry point for a very turnkey scalable uh like shopify shopify plus econ business yeah yeah yeah yeah so definitely north of four million run rate in terms of in terms of last you mean do you house closer you do you think you can get above 10 million revenue this year in terms of december yes so that is that is the plan and the goal and we've got a clear line of sight on uh on on passing that 10 million dollar ar mark this year that's great um and with that target this year where were you exactly one year ago in terms of revenue it sounds like maybe in the two-ish range two million yeah like i said yeah we we grew 250 last year yeah yeah i just don't know what the base would be right so if you're at around four or five million today i guess you'd be somewhere two two and a half million a year ago yeah closer to you know north of five million right now right around five million okay fair enough yeah yeah that's great that's incredible growth during clover did most of that come from landing new customers or expanding the current ones already worked with came from both and and and we you know we we were actually benefited from uh well to certains that benefited from covet we we we help econ brands and and and traditional brands uh make that trade make that transition over to being a digital first company and so um we work with a lot of econ we worked a lot of retail and helping them migrate over to a digital strategy was where our clients really leaned into us love that trevor thanks for taking us to the top where can people learn more about you thank you nathan yeah um measure.com www.measure.com one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a 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