How Meet CEO Aaron Lifshin grew Meet to $200K revenue and 100 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is aaron liftion he's the ceo and founder of meeting pulse he's got a 20-year track record creating and managing award-winning technical teams in the us and the uk his last successful exit was xln telecom as cto aaron are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right still here yeah thanks for joining um what is meeting paulsen what's the revenue model how do you make money a meeting pulse is a new type of audience response system which gathers a real-time sentiment as well as a q a and polls from audiences and uh our revenue model is uh and services software and services okay so how do you you know one common theme i've seen in the sas space well in the event space where they try and use a sas model our events start and they stop so churn is always an issue have you solved this this solution somehow or do people keep paying you even when there's not an event going on in the event i see a lot of opportunity to really add value around the services but uh you're absolutely right you know there is going to be a you know there's going to be one-off and then if that relationship is created then you then they come back for the next year because usually if they've organized it this year they're going to organize it next year but where i really see the value of the application of the technology as well as a good business potential as an enterprise and getting this into internal events and regular meetings so give me a general sense i mean you have some enterprise logos listed on your website on average what's a customer pay per year to get access to the technology you've built it varies but it's uh it's in the thousands okay yeah i'm just curious like if we're talking like a thousand or a hundred thousand per month or per year i mean are you talking like four or five grand a month or a year or what no no not not ten not usually our largest customers it's the tens of thousands okay customers to start to start out would be in the thousands um and uh you know it really depends and what we see a lot is uh there is a virality of spreading inside of the largest enterprises with this kind of technology what we see is a kind of mix of an old b2c model where somebody else would see it and bring it in and we're using a similar thing to spread inside of an enterprise where one department head will will bring on bring the technology in and use it for their meeting but somebody else attends so then they so then they bring it into they want to have it in their meeting as well and so as we spread then that revenue uh of course scales out the usage so you'd you'd say you know two grand a year is called you know a fair average for the folks you're trying to cater to uh that is about our uh our average value but that includes all of those one-offs um so for the larger enterprises um our price point is closer to 4k but you're you articulate it even though you say one off they might pay for a month cancel but they pretty regularly come back year after year correct well that's the goal uh you know that's the goal i think the event space is one offs and there is a lot of people that just need it for that for that one time um and we see a lot of uh a lot of downward price pressure as well with a lot of entrance into the market for those uh for those single events um but the goal always is to to build the relationship identify those uh agencies that are going to do more events and that have a more sophisticated clientele and then bring uh bring that relationship forward and and get them to come back but that's certainly something we're working on are you trying i assume you're tracking that so it's probably a bad question i mean are you tracking that and if so how a lot of people have troubles tracking churn if it's not like per monthly like some people have a lot of trouble you know tracking they they paid in november this year they canceled for 11 months they paid in november again that's actually a good customer uh yeah i mean you know that's a challenge and and we do it with some manual work especially there's turnover in those companies potentially so you might get somebody coming in with uh with a different different email uh so what i do is i just um you know i have i have admin uh matching those up and as long as the domain is the same then then you know then it'll get matched up and then also you know there's the question of churn like what do you consider churn if somebody comes up and they only ever needed it for one you know for a one-time use you just never you just never count you just never count them as a customer at all that's what i would do right they're never a sas customer they're in a different model so in this industry it's like it's a mix of models there's this one-off model the more standard sas model for people that have more events and then the services model as well where we really are seeing something emerge which is uh interactivity consultancy around events you have your av guy your sound guy your caterer you have your interactivity person and we've seen more and more expectation of that and uh and a new a new skill set and a new niche in that event ecosystem that's emerging around providing that service telling people when to ask questions when to enable interactivity to be most effective to get those feedback and engagements sure yeah the product makes complete sense to me um i want to understand more of your story here when did you launch the company what year uh 2014. 20 okay so four years and what have you scaled to in terms of total customers and let's just focus on the one cohort let's just focus on the true kind of soft sass customers yeah so we are we are between 100 and 200 customers right now and we've taken a lot of time to really listen to what people were coming in with in terms of their problems and uh and develop the product and we started really marketing out and growing the sas business in may of this year okay um so so it's been a kind of a learning and product development uh uh phase for us for a while and now it's an exciting exciting time and we're about to uh uh to scale and uh and go back and trap pretty much bootstrapped we had a little bit a small accelerator that we went through and the the story of it actually is uh it was a hackathon uh started company it was me and a few guys got together for a weekend to just see what we could do see we could put together and and on the back of that we met some people that that gave us 50k to kind of take this to the next level and it was around the pulse the real-time sentiment and analysis so how many people are on the team today uh full-time part-time about a dozen people okay about a dozen people okay so i mean have you gotten to the point yet where you're casual positive or you're operating right at breakeven are you burning still now i've started burning a little bit more with this uh with this increase in uh uh and marketing effort okay so now we're gonna move into uh more of a fundraising fundraising stage but i've kept it i've kept it bootstrapped and just growing the product and building out to the point where really whenever any customer comes in and like oh can i do this can i do that we always want to be able to uh just say yes and support that so we now have um close to 200 different features and different ways to use the product and aaron i mean i can i can back in a little bit here to minimum size correct me if i'm wrong here but at a 2 000 kind of average annual plan and you said between 100 and 200 customers on the sas model i mean that would put you guys that caught at least a 200 000 kind of ar run rate on just the sas line is that accurate that's about right yeah okay and and if i asked you growth rate on that so go back a year you'd say zero right because you just launched it in may we launched the marketing in may but we did have customers so we doubled oh yeah one year so about eight grand a month a year ago yeah is that right about eight grand eight grand a month a year ago uh 100 yeah it's about right about right yeah that's good that's healthy growth where are you so how are you signing these these folks up um what's the what's the number one growth channel we use google adwords and we get a lot of referrals we get repeat business and just the organic you know as soon as we put this up there we had organic you know aaron that's not just like a magical thing like everyone who puts up a website doesn't just like magically get traffic you had to do something whether you realize it was smart or not you had to do something to get traffic um well for a while it really uh it really wasn't we got a few influencers uh that came and saw it um you know we uh we launched at the launch festival we were at the hackathon people saw us there so i think that that helped us kick us kick us off um and then from there it uh it was organic for uh for a while and that's um you know that's a lot of why i just uh kept kept sticking with this business because there were just always such positive signals around what we were doing so what it sounds like...