How Mention CEO Matthieu Vaxelaire grew Mention to $114M revenue and 4K customers in 2025.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is hent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka many of you who have met in person have seen my unbelievable dashboards that I built you know I'm an anal analytics like crazy person I love the data and I love presenting the data in beautiful dashboards that my team can use on their mobile devices their phones and TVs throughout the office now the way I do this without having to hire a big development team is at Nathan ler.com analytics it's using a company called clipfolio and I'll tell you more later on in the show how I use them it's na.com analytics this is episode 6 30 coming up tomorrow morning you're going to learn from Greg who his company sales wise just raised $3 million and finally launched their product they're brand new they're currently helping 12 customers develop better relationships with their data good morning everybody Nathan ler here and our guest this morning is Matt velair he is the CEO of mention where he moves all Trello cards to the right and closes deals he splits his time between Paris and New York City Matt are you ready to take us to the top here yep very good so tell us what mention does and what's your business model how do you make money y so mention is Google alert on steroids so basically we allow any company to know what's being said about the about their brand competitors and products um in real time how we make money so we are a staff uh subscription based service uh so people buy subscription and what is the just to avoid going into every individual c customer kind of cohort what's the average customer pay you per month we have different type of segment of customers so we have the type of customers that pays on average 65 a month and then we have the midmarket that pays on average uh 400 a month okay and again if you just take an average across your your entire customer base what would you say the average is uh the average would be I don't have the final number as we really make the distinction here uh a number between those two yeah okay so call maybe like 150 bucks 200 bucks something like that uh we we we launched not so long ago the midmarket offer so it would be closer to the to the uh pricing okay so closer so somewhere between between you said $60 and $400 yes but closer to the $60 got it okay good um okay great so let's get some more let's get some more kind of the story here in terms of uh maybe a customer that's using you guys tell us tell us about a customer using you um yeah let's Pi an example potential customer could be uh Nike tell me though don't tell me about a potential one though tell me about one that's actually using you and how they're using you like I know you have o right OG is using uh correct a lot of customers uh do not accept for us to share their uh of course their information and who they are but let's let's take uh oil as a customer this is an agency yeah yeah so Matt tell me how they're so if there's other agencies listening they're going to learn by you telling how o is actually using you so how is actually using you is using Mansion um to track campaigns you're building for their own clients okay so let's say is a McDonald as a customer in South America uh they want to launch a special they're launching a special campaign for McDonald over there and so they're buying Mansion to offer uh McDonald a comprensive view of the impact the campaign has online okay got it and are the is that how the majority of your customers are using you I mention I see you also have a segment where you can kind of find influencers and do kind of custom insights as well yeah so other customers will look more at what you just mentioned more the influencer tool and so we have other type of customers that much more interested to do uh influencer detection to connect with influencer whether uh people already talking about them or that should be talking about them okay and then tell us uh more about kind of the story here is this something where you've raised uh sorry you've boot stor of you raised Capital uh in between so we wait mat how's that how's that in between you're either self-funded or you've raised Capital no we raised Capital very very early on so when we launched 2013 and since then we now 45 people in a company we haven't raised money anymore okay got it so that first so you founded in 2013 the first amount of money you raised how much was that half a million oh half a million okay um and you haven't raised any since then correct and you mentioned you're 48 people now 45 45 and where are you guys all based New York and Paris okay about even evenly split no 10 people in New York 30 people uh in parison okay cool and five and five people where a remote a remote got it and then okay good let's keep let's kind of pull the story forward so in 2013 um what were you doing before you launched the business did you come from kind of industry or have you always been an entrepreneur what's your story um long story short uh more of a finance uh background but I was in entrepreneurship uh working at a company called efounders which is a startup Studio that built startups on average three to four startups per year and actually mention was one of the startup built by that startup studio and so you just you helped build it and then decided you wanted to spin it out is that what happened correct okay and then okay that was 2013 uh so fast forward to today uh how many customers are you serving on a monthly basis on a monthly basis we have more than 600,000 users and we have several Bay C several thousand pay customers more than 4,000 paying customers okay so so 600,000 total you users and about you said a little over 4,000 paying customers um help me understand for folks listening what what would people if they want to use you guys for free like the 600,000 people what do they get for free uh a limited version of mension uh so basically they can track one keyword usually their Company the company name and can get up to 250 mension a month for free got it okay so your your company appearing 250 times uh in the news uh per month and then obviously they have to pay and then if they cross that threshold they would move to a paying version what other kind of Economics are you using to encourage people to move to a paid plan besides usage numbers like do you have upgrades based off number of seats or upgrades based off number of products what other things you use to excel yeah we use um two other things number of seats okay if you want to collaborate or if you want to share stuff with a colleague then you need to move to a paying version and as well features okay so you mentioned one the very appreciated is all the influencer dashboard this is not accessible uh on the free version all the analytics part as well is not accessible on the free version those are good reasons um to move to the paid version and are these mostly no touch sales or do you have an inside sales team that upsells folks okay that's a very good question on the segment there is a no touch sales model okay so it's all marketing driven uh all automatic however for the midmarket part that we launch 2016 mention Enterprise this is really inside sales uh driven and how how many people on your total team of 45 are inside sales inside sales um we divide this into two groups there is really the inbound team that manage all the incoming leads those are six people okay and then we have the outbound team that uh is doing prospection got got it okay got it so how how many people are on the outbound team on the outbound and there are six people as well okay so about 12 total specifically focused on either outbound or or inside sales okay great good and then and then can I do them so I'm going to get a minimum here if I take a minimum of 4,000 customers paying a minimum of 60 bucks a month it's fair to say you guys are doing at least about 240 Grand per month is that accurate uh yes at least as a minimum yeah yeah yeah very minimum you're laughing because you're going our revenues are actually much higher than that right no yeah higher than that yeah good I'm just going off the range you gave me so that's helpful to understand take us through some more the kind of economic stuff so anytime you have a price point kind of in the $ 60-ish Dollar range per month or as an arpo you're you're dealing kind of with small businesses and churn is sometimes an issue what do you guys at in terms of a gross customer turn per month we are much more focused on to R grow CH or Mr net turn uh on the midm market segment uh we would be on average something uh from 3 to 2% gross okay not net and I'm speaking Mr and of course that number is much much smaller and could be even negative on the mid Market mid Market side is it negative the fact is we launched the midmarket segment 2016 it's a yearly subscription so one could argue we don't have enough yeah but what we see we already have one month of History uh yes the numbers looks very promising got it so just to...