How Mention CEO Matthieu Vaxelaire grew 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 summarize that you have your mid-market cohort which pays somewhere between that's the lower plan right right Matt somewhere around 60 bucks a month no no no no that the so M Market they pay 400 yes got it so just to summarize the midmarket then so your mid-market price point is around 400 bucks per month and you're seeing 2 to 3% gross monthly Mr churn however net negative Revenue churn on that cohort is close to negative however uh you only have one month of History correct uh but I want just to reiterate where we have almost like negative net turn is on the midm market where they pay 400 months however on the okay they pay on average 60 months and here uh gross 2 to 3% per month okay got it got it so you're saying sor I Mis I misunderstood that so on your on your on your cohort paying 60 bucks a month you have 2 to 3% gross Mr turn on your cohort paying 400 bucks per month you're you know you're basically at zero turn or almost net negative turn correct understood and then what about uh talk you have a lot of customers over 4,000 how are you getting new customers we have uh on average every month 10,000 people that sign up for mention uh regardless of uh marketing action or whatsoever this is thanks to the product uh people speaking about manip um this is one uh way to get customers or three other acquisition channels are paid inbound marketing and uh outbound strategy and each month just on the paid Channel about how much are you spending not much we're still at the very beginning anything from 5 to 10K okay and where so you're kind of testing that still where are you running tests Facebook ads Google ads or is there some other unique Channel you're testing yeah like mostly it's on Google we testing platform as like get up Capa uh we do little test with G2 crowd um we haven't tried anything yet with Facebook uh except promoting our own content we don't do really like um pay demo request on Facebook do you have enough data yet to know if G2 crowd is working well for you uh the first uh result we're not encouraging God sorry you're not what we're not uh but not sure not sure okay and then um uh talk to me do you have I imagine a lot of the reason you're getting this this traffic 10, fre users per month is you have a Content strategy or something like that is that accurate we used to have a strong open content strategy meaning by that's like articles on the blogs but we moved away from this to generate leads with the content so exclusive content strategy so landing page ebooks this do not does not drive pre-t trial okay and it's does not work very well on SEO because it's Jed content but it generates leads for the sales people okay and if you take kind of a fully weighted customer acquisition cost so including any paid stuff including any salaries of the people focused on user acquisition what are you willing to pay to acquire a new paying customer very very like um it makes no sense to put one number here as we discuss with different customers segments like different teams different acquisition channels so we don't even look at one number you know we of course have one number for each Channel and usually we have a number for the midm market the I would say for the type like no one I've mentioned is currently Focus onto the parts of the business so if we just focus on the mid-market cohort and I know you have different CS per Channel but if you take an average like it's and this is less about what you're actually paying and more about you as a CEO when you're looking at the data and returns from these test what are you willing to pay for a new midmarket customer I can go easily I can go up to 1K okay to pay for a bank custom yeah got it Al and then obviously the payback period on that is about three months or two months right yes okay makes great sense Matt very good what's your goal what's your goal for for 2017 what what Revenue Target would make you really happy if you hit it uh the goal is we've been boost strap as I said uh since a couple of months and years uh so here it's about accelerating so there will be a fundraising on Manion uh 2017 and of course when the fundraising happens will have an impact on a growth as will grow much faster with the funds uh so difficult to say but it will be double doubling the size in terms of Revenue of the company in 2017 do you think you'll break you know $800,000 per month in monthly occurring Revenue by December 2017 is that a good number no we have a good fundraising yeah with okay so you're in the process of fundraising now then correct got it and then your goal would be with that funding to help drive you know and hit a monthly requiring Revenue Target by December of this year somewhere around 800,000 that would be good growth for you very strong growth could could those are the type of numbers we're looking [Music] at like I told you guys at the top of this episode I have amazing data and you guys know from my interview style I love data but what I have more than data is making it actionable via beautiful dashboards that I can view on my phone on my TVs in my living room or even on my laptop as I'm traveling and the company that I use to create these dashboards which pulls in data from my Libs in backend my Google analytics backend Salesforce and other data sources is called clipfolio you can see an example executive dashboard or my social media Command Center or my web metrics dashboard at naa.com Analytics that's Nathan ler.com analytics and you can try it there for free for 3 months it's clipfolio you can try it free for 3 months everybody else has to pay so you get it free for 3 months Allan's a good friend he's a CEO of the company he came on the show I said I love your product can I feature it so Nathan la.com analytics go check it out now okay top tribe I have to tell you many people go Nathan you came out of nowhere your website's growing so fast how' you do it the answer is simple so I use host skater I know if you guys know that but I use host skater and the reason I do they have like about 4500 free templates I can use cuz I don't code they've got a great e-commerce plugin and guys I bug the heck out of their support they've got 247 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 Nathan you can sign up get your own domain for 30% off and a 45 day money back guarantee okay again I'm a great deals for you guys go to hostgator.com Nathan to grab that now awesome well very good Matt I appreciate being so transparent it's super helpful let's wrap up here with the famous five are you ready yes all right number one what's your favorite Business book um there uh the art thing about the art thing that's a good one uh number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now uh big fun of R yep uh number uh three is there a favorite online tool you have like uh acity scheduling um favorite online tool I would say mention and on top of that um it's a tough one we use there is one great tool that we use that's called all. AO that's a basically a segment on steroid what is it all. AO so H.O which is basically segment on steroid so done better that allows you to store your data and manipulate your data and this has been a tremendous help uh for Marketing sales and customer success team uh to to improve process gain time and add a lot of Automation in everything we do oh yeah I'm I'm on the site right now looks like an interesting tool cool number uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get each night on average I need to sleep a lot I have kid so I don't get enough but I hope like at least eight what do you get though typically uh I would say anything from six to seven but I need at least eight okay and how many kids do you have uh twins twins yeah all right and and so and how old are you today uh 31 all right so last last question take us back 11 years Matt what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew uh two things do more things and read less as you learn much more by doing than reading and spending time on Tech crunch uh that's one thing and the second thing that network is uh undervalued so it's massively important all right guys there you have it do more things read less and remember your network is where all your value is so focus on building it from Matt who founded mention back in 2013 raised Capital early on of about $500,000 they've got two cohorts they're tracking closely one is their SMB Market that pays somewhere around 60 bucks per month and then they have their mid-market folks that pay closer to 400 bucks per month where they've already got uh again sign well almost zero gross churn per month maybe net negative Revenue turn but the sample size is small currently uh they're doing again about 4,000 customers so doing a minimum of $24,000 per month in Revenue they've got a team of 45 People based between New York City Paris and other remote locations for his midmarket segment he's willing to pay up to a grand to acquire those customers again focused on making it easier especially like a Google analytics or Google mentions on steroids Matt thank you for taking us to the top with pleasure see you if you enjoyed Matthew today go back and listen to Jennifer yesterday her company gasen just started out raised $700,000 and they're using roof meters to tell Mexican households when their gas is almost very interesting business model it would mean the world to me if you guys got any value from this episode if you would go leave a review on iTunes right now and then subscribe you know I hustle like heck to get these episodes out every freaking day for you guys and trust me I love it I would do it with no listeners but boy oh boy it makes my day and it makes my team's day when we see great reviews and get your feedback so thanks so much top drive I love giving away free money I feel like o we're giving away cars and I have something special for you today how many of you have heard our super sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook and Google ads well all of you listening right now yes if you're listening you get $100 in free AdWords here's how you get it okay again thanks for listening get the free $100 from Google right when you sign up with my website host provider HostGator go sign up now to get your free money hostgator.com Nathan again that's hostgator.com Nathan