How MiiTel Reached $19.2M ARR and 1,600 Customers with 100% Growth in 2023 (Interview with Founder & CEO Takeshi Aida)

Host intro and MiiTel overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, MiiTel. Think of it like Gong, but for Asia Pacific plus extra things added on top of Gong. He's got over 1,600 paying customers doing over 1,600,000 a month in revenue up from 800,000 a month just a year ago. Done this very capital efficient. They raised $15,000,000 in a series a. I called a 150,000,000 valuation back in 2020 and hasn't raised since. So very efficient growth, 200 on the team, 80 engineers, 30 sales reps, 120,

00:25110 plus net dollar retention as he TK looks to scale. Hey, folks. My guest today is TK. After joining Mitsubishi Corporation, he was involved in automotive trading, planning, and executing sales and marketing initiatives in overseas markets, cross border investment deals, and new company formations among many other things. He founded RevComm in July 2017, which provides a self coaching tool called miitel and miitel for Zoom, a service that uses artificial intelligence to visualize sales calls, call center

00:53operations, and meetings. Company has expanded more than 40,000 users in four years among Japan, Indonesia, The Philippines, and The US. TK, you ready to take us to the top?

RevComm vs MiiTel: company structure explained

Takeshi Aida

01:02>> Yep. Alright. How's it going?

Nathan Latka

01:04Good to meet you, man. So just to be clear, is is RevComm a parent company with a bunch of companies, or is the main thing miitel?

Takeshi Aida

01:11>> Main thing miitel. It's the you know, company name is RevComm. It's a RevComm Inc, and our service is miitel and miitel for Zoom.

Nathan Latka

01:20Okay. So the website, if you wanna follow along, will be revcomm.co.jp. Right? Yeah. Alright. Very good.

Takeshi Aida

01:27>> We have lp, like, you know, miitel.com.

Nathan Latka

01:30That's great. Alright. So let let's talk about miitel.com. Right? So what does the product do and what kinds of customers are you selling to?

Product walkthrough: what MiiTel does

Takeshi Aida

01:37>> Yeah. It's, you know, b to b SaaS self coaching tool, very simple service. It analyzes and visualizes the sales and shares competition by artificial intelligence in terms of what and how. So in terms of how, we, you know, visualize talk-listen ratio, number of silences, overlaps. Overlaps means interruption, by the way. And number of silences, rallies. Rallies means a conversation back and forth, and speech rate. How many characters per second operator spoke, and customer did. So,

02:09>> for example, in terms of, speech rate, it is said that pacing is important in sales or shares. Pacing means you are supposed to talk plus minus 10% of the customer because there's a strong correlation between brain speed and speech rate. So if you speak too fast, the customer can't understand. And if you speak too slowly, customer is

Nathan Latka

02:29Right?

Takeshi Aida

02:30>> Not

02:33>> Yeah. So that's why you're supposed to talk plus minus 10% of the customer. In this way, you can see how the communication was made and where the issues are. And in terms of what, we transcribe the whole conversation and summarize it and all the market and put it into CRM as a way. So that's what we do.

Nathan Latka

02:50TK, can you do sentiment in that sentiment analysis? You know, happy, sad, things like this?

Takeshi Aida

02:55>> Yeah. We, you know, analyze emotion as well.

Nathan Latka

02:58Interesting.

03:00Okay. Very cool. I mean, have you been what this reminds me of mean, it it feels like you're effectively Gong, but for Asia, I mean, is that a fair comparison or no?

Takeshi Aida

03:09>> Yeah. It's a fair comparison. Okay. So the difference between Gong, Chorus, and miitel is that very simple. You know, the miitel equal Gong plus, you know, Zoom Phone or Dialpad and RingCentral, which is IP phone. So miitel consists of two parts. Right? IP phone, cloud IP phone, plus conversation analytics. Since it's a one stop service, and we provide it with only $79. And it won't cost you, you know, you know, 100 to $140.

Comparison to Gong and pricing model

Nathan Latka

03:43So Yeah. So so it's 70 I see. You're very clear on your website. It's 69 or $70 per month. Is that per user per seat?

Takeshi Aida

03:49>> Yeah. Per user per seat. Yeah. Okay. Per user per month. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:54Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

04:17your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:41get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity And red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is

05:03not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

05:29going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But

05:51if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into

06:17the interview. What does the average sort of company pay per month? This will be driven by, obviously, the number of seats they're paying for their team size.

Takeshi Aida

06:25>> It totally depends. But in Japan, enterprise customer pays us, usually, like, you know, $140 per month per, ID, including, you know, call charge and mobile, app, you know, options and also storage options. You know? So 69 bucks, it includes two months of recording, you know, storage, But enterprise users usually, store, there's you know, record data recorded data more than, you know, twelve months. Yep. So they have to pay the storage fee.

Nathan Latka

07:09Yep. That makes no. That makes a lot of sense to smart upsell. But if you look at your not just your enterprise cohort. If just look at all of your paying businesses today, is it fair to say the average business is paying something like 500 to a thousand bucks a month?

Takeshi Aida

07:24>> Yeah. That'd be, like, four or five seats, basically.

Nathan Latka

07:27Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting.

Takeshi Aida

07:29>> It's, you know, industry diagnostic from financial industry to manufacture, from listed company to SMB. Yep. Yep. It's a horizontal SaaS.

Nathan Latka

07:41This is great. Okay. I understand what you charge. I understand the product. Put this on a timeline for us. When did you launch the business?

Company timeline and founding story

Takeshi Aida

07:47>> We launched miitel in two thousand eighteen, November. So it's been about four years and three months or so.

Nathan Latka

07:57And are you the only founder?

Takeshi Aida

07:59>> Yeah. I'm the solo founder.

Nathan Latka

08:01That's that's the way to do it, man. Right? Now are you already super rich? You put up your own money or what?

Takeshi Aida

08:06>> Well, not really. I mean, what what I'd like to do in the future is like, you know, I'd like to spend my time and network, social network to the philanthropic, you know, activity. So most of the share is owned by, you know, my foundation. It's called the ThinkAct Foundation and Takeshi Aida Foundation. Mhmm. So 90% of my share is owned by found that foundation.

Nathan Latka

08:36Do also do that because of a tax from a tax strategy perspective, that's smart tax planning?

Takeshi Aida

08:42>> Yes and no. I'm willing to pay a tax to the Japanese, you know, government for the, you know, society for the society. Right?

Nathan Latka

08:52What is the average tax rate in Japan? If you sell the business for a billion dollars and you own all the equity, how much you're gonna pay the Japanese government Yeah.

Takeshi Aida

08:59>> Capital gain, tax is 20%. So it's not that much

Nathan Latka

09:04lower lower than that's lower than some spots in The US.

Takeshi Aida

09:07>> So Right. So, you know, the tax strategy is not that important for the capital.

Nathan Latka

09:13Yeah. So you keep going here in 2018. Now did you write the original code, or did you convince an engineer to write it for you?

Takeshi Aida

09:20>> I I convinced engineer write for me. Yeah. So

Nathan Latka

09:22You're very convincing then.

09:24How did you do that?

Takeshi Aida

09:26>> There's no, you know, secret sauce. It's keep communicating with a lot of engineers. But my findings at early stage was that there are four types of engineers, right? The engineer for all strength strong at, you know, structure, architecture, and algorithm and application, and management, right? And so what early stage founder should find is the architecture engineer through a strong architecture engineer. Because if the architecture is not well architected, then you have to rebuild in at some

10:11>> point. Usually business person seeking the application engineer because application engineer is very, very, you know, well known. Yep. So the engineer who made this service, right?

Recruiting the first engineer

Nathan Latka

10:28Did you just pay him or her a lot of money or did you give him equity?

Takeshi Aida

10:32>> Equity plus, you know, money.

Nathan Latka

10:35What what does an mean, don't tell me the salary of your first hire, but in general, an architecture engineer in Japan today, I mean, what are you gonna pay them per year in salary?

Takeshi Aida

10:43>> Well, it totally depends. So at first, I paid them only, you know, $5,000 a month

Nathan Latka

10:48Yeah.

Takeshi Aida

10:50>> Plus salary plus stock option. Right?

Nathan Latka

10:55Yeah. But we're talking, like, under 5% equity. Right?

Takeshi Aida

10:58>> Yeah. Under 5% equity.

Nathan Latka

11:00I mean, that's still impressive that you're able to recruit someone that you feel like is pretty talented for $5,000 a month plus under a 5% option grant. I mean, he must or she must have just really believed in your vision.

Takeshi Aida

11:11>> Yeah. That that's that's the point. Right?

Nathan Latka

11:14Why? What what why why did he believe you? I mean, is this your second or third company? How did you build his or her confidence?

Takeshi Aida

11:20>> Enthusiasm, man. It's all about enthusiasm, dream, vision, and also engineer really care about, you know, logical strategy, right? So how are you gonna make the business bigger and watch your tactics and watch your strategy? You have to be very logical. So it's a balance of enthusiasm and logic. It's all about that.

Nathan Latka

11:47That's the origin story. You get going in 2018, we put out a report every year of the fastest growing SaaS companies. We found you, you give us results. I don't wanna steal your thunder here, so I'll let you share. Right? What what's revenue today, and how fast did you grow the last twelve months?

Takeshi Aida

12:03>> It's it's we are not disclosing the revenue. But

Early customer acquisition at Salesforce event

Nathan Latka

12:08Wait. TK, I you gave it you gave it to us already publicly.

Takeshi Aida

12:13>> It's a, you know, beyond t two d three cop, which is, you know, triple triple double double double.

Nathan Latka

12:20And Oh, yeah. But that's that's yeah. That's, like, that's a non you know that's a non answer. Let me let me ask you let me ask you this question. Instead of a revenue figure, you know, you get your do you get your first customers in 2018, did it take you a couple years to get the first customer?

Takeshi Aida

12:34>> At 2018, we had you know, at the first of, you know, launching, we already have 30 companies.

Nathan Latka

12:44How'd you do that?

Takeshi Aida

12:46>> You know, I went to a Salesforce event and keep talking, hey, we are self coaching tool, and if you're interested, why don't you use closed beta version? And then when we officially launch, you can, you know, turn it to paid customer. So that's what I did.

Nathan Latka

13:03What was your initial price point? Was it always $69 a month?

Takeshi Aida

13:07>> No. At first, it was 49 because the, you know, function was very limited. We didn't have any emotion detection engine. Also, we didn't have a transcription engine. We only have how to speak engine, like, you know, talk-listen ratio, number of silences, overlaps, and speech rate. That's it. But, you know, customers'willingness to pay with how to speak engine was, you know, $59. So, you know, I

Revenue today and 100% growth rate

Nathan Latka

13:36I 30 customers because you're hustling at a Salesforce Salesforce conference. You get 30 signed up. Now fast forward today, three years later. How many customers are you working with?

Takeshi Aida

13:46>> We have company number of company is 1,600.

Nathan Latka

13:531,600.

Takeshi Aida

13:54>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:54Okay. And you mentioned earlier the average one pays about a thousand bucks a month. Right? I mean, so we can sort of I mean, you're doing somewhere around a million and a half a month in revenue.

Takeshi Aida

14:04>> You can guess.

Nathan Latka

14:06I'm not guessing. I'm multiplying your numbers. You told me earlier your average ARPU was 1,000 a month, and you just told me your customers were 1,600. Is there any reason I couldn't just multiply those?

Takeshi Aida

14:16>> Yeah. Well, I mean

14:20>> yeah. I mean, average ARPA, average revenue per account is more than thousand bucks. So So

Nathan Latka

14:28you're doing more than 1,600,000 a month right now on revenue?

Takeshi Aida

14:33>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:35Okay. That's good enough. You're at, you know, above that range today. Where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate a growth rate?

Takeshi Aida

14:39>> It's half of it.

Nathan Latka

14:41Okay. So you've grown a 100% over the past twelve months. That's great. Now did you do this bootstrapped or have you raised a bunch of capital?

Series A raise, valuation, and capital efficiency

Takeshi Aida

14:48>> We raised approximately $15 three years ago, and since then, we have not raised any money.

Nathan Latka

14:55Alright. You raised capital efficient.

14:58You raised how much?

Takeshi Aida

15:00>> $1.05 15,000,000 USD.

Nathan Latka

15:03Oh, million. Okay. I thought you said you raised $15. No. Got it. Got it. So you raised that money in '20 in what? 2020, you said?

Takeshi Aida

15:13>> No. '20 yeah. 2020. It was '20 Yeah. Three years.

Nathan Latka

15:182020. And why I mean, why did you need to raise that money? What what about this business is capital intensive?

Takeshi Aida

15:25>> Well, to accelerate our hiring and also sales market marketing expense, I'd like to, you know, raise approximately 10,000,000. But, you know, for the 10,000,000 call, $50,000,005.00 has, you know, knock knock us. So I have to arrange, you know, who who to welcome and then end up with $15,000,000.

Nathan Latka

15:53Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Now would you consider that sort of your series a?

Takeshi Aida

15:57>> Yeah. Series a.

Nathan Latka

15:58Yeah. Yeah. I mean, most people know series a, they're selling between 10-15% of the business. Were you sort of in that same range?

Takeshi Aida

16:05>> Yeah. Yes.

Nathan Latka

16:06Okay. So it's like a 150,000,000 valuation, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Very good. And do you remember what revenue was back in 2020?

Takeshi Aida

16:15>> It was, like, approximately

16:19>> 200 k MRR.

Nathan Latka

16:22Okay. Okay. Yeah. So did that valuation back then feel fair to you? Would you do anything differently?

Takeshi Aida

16:27>> Yeah. It was fair.

Nathan Latka

16:28For sure. I mean, what is that? What is that? A 150 divided by 2.4. That was a 62 x multiple. I mean, back then

Takeshi Aida

16:35>> Pretty much.

Nathan Latka

16:37Back then, that was the market. Today, that would be very aggressive. Yeah.

Takeshi Aida

16:41>> Yeah. Market has been changed totally.

Nathan Latka

16:43Do you are you in a position right now to sort of outlast the recession, or are you burning a bunch? You need to go raise money this year.

Burn rate and outlook for 2023

Takeshi Aida

16:50>> We don't have to raise money. We are still capital efficient.

Nathan Latka

16:55So That's awesome. That's awesome. So what's what's the target this year? I mean, do you think you can break a 30,000,000 run rate, 35,000,000 run rate this year?

Takeshi Aida

17:05>> Less than that run rate.

17:07>> I mean, burn rate. Right?

Nathan Latka

17:10No. No. No. What do you think you can hit this year in terms of revenue?

Takeshi Aida

17:14>> Well, we'd like to double it for sure.

M&A interest and competitive positioning

Nathan Latka

17:16Okay. So that I mean, do you think you can get over $40,000,000 in revenue run rate this year?

Takeshi Aida

17:21>> Pretty much.

Nathan Latka

17:21That would be aggressive, but

Takeshi Aida

17:23>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

17:24A little uncomfortable but doable?

Takeshi Aida

17:26>> Yeah. I think, it's doable,

17:30>> in in terms of we are expanding, you know, our, you

17:33>> know, market, not only in Japan, but also Indonesia, Philippines, and The US.

Nathan Latka

17:38Henry Schuck went out and acquired Chorus recently. Well, call it a year and half, two years ago for about $450,000,000. I imagine he's aggressively looking at Asia. I imagine you've had to have conversations with folks in terms of m and a. Are you in any conversations right now to sell the business?

Takeshi Aida

17:55>> Not really, but we are open every time. I actually talked with ex founder of, you know, Chorus.

Team size, engineers, and sales reps

Nathan Latka

18:05Roy or who?

Takeshi Aida

18:06>> Yeah. Roy. Yeah.

18:07>> Yeah. You know Roy?

Nathan Latka

18:08Of course. Yeah.

Takeshi Aida

18:09>> He's Nathan Latka.

Nathan Latka

18:11Knows everybody. Come on.

Takeshi Aida

18:13>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

18:14I mean, look. You're an interesting target. You're an interesting target for ZoomInfo. You're an interesting target for Amit at Gong. Like, anyone that wants to expand to Asia Pacific, I would say you are, like, a prime target. You're very well positioned because you're so capital efficient. Yeah. You your ARR is more than, correct me if this is wrong, you have more ARR today revenue than the total amount of money you've raised.

Takeshi Aida

18:34>> Yeah. For sure.

Nathan Latka

18:35Of course. So you're very capital efficient, which makes you a prime target. Uh-huh. Yeah. No. I love that. That's great. How many folks are full time on the team today?

Takeshi Aida

18:43>> 200 people, approximately.

Nathan Latka

18:45How many engineers?

Takeshi Aida

18:48>> 40%.

Nathan Latka

18:49Okay. Got it. So call call that 8,200. Yeah. 80 engineers. Yeah. How many sales reps with the quota?

Takeshi Aida

18:56>> 30.

Nathan Latka

18:5730. And how aggressive are quotas over there? And, I mean, is it is it is it a million a year is what you want them to do? Per per Per rep?

Takeshi Aida

19:06>> Per rep. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

19:08Is is that it? That's what you have your set at, a million dollar quota for your top reps?

Takeshi Aida

19:12>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

19:13Wow. Okay. Do all of them hit it?

Takeshi Aida

19:16>> No. Only 20%.

Nathan Latka

19:19Oh, okay. We're okay with that.

Takeshi Aida

19:21>> They're using, you know, self coaching tool miitel. So

Nathan Latka

19:26That's fair.

19:28That's fair. That's fair. Okay. Very good. And then, I guess, look, net dollar retention is obviously a critical component of a SaaS business. Are you guys above a 100% today? And if so, how far?

Net dollar retention and key SaaS metrics

Takeshi Aida

19:37>> Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Our key metrics is, NRR. So How like to maximize One one forty. 40%.

Nathan Latka

19:47It's Are you above one hundred?

Takeshi Aida

19:48>> Hundred to a 150.

Nathan Latka

19:48Yeah.

19:49Okay. Well, I mean, that's a big world class is, I would say, 150, one forty or above. You've I know. So

Takeshi Aida

19:56>> It's it's less than one one forty.

Nathan Latka

19:59Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. But you're between a 100, you know, call it one ten and one forty, somewhere in there.

Takeshi Aida

20:03>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:03Yeah.

Famous five rapid fire questions

Takeshi Aida

20:04>> Somewhere around that.

Nathan Latka

20:04Very cool. Well, listen. This is a great story. I appreciate you making time. We're out of time though for today. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Takeshi Aida

20:15>> I I I love, you know, philosophy. I I like the Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. That's my favorite book. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:23That's the one, the Kant.

20:25Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Takeshi Aida

20:30>> I would say my dad, but what I respect most is Bill Gates.

Nathan Latka

20:36Bill Gates.

20:37Number three, what's your favorite online tool besides your own for building miitel?

Takeshi Aida

20:44>> I would say Slack. Without slack, I cannot do work. Yeah. For sure.

Nathan Latka

20:49Yeah.

20:50Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Takeshi Aida

20:52>> Usually six hours.

Nathan Latka

20:54Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Closing thoughts and wrap-up

Takeshi Aida

20:57>> Married with one, you know, daughter.

Nathan Latka

20:59Oh, that's great. One kid. That's awesome. How old are you?

Takeshi Aida

21:04>> I'm 33.

Nathan Latka

21:0533.

21:06Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Takeshi Aida

21:10>> When when I was 20?

Nathan Latka

21:12You were 20 years old.

Takeshi Aida

21:15>> I don't know.

21:18>> Start my business earlier. I I started my business when I was 28. I should start, you know, much earlier.

Nathan Latka

21:26Guys, MiiTel. Think of it like Gong, but for Asia Pacific plus extra things added on top of Gong. He's got over 1,600 paying customers doing over 1,600,000 a month in revenue up from 800,000 a month just a year ago. Done this very capital efficient. They raised $15,000,000 in a series a at called a 150,000,000 valuation back in 2020 and hasn't raised since. So very efficient growth, 200 on the team, 80 engineers, 30 sales reps, a

21:50120, 110 plus net dollar retention as he TK looks to scale. Very exciting space. TK, thanks for taking us to the top.

Takeshi Aida

21:57>> Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

Nathan Latka

22:01One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

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23:10for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

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