How Mixmax CEO Olof Mathe grew Mixmax to $1M revenue and 10K customers in 2023.

hello everybody my guest today is olaf mate he's the ceo and co-founder of comic con mix max a company that is bringing the power of web to email by creating richer email experiences with embeddable slack style commands to trigger polls videos calendar invites and more without leaving the message they were founded in 2014 and received 1.5 million seed investment from a number of individual investors in april 2015. after finishing his engineering degree in france he then worked at skype and mckinsey and also helped he also helped grow inkling habitat a cloud-based authoring environment for writers and publishers olaf are you ready to take us to the top sure let's do it all right so i think people who know mix max probably know you because they saw someone send them an attachment or something and it was in this beautiful kind of purple highlighted box and looked much cleaner than any other kind of email they'd gotten with something embedded in it help us understand what the company does and what your revenue model is how do you make money yeah abs process business words like on month monthly plan by basis and at mixmax is x we think about it much broader than email even though that's how we started we're kind of a communications platform mainly for people in sales and success and we help you automate kind of your most common workflows not just in email but across slack crm phone document signing apps even so the product's grown a lot that's great and help us understand you know i'm sure you have a lot of different customer cohorts but just because we're short on time what would you like the average maybe team pays you per year would you say uh the average person probably pays us on average like 40 bucks a month okay and then perhaps average team size is like 10 10 people something like that okay well this is these are very different though so that's bottom up versus tops down are you typically selling directly to a 40 one-time user are you going directly to the cmo or cro directly and selling a 10-seat plan great question the kind of the the overall like core of the company has always been a really strong self-serve virally growing business where people pay out of pocket and incidentally over time those courts tend to mature into team licenses uh which is also why we started to build out a sales team actually so it could be a fun topic to touch upon definitely the biggest issue i've seen with this model frankly is is when people are paying personally because it's so valuable it comes a time where you go literally go and do a database query and you say wow we have six people from uber using us but they're all in different credit cards and it's very tricky to get all of them from an architecture architecture perspective on one corporate credit card have you figured this out bane of my existence yeah have you figured it out or no i uh no we have not i think there is actually where is there so many sas products off the shelf for finance and accounting and whatnot i think this problem is unique to actually to mixmax and potentially a product like dropbox most anyone who's bottoms up yeah i think it's actually there are a lot of sas companies that are bottoms up like asanas spot on black bottoms up you know low signs bottoms up the issue with a lot of the advantage that like donna and slack has or even like an intercom you pay for your company straight up you always buy a company license from the get-go even if you self-served whereas with a product like dropbox you might just be using it on your own uh and mixmax is similar in that regard so yeah really tricky one is but you have no solution what's your billing system what do you use uh well we use stripe out of the box and then for finance metrics we use a software called uh profitwell that sets on top of stripe uh and then good old spreadsheets man okay so you don't have a really good solution yet this is literally just your sales team calling saying we saw you have six different credit cards let's put them all in one pretty pretty much we have just a little bit of automation we've started to build in in salesforce so this is something huge that we're really excited to build out okay fair enough all right let's put all this on on a timeline you said launched in 2014 i think we created the company in 2014 we launched the product in 2015. okay and you did some funding then i think you've raised more as well how much total have you raised to date uh probably around 13 million okay and why go the funded route why not really stay disciplined try and stay bootstrapped uh amazing so uh in my mind a little bit i think bootstrap is actually a code word for founder wealth and so i'm not sure we had some runway as founders to start with we didn't have um at least for the type of product we were building we uh we needed some seed funding in order to uh yeah just be able to like keep the lights on and so that was the kind of original impetus for our a round which we closed earlier this year that was kind of a different story and and we had up until then run the business on kind of a cash flow neutral basis and for us that was just we were excited about accelerating growth and building out like a bigger uh go-to-market team yeah obviously you know raising that much money unless it's just gonna sit in the bank which makes for interesting board meetings you're obviously burning cash now at this point correct yes yeah yeah makes good sense where is most investment going towards engineering or somewhere else it's pretty much across the board i'd say the kind of new area we start to invest in is go to marquette team so we just brought on a really amazing marketing leader two three months ago uh similarly for sales and so yeah it's really exciting in a way it's a little bit ironic because obviously mixmax is a product for people in sales and success and we didn't even used to have anyone in-house who worked in those functions and so the joke was that mix-mex was our sales team yeah that's funny what's your team size today total uh total will 48 people of which 11 are distributed oh great okay so so remote and san fran uh yeah so we're like whatever that turns out to be 37 people in san francisco and 11 remote and they're kind of spread out in the us canada mexico yeah you guys have a fun little spot i always eat right there on the sweet green and i know when i go up and down about kind of optimizely or or unbounce on kind of one end you walk down the street and you see the little mix mac kind of brick brick facade there at the bat that start with the nice orange neon or sorry purple neon light on the inside oh nice you saw that the best invested thousand dollars we ever did i think it is some cool factor to it maybe maybe helps your hiring and recruiting a little bit right all right 48 folks sam did have at least one yeah we did have at least one engineer who's like yeah i heard about mixmax since i walked past the sign it works it's cheaper than a recruiter so yep all right good all right 48 people san fran remote um and over the past four or five years how many customers have you scaled to uh we are so if you think about in credit cards we're north of 10 000 credit cards that's kind of the public number is that how you guys measure it and that is currently how we measure it and that's actually not technically great because ideally you'd measure it in like per credit card like what's a single seed what's actually a huge team behind it etc uh we definitely have some bi uh debt uh we need to need to address it listen it's not an easy problem i mean i i've interviewed again about three thousand bb ceos everyone that has a model like this has this exact same problem and um do you measure by logos by individual seats or all the way down to just the pure credit card numbers yeah yeah and now we actually what we do in excel which has been kind of a long exercise which is part where i'm trying to hire someone and finance so i don't have to do this is and we have like this huge excel spreadsheet to try to get actually domain or like account based metrics on everything to address that issue that you yeah yeah it it um macbooks just aren't powerful enough to like chug through that excel sheet and good i mean look um you gave me two numbers ten thousand credit cards forty dollar arpu i can kind of back into a minimum mrr there are about four hundred grand is that a you know is that a fair minimum uh that would be understating it yeah but unless you want to give me more accurate numbers but minimum 10 000 times 40 is 400 grand a month yeah yeah that's directionally right okay do you want to share something that's more accurate or you just want to leave it at that minimum uh we can leave it at that i think what we shared before is that we're north of five and uh five million and ten thousand customers so is ten in sight like that's driving distance in the next six months or twelve months or no i'm sorry if what is is 10 10 million are is that in striking distance or it still feels like a stretch goal uh i think for 20 2018 that's definitely a stretch goal yeah i'd like to think about it within striking distance though that's good fair enough i like the aggressiveness and help me understand growth so if you're north of call it 5 million are today where were you a year ago uh a year ago well we've kind...