How Modigie CEO Ken Hoppe grew Modigie to $2.9M revenue and 25 customers in 2024.

so quick quick background on me I I was uh pre-med so when you look at my LinkedIn and you see Bachelor of Science it's not Bachelor of Science of computer science it was actually um life sciences so I was intending on being a doctor I worked in a teaching hospital at UCLA for about three years and then pivoted and found myself in software um part of that journey is I'm always learning and I always look for this event Luke you know I learned from you and Rajesh I learned from you and and I'll continue and if you look at um you know a nod yesterday he probably would have said I don't swear like an undo I don't know who who watched it on yesterday but very inspiring for the CEO of inside and um but profit of growth is is is hard but it is possible and I hopefully I can share some nuggets with you of our story and how we got there um scaffolding is critical and I'm going to share with you I think from the onset you have to have this mindset of building from day one of thinking profitable a shocking statistic 28 of the publicly traded companies were not profitable in 2021. how is that possible crazy statistic um it's my own money and it's my co-founder's money and for like many of you you put your own hard work money in here spend it wisely right there's a lot of things you can spend money on but you got to say no a lot and if you do a and b and I thank Nathan because I have control of the company right he's been a big help to make sure that I stayed controlled that that we have ownership of the company so that's one is the foundation we're gonna talk about number two is um particularly in in a down economy figure out ways to remove buyer friction we're a sales LED Growth Company many of you here might be product LED growth but we actually have to do some hard work to convince customers of value part of that we do everything for the buyer and I'll share with you what what I mean by that and as a new vendor as a company that's never spent a dollar on marketing that has no brand recognition you have to de-risk it for the customer to adopt you as a new vendor and then what I call escape from velocity I believe we're on the the front end of escape from Blossom I'll tell you how we got there and what we plan to do that and you really have to differentiate yourself by offering something unique and different offer something everyone needs I feel we have something that every B2B sales organization needs and I'll show you what that means and get inside this trust Circle what we have going on is our buyers are bombarded email in mail phone calls and they're blocking us if you get inside the trust Circle to get that first meeting it's highly valuable and I'll share with you how we're how we're able to achieve that so digi's basically a software's a service that boosts sales rep productivity and we drive Revenue through efficiency and so 40 percent we're finding about 40 percent of contact data that reps use to prospect is inaccurate it's a shocking statistic but it's real and so what modigi does is we fix this inside Salesforce before a sales rep makes a phone call 40 inefficiency in today's economy you have to provide Revenue outcomes or efficiency so what we do is we sit inside Salesforce we monitor leads and records that are going to go into a Cadence or sequence sales Loft Outreach I'm sure you've heard of them and then that's when we Act so we inspect every record make sure it's accurate if it's not we quarantine it or we fix it and it makes reps extremely productive so that's my little that's my little spot in in the Salesforce ecosystem so we have a tab and that is functionally where we place our information and gets mapped to the to the dialers it gets mapped to the sales engagement tool and we look and feel just like Salesforce and what it gives me is the ability to reach what I feel is about 70 of the B2B Market which gives us a little bit of Leverage I don't know how many of you can relate to this but I can sell without a CRM I can sell without intent data I can sell without conversational intelligence these are wonderful Technologies I can sell without a sales engagement tool I just need a spreadsheet and I have to have the contact information for my buyer otherwise it's a non-starter for anything else so where we find ourselves when we thought about where we would Place Mo Digi in the in the ecosystem there's lots of wonderful sales Tech out there is we're the last mile we're cleaning everything up otherwise all those tools to record conversations and train against conversations the intense signals who's my like who's my high fit buyer they're ready to buy if you can't reach them it's a waste of money and so that's part of our sales motion so um as people that know me know I love live music and I just moved to Nashville from the Bay Area it's a wonderful town anybody been to Nashville live in that yeah there's music everywhere and so when I think about this um the way that we started our company it's like a three-man band Rush great band BC boys since we're in New York great band the police that didn't go so well right they broke up but right now we're through we you know we've we founded this company based on the ability to produce wonderful music with with just three people initially and there's a lot of crossover between what I do and what my co-founder cro does and what our CEO does look at look at so I called the Swiss Army knife but we all come together we're all around Innovation all three of us get together on Innovation two of us focus on lead gen and sales and then um we have a CEO who really is incredibly talented that runs not only operations he runs product he runs technology he runs customer success which I do as well and and so that would cost a lot of money if you had specific people to fill those roles expert advisors this came out of anons I'm keeping score on what Anon said yesterday don't believe you have to raise BC did not do raise BC don't be afraid to hire expert advisors so we have advisors I have a president of a telecom Telecom company because we're dealing with mobile phone information I thought it was important to have that we have Google on our Advisory Board technologists the lead technologist at Google we have the cost of legal oh my God 850 an hour so one of my advisors isn't is an attorney but he also worked at sap on the deal desk he worked at DocuSign he built their go to market strategy and privacy compliance but I also have people on my board from RingCentral and Lace work which raise more money than any uh cyber security company in a single round so we're stacking the deck of things I can't do that I need expert advisors so check on on and on thank you don't believe your own hype um we haven't typed anything we've spent zero dollars on marketing we've aggregated our customers uh through just hard work and grit and now we might go out to Market and tell the world uh of you know what we're doing don't sell only to startups that was another thing a non said yesterday we actually started out Upstream so the majority of our Revenue has a new company comes from companies that are worth over a billion dollars I'm going to share an example of a company that's worth 25 billion dollars that we're working with um don't hire sales people before you can sell and I'm going to come back to this that 1.7 that we did last year it's a small number I've been dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars of numbers when I've worked in sales leadership that's just two people selling that's me and my co-founder so now that we know I'm trying to go back how do you is there no back button anyway so the um the idea is that two of us just two of us selling accomplished that and what I feel good about is we have the feedback loop from every client engagement so I was determined to be on every install of our software which takes two hours to install and set up in Salesforce to be on uh so I can get the feedback loop to improve our our technology so yeah don't hire we haven't we just hired our first sales person because now we've mastered what the sales cycle looks like in 2022 uh we were at a you know to hire that individual and to hire my first customer success manager came to Nathan to get a trunch of money to help us scale and grow or growth and and here are the numbers I'm not afraid to show it and at the end I'll show you my pro forma for the next 24 months or next two years but we made profit last year and we made profit this year or the 2021 we made profit in 2022 we made profit we were a services company in 2020 and we didn't launch a product till q1 of 2020. 1 so this is hopefully I share some nuggets with you about so in in a down economy you got to do a lot of extra go through a lot of extra Hoops for for buyers um I have a couple fun stories um but one I'm going to show you what a value report looks like so I heard you know Luke you've talked about data driven almost everything is data driven particularly the type of deal sizes that we're working on um and you have to prove that you can solve a problem so come up with a use case or two prove it out empirically through data and then increase you know it has to be around increasing Revenue increasing productivity a lot of companies are are...