How Motiva CEO David Gutelius grew Motiva to $1.8M revenue and 36 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is david gutellius he is the ceo and founder of a company called motiva ai partner at venture studio the data guild uh david is a serial entrepreneur previously founded social kinetics which was sold to red brick health and proximal labs which was sold to jive software he served as chief social scientist at jive and part of the team that took jive to an ipo in 2011. he began his career as a program manager for darpa's callow the largest machine learning project funded by the us government today he's an active early stage investor and advisor david are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right uh let's talk about the company what do you guys do and what's your revenue model motiva is all about using machine learning at scale to help our customers both on the b2b side and b2c side develop deeper relationships with customers at the end of the day what we're trying to do is use ai to create trust between humans that's really what we're up to any sector focus or anyone really anyone what we're finding is we're having some really great success in healthcare and life sciences around patient engagement but it really uh goes across all sectors and verticals give me an example of healthcare so let's dive deep onto that use case for a second how would a healthcare provider use you yeah absolutely so you could use this in a number of different ways but one way would be on the kind of acquisition patient acquisition side so provider system looking to get the right patients in the door we can help them identify who those folks are and develop messaging strategies that really appeal to those people in a deeper more personal way and that's really kind of the secret sauce is to use learning to personalize and engage folks in a much more uh meaningful way but this is all happening pre-sale not post sale correct yeah that's so that use case is pre-sale but you can think of kind of you know staying with health care more of a patient engagement use case so they've seen the doc already and now it's time for a follow-up and we can be in the middle of that exchange not necessarily with humans in the mix but with machines kind of driving the communication between the back and forth between the patient and provider and again using the learning to optimize how we engage that patient so the whole point is to kind of deepen that relationship over time keep those patients or customers depending on the vertical engaged and growing that relationship in terms of the not just sort of personal human depth but also the the revenue as well so i imagine my audience when they're hearing this they're going okay wait like it's kind of a marketing engagement to drive a sale on an engagement post sale to drive activation and maybe expansion revenue and they might think well like we use outreach for this or something like that how would you be different than like what manny's building at outreach yeah absolutely so the the way to think about us is kind of a brain for those outreach type platforms we hook into the major marketing automation engines like eloqua like responses all those sorts of traditional modes of actually you know reaching out and engaging folks at at some level the difference with motiva though is really that we're using some new generation machine learning to understand what strategies work understand what strategies don't do more of the stuff that works automatically for you so it's really about trying to scale kind of human team's ability to connect with their end audiences that's kind of the bottom line and it sounds like you have a lot of different cohorts you're working with here but what would you say on average right a brand or a customer is paying you to use this technology uh sorry can you rephrase that yeah sure i'm simply asking average acv right i'm sure you have a lot of different cohorts but on average what's the company pay to use this oh right so it's anywhere from on the low side about 20 000 a year all the way up to a couple of million okay and i assume you probably have power laws the biggest customers make up call at 40 50 of the revenue in some cases but would you say i mean the average is closer to 30 40k per year average i would say it's about about 50. about 50. okay fairly healthy so that's a that's enough of a price point where you can kind of afford to put touch on the sale and kind of have an inside sales machine do you have an inside sales machine what's your acquisition look like yeah so the acquisition model is very savvy using some of our own technology to identify the right kinds of customers and kind of nurture them through on an account basis so it is a you know in that sense a traditional sales enterprise sales model it's a b2b the inside inside sales team is me because we're scrappy and tiny how many how many people total right now so we've got nine total i love that small and scrappy that's great and put this on a timeline for us when did you launch uh so we launched in 16 but we stayed stealth for about 18 months and came out in 17. so we've all been out for you know more or less a year or so and ever the whole team's in reno no we're split all over the place we've got a couple of folks in japan we've got folks in toronto canada and the bay area and i'm the the sole uh operator okay so nine nine remote that's good total freedom and uh what if you guys so over the past call it year what have you scaled to in terms of total customers using the platform uh we don't really talk about that we're a little bit uh still under the covers there um but uh it's uh it's a couple dozen okay couple dozen yeah is that what you said okay very good and um and walk me through the getting these first customers you mentioned obviously you're kind of the inside sales machine how are you training kind of your you know motiva brain to figure out what kind of accounts to go after yeah so it's a lot about identifying characteristics that we think are good fits especially where we are as a company early on so as a founder kind of serial founder what i've found is that you know personally reaching out once we've identified kind of a cohort to go after really personally reaching out as a founder ceo and establishing a trusting relationship and then building on that sort of basis of early more progressive customers to both understand what is working in our product and maybe what still needs some work and then also where to go next in terms of uh outreach into to new customers so it's it's a very kind of hands-on model have you bootstrapped this or have you decided to raise capital we bootstrapped it uh for about a year and then decided that we needed some growth capital injected so we did a very small round uh in 16 just essentially with you know folks that that i knew uh and we've been growing organically ever since okay so how much total in the company to date uh we don't talk about that either okay why not out of curiosity uh you know the the venture capital market loves to gossip about these things and we like to just uh keep it quiet and keep it modest until we're ready to publicize that sort of information yeah by the way i i actually i actually if you listen to my interviews we've integrated out 3 000 b2b ceos i actually much more appreciate a bootstrap story versus a funded one so i'm not it sounds like you feel like i'm judging you because you might not have a sexy headline that you've raised 20 million bucks at a billion dollar valuation i'm generally just curious to get to a couple dozen customers and the stage you're at today how much you've raised to do that i mean are we talking a couple you know less than a million bucks or less than 10 giving me a range oh yeah it was around a million dollars for our seed round yeah that's great and and and um yeah thanks for sharing that i appreciate it um talk to me too i mean you're only you know caught a year a year and a half in but churn's critical in any sas company how do you think about your churn very good question so what we like to do just in terms of the product itself and the way that it's designed is create experiences on the customer side where it is really well aligned with the users careers themselves that makes sense so really the way that we think about the product is almost an extension of the human marketer for us an augmentation of kind of what they're able to do so we love making them heroes and the way that we've designed the product is all about giving them confidence sort of in what we do in terms of the marketing optimization but also in the sense of allowing them to demonstrate impact in their organization to pay a lot of attention to metrics a lot of attention to very easy to understand reporting that they can kind of review internally with their stakeholders whether it's their boss or their large organization or peers so it's really for us we think about churn as how do we build relationships for our main stakeholders on the other end of that table um and really think about that as a a relationship that we you know nurture in a very personal way oh and david just to push harder i mean your ability to deliver on all those goals you just so articulately delivered is measured by churn so what is your churn today and how do you continue to drive that down oh so the actual churn is uh zero we haven't lost a single customer any downgrades no okay yeah the way that we price uh would make it difficult to kind of downgrade you're either kind of on...