How Niche CEO Luke Skurman grew Niche to $110.2M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is gehome de cougas he's the ceo of scoop dot it or scoop it a sas platform that helps marketers publish content using data science he's been an entrepreneur since 2000 first with museo wave which was the first mobile music platform acquired by microsoft then good jet which is pre-iphone mobile widget platform then he's been a startup and advisor along with an investor in tetamus which is email retargeting it was acquired by cruteo the refiners impact which was cross-border accelerators in san francisco all right get home are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right you've done a bunch real quick just because you you have some exposure to music and first mobile platform back back in muse wave time uh iheart media why is it going under um not sure [Laughter] yeah you haven't followed it closely enough huh no all right yeah you know i left music uh where was that seven years ago uh i'm still involved you know i have a i have a band with fellow entrepreneurs here nsf we have a rock band so i'm still a musician but i left the music industry seven years ago and i didn't look back too much what do you play or are you this are you lead singer i'm a little singer oh very good i love this we have we have have cool the cool factor of the show went up today all right tell us about scoop it what are you doing how do you make money so scuba dive you know helps marketers you know figure out what content to publish uh we started as a curation platform we're realizing that a lot of um you know for a lot of people creating content was really hard and curating content was an easier way to um to get content published so we helped you know filter the web for relevant stories and more recently we launched a a new version of our platform which is called hawkeye which helps you derive some trends understand you know get some insights on what content is out there to kind of guide your content strategy help you understand what topics to engage and publish content on uh what your competitors are doing what influencers are doing so we we monitor the web for you so that you are better at uh content marketing this sounds like something maybe similar to a buzzsumo kind of concept yeah so you know buzzsumo uh you know they've done a great platform uh they've done great stuff uh what we added is uh we we've done some natural language processing so yeah you know not getting technical but that's artificial intelligence that can tell you you know this is what the stories are really about uh and we've added some measurements so we we derived a few more insights uh to look at your competitors to look at influencers to to measure things that are meaningful for your content strategy okay and what's the revenue model is it a pure place ass model it's pureblade says um you know we've been talking with the idea of adding some professional services we're you know at the point where you know it could make sense but it's pure place has for now okay great and hey uh real quick just move the mic so it's not rubbing against your clothes just because we're getting a bunch of friction i wanted to make this look that's perfect um okay good so it's pure play sass and then give us more of the history here so when did you launch the company so we launched uh ann of 2011 um and the background was really around you know realizing that we were going to be in a content first world where online visibility was going to be determined by you know the content you were going to be publishing and we felt that it was going to be a big transition for a lot of companies out there you know it was about becoming uh you know a media outlet a media brand and we felt a lot of marketers are not trained to do this it's a it's a new paradigm it's a new environment and so we wanted to see whether technology could help and we realized that you know looking at what's been published out there building a technology that can do that for you was going to be the natural first step um and so that's when we started so we launched end of 2011 um you know first as a as a free tool that anybody could use we have uh now more than four million users of that free version uh we launched the b2b version three years ago in 2015. um yeah so that's kind of the story behind the company and do you the folks that want people are listening around they saying yes i need this i want to use it i mean what are customers paying you on average would you say per month are we talking small 10 a month or 10 000 a month so we have actually uh we have both we started with a freemium model uh that you know is more like for solo entrepreneurs or very small companies and then you know we realized that we needed a b2b version uh an enterprise version uh that would be more scalable that would have you know more features and we have you know clients like uh ibm microsoft so you know very large companies our sweet spot tend to be mid-market companies um you know in that in that range but we've been covering uh the whole range just because we started with a free product then did freemium and then the b2b sas version okay so if we just focus on b2b sas and i pin you down and say give me an average what would you i mean would you say an average is a grand a month 10 grand a month but more than that uh or you know our average is about 10k a year okay so in that in that range but we have you know uh we try to scale with uh larger companies to much higher numbers and what are the uh when you look at your pricing plans and what your sales people are pitching what are the kind of value drivers that drive expansion revenues a number of seats number of pieces of content what is it so for us it's been um you know three things uh the value metrics or number of seats a number of topics you want to cover which is probably going to be one of yours very small company but could be hundreds uh if you're a large uh fortune 500 company and then we have a number of features which are also helping tier the products and and separate them out got it and tell me more about that team how many sales folks are on and what's the total size of your team today so we're still pretty lean we have you know pretty much relied on the the free version to bring us leads so our team is about 20 people um the um you know sales marketing team uh that's about uh seven people um and so you know we're still having a pretty lean model we've been trying to leverage the fact that with the free version we get a lot of inbound interest that's helped develop our brand but also brings a lot of people who sign up for the free version for themselves and then realize they could use this for their company uh and we use a lot of content to help them realize that there are there is more that could do with the platform uh with our more advanced uh versions yep and and ignore i mean by the way it's tough to ignore four million folks but ignoring your free version and just focus on your b2b sas i mean how many customers have you scaled you on that thing since you launched it it's about 250 okay 250 uh b2b clients that's i mean that's healthy if you've got 250 folks paying you know on average 10 grand per year what's at 800 ish per month you're doing north of what 200 grand just on that line of business right that's healthy and then you're you're just to be clear though your freemium users i imagine they're they don't all stay free you have a smaller price 10 a month plan or something for them yeah we have a we have a actually a 12 uh plan and a 79 plan uh for the guys who are more advanced like more consultants and so on and that's a part of the revenue as well but to be fair and that's been kind of the learning we we realized that uh you know i think if you really want to go after a freemium model and i think you know there's the dropbox ipo there's been a lot of numbers coming out of this you really have to have very strong numbers and four million is good but um you know to have a very healthy freemium model with it probably would need to be 40. um and so we started with freemium we we like the revenue we get from premium there's a lot of very happy customers on that plan but we will realize that for us the ufc was born on the b2b uh part with larger companies so would you ever consider selling off the individual part of your business or no um no but for a different reason um the the technology we have um that helps monitor the web that helps with natural language processing uh that uses a lot of the the data points we get uh from the those four million of users they help us think of it as they help us crowdsource what we call the relevant web so the digital web any website that publishes meaningful content beats you know blog or podcasts or videos we wouldn't be able to do that just on our own just crawling the web on our own google can do that um but you know we we have 40 million sources of content that we crawl on a daily basis and the way we re you know we crowdsource some of the the way we source some of those uh most interesting more niche and longer tail uh sources are thanks to our users...