How Nimble, Inc CEO Jon Ferrara grew Nimble, Inc to $8.8M revenue and 10K customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is held on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka this is episode 692 it is brand new for you guys this morning be sure to tune in every morning tomorrow morning I talk to Victor Leviton he breaks down how to three times your Revenue in under 8 months he did it himself going from 25k to 85k fast good morning everybody my guest this morning is John Ferrara he's been recognized for pioneering innovation in the customer management category for many many years prior to founding Nimble which we're going to talk about today he was the creator and co-founder of the award-winning customer management product gold mine in 1999 gold mine got acquired by Front Range and he left to pursue other interests during those years he continued to watch the CRM that's the customer relationship Market or management Market grow he saw that most of the CRM in the industry were saving small bus were uh that were serving small businesses moved up Market they became way more expensive and complex and they just fell by the wayside leaving the market totally underserved it was at that point in time that he decided to create the Next Generation CRM product for for small businesses called Nimble John are you ready to take us to the top I was born ready let's go awesome brother okay so we had you on last time and I just want to reference that that episode quickly if people want more background uh that was episode 643 at Nathan lea.com thetop 643 and John I'm going to quickly hit these numbers and then move into other facets of your story so John shared on that show they have about 10,000 paying customers paying on average an average RP which is monthly of $20 so truly an SMB product doing again somewhere around $200,000 in monthly recurring Revenue healthy churn for the SMB space at 3% monthly that's gross customer churn not net negative Revenue churn they spend about $5 on customer acquisition cost but they're not they weren't doing a lot of paid acquisition at the time they have a lifetime value of somewhere around $600 their team is 25 people based between uh Santa Monica and Ukraine again all small business Market founded in 2012 at that point they' raised $3 million John about accurate yep awesome okay so update us where are you now have you raised more Capital so what we've recently done is we closed round of $9 million uh and we're going to use that to scale what's working today and start investing in other areas of our business that can help us reach uh more eyeballs put more eyes in the top of the funnel you've mastered kind of acquiring the small business customer which is difficult that's not easy how are you acquiring these small businesses at such a large scale well ultimately it's exact same way that we scaled Gold Mine which essentially was Outlook and Salesforce combined in its day so back in the day there was no Outlook there was no Salesforce gold mine was the thing that everybody in the company lived in so I think the biggest problem with serum today is that it's only sales and marketing people that use it but ultimately everybody in your company should be using a relationship platform for the whole business because everybody in the company touches the customer and the way we scaled gold mine is imagine this two guys in an apartment in Koga park that's a suburb of Los Angeles who just created the world's first workable business sales and marketing relationship tool nobody even knows they need that thing how do you sell something people don't know they need and you have no money to advertise what we did is we cold called every novel reseller in the country and novel resellers essentially sold the network to that small business and we got them to use it people sell what they know and they know what they use so they started to use it they started to recommend it and resell it and each one had sold a th000 networks to all these small businesses so we instantly had $50,000 a month in recurring Revenue fast forward to today when we started Nimble five years ago nobody knew that social was going to be the new way we all do business and so when we built the first social relationship platform the first social sales and marketing system we had to go build that market and so what we did did is we went after the influence of our core customer in and around the areas of promise of our product and that's basically thought leaders and sales marketing and and social media and what we did is we started to share their content which attracted people who wanted to learn how to be better smarter faster at Social sales and marketing and we started building relationships with those influencers so we were early Pioneer of influencer marketing and that generates our eyeballs as well as generates those people into users and evangelists of nimble so that combined we got our monthly recurring re monthly recurring uh unique users uh to our website at almost 100,000 uniques per month with zero marketing spend and that's why our uh CAC is uh so low so have you've raised capital I imagine one of the questions at those meetings was hey John how are we going to spend this money to acquire new customers what was your answer well you know I believe that as you start scaling uh the way you're touching the customer you need to touch them multiple different ways so we're really good at generating those eyeballs through influencer marketing and Guerilla PR getting people to talk about the platform how do you John how do you find the influencer to to get to market for you and how do you pay them you don't pay them how do you do it so what you do is you identify the key influencer of your core constituency in and around the areas of Promise your product so thought leaders that are inspirational in around the areas of functionality of your products or services and you begin to share their content and then engage with them when they respond but you don't engage with them and say hey this is who I am and this is what our product is you find ways to add value to that person and ultimately that person becomes a friend a user and a recommender of your platform if you do it properly and so we are we really good at at generating those eyeballs through influencer marketing and gorilla PR helping writers and bloggers tell stories about how you be better smarter faster at Social sales and marketing include Nimble but now what we're going to do is we're going to begin experimenting with some spend on eyeballs through some ad spend but I'm not a big believer in in going to a rat hole of uh of of Click spend with people I believe there's other ways to get access to the customer so what we're going to do is we're going to replicate a strategy that we did a Gold Mine by partnering with people like Microsoft and Google to get their vars to use Nimble and then start recommending it so we just sign guys value added resellers so folks already selling those products that's right and so what we designed a deal with Microsoft where they became a reseller of nimble Microsoft has started to resell Nimble with Outlook through their vars and they're going to gift their vars Nimble so that their vars can be better smarter faster at sales and marketing with Nimble and Office 365 combined and I believe that the the first thing you do as a business is you get email in the old days was pop and IMAP today it's Office 365 and Google apps to work but they're not good contact managers and they're not good at sales and Market automation so Nimble on top of Office 365 and Google app so work is the operating system of a business and what we're doing is we're partnering with Google and Microsoft to scale and help their Partners uh become more Nimble and then help their customers become more so if Microsoft brings you a new I'm sure they're doing much more volume but they're bringing you one new $20 per month customer what of that Revenue goes to them sure so Microsoft uh currently is passing through all that Revenue to the vars so Microsoft's not actually getting a margin on Nimble okay so the vars are getting that margin and so ultimately what's happening is that the vars uh make the margin on the monthly current Revenue which is what what do they keep about 20% okay got it so they're going to keep they're going to keep four bucks of the 20 and you're going to keep 16 but the thing is is that the uh the average revenue per customer today is actually higher than the uh than the $20 that we talk so it's actually closer to $30 today and we see it continuing to grow higher uh but the key thing that the vars are going to benefit by recommending Nimble is that if you can help a business person solve their sales and marketing needs you then open yourself up to all the other functionality and services that you could be providing to that customer and Nimble is a trojan horse into businesses because every business struggles with sales and marketing and relationship management and if you could solve that problem what you're doing is you're talking to the decision maker of the company because typically the person making the decision on Nimble is the owner the CEO or the manager of the company so just to be clear at a $30 arpo now uh you've increased it these vars are keeping anywhere between called four and eight bucks kind of per plan is that recurring every month they keep that in perpetuity yes yes okay and we just rolled out new with this funding we're rolling out new products pricing...