How Nova.ai CEO Will Dinkel grew Nova.ai to $720K revenue and 100 customers in 2017.

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 top 5 and6 million he has help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top tribe this week's winner is is Charlie dags okay he was a middle manager at a Manufacturing Company he wants to break free and he won the $100 I give out every Monday for your chance to win simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it folks many of you reach out to me and you say Nathan so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching but whenever I try and batch you tell me this you go Nathan they don't book backto back times so you or they don't show up after they book it's frustrating the answer is guys you have to use Smart Tools I use a tool called a cuti scheduling at Nathan l.com for/ schedule I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode Nathan L here this is episode 597 and coming up tomorrow morning you're going to learn from Oliver his company's called fids up and they've raised $3.7 million helping 2500 retail locations track in store visits from advertising they've got a team of 25 people and are growing fast the question remains though how are they tracking between digital phones and computers and if that person actually walks into a retail location well it's genius tune in to find out good morning everybody Nathan ly here our guest today is Will dinkle and he is the CEO and co-founder of Nova prior to founding Nova will developed his passion for Enterprise sales while working in various technology and sales roles at cloudfare flare and HP will studied engineering and business at calpal and Harvard Business school will are you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right very cool so tell us first what is a noa.al product that uses AI to help Str strs and AES set appointments more effectively um so today a lot of sales orgs they're either doing a lot of kind of high volume spamming or they're doing a lot of hand personalization and research um what Nova does is it helps sales reps have highly personalized one toone individual messages that they can create and just you know 10 20 30 seconds rather than 30 minutes using AI technology and are you also helping with getting the lead in the first place we don't do that um you know we don't get leads what we do is we just help people convert at about a four to five times higher rate than they are without our product um so so I'm going to try and dumb this down real quick I think you're probably way more powerful than this if but people listening you can think of this like hyper personalized mail merge is that accurate yeah it's uh you can use it in a one-off context a mail merge context an inbound context but exact exactly it's it's just kind of hyperpower your your ability to send emails sales emails all right will and we're all capitalist what about the money how do you make Revenue so it's a fast product you're you're a Harvard guy you really like money right yeah yeah yeah well you know definitely keeps the lights on um fast product you know uh you know pretty pretty standard you pay by the seat kind of thing and on average uh what are uh what is it per seat uh so I mean it comes in about you know similar to competitive products I mean it depends on on the deal size um you know what we do is very unique but the types of products we go up against are are pretty well known and uh you know so we go up against Dum workflow product we call ourselves a smart workflow product an intelligent sales product I think you know today where the market is there's a lot of products that are just built around mail merge like um you know built around phone calling so things like inside sales you know um things like yesware like that's what the lay salesperson today is using so which is great for us because you know it we love being compared to those products and what is the so so just give us an average because I don't want to go into every single different type of customer but on average what's a what's the seat what are people paying you per seat yeah so list price is 150 um and uh but you know depending on the deal size you know you know the standard stuff for for Enterprise SAS uh you end up with a blended price point but but that's the starting point great and then let's go back let's capture more of the story so you're at Cloud flare nhp what year did you leave and start uh start the business yes we started uh Nova in q1 of 15 um so we've been around almost 2 years now and uh you know really the inspiration came when I was uh running the Enterprise sales team at cloudflare so we used to do a lot of this personalization manually and uh we saw number one how effective it was but number two how incredibly hard it was to scale to measure to track to Institute across a team of more than a couple people so what we said is hey well you know there's got to be a better way to do this um can we do it with software and and that's really what what led us down on this road um my co-founder he's somebody who whom i' had known from underground uh he was going to MIT when I was at HBS uh thankfully got him to take the plunge with me and uh it's been Off to the Races since this is Brian exactly yeah Brian P very cool and what's your team size today yeah so we just crossed 10 employees so we're SE stage startup uh you know pretty small team but uh but grown pretty quickly all in San Francisco couple couple remote but uh eight of the 10 are in San Francisco so you're not paying everyone $300,000 salaries then right no 400,000 you oh my God it's crazy it is crazy doesn't cover rent San Francisco is like a different world you know I go there and I'm like this is just crazy I feel like I'm in a game or something yeah it's bizarre I mean lately you know I grew up in LA and I go down to LA and you I'll be down in Santa Monica and I'll I'll look at the menu at a restaurant and be like oh my God this is so cheap yeah exactly exactly yeah okay so 10 people mostly in San Francisco you said your seed stage how much total Capital have you raised today uh so we raised a few million we haven't announced it yet we're going to announce it in a few weeks though so ohce hey so so will everyone's going to hear this obviously but this will go live the middle of March uh so I'm happy to keep it off the Record until then but you're welcome to share it it'll again no one will hear until mid-march oh yeah so uh so we raised two and a quarter so far um Salesforce ventur is one of the investors a few others so uh yeah pretty exciting stuff so 2.2 you said uh yeah two and a quarter yeah yeah yeah that's great and uh and uh was that a priced round or was that an e or a convertible note oh man you know uh in in true YC fashion um yeah we did it all on safes yeah that's great I'm I'm shocked you know there's a trend happening as I interview these CEOs these safes are getting bigger and bigger and bigger investors are totally comfortable doing many many millions of dollars all in a safe well you know it's an interesting it's a really interesting thing because a lot of my friends you know they'll they'll do like a 1 million seed round or even less maybe and have a price round and you know establish a board you know we don't have a board we we kind of just Cobble it together from our advisers and people we pull in but but it's an interesting question um you know you see what's happening in the market but it it's definitely different yeah from your perspective why did you choose to do that and instead of trying to nail down valuation now you know we when we started we did an angel round on notes and so we it was kind of just keeping with the same tradition um and then you know going through YC they they taught us a lot I mean you know they're pretty knowledgeable about a lot of things and they push really hard for the safe and uh and much of our fundraise came on the heels of just finishing YC so uh just kind of naturally developed that way so fast for us you launch in 2015 you go through YC you raised you know two and a quarter how many how many kind of customers or logos are you serving to date yeah so uh we just crossed 100 customers um so yeah so got some pretty good pretty good traction going and we're really excited to to expand quite a bit this upcoming year and a lot of people I mean this varies drastically depending on which Enterprise B2B company you're talking to that uses number of seats as a lever to drive arpo increases on average uh how many seats does do one of these 100 companies have with you yeah so that's been actually that's been what the whole I'd say last six months or about um you know we're going through YC we're we're mopping up but mostly in kind of an SMB context you know working with really small teams you know 1 2 3 four sales people sometimes 10 but but...