Nova.airevenue & acquisition

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 generally you know smaller team team and you know we went through a pretty deep uh Dev cycle just to kind of support teams to support the features that VPS of sales need to scale our product and their ORS and now we're coming in we're looking at seat size deals of 15 20 uh on average right now for our new deals so um so we've been moving up Market a bit very intentionally okay so I mean is it I'm going to do back the napkin math if we do like you know 10 seats for your 100 logos is it fair to say you have somewhere around a th sales reps using you uh yeah somewhere around there you care about that number no yeah uh I think that's actually pretty accurate okay Co um I haven't checked lately is that something you I'm always curious what a guy like you tracks every morning you know your your alarm goes off the first thing you refresh on your phone is like some analytics to like see what happened overnight like what are those numbers you care about every day you know honestly at this stage my biggest thing is just making sure the team is is functioning well and um you know I'd say for the sales reps you know the the the easy thing about County Executives is they already have their track kind of built into the way that they're compensated um and as far as the dev team goes uh you know making sure they're tracking against the milestones and and knowing the priorities but um for me you know it's less about the business metrics I know you could say like oh well is it number of seats number of emails um it's really about just tracking and making sure that everybody's working really hard and understands the priorities and is being effective MH that's where that's where 80% of my time goes yeah great well and teach us more kind of about unit economics you know yeah which we'll get into in a second in terms of you know things like you know how you're acquiring customers things like that first though can is the back of the napkin math as simple as taking around round 1,000 seats times around $150 RP to get around 150 Grand in Mr is where you guys are at right now so actually uh it's 150 a month per rep so uh yeah so if I do 150 month per rep times a th reps you're doing about 150 Grand per month or somewhere around there yeah we're we're doing well um is that you don't have to confirm or I though but is that math basically accurate I mean yeah it's so we're we're scaling um and uh and so it's a pretty pretty good time pretty exciting time for us what do you focus on so coming right out of YC and kind of raising the capital 2016 obviously you did x amount of Revenue what are you kind of targeting in terms of growth rate in 2017 uh so we look at it in terms of head count so right now we're so we're looking to add uh three classes of AES uh this year three additional ones yeah with uh three per class um three AES per class um and uh and you know we expected two to three month uh so we scale our sales in in classes of three AES an SDR and a customer success rep okay so you have a a customer success rep and one SDR that one SDR is enough to power three account Executives yeah combined with marketing um so we we put some money into that as well to to drive some inbounds interesting yeah guys audience just so you know you guys have maybe heard me talk about this with other B2B kind of Enterprise SAS folks everyone has a different combination of kind of how many you know sdrs they have which are typically generating leads for account Executives and the account Executives then Clos and depending on how much folks are putting into paid marketing every month the ratio of sdrs to AES goes up and down so will you guys it sounds like are about three to one yeah and and another another wrinkle here is we use our own software for our sdrs and so that's not a wrinkle that's a good thing yeah so one of our sdrs who's cranking can do you know 20 20 to 30 appointments a week that's amazing for for those AES across all of them yeah exactly amazing yeah it's amazing um okay good uh that's helpful any have any any customers churned what's your gross customer turn monthly you know we when we were early on we had a couple you know some small customers um and you know being in Market a year a lot of startups come a lot of startups go uh but otherwise you know the product it it it's it's a pretty pretty hefty product you know most people are happy with it once they get it installed and you know something that you need to set up and get your team ramped up on so we haven't seen too much in terms of churn I think people are mostly happy we'll see how it plays out in the next year once you know these annual contracts start coming up but I feel pretty confident that that you know from a customer satisfaction standpoint we're doing very well is marketing spending any money yet on paid acquisition you know it's actually funny um so I I was resistant to this uh just this morning I was setting up literally just prior to this this interview I was setting up uh our Facebook ads account and you know our our marketing director he's been all over me on this he said let's you know do just you know do a few thousand a month you know let me let me prove you wrong yeah so we're experimenting with that now we'll see how it goes maybe check in in a month and I'll I'll tell you how that's been that's been homeing along okay but nothing to date no nothing to date so these sdrs when they're setting up 20 to 30 meetings for your account you know AES per per week I think you said they're using they're only using your internal system to do that right exact yeah just just direct yeah they're just going out cold to you know VPS of sales at you know companies of you know 150 plus employees awesome awesome awesome well hey before we uh before we wrap up uh will and get into my favorite part of the show um what are you guys uh how like how do you guys beat a company like a yesware because it sounds like it's more of a marketing problem than a tech problem it sounds like you think you have better Tech yeah I mean I think uh you know so it's an interesting Market I'd say it's still pretty nent um a lot of companies are are coming online and in buying sales tools sales workflow products um typically for the first time so uh I think you know the next 3 four five six years is going to be a bit of a land grab um you know the biggest the biggest competitor is just people who have nothing right now um so uh you know I think it's it's true for any startup that's going into a market where they're you know catching up or you know there's already some semi- established players is you kind of got to use the Judo strategy focus on what you do best you know don't get dragged into trying to do everything else that everyone else does because you know that's how you really lose is when you look at these other products and you know you start to get lured into building everything they're building you know what we do is we focus on the thing that we do best that nobody else is even close to doing which is the AI the personalization the data to actually understand what's effective what's not um you know the targeting so um so all that stuff you know our special sauce and that's what we focus on as much as we possibly can guys I get asked all the time Nathan you host all these interviews hundreds of them per month how do you do them efficiently and guys the answer is simple people always agree to my calendar backtack meetings I batch my interviews to stay very efficient and the way that I do it is I use a tool called Acuity scheduling at Nathan lat.com schedule and the reason I use them is very simple they keep my noow rate very low because they send out reminders about when the interview or the meeting is coming up and also they make it very easy to schedule time right I don't have to go back and forth the email 10,000 times with people I'm trying to meet with okay Nathan l.com schedu helps me so much and by the way look I like have so many meetings I'm the best at meetings okay I do them back to back very very efficient you guys know me many people say I'm the most efficient they've ever seen okay so I use the tool it's so efficient and by the way I got Gavin I said Gavin he's the CEO I said I want a great deal for my people he said Nathan well most people get a 14-day trial isn't that great I said no he's giving us a 45 day R trial at Nathan la.com that's not going to stay up forever so go get it now Nathan la.com all right let's wrap up here with the famous five will number one what's your favorite Business book oh that's an interesting question um you know I just finished one uh what was it the art of presenting I think it is by Jerry Weissman that's a good one number two is is there a CEO you're following or studying right now ah CEO I'm studying or following uh you know there's another company that we went through YC with and I think their CEO is brilliant he's Travis Kimmel at G Prime uh and I think their their company's brilliant I think their products brilliant they're just a seed Stage Company but he he definitely is an inspiring dude number three is there a favorite online tool you have like a cue scheduling um can I say Nova besides your own yeah uh oh man you I don't know I I gu security scheduling you use security a lot no what uh no I don't I was just just there um I thought maybe I had an association with it no no what's what's one that you use like like every day or every week can be to help you stay organized with anything yeah um I'm pretty old school man you know what I use like you know what I use most heavily is I just have my my notes my Apple notes and every day I come in and I rep prioritize my day and I rep prioritize my week and then I kind of Groom the backlog for a couple minutes too so I just like I live off to-do list and given that I should have a better one than Apple notes but it's the easiest number number four yes or no do you get eight hours of sleep every night I tried last night I did uh I'm happiest when I do so I try to get eight nine 10 actually and what's your situation married single you have kids uh in a relationship uh not married okay so not married and no kids right no kids no all right and how old are you uh uh 32 all right last question will take us back 12 years what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew oh man uh I wish my 20-year-old self was a bit more ambitious um it wasn't until I really got I was pretty lazy student actually in undergrad and uh I think I think I just didn't have anybody to like show me the way or you know help me understand why I should be ambitious at that age so uh I think I would I would love to just kind of show my 20-year-old self a little bit of the future um and kind of help let that marinate a bit says the guy that went through Cal Poly and Harvard Business School there you guys have it from will dinkle again launched Nova a back in 2015 just got done going through y combinator raised about two and a qu on a safe has about 100 logos using him about 1,000 seats total around $150 arpo so somewhere around 150 Grand in Mr growing fast no paid marketing yet too early to look at churn uh again team of 10 out there in San Francisco helping you manage and close leads and Deals faster will thank you for taking us to the top yeah thank you so much if you enjoyed will today go back and listen listen to Tatiana yesterday they gave up 6% of their business for $150,000 from 500 startups they're now based in Mountain View with three co-founders and four employees they help passengers over a thousand of them get to where they want to go with an average transaction value of about 420 bucks top drive I love giving away free money I feel like o we're giving away cars and I have something special for you 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