How Nōwn CEO Amit Jhas grew Nōwn to $1.2M revenue and 50 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is ahmed josh he's a serial entrepreneur and currently the ceo of known a customer identity platform bridging mobile devices with point-of-sale infrastructure to power human-centric transactions he's been the critical driver of transforming point-of-sale solutions and mobile payment technologies the range from retail to dining operators all right i'm at you ready to take us to the top sounds good all right so what's the company doing and what's the revenue model you guys pure play sas yeah we're pure play sas uh we built this around a vision to change the way commerce is done i used to be about people and now it's very much about transactions and so we took technology to try and build a more human experience of the physical store location so our clients are really mid to enterprise level but we also do the small business side and our platform's a point of sale uh all-encompassing point of sale uh system um with the first customer recognition um technology embedded can you maybe tell a real story of how a currently a customer is using you just so we can really put a face to the user yeah so if i i sometimes tell the story at starbucks and i just pick on them uh so when i arrive at starbucks i come to the front of the line i make my order they still ask me for my name on the drink they come back i pull out my starbucks app i scan my phone and done the transaction and our simple statement is we want the eyes off the device and between the customer and merchant so we imagine the experience looks like this i arrive i get detected on her point of sale my picture uh gets to the top of the list as i get to the front of the line she clicks on it says good morning on it would you like that latte it's a great makes that latte comes back clicks my picture five dollars done and i haven't even had to pull up my phone got it okay so what's the challenge to actually making that happen at scale yeah so the point of sale itself was built by accountants a long time ago um designed to as a transaction ledger uh and then it's got a little more sexier with the cloud-based system much prettier tablet uh facing but still fundamentally to run transactions well we we looked at it and we surfaced as it should be a hub a platform that we saw uh where it brings and connects devices and brings the relevant point of information at that highest point of impact at that point of sale so are you are you actually not developing the is there a hardware component here or you're purely software we're purely software um we rely on the bluetooth technology for the customer recognition um our platform base is a point of sale to run from anywhere from a small business to an enterprise client so it has all the things you need for inventory integrations um running transactions etc different tenders um but then around it is enhanced the mobile aspect to it so clients can then bring on their branded app and bring on features like uh their loyalty program digitized their their gift card embedded in there they're doing mobile payments um and uh but on top of it as customer recognition so when the customer comes their picture and face show up and they're greeted then at the point of sale and uh their last orders brought up there might be promotions that are specific for the customer running um etc and then around that has a marketing engine and that and which is powered by ai and then so walk me through kind of your pricing structure right so let's let me start from the top right so an average business that's going to use you you know a starbucks or mom and pop shop what are they going to pay you per month or per year to use your technology yeah um so we start with the starter package and that can start at 99 a month per location that's different from our competitors that'll do it per station or per log in for user we just lock it down to location then it goes all the way up to 269 for much more enhanced features for example securing it down with the pin codes um and then there's enterprise level where now you're asking for a branded app yeah okay and so most of the folks that you're working with are you kind of going sell enterprise first then move down to the one-off shops or are you starting kind of bottoming going up so do most of your folks have one location or a thousand locations yeah uh we actually started first in the campus space and so in the campus space they've got coffee shops and then they've got their dining cafeteria we started there um and they use both our point of sale and then they use the mobile platform for the students we branched out um hitting small businesses but really ours are we're getting a lot of love and attention from mid-level mid-level clients so these folks have anywhere between ten to hundreds of locations okay got it so is it fair to say that maybe a sweet spot for you would be someone that comes on board is paying you for 10 locations 99 bucks location so call it like a thousand bucks a month something like that yeah so actually on average our club where um our clients on average are 300 per month okay okay so that would be more like three locations per per sign up no 300 per month per location oh i see i see got it got it so someone so it's more like 3 000 a month then if they have 10 locations on average that's right i see okay so then most of the people you said you started 99 bucks a month and then you can upsell based off like you know locking down the pin and stuff at up to 269 a month how do you get up to how do you get up to the 300 is that just the enterprise deals is it more features more seats what is it that's right the enterprise deal has now branded application for the mobile it has a lot more uh enterprise features for headquarters it has international capabilities uh connecting your system to your ecommerce site got it okay so a kind of api to connect those sites it's branded so it's fully white labeled uh and then kind of international uh international upsells as well yeah yeah okay very cool all right so i was gonna ask you i got your initial customers so you just alluded to it sounds like you started selling directly to universities to use on campus to make students more comfortable that's right okay and i mean did you come from that world or why did you pick that as your target market um so one was that we were after getting into a demographic and segment uh with millennials we wanted to capture that data we wanted to be in a place where we could get our mobile application out there um in a very closed high concentrated environment where loyal transactions are reoccurring that loyal to loyal transaction and that's the data set we're after so we went we we strategically went after them yeah okay so you go after those folks and then walk me through like your first sale were you like literally looking up like the director of student relations at a university or who'd you target interesting uh that um they actually came to us um so it starts with a dining service they generally most campuses have a dining service partner that's running their uh operations or coffee shops or cafeterias they approached us yeah but how do they find you i mean you don't they don't just launch a company then all of a sudden people reach out to you well yeah so it turns out uh apple um noticed us noticed our mobile platform and then kept an eye on us um and then apple recommended us to uh this dining service partner and they reached out in contact that was where our first customer came from and what year was that when did you launch that would have been 2015 20. yeah our office we started and launched in 2014 uh brought on some beta customers outside of the campus in 2014 um but then we focused on campus through started in late 2015 and then went into 2016 2017 that was our focus and primarily in the u.s how much money did you plow into your mvp before you had your first dollar revenue well we were making uh we were making revenue before we even opened in office okay well that i mean you could still you had to pay developers to write the initial line of code there's all kinds of other expenses besides an office yes last series so we were generating revenue right from first aid but uh um and we're building up the revenue but obviously um we're still spending on growth sorry my question is everyone puts some kind of money into mvp sometimes people sell before they write any line of code sometimes people build for three years and then start selling and they've sunk 10 million into the business i'm just curious how much you put into the mvp before your first dollar of revenue yeah so uh just nearly 100k okay so i mean i called that pretty efficient pretty efficient wait did you decide to bootstrap the company or have you raised capital and digging delusion yeah no so i've built businesses in the past this would be my fourth one and this time i focused on just raising from high net worth individuals uh right from the start and so we raised uh we bootstrapped it along the way and raised somewhere around two and a half us okay and why did you decide to race from high net worth folks versus vcs that could potentially be you know strategic um the focus with the high net worth individuals people resonated with the vision and had the patience to work with us in solving this problem um this wasn't something that's been done out there before uh there was no technology a platform that we could show right now...