How Observepoint CEO Rob Seolas grew Observepoint to $18M revenue and 250 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Rob COC co-founded a company called observe point in 2007 helping grow the company from a lean startup with a global leader in digital data quality that today serves enterprise clients worldwide he's a thought leader life enthusiast and successful entrepreneur he has more than 15 years of experience leading innovation in the digital marketing space Rob are you ready to take us to the top yeah sure ends alright beer you bet so tell us what observe point does and what you mean by digital data yeah so we're a data quality platform where a SAS platform and we ensure the proper implementation of digital marketing technologies from Google Analytics to Adobe an Olympics any other marketing technology we ensure that it's properly Qaid and that's collecting the data that is supposed to and validated properly that's data governance okay so I assume that's growing is to but more options for their marketing and tech stacks or ready really any stack in the SAS world your business is growing it sounds like what you're doing is you're making sure all these things are connected properly and data is flowing smoothly and accurately that's correct interesting okay and what's that you said your business model is SAS is that right that's correct yes okay and I want to get on every customer cohort but on average what a customers pay you per month for this service and what do they get between thirty and forty thousand okay that's an you first your a CV typically yes okay and what do they get give me a sample like what do they get if I paid 30 grand or do I get for that so the first thing you get is our ability to accurately validate an implementation for digital marketing technologies so we have well over 600 technologies that were experts on and will go back and say okay you're implemented kruk correctly you know across 80% of your website for example and most of our brands are very large enterprise brands with hundreds of properties across the world multiple teams so there's also a process involved where we help them manage that process who owns the technology you know what is it trying to collect each each digital marketing tech these days is super-powerful so you can collect as much as little as you want and trying to validate that and make sure that rolls sound correctly is difficult so are you working with like a very very small handful of clients call it a dozen or do you have an SMB like no touch offering as well no we're all Enterprise but we have over 250 enterprise customers the large brains Hotels American Express very large brands like that okay and I mean if I take 250 brands times that first year a CBI word you just gave me if 30 grand I mean it's was at 2,500 bucks a month times 250 customers was at 625 and mor per month is that generally the range you're in yeah we're north of that okay North like far like I'm Way off far north of that now so we just crossed actually a really nice milestone for SAS at 10 million a RR that would be 888 that's a good milestone you should get as where's there should be sham empty champagne bottles in the background of this headshot here there's nothing if you look close enough you'll see some empty glasses back that's good okay so you're past that that that 10 million dollar mark which means you're a CV it sounds like if I take that 10 million divided by 250 customers is actually a bit higher right yes I mean you you ask for first bite right first buy the Apple not lifetime value yep so people you're adding are typically starting at 30 grand now what is the playbook you're running you drive expansion revenue are you selling more seats sorry I know you have three product lines are you selling additional product lines what's extension revenue looks like no so we actually focus on the the number of domains essentially so we're on seat base we're domain base so a large customer like turner for example can have over a hundred worldwide properties and then there might be a really large company that only has two or three so I can like a Best Buy for example so it just completely depends on where the the brand places its most value and so that's around domains and that's how most companies think about it they think about domains and that's how we do it as well and we have an app product that allows for validation of Adobe Analytics and other key analytics tags inside an application okay and its findings describe the video I get web assurance and a passer and describe the video assurance product Oh video hoping to manually QA as well as to validate out in production so imagine you have to watch a 35 minute video to validate that there's an Adobe Analytics heartbeat tag happening inside we can do that you know be a software so there's no there's no human yeah as it provides a huge an immediate ROI for all of our customers okay and now what are you growing it so you just said you just passed 10 million a are what we react twelve months ago yes we nearly double the last previous year and we have some really high lofty goals for ourselves this year that's good so December 16 you call it you know 5 million in a are about 400 grand per month do you think no you haven't you you you know I obviously know this Rob it's harder to double year after year when your numbers get bigger do you think you can double again this year or you think it'll flatline to 70 you know 60 percent yeah I think that's probably where we put ourselves right now this year we have some tailwind coming we think we talk about data governance and have as four years right now if you were to ask most of our amia customers because we have quite a few there as well your wonder what customers amia what's that europe middle east asia dot a half sorry so if you ask one of our london-based customers and ask them what data governance as they would say gdp are because that assigns what gdp are is its data governance it's just called gdp are so that is a tailwind that we expect to see in a really positive way for the next two three four years of the business and give me more the backstory what you did you launched somebody in what you do we launched the company in yep so we we incorporated if you will in 2007 but that's not fully accurate really we fill our first year is 2010 our first role alpha customer came on board in 2010 so what we've got seven years old what was happening between oh seven and 2010 well not a lot actually i had built and sold a company previous to this the other co-founders john post anna so john post anna was the almond ship co-founder so they obviously had the adobe acquisition and the transition there so he was busy doing a few other things as well that kind of caused us to to take the business not as seriously as we started to and it takes time to build software so we bootstrapped our way all the way to being profitable to a million dollars plus and then we went and you know went out and got capital for the business to accelerate after that how much have you raised today or mean how much have you raised to date in north of twenty nine north of 20 million okay and is that all equity like that's all equity or their debt on the back of that and that's all that's all equity mercado's our leave investor as well as telling on venture partners both here in utah where who is it mark you said Marketo is the lead no Mercado Oh marcado okay God as I say I thought I heard you wrong okay good and and what is the weird question here a lot of people wonder when founders like you guys have big successes I know Dom attracts it was a good one I don't know what your exit was but I soon was a meaningful financial event I mean it's hard to make a wealthy person yeah you know I feel like their backs against the wall again so so how are you brainwashing yourself that your backs against the wall so you have that drive well that's really interesting I think most entrepreneurs actually just are inherently self driven if you were to go back and ask me of my 20 year old self you know how much different I am now and then there's just experience I don't think the drive is fundamentally change so most of the entrepreneurs that I see that take companies from zero to exit and then I experience they go on to the next project I know very few that have just had an exit and then do literally nothing they all have different projects sometimes those projects change from technology to real estate but they still have a project and that's what it is for me tell me about your turn yeah I think that's the that's the juice if you will incite any SAS business retention retention retention is our focus for this year as we acquire a lot of customers one of the things that you learn is what your best customers are I think we really understood what those look like feel like and how we interact with those in the last 18 months so the focus on the business is ensuring that we acquire retain and grow the right customers from from my point of view you can do all the it's kind of like going to the gym you can do all the lifts that you want and take all the right supplements and grow but but if you really want to juice up and grow that's that's high logo retention you know Heilig retention eighty high 80s to low 90s that whatever right now now that's our aspirational goal for this year or so that grow a little retention what do you out right now annually well we've been at 84% we want to get north of us no that's not horrendous right so logo now...