How Onemob CEO Sati Hillyer grew to $10M revenue and 10K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Satya Hillier he is the founder and really sees an entrepreneur who loves building product growing people and delivering customer value he's now building one mob but he has both enterprise and startup experience and enables him to transform an idea into a scalable company he founded Zen crafts the leading shipping platform for Salesforce ever sauce which was CRM for P at the PR industry and most recently one mop which has earned the support of Salesforce ventures and was awarded Gartner cool vendor and Argonne hot vendor awards the company makes video recording sending and tracking easy for any professional with powerful integrations into platforms like Salesforce Cisco spark LinkedIn and more before starting one mile he spent eight years at Salesforce where he built and grew the app exchange from idea to over 2,000 applications sorry are you ready to take it to the top let's do this alright man so first I'll have to tell you I have so many entrepreneurs on that credit the app exchange for their crazy growth in fact a company called was I think was dial touch or dial pad founder just came on and said you guys drove all this growth so you built quite the machine in app exchange oh yeah I mean that has really become a powerhouse for a lot of companies and I think what was really exciting is it was before the Apple I store the Apple iPhone store right so this was something that when its marked the bent of the CEO of Salesforce when he was building out his platform he's like you know we need to make enterprise software as simple as buying a book on Amazon how can we make it so that you can just literally go to a store try something out install it and then from there use it and you know one had iPhones at the time so you weren't really having this opportunity to do this on your phone so it was quite a you know audacious goal but I think what's been great is you know with the whole admin of cloud computing and the internet it's made it very easy for you to be anywhere in the world for you to build something really amazing and for you to share with everybody else and hopefully it adds value did you ever look at some of the top-ranked apps and go my gosh they're killing it in terms of revenue how do we get a piece of that you had to us you had to have a little inkling of that thought oh I mean look at the end of the day like we're running a business for profit so we needed to figure out how to one add value to our customers and then to see well if this is doing so well where can we be part of that you know success and so I mean now Salesforce has this whole model where as partners build and sell products on the app exchange Salesforce will get a percentage of that which is very similar to the Apple store model with the app store as well all right let's talk video it's a hot space what's one mob doing how do you make money what's the business model yeah so the idea is really simple as well which is you know everyone's using Facebook snapchat Instagram to communicate with their friends and video has become very prolific I mean think about the last time you were looking at your feet you're not reading text you're looking at images and photos and videos so we thought well why is it that I can do this my family and friends but the moment I go into the office I'm back to you know plain old email and cold calling and everyone's got these amazing phone you got these iPhones these androids with amazing cameras so why can't we just take this this movement the selfie movement and make it so I can easily record a video myself send it to you say hey Nathan its Effie you know thanks great meeting you last week and would love to just get some time in your counter so I can tell you about our product it's so much more engaging for you you can actually see him a real person as opposed to just some fake email perhaps and so that was our business it was literally pull at your phone record a video of yourself set into a customer and we will not only help deliver the message cool track what they're doing did they watch it they watch all of it and that really seemed to resonate and you know it's funny because what does that mean set they quantify that when you say I really seem to resonate you were looking at some data that said wow this is working what was that data well we saw a lot of folks at these organizations saying yeah you know like people aren't taking my calls they're not responding to my emails but if I can record a quick video and I can send it to you and I can know if you're watching it how long you're watching it and as a result I can follow up with you right away or because I've been able to kind of build this more engaging experience with you I'm more likely get a response well as a sales rep that's a no-brainer and as a result we were able to sell our product per user per month so it's very much like the typical SAS and you know it's pretty affordable you can get started for $20 per user per month and then is that it is that a accurate reflection of what the average seat pays you is about 20 bucks a month yeah I think if you were to take all of our customers across the globe and then aggregate them all you're probably looking at that across the globe some pay us more because we have some different integrations into platforms like Salesforce and Cisco spark and things like that but we want this to be very easy low barrier and we want it to be something professional so we don't just allow you to record videos you can put your company logos you can have the branding you can have everything to make it look like a very professional video but at the same time you know make it as simple and easy as pulling your phone at your pocket clicking record and you're good to go okay earlier on we had a company named add greets on run by Eric which seemed like it was massive video customization just to be clear you're very much one-to-one you're not working with like a a you know a a car Ford and helping them send mass video things to cut their customer or email us based off where their customers are located yeah I mean there are video marketing platforms out there I don't know that one but I know about their ones like Brightcove which is a partner of ours and yeah we're more geared to the seller not marketers so our buyers are like sales reps CSM's account managers support reps who are trying to just talk to their clients so sales not marketing yeah and then we might work with marketing who might want to put together a bigger campaign but for us we want it to be easy so that I as a seller I can record the video on my own I don't need a studio I can do this literally from my house from my car I can send it to my customer or I can send it to maybe 20 customers right like a great use case of ours is maybe a real estate agents using us they just had an open house now they want to followup with all the people who came in an open house they record a quick video they send it to those 50 people who stopped by hey thanks for stopping by again here's some video of the house hope you like it let me know if you want to chat more and they can do kind of a one-to-many so those are the two use cases that we see one-to-one or one-to-many interesting and take me back to the beginning what was your one well we started the company in 2014 and you know really when we started again we were just trying to figure out like well how are we gonna do this and are people gonna buy and our first product was literally just an iPhone app you pull it out of your pocket you launch it you're recorded click send what I think we did really well that differentiated us is we integrated to sales force out of the gate because as soon as soon as you start talking to a business well there are they're automatically thinking about well I have all these other tools but I have one system to manage my customers are you going to integrate to that and so immediately we're able to tell them that yeah we could and that helped us to kind of get into these organizations but then if you you know fast forward to today it's been you know close to four years we have an iPhone app an Android app we have a chrome app so you can record not just yourself but your screen if you want to show something we have a whole kind of web platform for analytics and things like that and we had to do that because over time you realize well a lot of sellers are at their desk they don't always have their phone on them sher gonna record from here just like you and I are talking on skype or they're out on the field and they're doing other things or they want all these other bells and whistles so we really had to use that first six months or so to you know plant the seed with video and then from there evolve into like a robust platform that could work to the enterprise and build all these integrations etc so it's it's a learning curve and I think what's been exciting is we still have pretty much all of our fortune 500 - been using us since day one are still customers and they've basically helped us co-create this product I want to talk more about churn and economics in a second like net expansion etc but give me a sense of kind of what you scaled - over the first three years so so how many seats are how many folks are using you today so now we have about a hundred paying customers okay now seats obviously those are actual logos exactly logos and it ranges I mean we have SMBs who might be you know small companies like mom pop shops and that can be anywhere from like five to ten employees we have a bunch of mid-market a lot of sports teams like the 49ers or Sacramento Kings and New York Jets things like that and those are typically seat size between 25 to a hundred reps depending on the organization okay and then we have some pretty large logos companies like LinkedIn Cisco ATP and others and and typically we sell very much kind of the traditional seed and grow start with a department maybe 25 to 50 reps show some success and then grow from there and that allows us to do a couple of things one you know really start to show stickiness and value you and then to see what other relatable fields outside of sales because again seller sellers aren't the only ones talking to clients you also got like account managers you know support etc and so then from there we really want to grow across the organization and that's where you know it can be getting really exciting because you know these companies have thousands and thousands of employees so set the ignore every cohort obviously you just mentioned a bunch of them but total seats I mean are you talking ten thousand a hundred thousand a million well we're since we're b2b we don't sell the consumer it's probably closer to yeah I'd say maybe close to ten thousand cool and just to be clear I know you sell directly to the customer I'm just curious when you take all your logos and you add up all the seats under all the logos how many seats are using you and you think about ten thousand yeah okay got it now can I just multiply that times that twenty dollar figure you gave me earlier and assume you guys are doing about 200 grand a month in revenue yeah we're yeah plus or minus you know because we have some accounts that are you know because we have such a large volume with them we've given them a volume discount so you know are we haven't made our revenue numbers public so I'll just leave it at that cool I mean fair to say they're generally in that range I'm just multiplying your numbers within ten percent is that fair yeah I mean I mean we're definitely in a we're kind of in a series a numbers yeah that helps yeah that does help now what are you growing at year over year series a would be like your Delhi's doubling year but you're hopefully tripling yeah I mean that's something that we're still kind of we're in a we're in an area where I don't know if I can necessarily say you're a year it's a specific consistent curve it's something where we're starting to see different pockets where our platform tends to do better jell better so I think that's gonna really affect you know what are your growth looks like yeah but generally I mean when you look at historical data I mean did you double your over a year or fifty percent growth for the most part we've been able to double year-over-year since inception that's I mean that's healthy I mean so that would put you again assuming these numbers are right somewhere around a hundred grand just thirteen months ago you're doubling now you've found some pockets that are working well and you're driving that's what's driving growth here in 2018 yeah interest absolutely you raised capital you mentioned sales force in the bio how much couple have you raised to date we raised about 1.9 million okay and I imagine because you're coming from Salesforce she had a special relationship there which helped obviously make the fundraising early a little bit easier that being said how did you put a valuation on a pre-revenue company maybe while at the same time you're negotiating your your exit from the company or you're asking the risks from yeah well it wasn't like that actually what happened was is we first went to an accelerator we went through an accelerator called alchemists which is pretty well known in the bay area and so that actually helped us because that allowed us to at least kind of get some initial funds and they actually set our terms oh and so when we went through their kind of traditional demo day they set some term we able to get our initial investors like Tim Draper Sam hell angels and some others all that the kind of note that was set by alchemists and then what we did as we hit different milestones we just kept raising our evaluation on the note we actually have any money I mean the cap on the note yeah the cap yeah because you don't have a price you don't have a valuation yet exactly and then when Salesforce came in oh yeah there is a good relationship there with Salesforce but you know they don't invest in seed they typically invest in like later stage BC rounds and so for us we had to show like some real customer growth in revenue before we got right investment because they invested in our seed which is not typical interesting take me through some of the other economic churn is obviously critical to SAS business what's your trend look like the we haven't ensuring we haven't lost any mid market enterprises okay so pretty much our accounts that are I would say maybe a 500 employees are higher we're able to renew okay and typically we always renew is its negative chair and we're able to at least you know again start with maybe 50 accounts and then grow to 100 or more what's gross revenue so you just a net revenue Ternes negative what's gross revenue churn well that's where it gets a little challenging because we do have a lot of SMBs who self-serve well yeah right yeah but revenue churn makes that easy right if I asked you for a logo churn that would be misrepresentative if you have a lot of SMB is but a revenue churn that's that normalizes yeah so I mean so specifically what would you like to know I'm curious what gross revenue churn is you said net revenue Turnus negative yeah which is great sounds they're expanding yeah gross revenue trim yeah I wouldn't know that up slam I don't know interesting it okay got it but you're saying most the folks that are churning are the SMB accounts with one or two seats of twenty bucks a pop not that large or larger accounts yeah and it's usually like hey you know I'm gonna use it for a few months I'm maybe working some deals I use it for their and then they may not recognize and they come back yep how negative is that is the revenue turn we're usually able to grow each of our accounts somewhere between twenty five maybe around twenty five percent growth okay so then we have to subtract the any look any any revenue turn from that to get the net rag of revenue number yeah but again I mean I'm talking about most of our mid market enterprises we don't have we don't have any churn okay got it so you're what you're telling me is your net negative revenue you're basically negative hundred twenty-five percent that's it would be incredible most really healthy SAS like Infusionsoft 1 million LRA our kind of folks Qualtrics they're like you know in negative 106 percent I think what's happening here is you got you're looking at and you tell me if I'm wrong here you know your data better than me but you're looking at kind of the revenue expansion you haven't really looked at logo turn because it doesn't matter to you because they're SMB accounts I mean is that generally accurate yes yeah okay cool I'll get off that topic then so talk to me more about the cohort that is a fit for you how are you growing that customer base where like what are you paying to get them where are you getting them from yeah so I mean have you been pretty lean so most of our team right now is you know been product and it's myself and my thought my co-founder who've been pretty much selling and we we don't do a lot to miss out big sethi it's right now about 10 on full time and then we had about maybe five contractors ok great but most of the selling has been through just word of mouth got it we have some events you know like we'll go to some very specific events sponsoring or just attending sponsoring like we've sponsored some Salesforce events in the past we got some good leads out of that or some very specific events maybe like we did this one for sports a LSD where that gave us some pretty good results but for the most part it's either been word of mouth or our customers when they send our products to their clients their clients will see that they're using us yeah and so that's kind of again giving us some organic leads which has been great kind of primary case we just really we just hired a kind of our first full-time sales person actually last quarter so it's really three people selling and then and it's kind of hard because for me it's not full selling right because I have to also manage the business but that's kind of a rat right now and as everybody based in San Fran yeah we have a couple remote contractors that are international but most of the core team is in savory school and then last economics question here before we wrap up lifetime value what do you soon lifetime value is on these customers though the ones that are fit not the smbs I mean that's tough to say because I mean these accounts are so big I know this is why it's a dangerous question I mean if you just do in Excel you anyone can make the argument for infinite but that can but then you could say well then I must been infinite on CAC which would be dangerous yeah I mean I I don't know it's more than in terms of a hard number yeah like what do you know it's more than you can really pretty particularly rely on X amount of revenue from these guys yeah I mean I think if it's a large enterprise like a fortune 500 it can be a million dollar deal mm-hmm but but talk to me in terms of what you currently have right like your your current cohort that you're working with it varies I would say you know our enterprise accounts there you know definitely six seven figures okay and then our our mid-market yeah there may be more comfortably in that you know mid 50 K to 100k right sure sure and that makes good sense all right let's wrap up here with the famous five sethi number one what's the last business book you read man the last one I read was probably Crucial Conversations Crucial Conversations number two who is the last CEO in San Francisco you had dinner with that would probably be last CEO or business thinker someone you respect in business yeah I probably be Ron Lee who is the VP of innovation and sales transformation at ATP yep okay good number three besides your own what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides what beside be write our own I mean it probably sales person we use it every day yep if Benioff says hey is that a listen come back we want you back here's ten million bucks sells the company do you sell really gotta talk strategy I do I do think here's a good place with us in Salesforce but there's still a lot more I just get bored there by the way I mean clearly it was a ship that was rising very quickly when you left were you just bored managing the app exchange no no I mean I spent four years doing the app you chained to the end of four years managing the partners and actually even got real okay - Julia so it was never a question about boring it was more about just I know I want to run my own business and I want to do this now I don't how are you I'm 37 yeah you're going okay let me I gotta get this in before before the big 400 hits let me take a risk now right yeah all right and sethi how many hours of sleep are you getting every night right now not many with the kids having clothes that's so fun how many kids - two okay so what you're getting four or five hours I don't know I could probably hit I think I get six okay that's good that's good and obviously married I guess last question take us back to your 20 year old self what do you wish that he knew I wish I knew back then that I really could achieve whatever I want as long as I put my mind to it there you guys have it you guys can do whatever you want as long as you put your mind to it he helped he was really the critical guy behind building the app exchange with his team at Salesforce before he went to Australia started managing some partners 2014 decided to go out want to strike out or strike big on his own launched his company called one mob I don't wanna say snapchat for companies because I think that makes it sound too teenager ish they're currently they're correct Sethi probably appreciates that but they're currently serving about 10,000 customers paying 20 bucks a month per seat so around 200 grand ish per month in in revenue growing about 100 percent year-over-year so about a hundred grand 12 months ago raised 1.9 million bucks with his team of 10 people mostly in San Francisco grown accounts 25% year over a year again trying to help folks use video content quickly from their phones to drive sales and across sales teams Fe thank you for taking us to the top thanks David