How Packetzoom CEO Shlomi Gian grew Packetzoom to $900K revenue and 68 customers in 2017.

he joined in 2016 when it was basically pre-revenue since then they raised six million dollars they have 68 customers they're doing just out of call it a million dollar annual run rate currently his goal is to get that up into the millions by the end of the year it's too early to talk about economics because they haven't really done much on paid spend but their team of twenty is focused in out there and San Mateo on making a mobile experiences better and stronger no matter if you're in a train if you're in an airport that security connection or about internet connection or anywhere else they want to make anything you're doing on your mobile device more efficient for those companies like Eventbrite this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs - our number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you 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 Tov I haven't excited he has happened on global domination we just blow Khan a hundred thousand units full mark and I'm your host Nathan Lakha this is episode 753 coming up tomorrow morning Lewis joins us they've passed 15 million in revenue using breakfast to meetups for growth interesting growth strategy tuned to find out how we did it so you can do the same thing hello everybody my guest today is slow me geonhee it serves a packet zoom chief executive officer since June of 2016 we'll jump into how we entered that role when he wasn't a founder here in a second he joined the company after spending four years at Akamai where he did where he founded really the emerging mobile business unit and served as the head of mobile market development before that he was a general manager of mobile solutions at contend o that invented mobile CDN back in 2011 before it was acquired by Akamai I got a great story show me are you ready to take it to the top things you need yeah I'm ready very good you just drive it really well the journey went through dealing with mobile performance dealing with mobile applications and the challenge is that food the total foot tell us what package zoom does and what's the business model how do you make money well that means mobile application works better especially where networks failed to deliver so think about the wrong part of the building think about the wrong part of the country think about the wrong part of the globe right they're developing countries where mobile networks are not working well we all use mobile devices and mobile applications more specifically more and more and we're seeing this in all the reports right this is our best friends that mobile phone the small screen we're using applications are more more and we're trying to buy we're trying to learn in ourselves often times or in locations where networks do not deliver the right quality and that's for packaging comes in we would like to take away all the hassle has to do with networking because they're just too many networks out there you're like you can look at this is like anyone who's listening right now who's ever tried to like buy a ticket off Eventbrite when their have a spotty internet connection Eventbrite would pay you to like make their system automatically like work for a bad connection is that how it works that's correct we want the right to work on the strain we want events like to work in your test lab we was event wise to watch it on the plane and in India and Russia and Brazil and China where things are not working perfectly right so that's what packaging comes in we eliminated what we call the roadblocks we gave you on the express lane yeah I'd like to do and how do you make money as an assassin mess Isis ask reason we give you an SDK we charge you for daily active users they like doing pretty common you know model anyone who is using this service or people day will give us the function of attaining got it okay so are they is is it a flat SAS feed based off a daily active user number or is it penny per like API call penny per you know use question we started as daily active user being very simple simply defined as anyone is using the system up to certain usage there are cases where we're now getting into the details of how many calls how many gigabytes are believers etc but most of our customers are very comfortable with that the definition of daily active user to simplify things so they're just you've made its way to other vendors and we're trying to make it as easy as possible program and select communing tempo what's the average customer paying you just from the SAS P 400 to 4,000 per application that was really not in the four thousand of course you have to be a very popular game or retail application the four hundred is more reasonable if you have the as of thousands of daily active users you know our cost is not high your cost should not be high we're taking actually the way some of the unleash the other cost you have many of our customers are using traditional web CDLs like Akamai Amazon CloudFront etcetera once you start using packaging this field also goes away and it can replace this with a better service and all that technically they don't have to change they don't have to terminate the relationship with the other CDN box by placing us in problem they'll see a big reduction in the bill and have you bootstrap this company of your age capital or we raise capital so our main investors are baseline in personal capital and how much to lobby race about these okay energy and then tell me is the more the backstory here cuz it sounds like you may have come in through the investor right in an investor round or something like that and you tell me this story when when to the real founders or the original not the real and the original founders found the company and why'd you and how did you decide to jump in huija who started company in 2013 was Google back then and he was very frustrating with the state of mobile data and mobile content delivery so he tries to promote this idea Google of course nor so many things in Pasadena Google and start packaging it is a very complicated technology we mainly basically build mobile networking stack this world differently was designed just for mobile applications and when you look in a while to build it with a small team of engineers bootstrap and then I was at Akamai bigger than hundred acquisition of pretend oh I was looking for who cutting-edge technology to bring into occupied and we were looking at everyone out there packaging seems to be the only technology that work but didn't have much commercial traction and it was very interesting at the same time the investors were looking for steel with more of a business background to come and lead the company really finally go to market when I mentioned in the team I realized that they go to market how long how did you meet them I met in just through headhunter so basically they invited me to see there was a year ago exactly to see a warrior game we were playing to meet for an hour we stayed for seven hours I fell in love with the product and the technology and I decided to leave my comfort question as cushion as a Kamali I favor this reason so if they found you through a headhunter they had intention on their side they were looking for somebody like you to bring in that's what I hired the headhunter exactly someone that understands giving my big one contained Akamai I mean they bailed and the right the right guy I was looking and I'm you know I was looking for a long time for the right technology to solve this problem and they were you know just right the product was working everything was right it has the type of people we they were going after did not have the budget to pay for it so we have to tweak the story little bit we started with enterprise selling we were able to attract customers like simple blue mobile and after work in now we're going back to the core we're going to shoot with small more than and yes with him yeah that makes good sense now did you what was them bringing in that headhunter tied to a funding round they did where the investors said hey you need to go hire a headhunter and bring in a CEO today what called seem seem to investors really wanted to see traction on the business side acronyms great everything was promising but there was a CDMR are going so well that's why I joined and luckily things are working really well and we're just losing a so very excited about that well we'll talk more about that in a second I'm curious what was mor when you joined I was close to none oh really okay so they were really pretty revenue yeah okay got it got it and how much have they raised at that point already that boy was Wesley okay got it well I mean so clearly very talented kind of technical thinkers for the newly raised three million you know pre revenue is quick yeah this product is not just well let me put it this is a very difficult product to build it takes time it is not just time to build the problematic five univer time because it has to work on 800 networks worldwide so it just takes a lot a lot of I yeah how many customers are you serving now today we have about sixty eighty I talked about 68 got it and then take me back it like I'm curious to the CEO like you that's coming in obviously your goal setting every year what's like a number that you and the technical co-founders on the team like well what's the what's the number at the end of this year where if you hit it everyone's celebrating it could be a revenue number or customer number or usage number what's the number well we have word...