How Peeva CEO Michael Hamilton grew Peeva to $17.6M revenue and 251 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Michael Hamilton he's the founder and CEO of Piva that's p-e-e-v-a before uh tuning into entrepreneurship he developed more than a decade of experience in New York managing litigation support and e-discovery projects for some of the nation's largest law firms and corporations all right Michael you ready to take us to the top sure yeah absolutely what's an e-discovery project electronic data Discovery is just glorified photocopying electronic format there you go okay so Loop this now into what Piva is working on and how this has to do with pets and microchips uh it really has absolutely nothing to do with it other than um ultimately dealing with large data sets uh the pet problem is ultimately a data problem the field of uh Veterinary Care in general is extremely fragmented uh it lags behind other Industries technologically and to resolve the problem over Missing Pets you have to resolve the data problem that's what we're essentially doing with a critical mass of data on Kiva is a universal pet tracking system so we can read any brand of microchip our microchips can be read by any brand a scanner we're the first to re-record analyze catalog any brand of microchip regardless of the manufacturer and we pair literally millions of pet microchip IDs with Pet Medical Records in one centralized location so that streamlines uh veterinarian shelter worker workflow to ensure that microchips are scanned and pet owners are instantly notified the exact second that their pets uh microchips are scanned so we're essentially two you know b2c and we're B2B right so that might get a little confusing when you want to start uh talking about percentages um you know ARR and mrr and all that I would say I'd say you're B2B but really then it's it's it's C to D consumer to dog right um flushing that out yeah help me understand people are going to hear microchips they're gonna go wait a second wait a second so let me just sort of break the time and try and dump it down for me um if I how you have a great golden retriever um he sees the vet once every you know two months sometimes it's a different bet though because I'm on vacation or I'm moving around how do you incentivize vets to submit the data it could be different bets to your central database that then shows on the microchip yeah that's an excellent question with every hospital that we on board we take a hard look at the data right so we have a breakdown of every pet you know that has a microchip uh the brand of mic per chip every pep that does not have a microchip uh to break down like how many pets you know how often they're seen that year so we know exactly what we're getting into so we're essentially providing a service for them by you know pulling all this data together right and then you know we're able to Garner a critical mass because every pet that is already chipped with another brand is auto enrolled into Piva at no cost of the hospital or uh the pet owner they just have to kind of confirm their accounts right but that's really really important do you also make your own chips or are you just aggregating other people's chip data we distribute our own chips uh we do not manufacture we distribute them um I see we will register any brand of microchip and to offset that upfront cost right um you know that's our required to scan every or vet techs every pet that comes in into their office and then vet techs had you know a line list of six or seven bullet points the benefits of microchipping specifically microchipping with Kiva they then register the pet on site and then we build the vet oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can 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evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview got it so what what brand I'm looking at your website right now this is very interesting it almost looks like a turkey syringe ISO compliant transponder that holds like it looks like a pill almost who's manufacturing these for you uh a company called wixie in Shanghai okay how'd you I'm less interested in who they are I'm more interested in why you pick them uh our electrical engineers uh just vetted everybody out it was very important that they have what is called an ISO certification see in the states part of the problem is not all microchips can be read by all microchip scanners because there's multiple Distributors multiple frequencies so uh you know in Canada the UK and everywhere else they have a specific frequency um so we chose that brand over the others to truly be a universal uh microchip but we can also read any other brand of microchip as well yeah so what does one of these things cost you me well not you but the company the company Piva what do you pay like they're the it's it's a volume game I mean if you got them individually they'd be really expensive but literally like less than a dollar like 60 cents I mean when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of these things they're they can come down and cost considerably okay interesting so when you first launch them I'll get your origin story here in a second but when you first launched what was the order size you you got as your sort of first you know slot of inventory are we talking like like a thousand or ten thousand or a million or what no no 4 000 chips okay okay interesting and so that cost you what something like four thousand bucks a little more than that at the time uh maybe closer to six okay so you don't have a real like Capital allocation problem here that's not I mean that's an upfront cost but it's not a heavy upfront cost no no I mean it it's it's a volume gamer it really truly is uh yeah um you know in regards to our actual launch date I mean basically I started Piva LLC like from a one bedroom apartment like years ago but we didn't actually start taking in Revenue till um late 2018. we built I mean this has been very very weak it's been bootstrapping my brother and I like to call it drip financing if you will on you know so based on meeting milestones and having certain needs then we throw more money in and we've you know it got pretty expensive I mean it was initially all my money in the beginning how much did you put in yourself a couple hundred thousand great is it making nerd that make you nervous at the time um no it really didn't because I just had um so much support at that time on from the University of Buffalo I mean academic chairs I mean this was after like a root cause analysis I had um you know was offset by different grants I also had buy-in from you know a highly uh regarded veterinarian here that sold off two practices to a major corporation and then um you know once I started putting my own money in it it's just like it's kind of like a no lose situation plus I was a single guy at the time just loved my dog when I was a little kid my dog was still and never got him back I identified the problem and this truly is the only way to resolve the problem yeah okay this makes sense so so grants your own money at the beginning 2015 got going...