How Premise CEO Maury Blackman grew Premise to $39.4M revenue and 80 customers in 2025.

hello everybody my guest today is mari blackman he's got 20 years of experience leading mission-driven high-growth tech companies that make an impact by connecting communities and providing a more transparent world in 2016 ey named him northern california's entrepreneur of year for his work in excel as as excel as chairman and ceo in 2018 he took the helmet premise data san francisco company operating a software platform for empowering the world's highest impact institution and companies to track and comprehend the ground truth mar you ready to take us to the top i'm ready let's go data space is hot help us understand where premise fits well we're a market intelligence platform and so this this space when i first took the business i was blown away by the tech stack and at the same time the tech vision the tech stack at the same time when i looked at the space and the different players in there that basically serve uh large organizations and global companies in their market intelligence need i find them we found them to be very dated and antiquated in their processes and so what premise does at the highest level is we recruit a we recruit contributors on a global basis 100 different 20 countries and we find these individuals they're ordinary individuals through social media they download our app we run them through some training exercises and the output of that they can enter into a task marketplace where our clients have posted small data collection jobs that once completed and all conflated together provide very powerful insights about their brands their campaigns their policies whatever it is what they want to measure to help them um understand their businesses very interesting mousetrap obviously we see zoom info and what henry's done with the zoom in for acquisition the market cap there is incredible you also have up-and-comers like enigma really taking off in the space all different data traps i haven't heard somebody doing what you're doing which is essentially something mechanical turk almost but you're only posting data capture jobs i mean is that accurate correct correct and and nathan we draw a lot of inspiration here from zoom info i mean zoom info is a market intelligence platform for sales and marketing organizations the way i frame premise is that we're a market intelligence platform for the world so you're selling what is the number one um job title of your buyer someone paying premise oh a brand manager a marketer at a large company someone who's focused on data data and analytics at a large organization okay so so can you can you maybe talk about like a customer that actually used you for this and the result of what they got as an output of the the tasks being run yeah sure so um abm bev is an example um they were one of our first customers when i joined uh the company and what they wanted to understand this is you know a pretty pretty interesting topic they understand beer freshness globally so how quickly were their products moving off the shelf and not just in one geo but across the whole world and so what we were able to do is very quickly um through our through our contributors go out and capture that information off the back of off the back label the beer and uh give them a very rich look in a very fast i mean i think that's the key here is that a lot of these studies that your traditional marketers would do would take you know three four five six months at premise you know we can accomplish that beer freshness study in just a matter of weeks interesting and what are customers paying on average to use this tech our our typical customer is paying us around 100 000 a year and and how many tests are they running for that acv well the way we the way we sell it is we've divided up the world so different tasks require different amounts of payments and so we have what we call credits and so we scope it out with them on an annual basis about how much data collection they're going to do and how much the complexity around it and then we provide them with okay here's here's the cost from a credit perspective based on our understanding of what you want to do and if they don't use those credits do you refund or roll them over uh it's a use it or lose it business here yeah i was gonna say trap question here i'm going to lay it on either okay so use it or lose it interesting and and how do you so when i hear i look at this as usage-based pricing right this is a trend snowflake just ipo they're almost purely usage-based billing and one of the things that's tricky about snowflakes modeling when you talk to you know sleepman and the team there is it's really hard to model some of this because you know in a year like cobit a bunch of people will decrease usage but a bunch will increase usage and so they've been able to obviously hit ridiculously high net retention rates because they just drive usage and rates go up help me understand how you think about net dollar retention relative to selling credits well i think that what you know similar to snowflake what we see is that once people start using the product they get addicted to the they get addicted to the data and you know so it becomes a crutch for them it's like they they understand in the past hey we've been flying blind we haven't had proper information about how to make decisions with the right insights and so once they start to sample what premise has to offer and how quickly they can get data that can help them drive drive their decisions um then it just becomes you know it it's got that flywheel effect to it where they just start relying on it more and more and start buying more and more credits from us so mari can i ask you is your net dollar retention greater than 120 percent absolutely oh wow can i ask how much higher well keep in mind nathan we're still pretty early but it's around 250 to 300 percent wait mark come on that's like that's like insanity high i mean like i'm looking at some id you know gong we just had a meet on he's at 150 net dollar retention uipath just raised at a ridiculous valuation 33x implied valuation multiple with 140 net dollar retention 230. i well 250 to 300. but i think keep in mind we're still early days okay and so the number the number of clients that we're serving today is is we just signed our 80th our 80th logo and so these are very very new organizations and it's just ramping so fast they'll try us out as in a poc so maybe spend you know ten twenty thousand dollars and then once they see the power of this and they just you know the floodgates just open up and so i would expect that to normalize over the next you know 24 36 months and to have you know maybe something around 120 like you suggested yeah it's still impressive i mean early on having you know 250 to 300 percent expansion year over year even after churn that's a great number now can i take 80 customers times the acv average you just gave me 100 grand you guys are flirting with an 8 million run rate right now um what's higher than that okay you know i'm averaging it out for you okay and but we we have some we do have some customers that are paying considerably more so right now our run rate's around 20 million oh thanks for sharing that that's super helpful the reason i'm asking is because you have a very interesting profile when you look at the timing of the vc raises you guys have done there's a very long gap between 2015 and the one you guys just recently did help me understand how and why you got involved with the company yeah great question um i came on board in 2018 as you mentioned um i started interviewing in late 2017 and i i love the concept and the tam the tamper this space is 45 billion dollars but what what was really challenging for me is even though the company had been in business for several years they raised a bunch of money they had what year what year was founding say again what year was the company founded 20 2012 2012. and so between 25 2012 2013 up to 2018 when i joined there was really no commercial activity and so what i had to do is come in and you know this is a horizontal application it can serve almost any industry and so what i did is really focused our efforts in three cree verticals because we had limited resources and what i wanted to do was find a what i would call an initial founding customer set that we could consolidate around and build from there and who was what was that consolidation yeah um well i mentioned abn bev western union facebook um gates foundation u.s government the uk government that was that was really the initial phase that we were focused on now i mentioned to you you know these these customers would spend on the average when we first signed them up somewhere between 50 and 200k but that you know once we got through that initial year and proved out the business and people got addicted to the data they got addicted to the insights we were providing to them on average they spent 500 percent more interesting now help me understand a little bit about growth rate here right so 20 million rate today where were you about a year ago do you remember 10 10 oh okay i mean this is impressive growth the question that i have is how on earth did the initial founders convince baylor to put in 50 million right back in 2015 with such little revenue and it sounds like not great growth until you sort of joined and changed things yeah i think i think the the the technology the vision the capability the size of the market just really excited the you know sand hill here in in san francisco and so they were able to they were able to...