How Pricimetrics.com CEO Mike Kimel grew Pricimetrics.com to $10M revenue with a 4 person team in 2024.

price and metrics he's been a consultant in the pricing space for a long time he's now Building Technology to help Brands skews the corner grocery shop with over 250 skus optimized pricing real time to quickly understand pricing profitability margins with a click of a button take anybody knows from Consulting in his head and putting it out in software space he's got 10 folks in the team today one of which is their coder who's actually being paid the founders have put in 100K to build the MVP and three folks on that 10 person sales team working for Equity are looking to land there for sale here in the next couple of months hey folks my guess today is Mike Kimmel he spent almost 30 years in analytics and pricing since obtaining a PhD in economics from UCLA he's made a lot of money for a number of companies and decided it was time for him to make a world-class pricing accessible to companies of all sizes that's why I launched price and metrics with an i in the middle.com Mike you ready to take us to the top yes yes I am thank you all right so what give me a story you said you've made a lot of money for a lot of other companies who are you making rich well I've worked for a lot of Fortune 500 companies and multinational corporations both as a consultant and as an employee um so uh over time I I started out as kind of a lowly minion in analytics and uh grew to run the pricing department for uh several large companies interesting so tell me how price metrics Max Works uh yeah you did share pre-show your pre-revenue today uh how are you what's guiding how you build the software is it your own use case do you have some free users how are you building MVP um well we actually have built our MVP um to a large extent uh this is the product that I always felt I needed when I was running pricing departments um basically what we do what our software does is it finds the profit maximizing price for all of a company's skus uh it also does a number of other things that are useful for instance it can tell you which products which of your skus and which locations are responding well to being an ad which of them respond while being in circular for companies that produce circulars that kind of thing so it basically identifies information about different products how much you should charge for them um and uh it tells you uh what it provides you with that information and it provides you with other information that allows you to run simulations uh determine whether you're going to accept the guidance provided by the software or not you can always override the companies the the software guidance and if you accept it you know in general we will raise your profitability and Mike what year did you launch or write the first line of code for the platform well originally the the company was going to be basically just a um vehicle for me to do more Consulting so that was 2019. uh but uh it really it kind of grew about a year and a half ago or so people started doing people from my past life started joining the company because they like the idea it's like joining full-time as employees uh joining part-time everybody but me currently is part-time and how many are part-time today we have 10 people in the company right now and how do you pay them if you're pre-revenue that is an excellent question uh we have one person getting paid right now and uh that's uh our head coder um we we basically are bootstrapping right now although we are looking to raise money um the rest of the team is working on Equity as I said uh everybody kind of uh joined this started out as a one-person operation and uh people liked what they heard they liked the the idea of what we're planning to do what we are doing and how and so little by little people started joining next thing I knew I had a company sort of an accidental thing Mike one of the things I look for obviously in any early stage founder you've got to be able to convince world-class talent to join you right you've got to be very convincing and so why do they believe you why why do they believe the equity they're working for right now is going to be worth anything um well everybody in the company just about with with two exceptions are people who've known me for a long time so um in each of the cases these are people some of them I've worked with um most of these people uh if if I wanted to rip them off at some point uh presumably I would have done it a long time ago they know me I know uh there's a trust Factor 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 access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash 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 I mean they can trust you though but still not know what the vision is going to be there's a lot of people that trust the founders they work with but they don't know if the equity is going to be worth anything uh that that's a good point uh basically what we do have um well I'm not the only person with a background in analytics in the team um additionally um uh so so the others um they have they've had the opportunity to see what I can do with uh analytics uh they've seen they've had the opportunity just to see what other people on the team can also do with their analytics skills um so it kind of between the the skill set knowing that the skill set is there knowing that uh uh the others on the team have the ability to do X Y and Z and knowing what the software is intended to do um it just sounded compelling to a number of people you could have the best code on Earth with the smartest phds but if you can't sell there's no business and the equity is worth nothing um how do you tell a story that makes them understand that hey you can sell Mike can sell a million dollars worth of this product well actually that's a funny little story I began by trying to sell the product myself turns out Mike can't sell uh Mike can sell division to uh people who he knows um and uh who he gets introduced to I'm guessing speaking in third person now um but uh basically um among the people who have joined the the the company are three individuals we have a three-person sales team uh so um one of the guys uh who joined the company uh was a VP of sales at a company that I worked for in the past uh he recently retired from his uh day job and yeah he's descended to join us uh we also have an experienced that sale another gentleman who most of his background is in finance so Mike what are the sales people doing today because you're you're pre-revenue right so how close are they to Landing the first customer um that's a great question and uh until we go through this process I really will not know however we had our first uh customer meeting last week um that resulted in the customer basically seeing a demo of the product liking what they saw and sending us some data so that we could begin a pilot project with them and you mentioned skus and pricing optimization I'm looking at the website looking at some of the screenshots you have here is this really the best fit for folks with like a thousand skus big e-commerce brands um well I mean a thousand skus or 250 000 skus the software really doesn't care um it's a distillation of what I've been doing for 30 years plus what some of the other members of the team have been doing for my point though is Mike is if there's someone listening right now that has an Etsy shop with three skus they're not going to get value what's the minimum amount of excuse someone would need to get value from your tool um that's a great question my guess is that uh probably if you've got less than 50 skus or so or you do um very little uh in the way of transactions you probably don't need the the product but one of the things that we are aiming for um we have entered into um a field where there is competition there are some established companies out there uh there are companies that have been around for 30 years uh Pros Pros uh has been around for I don't know since the 80s I believe um and uh they're they're on the NASDAQ I think last I checked their market cap is about a billion and a half um so we're up against some established uh competitors um but what is different about us aside from the fact that we think we do pricing better and we have reason to believe we do pricing better it's not just we think but we also have this Vision where we're going to democratize this you cannot get pricing software at less than call it a hundred and fifty thousand two hundred thousand dollars a year for an annual site license we are shooting for something a little bit different we we want to be able to service The Corner Grocery Store this is software um there but um the the I I've been in companies that have used a number of our competitors and I've actually been a user myself I I understand what they do I understand the limitations of what they do and I understand how to make this accessible so we have made software that is accessible to much much smaller companies there's an entire range of companies out there that could never afford a quarter of a million dollar a year site license we are going to be providing the same understood much smaller companies that makes lots of sense but but over you know 100 skus 250 excuse something around that is where this gets valuable now I guess the question I got for you is you've got one person that you're actually actually paying nine are working for Equity are you still doing the Consulting is the Consulting business still a thing uh no um our goal is not to be a consulting firm uh we um why shut it off though I mean some of the most successful SAS companies start off as Consulting they do a million in Consulting two million Consulting until they can get the software built and then they start selling the SAS I understand that um I didn't say we won't do Consulting I said our goal is not consulting firm however uh our goal when we look at it our goal is to be something like a quick books for pricing QuickBooks sort of created an industry out there um before that everybody thought you need a bookkeeper you need a person and possibly even if you're complicated enough you you need to go to Arthur Anderson or Ernst and Young or whoever um right now if you need you can tell the the bike shop around the corner you need pricing help and they'll say yeah but if I do who am I going to go to McKinsey I mean you know they can't afford it we want to make this sort of service accessible to companies of all sizes I understand the product Vision very clearly I'm just trying to understand how you're going to get there right so I guess uh the Consulting that you were doing did you own that consulting company uh yes I did some Consulting yes but I guess why should that I mean if you truly understand the customer's problem shouldn't your Consulting business be growing not you shutting it off um you may be right I may not be necessarily going about this the right way um sometimes uh there's no right or wrong way I'm just trying to get in your head um long story short um it comes down to something that we discussed about uh four or five minutes ago which is that uh I'm not the world's greatest sales guy uh when I was focused on Consulting basically I had the same customers in year one that I had in here the customers that I had in year one I still have in your ache um what I am not good at is um expanding business um so um basically we have a sales team and I want them to focus more on selling the product rather than selling something that is not that makes sense that makes sense Mike and your boots drop today correct yes or no um I'd say yes uh the reason I I put the I'd say in there is that there has been some money put into the company by another member of the team um so but since he's part of the team I would say that counts as good strappingers well I would agree with that very cool and how much have you guys all put in together so far um I think about a hundred uh K give or take does that make you nervous um well um I will be a lot more comfortable once we start bringing in our first few customers on that note we're out of time let's wrap up Mike with the famous five number one what's your favorite book um you know the dogs of war I've always liked that number two is there a CEO you're following or studying no number three what's your favorite online tool for building price metrics um well we use react for the front end so probably that okay number uh four how many hours of sleep do you get every night um now I get a lot more than I used to for a while this was uh that this was a hectic um uh job and it took a lot of time uh while we were knee-deeping uh now I'm becoming foreign far more redundant than I used to be uh and there's uh time for uh for me to sleep so Mike how many hours of sleep do you get uh I would say I'm up to about seven and what's your situation married single kids uh I am married and I have a 12 year old kid very cool and how old are you uh oh that's uh I'm kind of old for an entrepreneur I am 53. all right last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um you know I started companies uh other than Consulting I never really stuck with them um and I probably had I known I would have stuck with a few of them for somewhat longer um and uh made them work guys there you have it price and metrics he's been a consultant in the pricing pace for a long time he's now Building Technology to help Brands skews the corner grocery shop with over 250 skus optimize pricing real time to quickly understand pricing profitability margins with a click of a button taking what he knows from Consulting in his head and putting it out in software space he's got 10 folks on the team today one of which is their coder who's actually being paid the founders have put in 100K to build the MVP and three folks on that 10 person sales team working for Equity are looking to land there for sale here in the next couple of months we'll see what happens Mike thanks for taking us to the top thank you much appreciated one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded 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