How Progressly CEO Nick Candito grew Progressly to $3.6M revenue and 100 customers in 2017.

he's launched progressively really wants to be the operating platform or the system of record for folks uh companies and the process all the processes they run through all their employee set or vendors or or contractors things like that they've got a team of 30 again focused on this problem raise 10 million dollars serving hundreds of customers with less than 10 000 seats served less than 300 thousand bucks in mmr buddies goal is to hit a 5 million annual runway by the end of 2017. this is the top where i interview entrepreneurs who are number one are number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have i'm now at twenty thousand dollars per and i'm your host nathan latka this is episode 767 coming up tomorrow morning you're gonna learn from martin koppelman i asked him i said martin in a mature crypto market who gets rich who makes the money he tells me an answer tune in to find out hello everybody good morning my guest today is nick candito he's the chief executive officer and co-founder at a company called progressly championing the company's mission towards becoming the new standard for how teams find and execute business processes he previously served as related iq's head of user success in business operations which was acquired by salesforce.com as the first automatic and intelligent crm solution nick founded progressively to address how large industries operate innovate and share around core business processes nick are you ready to take us to the top hey everyone thanks for having me yeah man thanks for coming on real quick before we get into progressively who's going to who's going to win the crm space oh that's a great question um i am a big supporter of salesforce.com we use salesforce within our company and i think there's a lot of technology attached to the related iq acquisition that makes that a pretty exciting play and i i have not taken my eye off what linkedin and microsoft are going to be able to do together where i've heard some good things about dynamics so it'll definitely be a race to the finish let me re-ask that question that sounds good for the enterprise space but if i asked you to pick a baby in the smb space who would you pick okay so think like uh crm rpoos like under 100 bucks per month yeah i was always impressed by base crm they were they were the one that we were kind of keeping an eye on at related iq we launched the company and we had some massive differentiators and they closed the gap on us pretty quickly and also know the team over at uh social capital that that works really closely with them a moon and team um so i think they're they're one to keep your eye out for very cool okay take us into your story here so was was relate iq kind of your first kind of tech exposure or did you have your own thing before that or what's the story there great question yeah i had um i kind of stumbled into tech in all honesty where i was a finance major and i was thinking about what i wanted to do and if i wanted to kind of stay on the east coast and go do the new york boston finance game and really just optimized for the best team that i could find so i ended up joining a very small software team that was based in central massachusetts and we were building technology for the pharmaceutical industry so think of it as like a crm for clinical trials and that was the first time that i really got to see what it could be like building technology for large companies and it also kind of opened my eyes to a lot of the things that were very very manual within these companies where externally they had built efficiencies internally it was it was a lot of paper it was a lot of excel there's a lot of emails kind of back and forth that that didn't help with it didn't help people to get things done very efficiently and what moved you from that into related iq so i actually thought about taking a pass at my first kind of entrepreneurial journey right after that decided to run operations at another company in boston um and we were actually doing really well a close partnership with which company was called crimson hexagon and they're still doing very well in boston stephanie newby was the ceo that i worked i worked for and she was world class in my opinion so i i learned a ton from her around what it looked like to kind of take a company from where we were to the next level and i implemented a lot of tools like salesforce.com um in jira and what i saw is that i i felt like as the person who decides on a lot of those technologies your evaluation criteria is much much different than the people who actually use it and what excited me about relate iq is we were really thinking about how we could build a sales system of engagement and i think the way to think about that is you know you got to have social features um you got to work well with data and you really just have to kind of tie into how people are going to need to be doing their job day in and day out were you early enough at relate iq to get you know equity to the point where the sales force exit was financially actually meaningful for you or no you just really learned from the experience and now you're going to do your own thing no it's definitely meaningful um and you know still a shareholder in crimson hexagons one of their biggest cheerleaders but yeah that was a phenomenal ride i learned a ton steve steve laughlin was our our founder and ceo adam evans was our founder and cto i thought the two of them were probably the best founding duo that i had i'd ever come across and i was fortunate to to work very closely and actually report to adam for a period of time so um not only to kind of help me financially to be able to take the jump for progressively um but i also felt like the playbook that those guys ran made a ton of sense to me what number were you employee-wise there i think i was employed number 21 okay at that point yeah we were kind of hiring pretty quickly um the person who referred me to the company ended up being the first kind of non-technical iron on product hire that they made so i ended up being the second started on the same day as our vp of sales so it was a it was a it was a fun ride together you're surrounded on day one by all the all the tech guys going screw you and everything that the customers say they want and you're like they said they'd buy if we have this how do we get it built and it's the constant debate right yeah it turns out it was pretty helpful to have some people that know sales and know what sales reps want the company so i think hopefully it helped us close the gap on what eventually became a big driver around our success okay progressively what's it doing how do you make money so you can think of us as the operational system of records and the way i kind of think about enterprise today is that all of these large organizations they're all using microsoft products they have a crm tool which is your customer system of record they have an hcm tool which is your employee system a record and then they typically have some some notion of erp in the building so in sap and oracle and we really see it as an opportunity to build the system of record for fortune 1000 clos where we especially like the industry profile where it's an extended value chain so i think energy and utilities transportation consumer package goods even government there are a ton of people who work outside the building that need to be in the loop around what's getting done and if you want to make optimizations around how people can actually work better and stay connected there's really no way to do that today so so we you know pretty simply kind of have a mobile first strategy where we we typically really help the people who are in the field again not in front of computers every day and we connect the data that they need access to and the information that they need to submit all the way back up to what what a clo could be making decisions around um you know we kind of have a standard sas licensing model um around that and give me just a general sense of kind of kind of customer size are they i mean are they paying on average a grand per month or you know 10 000 per month or a million per month what's the general arpu yeah um you know our poo varies quite a bit i think you know we we work with some of the biggest companies in the world um shell oil is one of our big supporters and we should have some news coming on that and then we also kind of have a mid-market segment i think if you look at energy it can kind of be skewed in terms of how big the companies are and what they do from a revenue perspective it's an average though if you had to pin it down um so the highest licensing price that we have is you're looking at probably forty nine a user um one conversation that's kind of top of mind is working with with the it group at chevron um you know you know they have 60 000 employees within the company so you know you do the right thing for your customers where you want to kind of do value based selling where they understand what they're getting and there's high roi for them so i mean it's 50 bucks in about your average seed price or that's that's like the highest you'd say yeah that's our enterprise one so we...