How Propeller Crm CEO Eric Bouck grew Propeller Crm to $30K revenue and 50 customers in 2016.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs to our number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue for customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have on now its twenty thousand dollars per top five in six weigh-ins his head back on global domination we just broke 100,000 unit full mark and I'm your host Nathan lakha okay job tribes this week's winner of a hundred bucks is Justin Goodwin he's in the HR industry specifically in the software the service case looking to increase his revenue so congratulations Justin's for your registrants to win a hundred bucks every Monday on the show to build your idea simply subscribe to the podcast in itunes now and then text or Nathan two three three four four four again text or Nathan two three three four four four guys if you want to be easy people to use to book your meetings back to back to match your calls to make sure people extra show up on a schedule you want to use acuity scheduling it's what I use for my podcast interviews and Nathan black accom /schedule I'll tell you more about how I use it later on in the episode this is episode 5 49 I'm Nathan Lac des and come up tomorrow morning you'll learn from Daniel of attentive they've raised 150 grand in Portugal to solve a very unique sales problem stops draw good morning Nathan laughter here our guest this morning is Eric bow and he is the CEO and founder at a company called propeller this theorem now before that prior to propeller Eric was super involved at Samsung he was co-founder and CEO at zigzag software which again he sold to Samsung prior to that back in September 2008 he was group of product manager at Dell am C and worked his way up there again before founding zig zag selling a samsung and then leaving the found propeller see our Eric are you ready to take it to the top absolutely all right so walk us through it tell us first what does propeller CRM do and how to generate revenue yeah so we're below CRM that still people actually want to use and we're doing that by focusing not just on making bid entry prettier but about actually empowering silk people to get their job done on a day-to-day basis so the big vision is to career based tools that salespeople can use for doing their email their phone calls study meeting cheering presentations documents doing research and have all that hiking happens the natural byproduct and what is the business model how do you make money it's a saspa saspa sis pretty typical we charged a you know per user per month we have multi plans and able plan and yeah and before I get more into kind of a story and and how you're different similar CRMs help give us a sense of kind of average revenue per customer per month for the platform i know you have multiple plan yeah absolutely so you know we're a we focused on the pretty low end of the market right now and we're going to make our way up the food chain average revenue per per account is around fifty dollars per month right now okay got it perfect and it's just obvious question eric and there are this is such a crowded space you know that in such a crowded says Mary crying how how on earth do you win so I think it's an interesting concepts that go into such a crowded market and a lot of people told me I was crazy to do it but I think if you look around there are so many different companies that seem to be thriving by creating their own little niche the value proposition and so I think for certain categories of product here and being one of them there's always gonna be opportunity if you can if you go ahead and differentiate yourself so what we've got right now is a reasonably unique of integration of deep integration with gmail combined with the ability to do multi-step email campaigns and have great reporting and everything on top of that and that mixed together does seem to find a group of customers that have looked at you know dozens of CRM sometimes and land on us and say this is the one for us it's what I'm looking for and if you just sort of their reasoning like ears and one actually here in contextual language on the phone calls when you say hey why'd you just start paying us and they tell you x is it I mean is it because these systems you built directly in their workflow and then also go to Salesforce or some other external sign in yeah or here we don't know another way to think about is you know a lot of the people out there probably going and looking at Salesforce plus you know for tau plus and outreach that I owe or persist a queue and you know plus you know yours inside and be kind of tight a collision secures her death you put all together and it gets really expensive or you know you go as you know kind of other products and maybe they do a good job of one thing but not the whole package and so I think you know us sitting together kind of an all-in-one for a certain kind of workflow which seems to be pretty effective for small companies that it seems to be working and proof is always in the pudding Rory guys out in terms of total customers are serving here in December 2016 yeah so your question was pretty early in our life cycle Jessica are somewhere yeah absolutely so we launched the product widely on number first the three months ago oh wow I we've been growing at twenty-one percent month over month we said we put up 25 percent month over month in November we got a little over 50 customers right now great boost Raptor of you raise capital totally misstep ok good and what's the decision now I'm sure you can raise capital if you wanted yeah it's uh you know we're a bit about it you know it had a you know an exit with zig zag and maybe some decent money out of that and arrow is decent money give us to Rayna well I can't disclose the actual numbers but I could say well worth it for two years of work that we put in I'm a big rails oh that doesn't help have a like like a million to a hundred million or give us a huge range I'll put it this way let's say it wasn't retirement money but it's better than car money so maybe let's go house money that's good that's good at doubtful okay so you're currently in 50 customers you're three months old growing about twenty one percent month-over-month the massive I guess is simple right 50 customers I'm 50 our crew mentoring about 2,500 bucks a month in our visit mr I know playlist and you have a good sense of a well I mean this will be good indication if people kind of our stickin have you have you lost anybody at any turn we have insurance I mean as you would expect and but basically we've also had some upgrades so our net sure and hovers right around zero process ok so again net net revenue turns on zero percent because of upgrades and how what are you doing to upgrade people is it is it you like contact based or what um it it's been a function of people add in you know we'll start out with a couple seats it works for them and then they'll add more they'll hire people so you know it's kind of a combination of those things and what's the what's a team look like so it's pretty small we've got we've got basically in five people seek out some part-timers you know an engineer you know designer marketing guide we're going to me it's a remote team so I'm actually the one it I'm in San Francisco I've gotta be folks in in Europe and then I've got my work and go to LA if somebody was interested I mean you're small enough we're kind of any of these guys could grab you early if you want it I mean if somebody came and offer to you you know a million bucks two million bucks to buy the business because they saw something in your tech or something like that would you do that kind of deal or just something you can see yourself working on for the next two or three decades yeah definitely definitely not a deal right now I mean we're really this is you know this is what I want to do for a long time so this is my you know this is my 10-year plan and I can't think of any better way to spend my time I'm having a blast and who do you think is leading the space currently and so forth come on a tournament I chose for you know if you look at if you look at the overall market it from the big players don't force the growing the fastest dynamics is probably the second decide if i pay attention to that and then there's a lot of there's a lot of interesting products that are coming out i think we're all going to do our parts to really improve the space and to start taking down sale for supper with the lower end what is the outgoing saying in the mid and small market who do you think is kind of leading right now in terms of what sales people are happy and excited to be using i hear some satisfaction reasonable satisfaction pipe drive a lot of people i think that's a reasonable product I think that I'm sponsors nursing stuff for sure yeah are there are their components of propeller that kind of integrate a I I've heard a few people actually in fact I had Timo on from pipes drive and I had to outreach guys on as well and I seeing a trend of people switching from pipe drive to outreach and they're specifically saying it's because outreach is just out engineered pipe drive in terms of AI and smart sales recommendations I will say outreach is a fantastic product I've been I've been...