How Repsly CEO Matthew Brogie grew Repsly to $10M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Alan Bondi he's vp of marketing at reptilian an adviser to several startups he's also held executive roles at place cap placed her Open Text in Cana and was co-founder of Offerpop which obviously was acquired he's been a consultant at McKinsey and Yankee group and started his career as a data scientist he's an avid speaker and writer and he blogs at small data a group Alan are you ready to take us to the top I am ready hey Nathan all right so tell us first your VP of marketing today were you founder of any companies in the past that you exited or what kind of what got you under VP in the role of VP of Marketing yeah sure so I've I've had a couple of my own consultancies which I've sold and I was also a co-founder a company originally called Offerpop now called wing which was one of the really early social media marketing companies kind of ahead of its time for good and bad and what happened with off our pop offer pops still going yeah we've I'm now an advisor where I think we've done a sea route at this point so still chugging along doing about fifteen million dollars in revenue so a nice little business but not exactly the big eggs that I was hoping for yeah I mean look I was very familiar with the space because my company Hayao was a much smaller player in the space so it was fun in 2012 for me to watch the wildfire that but will Buddy Media really started and wildfire then involve or then vitru you guys did not exit and there was another company I can't remember where there was basically two companies really in the space I would say they decided not tags that you are one of them why didn't you sell in 2012 you know I think we had a nice little business going and you know working with a couple other co-founders who had some pretty nice exits in the past I think they had a number in mind and sometimes that's uh it's tough right you you you have a view of what you're worth and it just didn't seem the right time and like a lot of things timing is everything isn't it I have a few friends that I've worked with just through M&A stuff where they'll say Nathan we turned down the 930 million dollar offer because we want a billion and you know what you look then forward five years and they're selling the thing in a flash show for ten million bucks and it was all because they wanted to be behind the number and I missed out I also have a big believer in cycles in business so I'm hoping that there's another cycle when it's social marketing gets frothy again and and you're right the companies you mentioned most of them had exits you know people like Adobe and Microsoft and others and I'm hoping that uh that comes back around so it's not like we missed the boat there's gonna be another boat yeah good and just real quick on to round out the story and Offerpop how much total have you guys raised offer pop I want to say has raised about 25 million so far but if my numbers are right so how the name want why the name change I think it's a I liked Offerpop way better than a wing which is like hard to talk about and hard to spell so it's interesting because that was that was sort of past my time as marketed but I think wing signaled you get a penny if you were going with a name change happened I'm not gonna hit you hard you get a free pass okay I'll use my life one and that one all right tell me about it tell me about you're currently working on so I've been working with some guys and it's it's an interesting story rep sally is a mobile CRM specifically for field teams and for consumer companies that sell to retail and it was started in Croatia of all places so it's it's it's not your typical or maybe it's your typical Croatia to Boston startup story where started by some guys first client was L'Oreal in in Europe so really nice initial client they were doing consulting for L'Oreal creating a tool so that their sales reps their merchandisers could just be a better organized when they went out into stores yeah Alan just clear they're selling a L'Oreal shampoo they're canvassing some geographical area the rep for L'Oreal they're trying to convince Kmart Walmart these places to carry the shampoo and this tool this mobile CRM helps them stay organized it help them stay organized and so this was L'Oreal in Europe initially so the business started in Europe it started focused on Central Europe but you're right think about the reps what are they doing every minute of their day they're going at visiting accounts checking on stock looking at competitors trying to figure out how the product is doing in retail and the old way of doing that they had to have a notebook maybe they'd put stuff in a Google Doc maybe they would be you know filling out a whole bunch of paperwork when they finished their visit what reps Lee does it enables them to take pictures fill out forms it's more like Instagram than Salesforce so so when I position the company I have stuff with CRM for years back to doing work for an initial Siebel integrator if your audience remember Steve don't Agers falen sorry I'm aging myself so CRM is great when people use it it's awful when people don't use it and so reps li addressed the challenge of how do you get reps many of whom were kind of younger they're in the business because they like dealing with people they like being out and about they're not gonna use sa p or Siebel or something like that so how do you make an app this more like Instagram than Salesforce it helps them gather data organize their day feed all that back to their territory manager or the brand managers so that they can really see what's happening in the field and sell more stuff and are you selling just from a per seat model and if so what's the average seat yeah so this is a it's a kind of classic SAS model it's per rep per month okay and how much is it on average there's three different tiers starting at about 30 bucks up to about 60 bucks bucks per month and our average customer is paying us probably around 350 dollars per month okay and we just crossed a bit of a milestone where we just signed our 1000th customer which was another pretty big brand invited cocoa in the beverage space that's great so can I multiply a thousand times 350 and assume you guys are doing about 350,000 grand a month today that is correct we just hit a milestone of four million dollars ARR so that's great that's where we are yeah and what is that up from in terms of taking back 12 months ago what were you doing 300 grand then 250 so the business is pretty consistently and again starting from a pretty small base but we've pretty much doubled year over year over the past say about five years so it's not a pretty nice trajectory and it's relatively lean you know the businesses raised just short of about four million dollars but really through seed rounds there hasn't been a proper a round so it's been mostly bootstrapped and there are certain of rice around now where is it all convertible notes it's I mean the last round was in I want to say July and that was a 1.6 million dollar round so yeah right yeah okay that was last July that was the last July all right is the last we're coming up on a year you know what that means right it means we gotta sell more stuff and it means you're either raising capital or you're selling which one is it so we are raising and and the I mean it's a nice little story right if you can double the business every year if you could project forward we if if we're at or we want to do 8 and we think that in the in the bigger picture of CRM we've got a really nice niche market here rights not for everybody knew like how specific it is it makes it easier to compete in and one challenge I'd say in thinking back to some of your other episodes like what are the challenges of the business when I arrived on the scene it was relatively horizontal we had dog walkers and pool cleaners and solar installers and big brands and small brands and consumer goods and we had a lot of different things for a lot of different people and for a relatively small business we had to get more focused so this year and when I came on board were really doubling down on CPG and specifically what they call fast fast-moving CPG so food in beverage alcoholic beverages yeah uh Sporting Goods and apparel things that people tend to buy pretty often but where there's a high level of brand loyalty because really the the the difference in merchandising in the field you know we're not selling to commodity products we're selling to the L'Oreal's the Nike golf's the Health Aide kabuto we're going house we make bought it how sticky is it what's your turn look like today churn is pretty good it's compared to other SAS businesses I've been in our target is to be at about one-and-a-half percent gross and we've got pretty nice upsell because we tend to sell that's one and a half gross logo churn per month yes okay say and revenue churn is about equal yeah about equal okay got it not okay that's fairly nice and then sorry you were gonna continue on about expansion um there's a lot of upside in accounts if you look at sort of the total net churn we do well because we tend to sell to growth brands and maybe they have 10 reps and then they have 20 and then they have 30 so we tend to grow with companies the challenges as we go up market is it's less of a growth story it's more of a full-featured...