How Screenmeet CEO Ben Lilienthal grew Screenmeet to $6.2M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Ben lilienthal as a serial entrepreneur in the collaboration space he started four companies sold to two public companies and screen meet his current company is number four he's a proven leader and innovator Amherst College ba and Crown pho at the Aspen Institute all right Ben you ready to take us to the top sure fire away Nathan all right what is a screen mean how do you guys make money sure screen meet is enterprise remote support in the cloud so if you think of existing remote support applications which is basically when the IT Help Desk or the call center comes in to take over your computer they're all desktop to desktop based screen meet is the first enterprise SAS solution to be developed cloud native which means it's faster cheaper better than things like LogMeIn Bomgar go to assist WebEx Skype zoom for the remote support use case are you selling directly to the operator of the call center or the companies that put their calls through the call center we sell to the companies that hire the outsourced service provider call centers the verticals that we sell into are mainly subsets of high tech so hardware like PC and phone manufacturers yeah software like other SAS companies and then finally you know sort of random sort of verticals within education manufacturing and obviously the IT Help Desk you know goes across lots and lots and lots of traditional industries and help us understand briefly kind of how you price so the average customer pays you you know about what per month to access the technology you know anywhere from 20 to 60 bucks per user per month and how many what's at a logo bed set of a seed based at a logo basis are these are you typically serving small teams of five people or enterprise teams of 500 well you know the of sass and the beauty of startups is you build the software and to sell it to sell one license is as much work as selling 10,000 licenses not always with the sales motion it can be very different ones a notary play another has a whole system yes but from the back-end perspective of course so what we did is we started by selling a couple seats here and a couple seats there and then we landed a big customer an open table which was a couple hundred seats so we felt like we were pretty cool and then we recently deployed the largest technical services organization on the planet that has over 10,000 support agents around the globe and so the interesting thing is our software and our infrastructure didn't really have to change we just had to turn on more instances in our you know does in AWS as your data centers around the world and now that we've sort of gone live with the largest technical services organization on the planet we're kind of going back through the large enterprise customer list very diligently so and you I mean you'll have people obviously on both sides of this equation but yeah you know typically most people will double down on either enterprise or lote and you know touch kind of freemium based SMB Sci it sounds like you are really trying to do more of the enterprise size team sizes yeah I mean we have an online no touch offering at screen me.com but it's much more interesting to go into the large enterprises and rip and replace 15 year old software with screen meet because one it really drives compelling value millions of dollars of savings on day one and two we go in with some of the largest CRM platform providers in the world as part of a you know full suite session now I get we by the way I totally get the product you have to convince me on that it makes perfect sense I just want to understand the kind of economics and how you how you've gotten the customers you've gotten so because we can't talk about every core I mean is it fair to say maybe the average team signing up with you guys is what a hundred people or something like that from a support agent perspective yeah hundred you know 50 seats - nope ok 50 ok fair enough so so then can I write a fifty times twenty the average the average folks are signing up fifty to twenty bucks to see higher seat or higher or higher than your average deal you know like under 25 grand is kind of not that interesting at this stage of the company we're not gonna walk away from it I mean if that's you're going ya know what I'm trying to do is basically get out of talking about per seat and talk more about what kinds of companies you're targeting which would which would basically manifest itself in a CVS or a number of seats per company what you're saying is we want to have companies that are signing up at least a hundred seats at twenty bucks a month let's put you north of a 25 thousand dollar ACV yeah yeah that's right and so you sort of build the hiring plan and the revenue in the financial model and you know sort of the go-to-market marketing stuff around those metrics versus let's sign up 10,000 customers that's right what's this what's the backstory here when you launch the company what year yeah sure the company got started in 2014 we incorporated in 2015 I had previously sold a company and to GoToMeeting which most people you know it's pretty logical there was a product called go to my PC and another product called go to assist and so I mean was literally you know I was the entrepreneur they brought in I was at GM ran a division hundred people twenty-five million dollar P&L I started like I said you know yeah this is SAS but it's not really SAS it's not really cloud native and in the 15 years since you started this company this thing called the cloud has sort of grown up and so we need to reap lat form all this stuff as cloud native and I went to my boss who was the GM of the 500 million dollar division and he said yeah you you go do that I I don't have five million dollars in three years to you know do a science project mm-hmm so so that that was the back story you know it's sort of the incremental innovation of re-platforming a billion dollar a year business in the cloud the cloud versions gonna win yeah I talk about what Eric did this right I mean he did the basically I'm a same story and and the guys didn't want to let him build it internally so he said fine I'm gonna leave and launch zoom and basically now zoom is you know cannibalizing his other product he sold into that company previously so and I know Eric I mean Eric and I you know cuz I was the audio layer for GoToMeeting that was the company that they bought and so you know I we talked I said go for it man you know like having spent 10 years you know getting punched in the face by you know 10 millisecond packet drops I don't want to do audio or video anymore yeah so I'm gonna do the screen sharing part oh yeah okay talk to me talk to me about what you've scaled to today in terms of team size how many folks ya know so the other thing that's very interesting if you're going after large enterprise deals and your SAS company is you almost have perfect economics so we're you know we're under 20 people why do you say that like it's a negative I I have nothing wrong with small - no no no my point is it's a positive yeah yeah I have nothing wrong with that wait so less than your time we're like 10 11 how many people actually 15 ish that's great so what's the sales motion look like on those did you have any like SDR AES folks hit or no no no and I mean we have one Technical Account Manager okay but it's me and my CEO Oh between the two of us you know we have 50 years of running enterprise software companies doing sales are you both doing sales yeah we're both do it yeah we're both doing sales and what we do is we go in with the large platform companies sales for service now Microsoft Dynamics and sit there with the executives and say you know this is an executive level this is a platform decision now that you've made the platform decision what's the application to solve this use case it's not buying a box and putting in your data center you know that's what one vendor will do it's not buying desktop software it's buying the cloud version of of the tool yeah so no again I get the benefit of the product I'm sold on it I'm after you guys no but my point is that the selling motion is also not sort of a quick and dirty of selling at the conceptual level you know you're not quite selling the swipe your credit card and you're done kind of about those enter Oh God you you you anything above 5,000 bucks a year you're not having a no touch swipe your credit card on a website deal but all those companies typically they have still sales motions built out around STRs / ayee and then customer success reps / a to support onboarding I'm just wondering if you have that system built out yet yeah well we we don't and we're not entirely convinced that we need like even to scale like we can probably get there without invest like I mean a big head sales kind of yes are you bootstrap today or you decide to raise capital we've raised capital but we haven't taken any institutional money okay so we I mean kind of done the like after 25 years you know you sort of know the venture community and basically to a person they've said will give you money privately but don't take money from our fund because we're just gonna distort what you're totally half so how much how much into the company today you're talking like 200 300 grand no closer to 5 million bucks okay but all from all from kind of made more like...