How Seeforge CEO James Mcdonough grew Seeforge to $5.4K revenue and 50 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is james mcdonough he's a passionate entrepreneur technology ceo and past top tier management consultant he's now bringing and blazing new trails here at sea forge which helps digital forms and procedures uh occur in seconds with zero coding we'll talk about that today james are you ready to take us to the top excited all right tell us about sea forge that the bio is a little confusing what do you guys actually do and how do you make money yeah so c-forge is the company's name uh the platform is called fat finger our customers named it and it came from my work you know i worked my entire life in heavy industry and basically we enable frontline employees to build apps in seconds and so those apps are typically based around forms procedures checklists anything that bob uh is walking around and maybe an oil refinery or a field service worker is doing things like safety quality field tickets anything on a clipboard bob is able to build an app for himself or his team or his company um with no code not low code uh in basically seconds so it kind of empowers these folks to kind of not have to wait for the corporate id department to check off a bunch of boxes they can just empower them and do it themselves exactly so it's a it starts from a uh you know from an end user or or bottom of the pyramid and it starts working its way up when they start you know adopting and what will bob the frontline kind of oil refinery worker who's on the rig in the middle of the gulf of mexico what will he do if he says i'm sick of filling out these forms every day oil gets all over him you can't even read him i want to make this an app what does he do that night yeah exactly so uh you know they start searching around and now bob is kind of in our generation i mean kind of you know not using paper and and wanting to you know be mobile enabled and so you start searching around find fat finger sign up to our free trial go through our 60 second tutorial um and you know at the end of it he's created his first custom app and and then that really gets the kind of wheels spinning um the juices flowing to to say wow oh i could not only do my original intent which might have been his safety inspection but then oh why aren't we doing our xyz processes or procedures and that starts uh um maybe sharing the app with other people or gaining momentum but james does i mean does bob on that oil refinery does he have a laptop it goes to back in his bunk that night to do it i mean is it orzole on his phone the building uh the creation of the app he does that from his desktop or or your web browser uh and then the actual use of the app is as from any platform including mobile okay and and let's say he builds the app what enables him to then make that the standard app that all the other people use versus all of them going and creating their own apps to do the same thing right that's why there's process in the first place yeah of course so basically bob would invite uh his colleagues to the team so it'd be like you know the exxon team or whatever uh companies using it and then they would join uh that basically that that account and then they would depending on the access and privileges that's being set up um is what that user will see so we've got the ability to uh let's say that the safety team will see the safety apps and templates and the maintenance team will see you know that those type of procedures but but i mean what i'm really curious about here though is is like the friction right so like do they then have to like take the time to understand and learn bob's form and and do they actually do that or do they just stick with the paper that has been working all along after it's been created no so that the the new user let's say bob's colleague or or sam the person supervisor whatever sam george whatever uh they get an invite saying hey welcome to that finger download it for free as soon as they log in they'll see what bob has created and that's it so it's super easy okay but i guess what i'm trying to say is the reason that these archaic systems exist in the first place is because it is part of a bigger system so you're essentially enabling systems change from the bottom up instead of from top down and so my question is how do you actually drive true system change and adaptation you know outside of just bob's own usage how does he then sell that up from there so the whole thing gets more efficient yeah so that's the magic so i and that and that's really why i founded the company is is that that friction or that frustration is uh the front line employee knows their job they're passionate about their job and they're they're tired or really frustrated with basically people not listening to them or just waiting you know waiting for the bureaucracy to kick in or corporate i.t who is traditionally um under under-resourced and just can't keep up with the sheer demand of let's say digitalization of of uh procedures and so when bob and his team start using it liking it and it spreads to other teams because it's so easy to create more procedures and flexible um that they they really are selling it upwards and so there's this disconnect or this this i guess incorrect thinking that um that that the the i guess the field workers or the front line aren't i guess uh aren't guess motivated to change and that's that's completely wrong it's just that that typically enterprise software is sold to the sea level and and uh they're not i guess bringing the front line or the true subject-matted experts from the business um into those decisions and so we went the opposite way instead of selling to the cio or the executive we sell from the bottoms up and allow them to bubble up uh the usage and the i guess the initiation of change okay so so okay i understand the product walk me through pricing does bob pay directly he's the one using it yeah so uh a lot of times even with really large companies you know we have from exxon to other uh you know fortune 100 companies using the platform uh the they they start for free so we we take away that friction to at least start it to basically start the ball rolling maybe allow them to show their supervisor etc and a lot of the times uh they that team might just use their personal credit card to maybe in the first five ten users and then now they've got enough traction to you know put a business together and flip it over to it this reminds me this reminds me a lot of kind of how um uh oh the the name of this game expensify with david burnett out in boulder he did the same thing where it's like he it's basically receipt and a billing platform right so the individual janitor to do expense reporting might pay five bucks a month to do it but once the janitor and the secretary and everyone else then you'd sell it up to a bigger plan there's always a lot of friction between i know this sounds so simple but it's always very difficult to say okay we're looking at our systems records you're on your backend of stripe and you see like you know 40 like at exxon.com accounts sign up and you're going oh this one it makes sense to put touch on try and sell the cio directly you call the cio they say okay we'll put on our credit card but then you got to like figure out how to get all those users on that credit card and then shut off their personal cards and then there's like expense issues how do you deal with that yeah so that that that flip over from uh i guess you know individual team to larger enterprise and that's where it starts slowing down in terms of the automation because you know bob the trial to first users and credit card that we don't see any of that we just kind of see the data behind it when they start flipping over then that's where you know we start getting involved in more of an enterprise sale because then corporate it starts vetting us taking us through the security and compliance and all of the you know manual billing and that type of thing so that's where it does start bogging down but also the i guess the contract value started higher yeah so what what would bob start out i mean is it a lower price point a dollar five ten something like that a month yeah we start so we have a kind of standard pro plan ranging from nine to fifteen bucks a month uh per user unlimited apps okay and then uh and and then maybe some enterprise plans that if they're wanting some more enterprise features on top of that okay and what would i'm trying to i'm trying to figure out the right question asked to understand how much of your business is from the personal folks versus you've sold it to an it department and then they sell it and they triple the volume inside of that one organization so would you say like more than 50 of your user base is coming from a long tail and let's call that teams of five or less ah well so when they flip over they'll buy big chunks of users right so the enterprise starts i guess becoming much more important than the it's kind of like the top of the funnel we almost treat the the teams almost as leads um and and nurturing them to the larger deals yeah which then those that that yeah that revenue is is more uh than than the smaller teams yeah well what do you what do you track more closely what...