How Segmentify CEO Ergin Eroglu grew Segmentify to $2.3M revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is ergon arolu he's an experienced software architect and a startup guy who has a passion in solving real-world problems involving large amounts of data he's currently working as ceo of segmentify and helping online retailers to boost their sales by personalizing shopping experiences of shoppers all right ergon are you ready to take us to the top yep let's start okay so what does segmentify do and how do you guys make money actually segmentify is a sales platform for online retailers as you mentioned that what we do is we increase conversion rates and boost sales by personalizing the shoppers shopping experience actually how we do it we track each individual visitors behaviors like page views clicks purchases basket operations time on site visit frequency and many many more with this data our system calculates the best offering either products or even promotions for each register in real time and should this show them in appropriate places what is what is a source of truth so if i go to walmart.com and i'm browsing around and walmart doesn't have my email or my name and you're trying to customize my experience or is it cookie based or ipad dress based or what generally cookie based we also use some ip based information but mostly cookie base so i don't even need to know your nature interesting number for me i track it and find the organization that's not very nice of you to just say i'm just a number to you yeah but man you know for a software [Music] on average what do people pay for for this per month uh currently it's 800 per month for average revenue but we have been shifting the customer base so it has been increasing for the last year so in previous we got nearly 300 now our average customers pay 1 500 per month but the average is current okay and when did you launch the company what year we incorporated in 2015. and give me a general sense of kind of where were you at the time you just quit your corporate job or what uh actually it's my fourth startup i had previous ones one a small successful exit but at some point i said that's enough for me i got back to a corporate chat but after six months my now current partners got into my mind and got me into back to startup life so i do both very good and so how many customers have you scaled to today currently we have 150 more than 150 and they are from 15 different countries that's wonderful now i mean does that mean you're doing about 120 grand a month right now on revenue uh erroneous we we are over a bit like 1 hundred thousand okay reach to that point yeah and if you're at a hundred thousand a month today where were you exactly a year ago uh i think it was nearly around fifty five thousand okay so healthy growth starts in the beginning of 2018 there's a big financial crisis in turkey at that time our most customer base was turkey but now we continue with our strong growth with the european customers mostly from uk and germany and our last three months month over month growth is pretty good reaching to 10 and we are still growing with that yeah and now walk me through kind of the early years how did you get your first 10 customers uh at the start we were a bit like a bit like bootstrapping we were a bit like a more software us we were doing some projects for some of the companies and it's not totally far away from segments but it's like a bit like analytics some campaign automation tools and these are are the first customers so you were doing agency work basically you were doing custom development work yeah we do custom project development for them but at that time we also developed segments right and they became the first customers of segments okay and so how many you know how much revenue was the agency doing before you went all in on segmentify oh actually at some point we were doing a few good months like nearly 30 40 000 revenue per month but you know projects doing projects you do very well in one month but in some months then it's gone yeah yeah so have you raised capital for sigmentify are you bootstrapped at the first we bootstrapped but after we incorporated the company and after finishing the program we got our first investment so how much total today have you raised we raised totally 2.5 million euros around nearly three million dollars okay and when was the last round it was it was at the end of 2017 and it was a 1.5 million euro rounds okay so oregon that means right now you're looking to do your next round right not today we we will be we have a still run rate so we will be late by the nearly fourth quarter of 2019. what's there what do you mean you have run rate today how many months of burn do you have left actually we have enough capital by the end of by the mid 2020s but we will have a new round so at the end of 2019 are you being aggressive right now i mean are you operating the company at breakeven or are you burning cash uh no we are born in cash actually like how much like a painful like 100 grand a month or less no it's less but we started a good into that team and you know we we are planning to burn more in the next months so it will decrease our run rates but how how i mean i'm just curious to how aggressive you're being today i mean are we talking like 50 grand a month burn or less around 50 grand and is most that very like you're being aggressive on marketing and stuff or you're being aggressive on growing the team actually bought now we opened our last office in london now we have five people all stay still there and it's burning enough money from there but also we are increasing our tech team so what's a team today how many people it's a 40 people team 4-0 or 1-4 sorry 4-0 or 1-4 four to zero four zero zero yeah and where's everybody base now we have four offices majorities in istanbul our headquarters detective the success team the other team the other offices are in berlin london and paris and these are mostly sales teams okay istanbul berlin and remote that's great now churn's obviously critical in a sas company what's your churn today and how do you think about it uh our last year's turn is around 15 percent per year logo charter revenue churn sorry logo churn or revenue churn the revenue turn is actually the customer turn is a bit less than that but it's revenature okay so we mostly tracking the revenue for that part and it's the most important thing now we are we are adding more people to the success team to decrease chair so our goal is going below 10 this year so do you have any expansion revenue to make up for the 15 that you lost [Music] actually we do we added two new models to the product personalizing not only on the web page and the apps also on emails and push notification channels we do some upsells to our customers we do upsets to 20 customers in last year okay and so how much revenue expansion did that represent it's not that big i can't say 10 percent okay so if you're churning so if you're churning 10 per if you're turning 15 annually and expanding by expanding by ten percent the same cohort your net revenue retention is about ninety five percent yes that's correct that's pretty healthy um what are the plans over the next year i mean do you wanna just continue driving expansion revenue or adding new logos morally about adding new logos because let me tell you about more about how we came up to deal at the beginning we were more focusing on long-tail customers like shopify customers small guys but now we see we can add value to more medium level medium high level customers now a bit switched to in last six months so we we want to add more big customers to our portfolio at that part and also add some additional revenue to adding like new sales channels to these guys and i mean how aggressive are you being on getting these new customers i mean uh so if they're if you're signing them up at a thousand bucks a month will you spend the first year of acv to acquire them uh you know after changing to focus the acquisition costs really changed but on now currently we spend around five to six thousand dollars required and with this all right average it's nearly eight months seven months to get to break even for a customer that's that's not bad yeah that's not bad would you would you guys consider if someone came to you i mean you're doing what 100 a month right now so you're doing 1.2 million annually if someone came and offered you 5 million bucks to buy the company would you sell no why not you know i think we found two new high growth phase now switching to the customers adding new channels and we see huge growth potential we have go we have a really good place to go so not for now all right oregon let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book actually i was thinking about that i'll give a bit different answer from other guys it's wickman's traction i get a grip on your business you know i'm a software developer guy and this book really helped me to think more about it's what's it called get a grip on your business sorry what's it called get a grip on your business yeah the main title is traction but the tagline is get a grip on your business number two is there a ceo you're following or studying [Music] i will not give a startup guys first satya nadella from microsoft i think he does a great job converting a microsoft i like to follow him and also ellen he's doing some crazy job but it's really fun to watch number three what's your favorite...