Sellution revenue, CEO Scott Snyder, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hello everyone my guest today is scott snyder he grew up in the suburbs of philadelphia and studied business at psu after he started working as a 3d vfx artist he ventured into manufacturing wholesaling distribution of electronic novelties during the recession he realized that businesses that business had changed forever and in order to compete businesses were going to need a whole new set of tools this gave rise to his company solution scott are you ready to take us to the top yeah how are you doing good man thanks for jumping on so tell us what the company does and and how you make money all right so what we've created is a unified platform that streamlines your sales marketing and customer service and commerce into one system it's a sas platform we're doing a uh monthly membership fee okay and and what's the membership fee uh we're ranging from right now 35 up to 113 dollars uh just the entry level starter plans at 35 then we go up to 80 then 113 on the enterprise plan which is you know get everything that you need okay and how many customers today scott right now what we've done is we've launched an early adopter program so we're uh we have early adopters in the platform but it's uh pre-revenue right now okay so these are free they're pre-revenue so you're not sure what price point you'll go with yet well i think it's probably going to go up because we're really targeting the smb market but right now in this phase right now we are focusing on companies here in the united states and singapore that are closer to like more of a startup phase where they're selling products into the smb market yep so what year did you found the company and how have you been building this so technically it was founded last year but uh the system's been developed over the last three years all right how about how have you funded the development self-funded okay so how much have you put in a lot i'm not we're doing that right now that that's relative i mean we're talking 100 or a million or what let's say over a million dollars you put over a million but why on earth this is a serious platform you can't have those four big pillars sales marketing customer service and commerce and not having to make a big investment scott just be clear though just because you've put a lot of your own money in the thing doesn't mean it's a big like it's a big deal it just means you spent more than a million bucks so far why why i mean this doesn't seem like a good strategy why wait so long to test revenue um it's well there's validation i mean we ran a lot of qualitative research it wasn't like just uh jump into this with a huge investment with no anticipation of a need for it we ran validation tests on it what does that mean well you know qualitative research where we're talking to people that are looking for solutions to their problems and finding and identifying do you need a unified platform and it's overwhelmingly yes i mean you can see all the big players that are out there right now are trying to move into a so-called unified platform but their approach is that they're going to go and acquire different companies that have pieces to the puzzle they're not a truly built platform from the ground up that's unifying all of these uh sales marketing customer service features but scott you asked these people i mean you're a good looking guy you're rocking the whole salt and pepper look i mean who the hell is gonna say no they're all gonna say yeah of course i need this how do you know they're not bullshitting you i mean you could go and take a look at gartner research and all kinds of research out there it's overwhelmingly uh you know everything's moving in that direction we're entering into an experience economy right now and it's no longer going to be about what you're selling it's really about the customer experience so if you want to differentiate yourself you're going to need your customer data unified no matter how you look at it and trying to go and piece it together from a whole bunch of different apps using different vendors different databases you're not going to really be able to compete so we're coming into the market with a system that's going to give you access to your customer data at a fraction of the cost and are you specificating sorry are you targeting any specific niche for this yeah we're targeting the manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry specifically right now manufacturing and wholesale and uh for the smd market primarily companies that are doing under 100 million dollars in revenue and they are located here in the united states insane okay walk me through the team today how many folks on the team we have 10 people on the team today okay and how much are you burning every month while you wait for revenue to kick in we're we're not waiting anymore we're we're ready to we're ready to go out there and start to acquire our customers well your pre-revenue today you don't have revenue yet so over the past over the past 30 days how much like what what how much money have you been losing every month what are you burning the the company's burning uh previously i mean we look at like somewhere upwards of uh 17 to 20k a month okay are you married not married i couldn't be married doing this i was gonna say does it does it give your spouse heartburn [Laughter] no no no i really anticipated that scott people are gonna be listening to this going where did this guy get this money i mean did you just save this up it was just a diligent process over many years or did you have an exit before this or what i was doing manufacturing wholesale distribution industry developing products in china importing them into the united states distributing them around the world primarily electronic novelties and then what does that mean what is an electronic novelty well the products that i was developing are promotional product items like tchotchke things that you give away at trade shows and events most of the items that we were making were like you know the cost of making that was under a dollar but we had we actually had a lot of you know distribution issues that we'd have to face and through that born out of the frustration of trying to build a robust company the the you know the it was the impetus for building this platform when did you get out of that business and officially enter this one was that back in 2016 no no no i'd say like over uh yeah kind of like towards 2017. okay and are you the sole owner of this in this new company or founders no i i'm the founder okay okay and your team of ten where's everyone based we're based here in the united states singapore and a few other countries uh germany and actually morocco believe it or not okay so everyone's remote remote for the most part for the most part yeah who sits behind you at the desk that's my other uh position right there for working on my laptop oh got it that's your own dance multitasking you know how it is right but we're trying to automate the process so nobody has to sit behind the desk yeah all right take me back to this advisory group you've put together how many people are in it today and are these your friends or how do you curate the group okay so no i'm i'm going out uh we're using like outbound call strategies because most of this has to be outbound this type of platform is more complex where it's we're not going to just like open the floodgates and start trying to figure out how to use it so it's much more hand-holding doing a networking events trade shows and then going through and finding and identifying companies that are struggling and showing them how they can use the system to streamline their whole entire sales marketing customer service and why can't they use other tools out there that already streamline this stuff but maybe do it for kind of broader niches like like other marketing automation tools no they can they absolutely can it's just very complicated to rig everything together so if you want to have a dedicated consultant and somebody that's there to try to make sense of all the numbers you can go that path but you're going to see that it's a lot easier and much more cost efficient to do it with a unified platform and we're not saying that you can't continue to use the tools that you're already using we're building deep integrations you can do that and we're also approaching like you know when we talk about like unified commerce it's really everybody's focused on a multi-channel sales approach right now so you got to have depending on if you're in the manufacturing industry you're going to want to have a place that unifies all your different sales channels as well one one single truth the other thing is when you use a whole bunch of different platforms it's really a morale killer for your employees because it's a lot harder for them to do their job when everything is right there and unified you can make sense of the customer's needs wants and desires and then everybody is able to focus on growing the business yeah i guess scott my question is there's a lot of companies that will build themselves all-in-one marketing automation or experience management your angle what you told me is you have a unique kind of insight into the manufacturing space so your tools are specifically built for that that space what are things that your industry needs that's something like a hubspot or market or other market automation tools they they can't speak to that market right now market research so like really understanding your customer when you look at some of these other platforms the data is pretty much you enter it and then what it's not tied to the transaction so the transactional data is what really needs to drive your automation and when you're just entering you know data it's not really connected to something that's going to tell you like who is your best customer right so when we can go and use things like recency frequency and monetary scoring you're going to identify who are these best customers not just by putting some arbitrary lead score on them we can find out who they really are that are the ones that are spending the most with you all right when do you turn robin how many people are in this group and when do you start asking them to pay you uh we're actually i just finished uh a training uh just before getting on the line here and that's where we're moving into now so it's like first quarter starting to um convert these uh early adopters into paying customers how many of them are there right now right now we have there's ten companies in singapore and we have five here in uh southern california okay and so what's it sound like i mean the outreach to them when you ask them to pay sounds like what it's well that's part of the you know the rapport that's been developed through the early adopter program is we've established a relationship where it's pretty much clear that they want to continue to use the platform so it's it's not like a hard sell we've established the fact that's part the whole point you know building that relationship and also getting to understand their business more and then actually through this program we've been helping them implement the system so it's it's but what are you looking at what metric are you looking at to see if they're going to be active enough they're actually getting value there must be some specific metric you're looking at usage metric well yeah i mean well just daily daily active users who's logging in uh what are the amount of contacts that they're entering into the database and so forth okay how many how many how many contacts do you think they need to enter to start getting real value from it you know for it depends on each company's different so like some of the companies like they're dealing with smaller pools of customers but they're selling at like much higher value products so it's uh you know one company they only have a few thousand contacts but they're selling in a very expensive product so what carries yeah so so you're gonna you know i'm making this up you know hey sam you've been using the product now for free for six months uh you know starting next week we're gonna start charging a hundred bucks a month for this what's your credit card information i mean how's it actually gonna sound like yeah well uh during the early adopter program there's some functionality that requires your credit card information like we have a call center built into the system but no one's done that no one's no one's paid converted no not yet because we're actually just walking them into that process right now and it just happens to be it's at the end of the program so um yeah it's like yeah definitely you know here's an annual contract that uh you know you can either go monthly but we're actually encouraging of course the annual contract interesting most the million you've put in so far going to developers mostly mostly developers and just all around i mean when i talk you know it's completely full dedication to this so there's developers scott you better be if you put a million bucks in yeah i mean come on now so complete dedication into this this is not just like a fly by night up you know no no i i'm not saying that i'm just going this is i would never put i don't care if i would if i had 100 billion dollars i would never put a million dollars into something like i always my thought whenever i get a new business is how what little amount of money can i put in to get the first dollar of revenue not like a friend telling me yeah i'd buy the actual first dollar of revenue and so you you have much higher tolerance there than i do because you've said i'm comfortable putting in more than a million before getting at least a dollar back you know what i the platform was almost built for because myself personally my team we want to use it right so we're hoping everybody else feels the same way and we're really targeting the companies that typically can't afford this type of a platform we're trying to bring that enterprise level uh technology to the smaller businesses yep very good all right let's wrap up your scott with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book right now i'm reading venture deals let's go to a number of by brad feld number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah um a ceo from uh twilio really with uh jeff lawson yep number uh three what's your favorite online tool for building the company every day using uh google gmail google drive you know what g suite very good number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night eight hours that's good in which situation married single kiddos no i'm a single new kids that's good yeah you can be all in and how old are you 30 49 49 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew read more network more guys read more coming from scott again solution is his product essentially all-in-one marketing and experience automation specifically for the manufacturing industry that's what he knows best is what he's came from he's put a million bucks of his own capital in burning about 17 to 20 grand per month with 10 people mostly engineering and developers as he looks to turn on revenue here in the next couple months he's got an advisory group or early adopters using the platform again watching usage metrics hoping to turn those people on and their paid customers in the near future scott thank you so much for taking us to the top thank you nathan