How Showpad CEO Peter Minne grew Showpad to $145M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is PJ Brownton he's is the CEO and founder of a company called show pad it's the second company he's founded in 2010 he co-founded the mobile development agency in the pocket and still serves on its board prior to in the pocket he held senior roles at netlog and Accenture and holds master's degrees both communication sciences and international business PJ are you ready to take us to the top yes let's go all right good tell us about show pad what do you what's it do and how do you make money show Pat were sales enablement platform were focused on first of all making sure marketing understands how to influence the sales cycle so it's about and making sure that they can equip sales with the latest materials make sure sales people can deliver great presentations have more value-added conversations and that they understand how that's driving revenue and then for salespeople we're making sales teams more productive so it's reducing admin time increasing selling time making them more relevant make sure that they can actually deliver the very best buyer experience and we're focused on b2b at thousand customers in about 50 countries okay those are paying right not free paying customers yes got it and just to be clear so this we should think about this like you know we all have this problem we have like 10,000 power points created over you know two or three years in the beam of a company and we never know where we store them or what worked in terms of closing a sale or what not when we need them today we don't know where to find them that's like one big use case for your platform right that's it that's a big use case I mean from from SMBs to big enterprise companies the same is happening everywhere salespeople are downloading content they're changing slides they store it on their hard drives you have box you have sharepoint you have other you know shared drives and it's just a big big mess and so bad we want to be the single source of truth for salespeople making it easier for marketing to create what we call buyer experiences so think about from simple folder file structures in a branded environment to easily find a content to really guided selling highly interactive ways of prison anything material sharing materials asking questions to the customer and then getting to that right piece of content and we want to do that wherever a salesperson needs to get the job done so we have customers who have big inside sales teams and who mainly do their work behind the laptop or in Salesforce or in the CRM system so we have integrations with Salesforce and Gmail plugins and outlook plugin so PJ give me I don't anymore your back straight here cuz you have some history which is great give me just quick a quick sense of average customers paying you what per month alright or a CV right now is about 30k so $33,000 a year yeah we're real good annual contracts it's paid upfront so that's about twenty five hundred bucks a month yes yeah yeah and and how are you getting that number cuz on your pricing page it's 35 per user per month 45 are you selling just big seat deals to enterprises big CDs to enter probably our biggest customers at 1 million yeah we have now three customers for over a million per year we have a couple of customers in the 500k 600k range per year and so it's and then we have smaller mid-sized companies with maybe you know pays 10 20 K a year yeah I mean with a thousand people at the average a CV you just told me I mean you're well north of call it well you're doing at two and a half million bucks a month and about 30 30 million in ARR correct yep 30 million and air are yeah we crossed mark end of the year that congratulations that's exciting what does growth look like if you go back thirteen months what were you at uh we've grown to business about seventy seventy-five percent a year so you were about 20 million thirteen months ago air our run rate yeah something like that maybe even yeah yeah something like that that's good okay well that's great let's let's dig into kind of how you've driven the success so take us back to year one when did you launch the company we launched company 2011 on the back of for the first company I found it was called in a pocket you mentioned it in your introduction service business I founded a company together with Louis my co-founder and we had their so AB developer service business we had companies coming to us with various requests me at that time again it's 2010 I I phone was just you know I think three years out something like that iPad which just launched or about to launched and so a lot of companies came to us like hey we want to get our content on mobile devices or we want to have products and services optimized for these devices or please develop as an application and so we had a company come to us say hey we have a sales team we have a big trade show we want to stop using paper can you develop us an application to make them present materials on a booth and easily share with the customer and as we started looking into that problem and how how yeah that company used content and what the challenges were we actually discovered like hey this is like it's not you know it's not just a problem for this company like there's many companies that create a ton of content that have that are struggling with equipping reps relevant yeah yeah PJ so that makes total sense but I want to tell me more about the growth there's a lot of companies in this space you know one that comes to my head immediately we had on recently a slide beam but they're nowhere near your size I mean I mean you're from all the people I've interviewed where they give me a are our numbers you're way ahead of these guys why is it just who you're selling to no it's it's a great source for the great product first of all so I think we've delivered something that time T value is clear we we solve a true problem for both marketing and sales so it's not only sales focused or marketing focused it makes it a bit harder to sell but your deal size is from the start from the first week we had bigger customers approach can you be specific though give me like name one feature that these bigger customers appreciated that other competitors haven't developed I mean there's I think the first the very first feature back in the day I'm now talking seven years ago was the fact that shop ad was a fully branded environment you could really you could basically create your own application at that time if you wanted to have your own app on your on your mobile device or iPad you had to go to the App Store and the whole submission and companies were creating their own apps but show pad you could through an aunt through an interface a web interface marketing could create their own buyer experience at that time already backgrounds own logo create this really yeah interactive environments for sellers to sell and it was something at that time it sounds simple but nobody had it and it was quite it was quite hard back in the day remember the first applications would constantly crash on her phone and on your iPad and we were talking here b2b enterprise we're selling to bigger companies they don't want to equip their sales team with something and at that time we were mobile focused now today we're a bigger platform and we do more but at that time the fact that we had a enterprise-grade application which was super stable super snappy simple interface it had all the content branded environment it's not it wasn't like that we had one magic feature that really triggered those customers to buy it it was the fact that yeah I mean Peter just speaker there's not never a silver bullet but you made incremental changes 2% changes over time that I've added up I'm trying to identify some of those early 2% changes what I'm hearing is you're hyper focus on mobile early on was a big differentiator yeah and that was really the start yep yeah for sure that was so today in terms of getting new customers if I asked you like what distribution channel are you dominating are you in any kind of Salesforce app exchanges or any kind of channels where you're really killing it we're in the epics chains I mean it's it's not it's not from an acquisition point of view it's not our main focus or our biggest channel it's just direct sales we do all of our sales is directly we we don't have resellers we don't have we are in the Salesforce ecosystem we are in the Box ecosystem we are in several I mean we integrate with a ton of content management solutions we integrate with Salesforce on the CRM side we're launching or marquetta integration soon and also gonna go into marketing automation but these aren't driving your new customers you're just doing it for a narration sake yeah it for integration system our main channel is just direct marketing and and and you know acquiring customers to our own marketing and our own outbound efforts so so tell me more about the app and let's break down team today and how many of them are focused on outbound we have so Sherpa has it we have an office and we have an office in Ghent 150 people here then we have office in which country is PJ which which countries again Belgium sorry got ya again Belgium that's where I'm actually calling you from today so Shabbat was founded here again Belgium hundred fifty people here we have 50 people in San Francisco about 30 people in Portland 20 people in Chicago that's growing and then 20 30 people in London so it's over 80 total something like that yeah something like that north of 250 growing quite fast and then so on the outbound side we have here in Kent we have about 15 SDRs or BD our business development reps people who do our bound efforts they're mainly main focuses on bigger enterprise companies so Sherpa has a we go to market in a mid-market an enterprise way and so our BD ours here again target enterprise companies in in the AMIA region we have where are you getting the leaves from by the way are they inbound lanes or cold they're cold emailing let's call it so it's we don't we typically don't do call either emailing anymore we've done in the past we've seen it's not highly effective so it's a lot of inbound that we nurture and then based on certain activity levels we're gonna have a more proactive approach in terms of getting in touch getting in touch with them over the phone or trying to get them to one of our webinars or events or exam so I don't know 280 people how many are dedicated to sales so we have about 35 AES or you know from upsell to new business so quota carrying people and then we were gonna have about 30 you know probably 30 as DRS or be DRS across both continents how real quick diving and a lot of a lot of folks that are in the 15 to 20 million range that are listening to the show are starting to really scale their sales it sounds like you've come up with a formula you can understand how it works as you're on your you have 35 quota carrying reps what are the first off are they all in the same corridor is it different depending on how long they've been there yeah it's a different obviously there's a ramp and the ramp will be different from mid market to enterprise and for us that the ramp for a typical mid market person will be it will be close to six months before a mark it's really productive for an enterprise that will be closer to a year before on full quota no quota for both those segments full quota for open enterprise will be around a million for enterprise sales and will be around 600 K for mid-america so just to be clear naina price salesperson at show pad is expected at quota after a year to be hitting about a million new bucks and ARR and they're closing that over the course of 12 months yes interesting interesting that's great how did you did you kind of nail that right off the spotter to take you some editing to figure out ramp up periods and how many leads to give them and how many STRs / ayee I would say it took a lot of going back and forth and actually to be honest we're you're still in in many ways I think as a sales organization you're always going you're not making massive changes but you're you're always I think you always need to be focused on fine-tuning the engine and seeing what works and what doesn't work and we've made some for example we've made some changes in terms of what is the what is the cutoff point for mid market and enterprise in the past what shop it has mid market so that's 0 to 2,000 employees then Enterprise is 2,000 and Beyond but then we also have a global enterprise account team and those are like four people focused on there really yeah those are named accounts between the four of them they have about a I would say about a hundred probably you know 100 hundred accounts that were focused on on either closing or expanding and and so depending on obviously and that then trickles down to how you market howdy BTR's work and so now looking like you're fully weighted kak I know you have probably different cohort tax but on it I mean what are you spending on kak on these guys or our race I don't know the exact numbers in terms of like you know spend in the segment's I don't have them here but are you know what is it kak / or LTV / CSC is about four races for and what do you think lifetime value is our lifetime value we calculated based upon our grocery tension which is in the single-digit churn so a single-digit annually and as a revenue it's a single-digit annually in that's revenue okay on that's good yeah yeah and that retention is 130 percent or 130 percent now last year so basically means for we're upselling a rough selling or existing customer base like like crazy and that's yeah that's the combination of product innovation and then obviously getting better at selling it yeah so just to be clear if you're low single-digit in terms of revenue churn annually then you know let's call your turn in five percent of your revenue annually what you're saying is you're expanding revenue almost thirty five percent five percent makes up the loss and then there's 30 percent on top of that to get your net revenue growth yeah yeah that's nating interesting okay so so your cocktail to you have a nice ratio there are four with that kind of revenue turn I mean you must assume that these guys are worth at least four years of revenue to you right call like at least 120 yeah our LTV is actually now around the 200 K Mario so yep yep so with a four ratio there you're willing to spend up to 550 grand to acquire these guys fully weighted yeah yeah yeah I'm sure and then how do you did you look at payback period a lot in terms of how quickly your money back or not yeah we look at it I mean now it's you know it's it's it's depending on the set I mean average across show but it's about its close to two years so it's in the 1/2 the 2 year range I think if you would break it down you would see differences obviously I think would enterprise you you can just you afford a longer payback because churn is even lower in that segment and their lifetime value is very bigger and so we're now I feel around the this the maturity at show pad is right now if you would talk to my marketing leader a sales leader or for example a Jason or CEO we're starting to like really be more focused on those metrics as I feel we've looked at them over the last years but I feel at this stage is the first time that you can you know since I think 2016 and 17 or the first two years that we you need to have you need to build up the data you need to have ensuring you you have enough customers but you have we're running in time no I mean I know people that have only around two or three years that are raising huge amounts of money on two years of data you've got seven years of data so okay and are you bootstrap Derby race capital every race capital how much about ninety ninety million okay and well when was the first round first round was 2013 so the first two years we bootstrapped the business we saw vanity we got to 400k for 500k in ARR before we raised our first round which was for how much which was we raised one and a half million euros you went to the dark side PJ yes and win-win and when was the last round and what was the size last round we did we did a twenty five million dollar round just a couple of weeks ago okay congratulations yeah it was a kind of let's see it as a we raised fifty million in 2016 which is a pretty big round and then yeah but yeah end of last year we got a lot of interest from several VCS who were not in the company they were putting out term sheets you actually didn't need the money but we we then decided hey you know what if there's this interest and we can raise money on good terms our existing investors willing to put in additional cash yes sometimes people assume around where you raise less than a previous round is a negative thing they assume that's a it's a negative signal what you're saying is no wasn't negative we just had extra interest was that that was not a down round right it was a higher valuation in the 50 million it was double the value okay we've got the year before that's great that's awesome okay good stuff let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one PJ what's the last business book you read last business book is this a was it give less more handsome mark Manson yeah this is the subtle art of not giving a basis not giving a I liked it so it was a chunk of land sizable number two is there a CEO that you follower study Aaron Levie I like number three is there a favorite size earners their favorite online tool you have for building a business and my favorite I mean my favorite actually cool for growing the business is whatsapp I'm constantly on whatsapp just on my computer and on my phone number four how many obviously forget and every night I get about seven seven that gets good and what's your situation married single you have kids I'm married and I have two young kids oh great and Howard are you PJ I'm 36 36 last question take us back to your 20 year old self what he was she knew that yeah sometimes you need a bit more patience in life there you guys have it from PJ be more patient yet a lot of successes decided to go out on his own in 2011 which about foreigner' grand in ARR before going out doing the first one point five million dollar around again helping enterprises manage their sales content their sales communications really starting on mobile which gave him a great beachhead in the space he sends scaled a thousand customers payment average 30,000 a CVS so doing about 30 million in error right now that's up from about 20 million in air are just 13 months ago so healthy growth there 70 percent year-over-year growth 130 percent net revenue retention you every year about five to six percent in gross revenue churn so healthy expansion their CAC 2lt be super healthy ratio for getting paid back in less than two years scale and fast PJ thanks for taking us to the top all right you're welcome