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...