How Siftrock CEO Adam Schoenfeld grew Siftrock to $1.1M revenue and 140 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Adam Schoenfeld he is the CEO of a company called sift rocked he joined his ex post facto co-founder in October 2016 he's passionate about all things related to SAS marketing and sales previously he was a founder and CEO at Simply Measured in the social analytic space he's also a beauty member at visible leader in the b2b marketing attribution space Adam are you ready to take it to the top let's do it all right I remember Simply Measured back that was you know the heyday for those companies back in 2012 when wildfire vitru buddy media all those guys sold you sell the same time I know later it was it was uh I was in the business for a long time grew it and then it I left the business to come join sifter out and then it's sold to sprout social posts was that got it what did would it I mean size-wise what might get up to you guys were a couple million in a are right can you share no can't share details of that it was it was definitely more than a couple but I can't can't share details about why'd you leave why not stay with sprout social through like an earn out or something um so I actually left before the the sprout social acquisition and for me you know the company had grown we're over 100 employees you know had some success I'd learned a ton and I really love the the earlier stages of a business yeah and I wanted to go do something I want to go bootstrap a business actually I wanted to try different model and when I met Chris who was had started sift rocks so though I was just drawn to him and his energy and so I just had the opportunity to go do something else that was really passionate about yeah I'm sorry my numbers were way off too because yeah I mean you guys had raised I mean there was well I know one round you'd a debt that's simply measure was like 20 million you guys had raised a significant amount of capital right yeah we did yeah we went on the the VC path and and we did put a lot of capital in the company and as you know you were you know you're in that space at a similar time and yeah you know a lot a lot of companies that space got very crowded very quickly yeah it was a that space was a show I mean we had all kinds of different lis at different times there were some I should have probably moved forward with there were others that I should have said no to but um yeah I'm glad we got out of that space I'll just leave it at that so why get into walk me through you're doing today so what's company view and how do you make money yeah SAS model we work on annual subscriptions and we saw this sort of niche in b2b email marketing so if you send any volume of email to leads and customers you know whether you're sending on webinar invites or following up on white papers what happens after your email sends go out is you get a bunch of replies back mm-hmm like out of office messages and notifications that somebody's changed jobs those things just happen right and then you get people who actually want to talk to you and that's how many more and more so swift rock is basically managing and mining all of those replies so we take the hand-raisers the real people that want to talk to you we send with a sales rep we look at the out of office messages for signatures we look at the left companies to clean your database so this this process that just works behind the scenes to basically help you automate and kind of improve your process after the send okay and and so I love the products but I'm also curious about like how you ended up here so you said de facto CEO there's a lot of words and that bio which means usually some hit the fan and you had to come in I mean what happened why'd you come in and see his co-founder CEO I wish there was a juicy story about that hitting the fan but you know I used the Jason Lemkin ex post facto CEO because I came in as co-founder as CEO after the company had been founded sure we actually company was founded in December 2014 ok yeah so he'd been running it for about two years solo so you know one guy technical guy also a very entrepreneurial super impressed I mean can you imagine right he'd built the product he validated with early customers he sold early customers he iterated the product he built multiple integrations solo and he just got to a point where it was like hey either I need a co-founder to handle sales and marketing and help me take this to the next level or I need to sell the business yeah I said let's go do it yeah what did and he paid bootstrapped it at that point right yeah absolutely bootstraps and it says amazing so up to where you're at today so I mean it bootstrap have you raced capital fully bootstrapped ok it's too good Europe taking a full 180 from your previous ventures huh yeah you know I learned a lot through that process and I wanted to try this way I'm not like violently opposed to the VC model yeah I just think there's lots of businesses and lots of opportunities to you know take a different approach to take a more a little bit of a slower kind of more intentional approach to kind of the market and that's what we're doing here plus it's a way better story for you to take podcast interviews from your closet than it is some big fancy boardroom you spend all your VC money on all right tell me more about the kinds of customers you're working with so I mean like on average what would you say the average customers paying you per month yeah so on average existing business it's 7,500 per year okay and the kind of customers are you know people who send a good amount of email and who use a marketing automation platform so folks like a Valera LogMeIn procorp Glassdoor you know people that have a pretty big database they're nurturing those leads they're emailing their customers they use Marketo Eloqua HubSpot or part those are the platforms we primarily integrate with mm-hmm and what's the difference between someone paying 700 bucks per year to your expansion or every door they might pay 20 30 40 50 grand a year what what pricing axes are you selling up on yeah we just added the the second axis of features so we have we have a feature I have to feature SKUs and then we have volume basically volume of replies that we process which is a function of how much email they send so interest area Buhl's and which one is more effective for your salespeople for upselling is it just driving more usage to get more volume and that's the most effective no-touch way to upsell probably for upsell it's the features because you can't change their volume you know what I mean so we have no ability to affect that where we can kind of inspire them to try something new on the feature axis and so that's where a lot of our product development is to enhance our second feature skew and add a third the volume it's just do you send or do you not I mean they can expose this to more business units and regions to get more volume but pretty much at the start of the contract we know how much volume they're going to generate and what if you guys now scale to in terms of total customers using the platform we're about 140 customers okay that's pretty good so so I mean if I take a hundred forty times seventy five hundred bucks I mean I can kind of get into like generally are you guys are passed or flirting with that million dollar mark right now yeah we just hit that we just hit the million of air our mark last mile - congratulations that's that's a big I mean that's a big milestone yeah I know I'm super proud of it I mean a six employee we just hired a sixth employee so you know functionally a five employee company retail I know they are are on zero capital I think it's a cool milestone I mean it's it's small relative to many of your guests on the show obviously when you're talking hundreds of millions but it's always hedge the atom I don't understand why can I tell you a secret the the interviews I do with people that are at your level get almost three times the downloads as when I have Ryan on from Qualtrics and they're about to IPO it's you know why because those are inspirational but they're not actionable like your this episode will be actionable you're gonna say things that other people at your exact same oh they can go try it sure yeah no I love it I love kind of operating this size figuring out what it takes to get from 100k to a million it's a it's a fun problem and you try to get from one to two and you just sort of take it one day at a time yeah what's interesting to me though is so how old are you today thirty-five got a few grades coming in not too bad though it's interesting to me how you're able to put your mind back in this mode after you know I mean you guys raise north of 2530 million I think it's simply measured I mean it's a very different thing to grow at that kind of capital behind you versus the mindset you're in now I mean have you done anything to shift your mindset that way or no it's easier than I'm making it sound it's hard sometimes I mean I think but I like it because it keeps you keeps you humble right like I have to write copy for the website I have to design images for our LinkedIn ads right like I am I have my hands in the weeds of the operation and I love...