How Simplycast CEO Saeed El-Darahali grew Simplycast to $15M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is holly he's the president and ceo of simplycast a leading provider of multichannel automated marketing services which empower businesses of all sizes to create manage and track their own marketing campaigns all right so you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so for having me nathan yeah so is this help me understand who you're selling to so i'm selling to be b2b businesses around the world okay give me an example of a customer how are they using you so one of our top customers is a university and a bank both of them are using us to engage their clients in a multi-channel approach okay be specific so the university does what so the university is basically helping students before they come on campus to understand the type of services that they're going to be offering and how to basically fit in within um you know the university community uh when they get on campus sms email and voice that's what i say so the channels are sms media and voice um that's good okay so what i mean give me a general sense your sweets but here on average what are companies paying to use your technology annually yeah so uh the large enterprises are probably paying anywhere is between 100 to a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and the small clients are paying on average about a thousand dollars a year okay okay so very different kind of market segments right if you if i forced you into an average is it more like a thousand or like a hundred grand uh average about fifty thousand okay right in the middle fair enough okay and then put this on the timeline for me when you get the idea when you launch yeah so uh simplycast has been around for about 10 years we're celebrating our 10-year anniversary on the 20th of september and how i came up with it is i used to be in the canadian armed forces back in the in the good old days and the armed forces didn't have a way to communicate on a dime and i said there's going to be a huge opportunity for companies uh to basically put together a complete platform of 30 applications and channels and that's how the idea came about so 2009 you'd get going how much did you invest in the technology the platform before your first dollar of revenue uh we've probably invested less than a quarter of a million dollars okay so did you bootstrap this with your own money or did you raise uh we bootstrapped it without my own money and we had about 11 investors uh um basically friends families and fools um that put about 750 000 in the early days to get to where we're at today but that's pretty much the all the money that we put in we don't have any uh any venture capitalist or uh um you know institutional financing that's great so 750 of your own money plus friends and family and how many customers are you serving now today uh there's probably over 300 000 on the on the platform today you have 300 000 universities and yeah okay so how many people how many customers do you have today uh custom uh customers we have never actually shared that information online so i wouldn't probably want to share that today so okay well give me a general range are we talking like a handful of like 10 or like a thousand oh oh thousands yes okay okay so thousands of paying customers and on average um like you know a university when they sign up or your typical customer they're going to sign up a team of like 10 people on the platform or a team of like a thousand users yeah so uh the last university that just signed on board i think had about 180 users is that average i know that's that would be uh from uh you know from a small business perspective it's usually in the five to tens um and the universities is usually in the 50s to 100 this one was a little larger than than most because it became a campus-wide initiative okay so i mean if you've got 300 000 total users right and maybe 10 seats per account that would put you at something like 30 000 paid customers uh yeah sure if that's what you want to guess go ahead yeah well i'm i'm speculating here because you said the you know a sweet spot size might be 10 seats per per customer absolutely i would say thousands for now nathan okay um good uh moving i mean by the way the reason i'm asking is because if you're saying thousands which implies more than a thousand right but less than ten thousand right two thousand times that price point you just gave me obviously you can do the math and that puts you at four million dollars a month in revenue potentially well no no those are the numbers you gave me you just said fifty thousand dollar acvs was your arpu so that's two grand a month times north of two thousand customers is four million dollars a month yeah and uh that's a guess from your perspective but i'll share that information to be clear it's not it's not a yes you just said your rpoo was fifty thousand dollars in in annual revenue that's two grand a month and you just said thousands of paying customers our poo times customer account equals mrr so i'm not guessing i don't like being accused of guessing i'm using numbers you told me and i'm multiplying so if you want to correct one of those you can correct them yeah i don't at this point we don't like sharing that information online well you already shared it so it's clearly inaccurate do you want us do you want you either don't have two thousand customers right or your product is way lower than fifty thousand yeah i don't wanna i don't wanna correct it either so go ahead any other questions okay so well just to be clear when i'm asking you questions i'd like to get honest answers i don't wanna make my audience go a different direction right so understand if i'm going to ask very different questions if you're selling to enterprise versus smb yes right or if you're going for a university market versus an smb two-seat market sure but i can i can't really share that information i'm sorry as a private company syed you did share data points that's the issue you shared them you misled and when i asked the multiplication question you then said they're now not accurate i'm not trying to get you to cut you to share information you don't want to share i'm taking what you already chose to share and multiplying yeah i don't understand no okay and they're not accurate so if you don't if you don't want to correct them i want to just be clear for the rest of the interview please don't give me numbers and mislead because those were not accurate correct okay so growing from 2009 you bootstrapped the company 750 into the company what does a team look like today and how do you kind of differentiate what they're working on yeah so we're developing the roadmaps based on customers and what they're basically providing us nathan uh we're focused on the growth of uh each of the enterprise clients and the various uh capabilities that they're looking at so what is the team total team size today yeah so today we have about 40 people 40 folks and do you have an inside sales motion or is it organic or outbound what's that look like yeah so a lot a lot of our customers come to us based on word of mouth and we do have a lot of uh you know inbound coming in as well and we do uh some advertisement okay when you look at again your enterprise cohort with the higher acvs obviously they're not just going to put a credit card in online for 50 000 ace fees there has to be an inside sales motion there's to some degree how do you set up kind of your inside sales team today how many folks are you know quota carrying yeah so we have about seven inside sales folks that are working uh with our various customers and some of those folks are also account managing the clients depending on the size of of them but the majority of them are basically taking the leads as they come in the referrals are coming from some of the clients and then once that happens those customers are basically upgraded into account management do the how do you how does it go is it like an sdr to an ae to customer success manager or what's the flow there yeah no we've actually reduced that so that's the typical in the industry as you can imagine uh we've reduced it from sales to account management and pretty much everything happens within that account management role okay so you don't have sdrs uh there's no customer success reps there's just account executives and account managers correct and they are usually x account success folks but we've upgraded them into a single so every single customer in our company has a single point of contact and has multiple alternatives okay so you have seven again you have seven kind of aes right now correct okay how do you how do you figure out what the right ratios in terms of like portfolio managed per ae like is it a thousand is it account based like number of accounts or is it size or geographical uh location basis smart questions uh so uh no more than a hundred per uh per account for example um once they sorry a million dollars 100 what per account 100 customers or users 100 100 customers so one one customer for example let's say one of the universities at 180 uh that would be one account manager um and in that case there's a specific quota so an account manager can't have more than five to ten million dollars of of accounts that they're managing and they could hire multiple smaller um you know juniors to support them but the main contact is with the account manager okay so let me repeat that back to make sure i understand other seven account managers right now used to essentially say okay...