How Singular CEO Icenna Huang grew Singular to $52.6M revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is gadi eliya shiv he is the starting he started programming in his teens to help build a successful data startup that exited to facebook eventually and currently leads singular the top marketing intelligent platform for mobile and cross-platform marketers who need granular insights as well as high level summaries all right gotti you ready to take us to the top yeah all right which was the company you sold to facebook uh i was in navo uh we were part of the senior executive team um one of the first employees in the company and actually all three founders of my current company are actually part of their novel leadership team let's pronounce it or spell it yeah it was always funny it's o-m-a-v-o o-n-a-v okay good and was it i mean was it was it a was it a money exit or was it like a aqua higher we need to roll this thing into facebook exit it was uh it was actually a really good multiplier enough i don't know i mean for probably for the founders it was it was um a serious uh outcome but it didn't make you rich uh not really fair enough all right so so let's let's talk about your current company um singular what's the company do and is it a peer play sas company uh yes so it's a pure play sas company and basically what we do is we call it marketing intelligence platform and the concept is that we help companies especially growth marketers unify all their marketing data transform all this data into meaningful insights and basically optimize their growth and you know i'll give you another second and when we started the company we just noticed how marketers are just faced with all this data in front of them there's easily like 100 platforms that big companies use in their marketing suite and we're just shocked at how hard it is to even answer the most basic questions and at first we thought maybe it's just us we looked at our own company back in our novel and some of our customers but the more we've talked to companies the more we realized oh my god some of the biggest companies in the states in europe are facing the same problem as what we saw so that was really exciting to see and so um help me understand how your pricing so what pricing axis do you upsell against and what's the average customer paying per month would you say uh the average is we actually have a nice iacv so it's about 200k annually right um just be clear that's historical that's arpu not forward-looking what you want to sell acvs at uh yes although it's you know it's it's not yes i mean ideally i'd like every customer to be really big but uh but we've grown that quite a bit so when we started uh we were about 60k acv uh and we've gone to like 200 and a lot of that growth was how we built our product and how we've been able to add more value over time it just had functionality and that's one of the exciting paths of that we've chosen is bringing the platform to play and just expanding functionality with customers over time yes scotty just to be clear you're currently in an enterprise obviously playbook right at a 200 000 acv um historically you're as low as 60. so when you look at your historical arpu um the average customer is paying what 70 80 90 grand a month i mean a year oh no so that's the beautiful part we've been able to increase that cohort dramatically as well what we've done is both of the historical cohorts as well as the new ones yeah like 170 150 to 100 i mean yeah that's the ring okay fair enough all right and then put this on a timeline for me when you launch uh launched in 2014 um in about a minute or so in july and why 2014 did you were you leaving facebook at that point or what uh yeah so actually we have a funny story about that i'll tell you in a sentence we basically uh i was zero navo uh kind of sensed an acquisition is coming um and i felt that's my chance to um uh leave and start a company right now otherwise i'll have golden handcuffs so how'd you feel that way how did you know an acquisition was coming we were part of the management team so you know we were i was close to a ceo and then we knew at high level i didn't know all the details but you know we're seeing enough to understand that it's coming uh but also i've been in the company for such a long time and um you know i've known the founders really well i gave them like a nine months notice we were that close just to be clear weren't you didn't you join that team in 2011 oh yes so i mean you you were there i mean you're only there about a year and what a year and a half a year almost two years right so nine i mean you gave them nine month kind of runway but i mean you weren't there a long time yeah i was a con i was i guess a consultant in the beginning even though i was like full time i was still studying um doesn't that screw them though if facebook is in the middle of negotiations to buy them and they see assuming you are extremely important one of the extremely important people giving notice doesn't that screw the offer i you know in a way every engineer is valuable and every i was a leader of you know research and so it was valuable but um facebook saw much more than the than the team it wasn't equipped higher you know they bought the business or they bought the data and so it was meaningful enough where i think you know i don't think i personally made an impact or any single employee would make an impact um and even if if i did it was minimal um and um you know the ceo was uh amazing with me like he you know tried to keep me as much as he could and at first at some point i just told him look i want to do it now when he started company i was honest with him from day one and i said that and uh he was fair enough to say you know what gotti good luck i'll help you and he's been helping ever since so was it what there's a lot of people that said facebook did this deal because they wanted office in israel i assume that was probably part of it but additionally i mean this is facebook's getting into trouble some you know some trouble right now in terms of what they're doing on apps that look like they're kind of you know consumer facing will help you use the app more efficiently but really it's a research tool i mean this was really a research tool they were buying and that's what the value they saw um i think that they saw value from multiple angles so i think yes the research role the data was meaningful and again you know i wasn't that close to the final negotiations and everything that happened i mean i left before the acquisition so my knowledge of what happened after is very limited um but i can only guess that the data was valuable but also the team members like we built the killer team and all of our guys no but you can't say that if you're leaving you can't say the team is really important and then when i ask you well why didn't the value decrease when you left then say well no i wasn't important i was as head of research no i it's not to say i wasn't important it's just that i don't think that i as a single person as important as i was and i think that you know i was very important how many people were on the team at the point i'm sorry how many people were on the team when you sold um wow i don't remember maybe a hundred okay maybe more fair enough all right let's let's focus back let's focus back on you so 2014 you you sense an acquisition is coming you leave 2014 you launched singular um what so you've had four or five years now doing this how many customers have you scaled to uh about 150 200 something like that okay and walk me through the first like five this is like this is like where you're like hustling your ass off these are the fun moments how'd you get the first five wow uh that's crazy so we before first um when we started combat base in as well and we officially uh started the company in the us i had one co-founder in the us me and another co-founder and as well and we started the company one of the things we did was um just start by going to local customers in israel and i remember the first time they actually made fun of us that we don't even have an entity but the goal for us was just to come in and ask them some questions who who did you go into uh we usually went to heads of marketing vps of marketing uh back then but what was the company oh um there's a company called get taxi or now it's called get which is like a lift competitor and how did you network your way into the head of marketing there um it's funny i guess you know um i've known some mutual people i've asked for introduction in the early days as an entrepreneur you just gotta use whatever network you have even if it's very slim and you kind of build it from there uh i think we even you know actually in the really early days what we did was we put a self-service mock-up of the of the product on on the web and uh we answered some questions on quora and people were asking like how do i look at my roi how do i even understand what's going on in my marketing and we're like oh you should use singular and so people would come in sort of their self-service portal...