How Singular CEO Icenna Huang grew 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 they would um connect all their different technologies which is like the kind of the beginning of the onboarding of our product and then we'll show them a page saying oh we'll contact you uh to talk about the next the remainder of the onboarding so some of the leads came that way um and really the first five customers were just using our network or maybe some inbound did you close get taxi oh yeah yeah they're actually customer number one that's awesome all right that's good stuff so i mean can i take 150 customers times that acv you gave me earlier to back into revenue um i mean is that accurate that would put you at about 2.1 million a month right now uh yeah probably wouldn't comment on that but well i'm taking your numbers i mean you already commented you said 150 customers and earlier you said 170 000 ac historical average that would put you at two points multiplication that would put you at 2.1 million a month yeah you can put something in that range i guess yeah okay well just correct them though if they're wrong i mean are one of the numbers you already gave me not accurate or higher or lower uh no it's just um you know there's uh different i mean i guess that um the way i factor the tiers uh no it's actually it's it's not it's not accurate so yeah i just i want it to be quoted on your uh i guess on your website if that's okay well no no that it's fine but i just want to make sure so you you've broken two million a month at this point that that that would mean you have 150 customers at 170 thousand dollar acv on average yeah i said that ranges i said like 150 to 200 is it 150 to 200 customers so you kind of can can use that ballpark for the higher or lower ends uh as well yeah so then look i want to do the most conservative so then we'll go down 150 000 acb with your minimum 150 customers that would call it 1.8 a month something like that yeah will you break 2 million a month this year you think are you still that's too far out uh no we will you will okay and what's and what's the growth look like so if you're caught 1.8 you know a month today where were you a year ago um we were growing um last year was actually really strong and um what we've done last year was we even acquired a company uh which is something i never thought i would hold on hold on let's just let's focus on that yeah we'll go back to i want to get we'll dive into that in a second but so you're doing 1.8 today what were you doing a year ago january 2018. god let me see the numbers i'm pretty sure that we've either reached 100 or close to 100 percent so you're doing like 900 grand a month about a year ago see yeah all right it's funny you're asking me about the month and our cfo for the last six months is kicking my ass to talk ar so if you want to talk to neil we're not thinking monthly anymore um yeah something like yeah maybe more than that if i'm looking at your numbers like 900 times 12 probably more than that but yes okay that was a very confusing answer have you doubled your every year uh last two years okay good so that would have taken you from about 900 grand a month in january of 2018 to about 1.8 million a month today and call it january february 2019 yeah where did most the growth come where'd most of the growth come from expansion revenue on historical cohorts or brand new customer editions um a lot of upsells actually uh i would say more like forty 40 uh from upsells and 60 from new uh revenue and so one of the things that we've seen is um a lot of our historical cores have been growing but also um some of the new customer acquisition we've done uh just landed customers at higher size to begin with yeah yeah yep no that makes a lot of sense now have you funded the company or have you stayed bootstrapped uh no definitely funded uh so we had three rounds of funding total of 50. a most recent round was from noaa's venture now you've actually met scott beach i think you've interviewed him what'd you think by the way did you like i thought he did good i think he let me hit him a little bit but i thought he did well yeah yeah i saw an interview and i i realized you're asking the hard questions yeah but that's why you came on you like a challenge you're an israeli i mean you like a good you know you like to combat a little bit that's a good thing yeah um we love scott is he's incredibly good vc uh and i'm not just saying that because he made lessons you time out with northwest right um yes i mean but it's even beyond the brand i mean norris is great we had general catalyst before top tier vcs but uh uh scott's just making such an impact on the business from like recruiting executives to uh helping us make decisions in the business he's involved with the strategy and it's just he's amazing and he's not too pushy but he's there when you need them was he in your seat back in july of 2014 or did they lead the b in september 18. they let the b so gc was the first investor then we did an ea then we need uh then we got noise join the b and leave that yeah that makes good sense okay so 50 raised um and then what's the team size today how many folks uh 150. all in san fran no we have um about 50 60 in us uh then we have a big team in israel about 70 folks in tel aviv uh and then we have international offices pretty much in japan um in korea in london serving europe in india and so um you know you'll see a few like between five and ten in each region maybe a bit less depending on how the numbers add up that's good gotti turns critical talk to me about how you're measuring turn and how you'll use it to guide the company um yeah absolutely so for us one of the key goals is every quarter when you look at um the amount that we have for renewals um if we have an assumption of let's say up to 10 which is i guess the more conservative approach uh of that revenue to be churned we also have a team of account managers whose job is to kind of complement that from the existing base and cover that with upsells and so that's usually our goals it's like assuming 10 is going to go away um what we're doing is and i think that it's been working really well for us is the more we expand with the product within a single company the more important we become and then the less likely they will turn um the reasons i've seen for churn so far um are companies uh going under so some of the smaller deal sizes we had our companies saying okay we stopped marketing we fired the team or we just don't have money anymore and that's really painful sometimes but again it's like a you know 40k deal or 50k deals so these are the smaller types um and then the only instances where i've seen really big contracts go away is when one company gets acquired by another company and that company sometimes is our customer so then it kind of screws us because that big entity is like oh i already have a massive contract with singular so let's lump that in and then they get the benefit of scale um and so i guess um so gotti just just to be clear sorry before we go wait on this thing here you assume basically you have 10 revenue churn annually that's on a gross basis you have a team dedicated towards covering that hole with expansion so you have 10 expansion per year on the historical cohort not including new customer editions which means you have about a hundred percent net revenue retention annually uh no so that's the goal the actual net retention courts are they've been over 125 percent last time i looked at them so why would your goal be to go down um the assumption is to stay constant so that the goal is pretty conservative and it's you know we obviously that's kind of the goals that you report as a company so you assume um uh it's not going down actually we said 100 right so it should stay the same so every time every quarter there's let's say a million dollars for up coming up for renewal you assume that 10 may go away so you want to cover at least 10 back or let's say a million 100 thousand dollars can churn you want to do another 100 000 at least in upsells now in most quarters we beat that i think we've always been a net negative churn except one quarter you understand my point right you basically just told me your goal is to cover 10 losses with 10 expansion but you're already crushing that goal why would you have a goal that's worse than where you already are don't you want to push yourself and have a goal that's for you want to get to 130 net revenue retention you're right i just think that in the past i've seen where um aggressive goals uh applied some pressure on customers and i didn't like that but i'm just saying this is not about this is about the goal setting in general you have a goal that you've already beat so why is the goal not up that's i'm just trying to understand why don't you update the goal no it's a good question um i think that there's multiple factors and one could argue maybe we should make it more aggressive uh the first one is kind of be fair with the aems and is it something that they can achieve also sometimes our upsells are a bit um it's not all on the aam so what i what i told you is basically the sales account manager but some uh upsells are complex and require an ae so now it blends between customer success exactly and so you know you're kind of catching me on technicalities but really for the am it's a ten percent and then we assume in our model that there's more growth out of the existing base and i don't remember exactly this number so so what you really have your actual numbers today ignore your goals your actual goals are you're churning about 10 revenue churn annually that's on a gross basis you're expanding your team whether it's the ae the cs guy the sdr whoever the hell it is 35 expansion from that cohort so your net revenue retention over the past 12 months was called 125 percent losing you i think okay can you repeat that you're just saying your actual data is you have 10 revenue trend annually right per year right you have 30 expansion per year so you have 125 net revenue retention that's your actual metrics over the past 12 months um yes the last 12 months probably even more some of the courts have been very strong especially because of some product expansion that we've done yeah so i was going to ask you what are the what are the what are the top three pricing levers your team is able to use to drive expansion so it's feature add-ons what else number of seats is there is there a value based metric api call something like that no so we uh we like to measure based on data and the best proxy we have for most of our contracts is the amount of marketing budget that the company has why because this translates into all the different objects that we capture campaigns creatives users events blah blah blah we don't really want to quantify all of them so we take a proxy as the marketing budget and so companies that succeed normally expand that budget year over year and that's one i guess organic so they'll tell you their total marketing budget and then you price them against what they tell you their marketing budget is um it's more of an allotment that they assign ahead in advance it's almost like think about how many uh seats you're going to buy at the beginning of the year and then you can increase that over the year of course and there's different pricing for that but um also you got to remember as the marketing infrastructure we're going to see everything right so part of our job is to measure that information but they're not actually putting the dollars through you right you're just tying into the platforms they put the dollars through to get the intelligence is that right yes but it means that we have the visibility into that and so it's not really really a percentage of their uh marketing budget but more of a in a way you could back it out to some effective rate here how do you how do you overcome this objection gotti you're working this thing's working so well we're tripling our market budget next year and then your ae replies back great we're gonna triple your acv that's how we get our expansion revenue and we go wait you i'm not paying you more just because we're doing better like we're going to keep paying you the flat fee i mean how do your people respond to that well first of all i think that uh most companies would probably wouldn't be as aggressive but you're right maybe an israeli company will tell me that and i think the answer is pretty simple we can just show them how much data we need to process i mean our system captures data from every um every area you can imagine so it means probably more users right because you don't want to spend 3x and have the same amount of users right it probably means that these users will generate more events it probably means you'll have more campaigns at least you know some percentage of campaigns it probably means you'll have more variations or maybe okay so you're pricing against these things not the actual spend you're just assuming spend as a leading indicator of these things you just mentioned exactly but the problem is for us and i think you'll see it across other companies it's hard to come to a company and say oh our pricing is based on 15 000 variables we'll tell you at the end of the year of course of course yeah that makes sense foxy uh yeah some you know some other options would be counting based on dau or mau or number of events you set but they're not really representing everything that we have got it marketing budget makes sense so look hey we're out of time so quick answers here if you can fully weighted cac to get a new 150 000 acv account how aggressive are you being um what do you mean aggressive fully weighted kack are you spending oh you know all of first year revenue to get the customer in the first place or 18 month payback or what it's very aggressive probably even more like maybe one point two dollars for one dollar okay so you got about maybe a 15 month payback then a dollar 20 in to get a dollar new arr yeah yeah okay interesting um and then um talk to me here uh about uh about growth right so what do you hope to grow out this year uh um hopefully the same so at least you know 75 and above um and um this year it's i need to hire uh cro the theme is automatically uh so there's a few key hires we're going to make um but yeah good all right let's wrap up with the famous five one word answers here if you can number one what's your favorite business book um the hard things about hard things number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um steve jobs number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company for building the company yep um google drive number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um i have a newborn so between four and six i guess geez okay and so so married and how many kids uh married one kid just bought a house renovating so all fun things at once you're busy man how old are you uh 30th year 30 what 32. 32. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh what would i say what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. um the importance of sales leadership guys sales are important coming from again gotti lunch singular.net when he realized his company back in 2013 was going to exit to facebook he didn't want the golden handcuffs so he spun out and launched singular.net now 150 customers enterprise customers paying on average 150 grand per year so they're doing about 1.8 million a month right now up from 900 grand a month just a year ago so doubling year over year good growth right there they raised 50 million bucks to do this 150 people based in san fran israel and remote locations again marketing intelligence platform really again a unified marketing data intelligence insight and automations tool set here 10 revenue churn annually that's gross 35 expansion so called 125 percent net revenue retention in terms of cac aggressiveness a dollar 20 in to get a new dollar in ar and call it a 15 month payback period there gotti thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks again all right thanks so much bye