How Socedo CEO Aseem Badshah grew Socedo to $2.4M revenue and 200 customers in 2017.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per top 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top tribe this week's winner of The 100 bucks is Rhett Gillan he's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck he wants to start his own software business so congratulations Rett for your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now in order to enter and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed Nathan lka here this episode 583 and coming up tomorrow morning you're going to hear a YC founder y commentator founder the founder of flight Fox Say the following Nathan we talk about when to quit all the time well that's strange cuz it did 700 granding Revenue last year so what is Lauren Sullivan the CEO of flight Fox talking about tune in tomorrow to find out good morning folks Nathan ly here our guest today is aim Bajan he is the founder and CEO of a company called Soo now before that he had built his own marketing agency full service marketing agency called Uptown Treehouse they helped Brands meet their goals by leveraging social media and digital channels to reach current and potential customers he's now upping that with his new company Soo we're going to jump into it today as see are you ready to take us to the top I am thank you for having me thanks for coming on so okay tell us what Soo does and what's your business model how do you make money absolutely absolutely so here's the thing that we noticed in the agency is that there is so much data out there on prospects for B2B marketers uh and truly around activities right what's the behavioral data that that prospects Target audiences are taking out there on the Social Web our goal is to bring that in and actually make use of that in B2B marketing uh to acquire more customers and so there's really kind of two ways that we do that one is lead generation it's you know hey who out there in the world is is talking about your topic doing research going to the events that you bb marketer would be sponsoring and we give you a way to actually pull those people into your marketing automation to reach out to them to nurture them but then we also do that on your existing database if you're a B2B marketer and you've got 100,000 people in your CRM in your marketing automation there probably a good chance that a good portion of them are maybe not engaged anymore they're not active well we provide the behavioral data on top of those contacts so you can reactivate them you can get them in the right campaigns get the right messaging to them and get them to your sales team at the right time and we basically make money off of a software license so you know we uh we charge Based on data consumption on volumes and our clients basically sign up for you know six month a year long licenses to really power their demand generation and what is the let's just talk about in terms of averages so we don't have to get individual customers on average what is the company paying you per year average is around 12,000 to $15,000 a year okay so call it like a thousand doish monthly arpo something like that that's correct and then take us back when when did you start this thing so we started back in 2013 it was a bit of an evolution from the agency so we actually started this as kind of an R&D research project in the agency you know because essentially what we noticed is that when it came to social media marketing everything was really set up for B Toc marketers right it was all set up around brand awareness and broadcast I'm going to build a really big audience on Twitter or Facebook and then push my messages out and it looks a lot like traditional marketing right what you would do with a TV ad or a billboard uh which is great for B Toc marketers who are trying to build a brand Community engagement uh and and really do that with a large audience for B2B marketers where you're very focused you're talking about a long sales cycle you're looking to nurture specific people you know social media marketing in the traditional sense wasn't really set up for them and so we kind of wondered why right like you know social media is essentially one big CRM system why is there not a tool set to actually leverage it in that way and that's what we set out to do and so in at the end of 20 2012 we started building out as an R&D project in 2013 we spun out Soo we joined Tech Stars up here in Seattle and have kind of been Off to the Races since then and where are you today January 2017 how much uh or sorry how many customers are actively paying you per month we've got about 200 paying customers today okay and then in terms of capital raise you mentioned Tech Stars how much total Capital have you raised so we've raised about 1.5 million to date and have you know kind of been extremely Capital efficient right so 200 customers we grew Revenue about three X in 2016 and and are growing quickly into 2017 as well yeah is it fair to say can I take 200 customers times an average of 1,000 bucks per month and assume you're doing somewhere around 200 Grand per month but you're pulling a lot of that forward with six and 12 month contracts exactly exactly you know we've got some big customers as well right and some customers are paying all the way up to half a million you know a year and then smaller customers as well but our our kind of you know real March has been Upstream right we kind of started a little bit more in the small business segment and have have really kind of been working with much larger and larger clients as we get connected into their CRM and marketing automation systems to really kind of provide that core uh Advantage across their entire demand generation platform and what is you mentioned you grew 3x in terms of Revenue in 2016 what was total revenue in 2016 so you know we don't we don't kind of publicly give those numbers but you're kind of calculating it correctly you know based on uh on you know kind of average number of customers and arpo um and so you know kind of quickly growing into a you know a pretty mature company over here we've got about 25 people in Seattle at this point fair to say I'm just I'm just literally taking Mr and kind of guessing last year fair to say you did somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million right yeah and then uh what's your goal for 2017 you want a 3X 1X 2x what do you think you'll do so you know it's it's an interesting kind of Topic in conversation um right now we're actually looking at it and saying hey we're going to slow down growth little bit in 2017 and and really kind of Target to do a 2X in 2017 while we focus on taking the customers that we have today and really becoming more and more core with them and so the the the concept here is hey we don't need to grow a ton in terms of customers but we want to make sure that we're really sticky and core with our current customers get those average deal sizes up provide more volumes and really get kind of the product the customer success the onboarding the implementation all to a place where then in 2018 we're ready to really grow fast start to 3x again and and really press on the gas pedals so that's kind of how we look at 2017 is that and and you're kind of seeing this in the market all up right is that it's it's not necessarily about growth at all costs we want to focus on the fundamentals focus on our relationship with customers really get core really get sticky and then press on the gas when we're when we're ready what's what's your current team size team size yeah 25 25 here in Seattle all in Seattle that's correct very cool okay so 25 in Seattle and when did you uh I assume with 1.5 million raised I mean I don't know was that just a seed round or did was it also a series a that was just a seed round that was just the seed round so a little bit of convertible notes that kind of converted into that round and then our our Venture Capital partners with the Divergent and Vulcan capital Did they did they value the company was it an eoy round or no it wasn't Equity around yep it was okay good so you had what some amount of seed before and then you raised what a one 1 million something series you know you know series aish with and it was Equity an equity round exactly so it was a seed round it was a 500K that converted off the convertible notes and then a million in New Capital uh last uh last December last dece so that would have been what like a month ago or 13 months ago about a year ago about a year okay so right now you're you're either uh you're either raising more capital or you're in acquisition talks which one is it so you know the nice thing is that Revenue growth for us has gotten us to a point where we're almost cash flow positive um and so that's kind of the the game plan right is get cash flow positive really focus on getting core with our customers here in 2017 and then take on some new capital when we're ready to really step on the gas and and scale right I mean there's no point in going and doing a $5 million series a if we...