How Socialoptic CEO Benjamin Ellis grew Socialoptic to $1.6M revenue and 10K customers in 2023.

hello everybody my guest today is benjamin ellis he's worked with companies including cisco juniper networks during their fastest periods of growth he's a technologist and serial entrepreneur who's worked at the cutting edge of tech for over three decades and is passionate about what technology can achieve particularly particularly at the intersection of people data and software he's now building a company called social optic benjamin are you ready to take us to the top i absolutely am nice and great thanks for coming on man i appreciate this tell me about the company what do you guys do and are you a pure play sas company so we are a pure placeness company and what we do the clues in the name so social it's all about people and people interactions optic it's about transparent measurements and really what we do is take those measurements and present them back to people to help them make better decisions okay give me because when people hear social they assume like some consultant that doesn't know what they're doing right so like tell me tell them why you're legit okay sure we had a funny time once somebody we kind of went in and they said are you here to install the socialist system it's like no no no no this is not a political thing it's really the fact that the business you've got the capital but the biggest asset you've got is the people right and what happens in the business is they interact and that's what social means to us is the interaction of people my background originally was i was an engineer and then i retrained about 10 years ago and did a psychology degree so i kind of sit on the bound of those two things looking at people and how they interact kind of like a lot of people would look at a software system i look at people that way if that makes sense interesting okay so you've got a couple products surveyoptic this before that decisioneer milestone planner are these all serving the same customer base or they're all different cohorts so they there is a there is an overlap and they're all different takes on that that same thing so milestone planner takes people's goals and presents that back as data this before that helps people map out the dependencies so it's all about getting things out of people's heads into a web-based stash where they can look at that and make better quality decisions and interact around it right so you can get the whole team to see kind of what's inside your head and then say optic which right now is our fastest growing product um is a is a more general exposure of the platform that's a sas product let's people take any question set and turn that into something that gives you real-time data that you can present in the dashboard so it could be customer satisfaction it could be employee engagement and it kind of drives the the team then around those metrics is like a survey monkey kind of layout mps score things like that yeah kind of so those tools will focus on collecting the data and that's great and useful but what makes data really powerful is being able to present it back to your team in a clear and consistent way because if people know that something's going to be measured that's when it starts to drive behaviors right so that's really what we're about is making people think about what they're saying get a really accurate map of the territory to make decisions around so it's it's not just declaring it it's really how you personalize that data to make better decisions interesting okay so average customer because i'm sure you have a bunch of different cohorts i don't want to go down every single one but on average what is somebody going to pay to get access to all this are we talking a grand a month 10 grand a month a million per year i mean where are you at yeah so the the middle is 1k dollars a month that's like kind of median a thousand yeah okay and so there's a really big range then because we've got you know on one hand like a small veterinary clinic and and on the other hand you know a big pharmaceuticals company so there's a whole kind of spread of different folks in that but we we kind of aim for that one care a month medium okay makes a lot of sense and that that could be them using any combination of products or any one product but that's kind of the median yeah interesting okay we want to talk about more about that later um in terms of how you drive expansion across multiple product lines but first when did you launch the company what year so we we've actually the original idea was eight years ago but we spent a good few years kind of uh went off and did other things and then came back and realized that this was the kind of one good idea that we wanted to put energy behind um and really built a set of tools that we as a team wish that we'd had when we were founding other companies if that makes sense and who's we how many people on the team today so the the kind of cool team is a dozen folks we've all built and set up our own businesses so it's a very unusual team uh older folks and and we run the business in a way that's kind of compatible with that and that's kind of one of our ad differentiators nobody works full-time every works a maximum of four days a week and we really encourage folks to have other interests outside of the business so that when we're talking to customers and it's mostly kind of cxo level we're talking to we can have a peer-to-peer conversation with them so interesting just to be clear it sounds like you guys are your own power users and because that allows you to get inside your own head you then spend four days a month basically building these systems which you all then use to automate your systems and the other stuff you do three days a week that's exactly it so we kind of break some rules there in terms of kind of building the product that we want but we realized you know it gives us really good customer insight and then we keep that up to date by by making sure that we have in-depth conversations with customers around what they do benjamin that's to me that feels like such a smart model uh like a really intelligent model now hold on i'm trying to think about practically how this would work do all 12 people have are they all in the cap table uh yes they are and wow kind of employee ownership is is an important thing to us that was i'm i my early career was in silicon valley i came back to the uk and the uk has taken a while to kind of get hold of that from a tax point of view but we're kind of there now so i'm i'm uh here in london um so yeah that i think that people need to own the thing that they're behind so they can bring their full self to what they're doing yeah and and how many customers have you scaled to today over the past eight years so through the kind of range of products it's in the tens of thousands now and those are different usage levels some customers kind of come in and use stuff literally once a year others are in every day because of the the range of different tools but if we if we so instead of looking at kind of historical data we'll just take a snapshot of today like each month how many people are would you say are using it and i'm not talking free plans i'm just talking paid customers per month yeah so we pay at the um the kind of business level which is set to the user so some of our customers might have 10 000 users on the system to kind of give you an idea so for us it's less about monthly active users we're looking at whether each of the companies is engaged that make sense it makes perfect sense yeah so how many companies yeah so it's in the the tens of thousands of and those are distributed um between kind of europe and the um the us and also australia so we've tended to to stick um to english-speaking countries for the most part although we part of our growth path is to do what we do um kind of more broadly across europe um but there's some kind of fun and games in europe as you're probably aware at the moment around kind of uk's position in europe yeah so so we're kind of focusing on going in depth in the uk and then once things are settled will will start to hit europe a bit more so so benjamin hold on help me out here i think i'm missing something so you mentioned that kind of your average your mead price point was about a grand per month and then you just said you had over 10 000 kind of paying customers that would obviously put your mrr at an astronomical level am i what am i missing up there so for us it's a journey of customers going through and you kind of you talked about customer acquisition and one of the challenges as you know with assassin's business is it's getting increasingly expensive to acquire new users so we have a model that is um it's kind of like a premium model but it's really letting people use the tools get on board with the tools to the point that they realize the value and then turning them into paying customers and then networking from that so most of our users because it's b2b will change company at some point in a 12 to 36 month period so what we do is we kind of bridge those gaps and that's that customer acquisition model so it's very organic it's very slow it's not adwords driven and it's purely um you know word of mouth effectively through through those customers and then giving them a way to get the tool in the business help them realize the value of the tool so it's a...