How Structuredweb CEO Daniel Nissan grew Structuredweb to $20.4M revenue and 36 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Daniel Nissan he's a channel sales and marketing expert entrepreneur and president and CEO at structured web Daniel are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right tell us you bet tell us about structured web what do you guys do and how do you make money so structure web is the market leader in channel marketing automation software and we help large global enterprises and to equip their local resellers with ready-made marketing content and marketing tools to execute marketing at the local level most of our customers at the moment are large tech companies that have resellers dealers agents in variety of countries and they're the primary users of our system and is it a pure place ass model to pure-play sauce model and the channel partners get into the service at no cost fully subsidized by their brands that providing the service interestings okay so what's the average customer pay per month just to avoid going down every different cohort and the prices are very based on the number of a channel partners they have on on the platform and it can varied from anywhere from $5,000 a month to over $100,000 a month give me an average that would you say I would say $20,000 okay and give me more the back story here when did you launch the company in and why start a company at all that's a good question so I started company in 1999 99 my gosh Daniel you have the patience of a grasshopper it's all overnight success yeah right that's what they all say yes the idea was when when the internet was now booming at that time I saw a lot of small businesses trying to set their online presence and everybody trying to reinvent the wheel so I said why won't I create a company where we create a template eyes website with four different industries with different functionality and we'll keep that functionality evolving as the internet continued to evolve we didn't know what's kind of going to be available later on but well we knew that this technology is moving very quick so we we focus on small businesses in the same group and we try different industries we tried chiropractors too in that was in 2000 we try to sell themselves what is internet and I don't have a connection even DC are offering so we move through move to travel agents and there we had a great product with distribution we had a lot of travel vendors subsidizing the offer and we launched it on September 9th 2001 as Nene have you bootstrapped the company have you raised we raised money then and since then we bootstrapped the company so after they the travel was not successful we try to other resellers with awesome I don't think you know how much have you raised total we raised at 5.7 million dollars in in equity and we have about the few million doors in there as well okay the 5/7 and equity that you raised back in the early 2000s are those folks on the captive or have you bought them out Oh still in the cup table very supportive very friendly investors how are they patient for over 17 years how have you held them back it just a full dedication to the business full transparency and they do understand that sometimes things go immediately sometimes they go Buster then sometimes just takes more time late bloomer that's great that's that's yeah you're lucky you're a lucky guy maybe actually maybe I'll say you're a smart guy because you picked the right people right yeah all right what have you struck is also very important what is I said luck is also important yeah what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you we have a few thousand customers and global users of over 100,000 businesses using structure web so each one of our customers gave it to hundreds and thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of their channel partners globally so when you say a couple dozen I mean can we say like 36 something like that don't be weird about okay can I multiply that times the $20,000 a CV and assume you guys are what I'm doing 700 grand a month something like that installation yeah I was advocating no I don't know how publicly these focus is so we don't want to disclose too much information on the public pool what does that mean have you listened an episode before no come on Daniel that's your own phone pin the podcast is downloaded by by like five million people every month so it goes out all over I interviewed b2b SAS CEOs every day so but but just to be clear I mean I want to make sure I mean those are just numbers that you gave me that I'm multiplying 36 times 20 grand are you generally in that 700 700 : you got that's fair and then what are you growing at year-over-year a Bureau ver year last year and our plan for 2018 is about 30 30 % growth year over year that's pretty I mean that's pretty healthy so you're doing what about 600 grand a month 12 months ago something like that would be 20% growth yeah that's great and what's driving most the growth how are you finding new customers where are you getting them we do a lot of fair marketing activities both online and offline trade shows industry events and we have our own online marketing Google advertising and we have a lot of referrals so it's a relatively closed the small industry the tech industry we're talking about no few thousand companies or people in the industry share information and to go to industry analysts and ask for the short list of companies to talk to and we're typically will be on that short list of companies they consider what kickback do you pay to your partners we don't you don't it's totally free interesting do you do any paid marketing a paid marketing yes we do as I said we do google advertising we do trade shows we do events we do direct mail sometimes for that we pay but for any referral partners no we don't pay for that which conference is been most successful for you in terms of lead generation any one of these channels focus so because we deal with the channel industry so we go where you can find channel Chiefs those are the typical leader in the channel channel marketing channel sales so we try to be very industry specific and then to go to broad conferences about like marketing automation so on is this application channel visionary is one of them and visionary visionary and channel focus is another one so those are a small industry event so typically will have few hundred and channel executives meet mid-level executive to high level executive and that's where you really can create meaningful engagement in conversation with potential buyers and you're paying what 20 30 grand to sponsor each of these Okubo we broke them oh you're interesting all together we end up all your paid spend what percent are you spending on that relative to your revenue each month about we don't look at it that way we look at the amount of money we spend against new revenue that we generate and and typically it's about one to one so for every dollar we invest we would they generate one door in the same year that we invested that that's a pretty healthy kind of flywheel there yeah we have very good return much much higher than the average that you find in the industry of door invested the first beer a CV growth yeah it's usually you know 1.2 1.5 something like that takes a little longer what do you look at payback period or no hey we do and I said we typically see the return in the first year also sometimes the reason I have a new revenue wise no profit wise he's gonna say those numbers are not always the same so some people will look at payback period and they'll multiply gross margin on the end of it versus the number you gave me typically people don't consider gross margin it's a dollar and how long does it take to get a new dollar of air are ya interesting okay tell me more about the team what's the team size today we have total 50 people zero five zero yes we're mostly in New York City that's where our headquarter is and we have also people spread around the world there's some of them are in support services some of them are in development some of them in content management and so we do a leveraged now a global presence also because we have global customer base that need the global support with languages and time zones interesting they ask you a question holding that one to one ratio you just gave me earlier I mean that's great if you can get you know one new customer there but in order a scale you have to get more aggressive I mean how much money can you spend and still hold that ratio in your current acquisition channels good question I don't know the number right of my head I mean this is the tough part right I mean you can find a pocket of money with super healthy economics but how long does it scale on to diminishing returns kick in I think we can scale it pretty nicely at this rate and because the revenue that we generate really required more cash flow to subsidize or to pay for and kind of the credit that we give for our customers risk of course our customers very large well-established enterprises and we can continue to find working capital to subsidize the gap that is between the time that we expense to the income that we receive from our customers yep and I mean look if you have more cash flow management and other kind of a profit and losses you got it I mean look if you have a twenty thousand dollar monthly kind of average or two hundred forty grand a year and you have that one to one ratio I mean yours but you can spend up to 240 grand you acquire these guys that's how big they are yeah yeah how many of the of the 50 on your team are inside sales folks we're the total sales team that we have...