How Summitsync CEO John Corrigan grew Summitsync to $30M revenue and 9K customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is john corgan today's in his 30s and has found maturity with a purpose as both founder and ceo of a company called summit sync he's led the company to be one of the fastest growing enterprise sas companies in the us today the company provides sales enablement and marketing intelligence to drive more meetings for its thousands of clients at the conferences and trade shows that they attend john are you ready to take us to the top i am all right listen i'm a data guy so when you say fastest growing enterprise sas companies in the us today i have to ask you back it up how do you know that yeah so we're we're gaining we are acquiring about 650 to 750 new customers every week um and given who those customers are in the amount of revenue uh that's faster than almost any other sas company out there okay so what's your over the past 12 months what's your ar growth rate uh i'm actually not going to tell you that number but it's uh above 10 million no no great not the growth rate hundred percent year over year a thousand percent year over year fifty ten thousand percent year over year so i think at the beginning of 2018 we had probably 50 customers okay okay yeah let's let's let me take a step back here now for a second tell me about the people not familiar with the company what's the company do yeah so we can tell you where your clients and prospects are going to be at trade shows and conferences and we can automate the setup of in-person meetings for you and then we can connect those back to crm and marketing automation okay so people should think about this like a way to do you know all the sponsor dollars they're putting out this is a way to kind of juice those sponsor dollar results at conferences absolutely it's a way to get more revenue driven meetings at conferences and trade shows without doing a lot of work and it's an extension of your marketing cloud yep okay so give me a general sense i want to go down every customer cohort on average what's the customer paying you for this software uh north of ten thousand dollars a year okay okay north and why would someone pay a hundred thousand versus ten thousand in other words what are your pricing axes just size of just the amount of events they're going to and the size of the team that they're sending okay so it's team size number of events not number of leads though no not number of leads isn't that isn't that the key value metric why is the number of team members they send more important the number of leads they're capturing at the event for us it's about how many accounts they have so it's about seats and number of events versus number of leads number of leads we're not interested in charging you per meeting we're gonna drive that just didn't feel right to us well i guess my question is what if someone has a hundred seats but no leads coming in versus a hundred a hundred leads with one seat one the four wouldn't the ladder be getting more value from your platform by be paying way less their organization would just be failing at that point so it wouldn't they wouldn't be buying our software yeah if you had it's it's not about it's about mapping your current uh crm to where they're going and then us adding to that yeah it's not about us if you have zero people in your uh customer base we can't help you got it okay very good put this on a timeline force when did you launch the company uh late 2015 and where were you at that point kind of in life you just left corporate you just sold your last company where was your head at i had just sold i was a corporate um development guy i just sold that company which company it was called telemetry okay so we sold it to a asian asian conglomerate um so i did that transaction and then we started 17 the guy who's the head of sales at telemetry uh became my co-founder and we started summoning together we started out as a mobile consumer based app uh kind of tinder meets business conferences did that for about you know a year and a half almost two years uh that did we had a lot of users but it just there was no revenue and there's no path to revenue so we went out and we listened to a lot of companies and we iterated from there interesting so that would have taken you up through like 2017 and it sounds like there was a pivot that happened yep interesting um what do you say in terms of total customers today just about 9 000. okay and velocity-wise you said you're adding you said 650 per month yeah and where i mean this is obviously a channel that's you know you're killing it here if you're adding that many on nine thousand where are you getting these customers what's the growth channel so most of it is our direct sales force so we're out calling folks uh doing that ourselves we do we just launched a reseller channel so we have five uh resellers going out there who have a significant number of sales people uh each who are driving a lot of uh leads and demos for us that are converting nicely what's your team size today full time full time 35. and how many of those are focused on kind of the sales machine uh 18. oh well okay fairly significant and this is an ins like what's the playbook they're following an inside sales playbook at account-based marketing playbook account-based marketing playbook okay so they're going they're targeting accounts they're reaching out they're going that way yeah we've been we haven't broken into bdr's sdr's um account managers okay and how many how many bdrs per sdr in parade uh i'm glad i got to think about that so there are six it's about six six it's about one to one right now okay so every sdr in your company is responsible filling up the calendars of one kind of kind of a business development rep and then what happens after the sale the account executive is coming after the sale closes or they're closing the sale they're closing the sale handing it off to uh account management and account management's actually being supported a little bit by a couple product folks right now who we're gonna have to hire some more account managers to get them back to doing product okay and have you done all this bootstrapped or have you raised no we've raised yeah we raised about five million bucks okay why raise why couldn't it sounds like you're growing really fast uh you said fastest you know in the in the country why raise capital yeah so no so we originally we originally had raised uh and then also like we just needed to raise because we went through a lot of product iterations we went through a lot of people um and and the engineers that we have are not cheap so we couldn't have bootstrapped it in that regard we had we had to create a sophisticated enough product to sell yeah and that cost money and that was money we didn't have so we went on raised when was the last round uh last round was last july last year okay so you're fundraising right now or you're in m a talks which one is it yeah we're fundraising okay how much do you want to raise and why how'd you get to that number so probably we'll end up looking at around 20 million bucks okay um and that's just to expand sales and marketing and a couple of key uh adding and building kind of middle management and a middle layer to product and engineering and if you raise this capital on terms that obviously you enjoy what are you telling the potential investors in terms of what this 20 million will allow you to drive to in terms of ar targets um i kind of don't want to tell you that um but it's a significant number so it's going way north of where we are but that's obvious john my question though is people sometimes will raise uh and the ratio between how much they raise and ar they add is sometimes one to one sometimes it's 50 sometimes it's 10 percent i'm trying to get a sense of kind of how aggressive you're being with the capital yeah i think it'll probably be 50 okay so what's 20 million raised do you think you can be efficient enough to drive 10 million bucks a new ar yeah at least uh interesting okay um and then uh and then um take me into some of the other economics related any sas company so churn is critical what's your turn and how do you manage it yeah so right now our churn uh is around six percent uh and how we manage that that's the logo turn per month that is yeah logo turn per month so we typically it comes down to why our customers churning is that they are not going to there they've had some type of economic event or re-budgeting of a conference and trade show budget and they are not going to as many events so they're basically just either winding down or not consuming as much from us we don't necessarily lose them but our annual contract value uh goes down and we continue to to have them as a customer but they're just not paying us as much okay so that six percent is not logo turn it's it's revenue churn per month you still have the logo yeah okay uh six percent revenue churn and are you driving any meaningful so the cohort that signed up a year ago with you six percent of their revenue returns every month are you driving any expansion revenue in that same cohort or no yeah in the in the in the people that have were our customers last year in terms of acv growth yes significantly okay so when you net it all out net revenue retention year over year from that cohort a year ago they're obviously churning six percent every month what are you adding back on...