How Supermetrics CEO Mikael Thuneberg grew Supermetrics to $89.5M revenue and 18K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is mikel thunberg he is the founder of a company called super metrics which gives marketers easy access to the data they need mikael you ready to take to the top sure i was so impressed when we spoke in october in 2020 because you said nathan we start off as this little this little extension and then google said please please build an app for our for our partnerships to our marketplace and you resisted and then you said yes and revenue sort of took off you had broken i think about 35 million in 2020 in ar but i love before we get into the metrics to talk about product so what are you guys today and sort of where are you thinking about super metrics two three years from now in terms of product yes so so we want to give all the marketers access to all the data that they need need to be able to do their jobs well and that's hands-on marketers hands-on analysts who need to analyze and ask all of their marketing data marketing data is really split up in very many different places many different systems so you'll use a lot of different advertising networks crms marketing automation tools all kinds of different marketing technology very difficult to get the big big picture so we bring all of that data together for you and what makes us special is that we don't have our own reporting ui but we let you use whatever tool you already have in your user in our your organization so we can bring the data for you into an excel file or in google sheets or google data studio power bi tableau whatever you want as the destination so we kind of support all of the all of all of these destinations for for the data and recently we've also added a data warehousing product so you can also set up a marketing data warehouse very easily with super metrics now when we look at uh wac just take us back when did you launch your first app in the google workspace marketplace do you remember the year that was 2014. and that was at launch right that's when they launched the marketplace yeah and so now i'm looking here you've got 757 000 downloads through this marketplace you're updating it constantly um i can see that the last update was actually like today because they they tag it in the extension so i assume is this still your most powerful distribution channel in terms of where you're getting the most new signups from yeah we get a lot of a lot of signups from there um a couple of hundred every day same with the google data studio marketplace so that's also a really good source for leads for us um so those would definitely be the top two now you've done all this branching into your team a little bit what year did you hire your first sales rep with the quota that was 2018 and what was revenue around that time i just check um because that was while you're looking that up i mean that was right in the range because you told me this last time you you broke about 2.2 million in revenue in 2017 and that was seven years basically because you launched in 2010 where you're below 2.2 million revenue but then you exploded after that up to 21 22 million in 2019 so i'm curious how much of that was because of the partnerships with google or did you start to really hire a sales organization that helped drive a bunch of that growth yeah i don't have the actual the monthly numbers here i should probably look them up for me to have you know talk about that level of detail but for sure kind of both did that so when we launched the google sheets on 2014 and started monetizing it in 2015 that really took off uh then we launched the google data studio product 2017 and that was another immediate success even more more like a rapid rapid trajectory then and then 2018 we were on a really good crossbar but when we started building the sales org and of course that accelerated it further but we were already doing pretty well with the product growth oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations and what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you wanna check this tool out if you wanna jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so flesh out the full team for me today how many folks are full-time around 260. 260. okay and how many are engineers that would be around 70. 70 wow okay and then i guess looping back to the sales conversation how many sales reps do you have that carry a quota that's around 70 as well interesting okay so that has really that team's almost doubled since the last time we spoke so tell me about how you're doing that that's a lot of that's 40 sales hires with a quota in the past 24 months um did you get it right the first time in terms of the on target earnings to sort of quote a ratio yeah i think we've done pretty well we hired uh that the first salesperson i hired was an experienced sales leader from from a melt pointer actually and he's of course has a ton of experience and has been building the sales org or with yeah and who was that so if people are looking to hire their own version of martin what kind like what was his title at meltwater was he the head of sales or was he a junior guy at meltwater that you he wanted to leave and join you to be the guy at super metrics no he was the head of melt water in finland and and then he was head of a a product area for mail voter in the nordics and and for a while he was also in some role in the san francisco office of melt water i can't remember exactly what okay so 70 quarter carrying reps do they all have when they're all ramped up do they all have the same annual quota not that exactly i think we do have some like we have the basic kind of inbound variable quota and then we have outbound reps who are on a different different quota which one's higher um i should check that with martin i can't remember okay uh uh and the outbound reps are also on a quarterly cycle where sustained bond reps are on a monthly cycle and and and then we just hired our strategic accounts director so kind of a more senior uh sales um sales person who who's been doing higher value deals for bloomberg and and will be uh prime driving the higher ac videos with us as well because the vast majority of our deals are still rather rather low like 10k 15k uh deals so i think there's a lot of potential in getting getting more of this 50k 50k 200k deals as well so we hope that uh this person can accelerate that and don't don't obviously tell me the customer name but your largest customer today what's their contract value have you broken anyone with a million that pays you more than a million per year um no no nothing close to that i got it okay more do you have any more than a hundred thousand per year no we are very close uh so we have we have some some like 85k arr and i think we are in negotiation with with some that would be over 100k so what clues are you learning from your big accounts already in terms of what you might be able to upsell very effectively...