How Supermetrics Reached €46.5M ARR at 50% Year-Over-Year Growth Serving 18,000 Customers (Interview with Founder Mikael Thuneberg)

Introduction and Product Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Mikael Thuneberg. He is the founder of a company called supermetrics, which gives marketers easy access to the data they need. Mikael, are you ready to take us 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

00:22you resisted. And then you said yes, and revenue sort of took off. You had broken, I think about 35,000,000 in 2020 in AR, but I'd 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 supermetrics two, three years from now in terms of product?

Mikael Thuneberg

00:39>> Yes. 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 use a lot of different advertising networks, CRMs, marketing automation tools, all kinds of different marketing technology. Very difficult

01:06>> to get the 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 organization so we can bring the data for you into an Excel file or into Google Sheets or Google Data Studio, Power BI, Tableau, whatever you want as the destination. So we kind of support all of these destinations

01:36>> 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 supermetrics.

Google Marketplace Distribution and Sign-Up Volume

Nathan Latka

01:46Now, we look at, Wack, 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? Yep. And so now I'm looking here, you've got seven seven hundred and fifty seven thousand downloads through this Marketplace. You're updating it constantly. I can see that the last update was actually, like, today because they they tag

02:11it in the extension. So I assume is this still your most powerful distribution channel in terms of where you're getting the most new sign ups from?

Mikael Thuneberg

02:18>> Yeah. We get a lot of a lot of sign ups from there. A couple of 100 every day. Same with the Google Data Studio marketplace. So that's also a really good source for leads for us. So those would definitely be the top two.

First Sales Hire and Building the Sales Org

Nathan Latka

02:34Mhmm. 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?

02:48Let me check on

02:52that was, while you're looking that up, I mean, that was right in the range. Because you told me this last time, you broke about 2,200,000 in revenue in 2017, and that was seven years basically, because you launched in 2010 where you're below 2,200,000 revenue, but then you exploded after that up to 21, 22,000,000 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

03:16sales organization that helped drive a bunch of that growth?

Mikael Thuneberg

03:19>> Well, I don't have the actual amount in numbers here, I should probably look them up for me to have, you know, talk about that level of detail. But for sure, we're gonna both get that. So when we launched the Google Sheets ad around 2014, we started monetizing it in 2015, that really took off. Then we launched the Google Data Studio product 2017, and that was another immediate success, even more more like a rapid rapid

03:46>> trajectory then. And then 2018, we were on a really good growth path, and we we started building the sales org. And of course, that accelerated it further, but we were already doing pretty well with the product led growth.

Nathan Latka

04:00Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:24your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're

04:48gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

05:10is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe

05:35you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than 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,

05:58but 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/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back

Team Size: Headcount, Engineers, and Sales Reps

Nathan Latka

06:24into the interview. So flesh out the full team for me today. How many folks are full time? Around two sixty. Two sixty. Okay. And how many are engineers?

Mikael Thuneberg

06:35>> That would be around 70.

Nathan Latka

06:3670. Wow. Okay. And then, I guess, looping back to the sales conversation, how many sales reps do you have that carry a quota?

Mikael Thuneberg

06:43>> That's around 70 as well.

Nathan Latka

06:45Interesting. 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 twenty four months. Did you get it right the first time in terms of the on target earnings to sort of quota ratio?

Mikael Thuneberg

07:02>> Yeah, I think we've done pretty well. We hired a the first salesperson I hired was an experienced sales leader from Meltwater, actually, And he is, of course, has a ton of experience and has been building sales org with supermetrics.

Nathan Latka

07:15You said from Meltwater? Yeah. And who was that?

Mikael Thuneberg

07:21>> Martin Eilman.

Nathan Latka

07:22So 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 supermetrics?

Mikael Thuneberg

07:34>> No. He he was the head of Meltwater in Finland, and then he was head of a product area for Meltwater in The Nordics. And for a while he was also in some role in the San Francisco office of Meltwater. I can't remember exactly what.

Nathan Latka

07:51Okay. So 70 quota carrying reps, do they all have, when they're all ramped up, do they all have the same annual quota?

Mikael Thuneberg

07:59>> Not that exactly. I think we we do have some, like, we have the basic kind of inbound rep quota, and then we have outbound reps who are on a different different quota.

Nathan Latka

08:10Which one's higher? I

Sales Quotas, Deal Sizes, and Strategic Accounts

Mikael Thuneberg

08:14>> should check that with Martin. I can't I can't remember the details of the quarter. Okay. And the outbound reps are also on a quarterly cycle versus the inbound reps are on a monthly cycle. And then we just hired our strategic accounts director. So kind of a more senior salesperson who has been doing kind of higher value deals for Bloomberg, and will be kind of driving the higher ACV deals with us as well. Because the vast majority

08:46>> of our deals are still rather low, like 10 ks, 15 ks deals. So I think there's a lot of potential in getting more of this 50 ks to 100 ks deals as well. So we hope that this person can accelerate that.

Nathan Latka

09:02And 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?

Mikael Thuneberg

09:11>> No. No. Nothing close to that.

Nathan Latka

09:13I got it. Okay. More than do you have any more than a 100,000 per year?

Mikael Thuneberg

09:18>> No. We are very close. Okay. So we have we have some some like 85 k ARR, and I think we are in negotiation with with some that would be over a 100 k.

Nathan Latka

09:29So what clues are you learning from your big accounts already in terms of what you might be able to upsell very effectively to the base that's currently paying you lower ACVs? Is it number of seats? Is it product upsells? What's the lever, you think?

Mikael Thuneberg

09:41>> So partly it's expanding their usage of the core products, as we call them. So if they use Google Sheets, selling more seats on that. If it's Data Studio, selling more seats or more data source connectors, that's also a pricing factor for us. But where we see a lot of good traction is going to the customers who use Google Sheets or Data Studio really heavily and then saying, We also have a data warehousing offering. So as your

10:12>> data amounts are very large, you would get a lot of value if you add a data warehouse to your kind of marketing data stack. And there we see a lot of good upsell. And of course, these clients, they they often then end up having a data warehouse, but they also keep the data data studio or or Google Sheets products. So we we can support the kind of full full range there. Get your data still into spreadsheets

10:40>> very easily, into data studio very easily, but then you also have a a robust solution with the data data warehouse.

Customer Count: 18,000 Total Paid

Nathan Latka

10:46The warehouse upsell now. Now how many customers are you serving now today? All of total paid?

Mikael Thuneberg

10:52>> So total would be something close to 18,000.

Nathan Latka

10:5718,000. Okay. Wow. And do you think most of your future growth over the next couple of years will come from adding new customers or really expanding aggressively in the current install base?

Mikael Thuneberg

11:08>> Of course, we are doing both, but I do see a lot of expansion potential in the current client base. So we already have a huge number of big brands, and pretty much all major agencies are clients of ours. And many of them are currently on a quite a low ACV. So I do see a lot of potential there to expand them, and we are doing that all the time. So a lot of the growth comes from

11:31>> ACV increase.

Average Contract Value and ARR in Euros

Nathan Latka

11:33Yep. Yep. Now, this is sort of an unfair question because averages are not that valuable. But to keep it simple, I'll ask it. What is the average customer paying today in terms of ARPU or ACV?

Mikael Thuneberg

11:44>> So the ACV would be 2.7.

Nathan Latka

11:47Oh, you knew that right off the top of your head. Alright. So about 3,200 US dollars at current exchange rates or something like that.

Mikael Thuneberg

11:56>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:57Okay. And then, I mean, can we take Macau, can we take 3,200 USD times 18,000 customers? It puts you guys right around 58,000,000 in ARR right now.

Mikael Thuneberg

12:07>> In the USD terms, don't have actually the the number, but it's around, you know, 46.5 in euros.

Nathan Latka

12:15In euros. Okay. Fair enough. So depending on the depending on the conversion rates each morning, it changes a little bit, but €46,500,000, which is great. Now, what is that in terms of growth rate over the past twelve months?

50% Year-Over-Year Growth Rate

Mikael Thuneberg

12:27>> So we are seeing still rapid growth. So we are at around 50% year on year.

Nathan Latka

12:3350?

Mikael Thuneberg

12:34>> 50. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:35Yeah. Okay. Now, I remember last time I interviewed you, you were excited because you got your deal done. I think it was a 40,000,000 on 400. You shared some of that was secondary, but you were also kind of bummed because you felt like you took a bit of a hit on valuation because of COVID. Any you know, we're now we're now what are we? We're nineteen months after that round. So are you about to announce a

12:56new fundraising, a new secondary to create some liquidity for early employees?

Mikael Thuneberg

13:02>> Well, of course, there's lot of interest towards us, and these concerns are ongoing, latest today, just before this call actually. So let's see. But of course, you know the market situation. The multiples have gone down, and maybe it's not the best time to do anything. So let's see if we can get to where we want, but it's possible. Do you But we are On the other hand, we are in no hurry to do anything, so if

Fundraising, Valuation, and Profitability

Mikael Thuneberg

13:25>> you don't get a good number, you can just wait.

Nathan Latka

13:27That's what was gonna ask you. So from a unit economic and p and l and balance sheet perspective, can you afford to be very patient?

Mikael Thuneberg

13:33>> Are you

Nathan Latka

13:34guys profitable today?

Mikael Thuneberg

13:35>> Yes. We've been profitable throughout the company history and never used €1 of investor money in this company, so.

Nathan Latka

13:43Wow. That's impressive. That's very impressive. Okay. So I guess, you don't have a valuation because you haven't raised since we last spoke, but what would you value the company at today?

Mikael Thuneberg

13:54>> You know, I can't tell you because that will affect any discussions we may be having. But, you know, the last valuation I think was pretty low considering, you know, we did the valuation at the worst possible time during the when COVID started. And of course, we've grown a lot. The multiples have been increased. So And just to be

14:15>> clear, my cut, that was 40 on 400.

Nathan Latka

14:18Right?

Mikael Thuneberg

14:19>> So in euro terms, the valuation was €250 million.

Nathan Latka

14:23In euro. Okay. Got it. But a big chunk of that was secondary, you said, right?

Mikael Thuneberg

14:27>> Most of that. Most of it was secondary.

Nathan Latka

14:29Yeah. So And I would agree with you, by the way. So like, I think you guys traded at something like an eight to 12 x on that last round. I'm seeing companies that don't have anywhere near your performance, that even have a little lower revenue trading at like thirty, forty x here in The

14:44States. So I it's just not fair. Or maybe it's just a timing thing. Who knows?

Mikael Thuneberg

14:49>> Yeah. But but meanwhile, the competitors have been racing rounds with with much worse numbers than we have at a pretty good good multiples. So I think

Competitors: Funnel, Adverity, Fivetran

Nathan Latka

14:58Who would you put in that bucket? Who would you say are your top three competitors?

Mikael Thuneberg

15:02>> So who we meet meet most often would be Funnel, a Swedish one, Adverity, Austrian. Adverity? Yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:11Okay.

Mikael Thuneberg

15:13>> And about Fivetran, probably, you know, US US company, to some extent, competitive as well. We don't meet them that frequently, but still.

Nathan Latka

15:23So when are we gonna hear about you raising a large round and just buying out funnel dot and bringing the two companies together?

Mikael Thuneberg

15:33>> I'm not sure if we we would want to buy them.

Nathan Latka

15:36Interesting. Okay. Shots fired. You heard it. You heard it here first.

Mikael Thuneberg

15:41>> No. No. If I ask to funnel them, but, you know,

15:45>> they're looking at acquisition targets, but they're not on the list, to be honest.

Acquisitions and M&A Criteria

Nathan Latka

15:48Do you Have you guys acquired any other companies? Is that part of your playbook moving forward? Do you do you have any acquisitions on the table?

Mikael Thuneberg

15:54>> So we've done a couple of very, very small acquisitions. So so one man business is nothing major yet. We are looking at options. Of course, we have the balance sheet. We could do something.

16:05Mhmm.

16:05>> But we will need to see a good fit.

Nathan Latka

16:08Yeah. And so what would be a good fit? Right? Like, how are you thinking about M and A?

Mikael Thuneberg

16:14>> So what we are mostly thinking there is we have have a huge client base, a lot of, you know, very big companies, big agencies. So what could be a product that we could upsell to these clients that we already have?

Nathan Latka

16:30Yeah. And I mean, for context, right, if you This is gonna be a very small number, right? But if you buy a company that you feel like you're 18,000 installed base, you can convert 50% of them, right, to a new thousand dollar a month plan. That's that's 9,000,000 a month in new revenue. So so, I mean, it's significant if if you can if you can do it, you know? Yep. Very compelling. Okay. Well, as we wrap

Product Roadmap: Data Warehouse and New Connectors

Nathan Latka

16:54up here, any any product stuff you wanna chat about in terms of where you're going? We know about the data warehouse. What's next on the roadmap?

Mikael Thuneberg

17:02>> So, we are also looking at expansion beyond the marketing data, so that's quite interesting. We've developed some new technologies so we can expand the data source integration side very fast, so we can do more experimentation on different types of data sources. So we have all kinds of interesting data sources coming out. For instance, we just released a Slack connector just to see, like, MVP on to to fetch Slack data, and then and we see if there's

17:29>> traction or not. And, you know, maybe there's not, but we'll do a lot of these and and then see where we can get traction and then invest more.

Net Dollar Retention and CAC

Nathan Latka

17:36And it sounds like customers are loving it. They're sticking net what's net dollar retention today?

Mikael Thuneberg

17:42>> So across the whole business, it's around a 100.

Nathan Latka

17:44Okay. Around a 100. So that's actually about you told me last time you had about 12 churn, but 13% expansion is about a 100% net dollar retention. That hasn't changed much.

Mikael Thuneberg

17:53>> No. No.

Nathan Latka

17:54Yeah. Okay. And is CAC still about $400, or are you willing to spend more to get a customer today?

Mikael Thuneberg

17:59>> So we are investing more. Okay. Have we hired a CMO a year ago, and and definitely, we are we are investing for sure.

Nathan Latka

18:08Mhmm. Okay. Very good. Let's wrap up here with The Famous Five, Mikael. Number one, favorite book.

Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions

Mikael Thuneberg

18:14>> Oh, sorry. I didn't prepare for this.

18:16>> Your last one was bad your last one was Bad Blood.

Nathan Latka

18:20Uh-huh.

Mikael Thuneberg

18:21>> What did I read recently?

Nathan Latka

18:26Or tell me anything you read recently. Could be it could have been a blog, could have been a book, a podcast.

Mikael Thuneberg

18:32>> Was reading Starship Troopers at last

Nathan Latka

18:36There we go.

Mikael Thuneberg

18:37>> Starship Troopers.

Nathan Latka

18:40Alright. Number two, Mikael. Is there a CEO you're following or studying or maybe someone you really respect there in in The Nordics?

Mikael Thuneberg

18:50>> In The Nordics, I would say maybe a component from supercell.

Nathan Latka

18:55Supercell CEO. Okay. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building supermetrics besides your own?

Mikael Thuneberg

19:03>> Well, Google See, it's it's pretty obvious, I I think.

Nathan Latka

19:07Well, let me ask a more specific question there. What do you guys use in your, you know, your CMO? What are you guys using in your marketing tech stack to track, you know, key marketing metrics?

Mikael Thuneberg

19:18>> So on marketing tech stack, so we we actually have a marketing automation tool called Exponea. So that's what we use.

Nathan Latka

19:28Yep.

Mikael Thuneberg

19:31>> Yeah.

19:31>> They're great. Yep.

Nathan Latka

19:32Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

19:36>> Around eight.

19:36Okay. That's good.

Mikael Thuneberg

19:37>> And situation, married, single kiddos?

19:40>> I'm married with three kids.

Nathan Latka

19:42There. That's consistent. It's good both of those are consistent. Still married, still three kids. It's great. And I got an update on this.

Mikael Thuneberg

19:49>> Yeah. I I think you have two birthdays since we last spoke.

Nathan Latka

19:52So I think, what, you're 40, 42 today, or 41?

Mikael Thuneberg

19:55>> 42.

19:56>> 42. Yeah. Very good.

Nathan Latka

19:57Alright. Last question. Something you wish knew when you were 20.

Mikael Thuneberg

20:03>> I wish I knew I could do it, but, you know, being an entrepreneur, I had doubts for so long.

Nathan Latka

20:10Guys, there you have it. Supermetrics launched in 2010 as a very simple extension, then got into the Google ecosystem, rapid, rapid growth, passing 20,000,000 in annual revenue in 2019. Now doing €43,500,000 annually, which is obviously great. Sorry, €46,500,000 in ARR annually. That's 50% year over year growth profitable, which we love. Last round was caught, you know, 40,000,000 USD at around a 400,000,000 US valuation, but I think undervalued based of others in the space. Growing nicely up

20:38there in The Nordics. Catch Mikael's chat at sassiest2020 sassiest2020.com. It'll be April 20. Coming up in a couple days. April twentieth and twenty first in Malmo, Sweden. Mikael, thanks for taking us to the top.

Mikael Thuneberg

20:49>> Thanks. It was great being here.

Nathan Latka

20:52One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at one p. M. Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every

21:16Thursday 1PM Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. Make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a

21:39big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying.

22:01Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those

22:20people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments.

Mikael Thuneberg

22:27>> See you.