How Suzy CEO Matt Britton grew to $82M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

Susie is helping big Enterprise plans like Procter and Gamble at Gillette do market research they've got over 400 customers paying an average 150 000 bucks a year just past a 60 million dollar AR run rate call it this week this month up from 40 million just a year ago up and passing about 20 million back in 2020 so really healthy growth rate they did burn 25 million net burn last a year but obviously that was the Heyday now they've recorrected things they've got plenty of Runway to get through uh the end of next year and even further where they hope to break a sort of 80 90 100 million dollar run rate hey folks my guest today is Matt Brittany he's the founder and CEO of Susie and best-selling author of Youth Nation not your 86 at the top you got it all right now you're a regular man I I like I I had you on back uh gosh for the first time in early 2020 and then another time in 2021 and your story is unique in that I think you had your own agency that you sold before you went into your SAS is that accurate yeah we incubated what became known as Susie lay while still running my agency mry the agency was acquired but we had spun out the software company before the agency was acquired and then after my earn out ended the agency I rejoined the CEO back then it was called crowdtap rebranded the Susie and we launched in 2018. so that's amazing so talk about what you're working on today and sort of maybe give an example of how customers using you guys live yeah so Susie is a consumer Insight software platform that's used primarily like by large Enterprises uh we our ideal customer profile is what we call Super Enterprises the companies do over 5 billion a year in Revenue we primarily focus on technology food and beverage package Goods financial services companies in in those uh in that overall Revenue tier and what Susie provides is essentially a an on-demand platform that allows these companies to talk to their target consumer and gain feedback quantitatively and qualitatively in a really rigorous form to allow them to make critical business decisions throughout the product development life cycle so whether it's early on figuring out what product to launch or what should the packaging look like or which we call it or what should the pricing be or which of the advertising be at every single stage when these large companies launch a new product there's decisions that have to be made and we have built with Susie a research tool that allows them to run those decisions by the consumers that matter matter so you can be more empowered and ultimately making those decisions and increasing their chance of success now there's a lot of research tools sort of in this space whether you're a software company wanting to test a new flow or a toothbrush company wanting to test the bristle strength on a new toothbrush right what's interesting about Susie is you are you are vertically integrated here you actually own a platform that users engage on actively and then that's how you collect some of these survey based feedback when we last spoke these gamified apps you told me had between 50 and 100 000 monthly active users on them what's that number look like today is it grown um we haven't even focused as much on quantity and you're talking about our crowd tab Consumer Panel um which we have a million registered users on and on a monthly basis you are correct it's anywhere between 50 and 100 000 our Focus has really been on the quality of those users one of the big problems we're solving with online market research is there's a lot of Fraud and spam so when people try to buy an audience to respond to a survey from a programmatic audience provider what they often find is it's a lot of bots that are answering the questions so our focus on the audience size has been less about building more quantity of audience because as long as we have a diversified network of people that deliver on the demands of our customers we don't need to add more people right but we need to make sure that they are people and they're well intentioned and they're providing the right answers and that's really been our Focus we've actually have a patent pending for a product called biotic which is essentially a Spam and Bot detection tool that's built within our audience and with that we have the highest quality audience in the industry and quality is really the only thing that matters is an online market research 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 the 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 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right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview yeah guys so just to get your heads around Matt's business that's the equivalent of like he doesn't own Candy Crush but it's like if he owned Candy Crush right and then Procter and Gamble wanted to get user feedback he could basically put a survey up after you complete level three of Candy Crush and say hey we're thinking about a new type of candy do you like hard candy or soft candy Matt this is sort of a writing a good example right yeah exactly crowdtap itself is like a gain game and the users earn points for answering questions anonymously on behalf of Brands the pointer cash in towards digital rewards and currency it's exactly how it works and then what sits on top of this crowd that product is Susie which is kind of the sophisticated market research tool that our customer interfaces with to launch these complex research projects now this does obviously have you know the vertical integration is an advantage but it also does hit your margin a bit because I believe 10 to 15 percent of your monthly expenses go towards paying these consumers to engage in these surveys is that true and is it still 10 to 15 yep it's exactly 10 to 15 however we're able to uh really maintain the overall gross margin profile in the mid to low 70s so I wouldn't call it it hits our margin because we're almost like Farm to Table other companies actually have to buy sample uh some of our competitors if they're going to deliver a project for customers from a third party which is more expensive where we're actually mining if you will our own audience and delivering it directly uh to the end end customer so it actually makes us more profitable on a gross margin adjusted basis and also opens up a variety of different features and functionality that other companies can't deliver based on us being vertically integrated interesting so your competitors might put this expense we have to buy panel data below the line you're saying they end up paying more than 10 to 15 anyway you're just putting it above the line that's exactly right yeah really interesting what are I mean name two just to put us in the right space name two of your competitors you think about uh well qualtrics has really set the gold standard for online market research so I don't want them as sort of the company when we start it we want to be the next qualtrics the biggest difference being qualtrics started universities who are working the way Bottoms Up and when we entered The Fray online marketer research was a much more mature space so we did the opposite we started with large Enterprises and maybe eventually we'll work our way down so I would call them sort of number one number two has always probably been Survey Monkey um just because they they at first moved her advantage in the space they rebranded as momentive they've hit a lot of um you know struggles and headwinds just based upon their capital structure and really based upon um what seems to be the struggles they've had with getting into the Enterprise and moving up Market but those are probably the two companies we'd look at and so when we talk about moving to the Enterprise obviously we can look at arpu as a way to like measure your ability to go down Enterprise like what is the average customer I'm paying per month today uh so 150 000 a year so I guess it's about twelve thousand thirteen thousand a month yeah I mean that's up from our interview in 2019 of uh 60 000 years so it's more than doubled what's enabled you to double it land and expand so essentially what we're building at Susie which is different than some of the more Point Solutions who I had mentioned but companies that just do one thing within market research is that we want to be sort of like a a platform that goes horizontal so I mentioned that product development life cycle when you land a big cpg you might first start with a company that's testing their advertising or packaging but then we'll just go to the other departments that aren't using Susie for research and as long as there's trust and we're delivering we just pick off first you know going from uh you know brand say Gillette and they're using us for package testing we can then use them for ad testing or use them for Price testing and then we could also go from going from Gillette to going to tide or another brand at Procter and Gamble by way of example so there's kind of a vertical expansion in the horizontal expansion within an Enterprise and that's what's driving up the average contract value give me more examples of the vertical expansion inside the Gillette brand at PNG right so package testing ad testing price testing what else might they use testing Innovation is one of one of the biggest areas so a copy is launching a new product is there a demand for the product who is the target audience for the product we also do a lot of uh merchandising and Retail testing in terms of testing in-store displays uh we launched a product called Susie home which actually allows our clients to ship physical products into consumers homes they can try on clothing or try a candy bar and give instant feedback to it so literally any design design decision that you make in terms of a product rolling out and there's millions of decisions made a day many of which in the past were just guesses Susan can be there and the reason that they would use Susie and maybe not use research in the past is that research traditionally has been done through agencies which are slow and expensive where now you essentially have a direct to Consumer channel to go to the consumers that matter and get instant feedback literally within the same Zoom meeting answers start flowing in from our audience that can help you reframe your decision or evaluate or validate your decisions when I spoke with you last year you said there's about 200 folks on the team of which 36 were in sales and 18 actually carried a million dollar year quota where are they those sales reps typically Landing this deal with Gillette is it package testing ad testing Innovation testing what's the order of operations um it's a great question it really varies by category um and you know because you have Matrix organizations like Google and Microsoft which aren't as linear as that in terms of how their organization is designed um often we go earlier in the product development life cycle so Innovation or r d versus later which would be ad testing but that's just based upon our product roadmap and the initials that we have built but now we have a much more robust feature set as part of our product so we're going in really across the board and frankly whoever hires us first whoever gives us a good shot first and then we just go the other direction that's amazing all right so how many brands or customers are you working with today uh we have 400 large Enterprises that are working with us today that's good that's up from 350 when we spoke about uh 13 months ago so so there are and we've shedded a lot of the mid you know the mid Market smaller businesses we've just stopped going after because what we've realized is that the big Tam is with the agencies and the a the market research agencies and those market research agencies focus on the big super Enterprise companies so we've really made it decided you have to work you know work to go after these large companies where we can really expand our business with no it feels like it's working I mean 400 customers 150 000 ACV that puts you at what a 57 million dollar run rate as of today yeah closer to 60 at the year 60. and that's growth where were you exactly one year ago do you remember um we we're growing about 60 the share 65 okay so 40 million to 60 million something like that yeah interesting now you've raised a bunch right we have we've raised about 100 million today so how did you and I think the series when was the series d series D was July of 2021 yeah because I think you were very kind when you last came on and you shared that was like a 40 to 50 million dollar round it's somewhere around a 400 valuation million right yeah it was a little less than 400. fair enough fair enough what are you seeing in markets today I mean what are your board meetings sound like when the you know the economy starts tanking yeah I mean you know we have had a high burn profile over the last couple years not because our sales hasn't been efficient but because we've overrated like what'd you burn in 2021 like 10 million now I'm closer to 20 25 20. uh yeah um and and ultimately the burn was not coming from our lack of sales right yeah um it was it was coming from just over investment r d ads Peak r d was 60 65 percent of Revenue because we had to catch up the qualtrics right if we're selling against them we have to have a product now you know our product is getting there and now what we can do is slow down that r d ramp and let the revenue catch up so you know next year we expect r d to only be 30 the 30 to 35 percent of Revenue which is much more in line and when you do that and you have efficient sales process that's when you can kind of get burned under control um and in that regard we expect to be cash flow positive fourth quarter next year um so to answer your question what are our board meetings are it's when are you going to stop earning Capital because we don't want to have to rely on the capital markets to fund their existence anymore in this environment um yeah you can only really do that if you have an efficient go to market process right and you have high grade margins if you don't have that it does so when the lever you you can pull is r d expense right and you feel like you're just gonna the pace of innovation will just slow down a little bit then you can actually keep your Revenue growth but then drop your Opex growth right the second that you have to dip into that sales and marketing expense in order to get there well yeah sure you might slow down your expenses but then you commensurately you might slow down your revenue and basically then you have a company that's not make money and isn't growing so I think that's what a lot of companies are finding out right now is where is the burn coming from because not all burn is created equal and allow that 20 million dollar 25 million dollar burn of last year I think you put towards a new product called Susie live what is this correct yeah so Susie live is an example of why we invest in r d and Susie live is actually an example of an innovation we have that even the best companies in our space don't have which is we have the ability now to connect Quant the qual so say you are selling dresses and you're targeting Millennial women and you want to know what the dress they like the best the red white or blue dress right and say 70 percent a red and then we asked them why and they say because it makes me feel younger right we can actually then take those that subset of the people who like the red dress and say it makes them feel younger and pull them instantly to a zoom-like interface just like me and you were talking and do a live focus group or in-depth interview and ask them why the red dress makes them feel younger and actually have a detailed discussion all within the same workflow so the ability to connect Quant the qual in one workflow is something that traditionally has not been um accessible or possible in market research given the fact that most online market research tools do not have their own audience so they can't keep going back to the same person if they're buying a third-party audience they'll answer a question they'll never see that person again so Susie live is really a game changer for us because connecting the Quan qual is kind of the Holy Grail for Enterprise researchers and it does it in a condense and efficient form what's the name of the qualtrics product that would come closest to Susie live you know I don't even know and and I don't I I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about competitors and I was asked that earlier today um I look at our business metrics in terms of what's our conversion ratio down the funnel how are we growing year over year and as long as that's going on the right direction then I'm more focused on listening to our con our customers and MPS and what they're saying versus trying to chase what a competitor is doing so you know I know that they're gold standard because they you know they had a huge exit um and you know they obviously sort of set the path for us but that's sort of the extent of which I know about them um you're probably getting approval now right now at board meetings right the Q4 board meeting obviously for your 2023 plan what do you want to grow Revenue at next year um 50 to 60 interesting so you can I mean can you get up to well it'd be tough could you break 100 million bucks in ARR end of next year we'll we'll be in the high 80s to low 90s uh a year from now and then you know in a normal Market that's when you start thinking about an IPO who knows where it's going to be we have enough on our balance sheet now though to get through the other side um and then you know your options really change once you're not burning Capital anymore uh to access the capital markets and fund your you know your future growth um especially with our sales efficiency so who knows when we be able to IPO I would say likely in the next two to three years but probably closer than we're at 200 million ARR versus 100 uh and definitely not when you saw the spec craziness of companies going public at 25 or 50 million uh yeah enough on your balance sheet quote to get to the other side that's what everyone's trying to do right now what is that for you 20 30 40 million bucks that's somewhere in that range yes yeah fair so it's a combination of controlling burn and revenue from customers and also you probably still have some of that series D Money in the Bank yeah we have a good amount of series D and it's really just you know when when your op-x growth is outpacing the growth of your Revenue you're going to burn more and more so what we've done is we've looked at r d and GNA that the two of the three components of our of our Opex that were really slowing down you know you get General operating leverage in your GNA meaning you don't need another CFO or CEO Etc given the size of the company and then r d it's we're really slowing down the r d hiring because we've got more efficient the product has gotten to a very mature state so now the revenue growth is outpacing the growth in the r d and the only thing that's continuing its growth in the investment is sales and marketing because we have a payback for that and that's a very oversimplified way of sort of looking at how do we get through what's Total Team size today 300 people and how many are engineers 80 80 between product engineering sales is about 75. interesting yeah and and any more quota carrying reps there was 18 a year ago no we're in the 20s now I think we have 24 25 yeah still a million dollar quota well I mean it's really across the board but yeah that's an average amount it goes up based upon tenure we found that our sellers really grown productivity with tenure in a very predictable way because they're planting seeds each year like we're selling ultimately um vitamins in that Advil and you know so we're talk to people about market research but they might not have a growing need sound for selling cyber security right so I'm not going to always jump on the offer but a year and a half later they might so with every year you know our sellers kind of accrue these relationships in this Pipeline and things come out of nowhere and they start to get more productive just based upon the work they had put in over the last couple years so you give each of your 24 reps like what 10 customers to work with for life and they can track that relationship year over year um so it doesn't it's not that clean we have uh net new sellers who are focused on just winning new customers and we also have expansion sellers which will work more closely with our customer success team that focused on those large super Enterprise clients to do more account based marketing and expansion so they're kind of two different motions because if you're if you're a Net News seller you really just have to understand our product right but if you're expanding you actually have to understand the company and especially if you're already working with them there's an expectation that you know the company so those are kind of two different skill sets so we look at those different you know there's really three components right you have new expansion and renewal and we have three different teams each responsible for those components of error it makes tons of sense Matt we're out of time hell of an interview let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite Business book um I still love hard thing about hard things I read it over and over especially in this environment number two is there a CEO you're following or studying besides Ben well right now everyone's looking at what Elon Musk is going to do next so I don't know how I can have another answer besides that um so he would have to be my answer number three what's your favorite online tool for building Susie I love I think I mentioned this last time a tool called Insight squared which is a data visualization tool for Salesforce which has been tremendous for us number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven okay and situation married single kids three kids married all right and what are you 46 or 47 now 47 47 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. I would say how important your network is and how important it is to kind of mine your network over time and keep in touch with as many people as possible because ultimately when we launch Susie the way I got it off the ground was calling the people who I knew that trusted me that would take a chance on our product so I think always be focused on keeping that Network alive and growing over the years guys Susie Susie is helping big Enterprise plans like Procter and Gamble at Gillette do market research they've got over 400 customers paying an average 150 000 bucks a year just past a 60 million dollar AR run rate call it this week this month up from 40 million just a year ago up and passing about 20 million back in 2020 so really healthy growth rate they did burn 25 million net burn last a year but obviously that was the Heyday now they've recorrected things they've got plenty of Runway to get through uh the end of next year and even further where they hope to break a sort of 80 90 100 million dollar run right we'll see what happens Matt thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much looking forward to being back again one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to 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 SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big 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 SAS 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 sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 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 people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya

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Intro to episode with Nathan Latka hello everyone my guest today is Matt Brittany's the founder and CEO of Suzy and on-demand human intelligence platform used by over 175 leading brands including Microsoft PNG and t-mobile Matt you ready to take us to the top you know it all right man jump in here so for people that have not heard of the business before they missed your first episode what's the company do so Suzy is a software platform that allows companies to instantly become in touch with their customer to get instant feedback on anything from product design packaging or even to come up with new ideas with the customers that matter most yep and so how do they do this can you tell us how PNG is using you sure so we I can't speak to how any individual customer uses us because frankly I don't know I don't have access to their individual dashboard but the way Suzy works is we have a network of over a million US consumers that are on a gamified platform called Crowdtap those consumers earn points for answering questions anonymously on behalf of our customers so if you're a mom age 34 and somebody wants to hear from you you'll get a question either qualitative or quantitative forum you respond the aggregated of those answers go to our clients who are licensing software that answer the ask the questions and they can expect up to 500 open at the responses during the same meeting they actually ask the questions in yeah now make the link again between Crowdtap and Suzy are they on the same cap table same text editor okay so Crowdtap was that was the original company which I spun out of my agency mry and basically when I joined crowd's happen 2016 after selling the agency the publicist group it was an influence or activation platform so they were having the members of Crowdtap create and share content that business has kind of leveled off over time and I knew I had that sort of unlock growth and new opportunity so we've essentially changed the use of that network of Crowdtap by instead of having to create and share content answer questions I also knew I needed to create a new b2b brand to sit on top of the crowd tab network because Crowdtap is sort of had gotten a reputation of being in the influencer space so that's where Suzy was invented so it's basically two different brands under the same company now back on October 25th 2017 when you and I spoke last on the show you had articulated that our pool was around as monthly our boo was around ARPU kind of $11,000 so very much enterprise motion and you had about 70 customers at that point update those numbers have moved upstream and how many customers today we have nearly 200 customers are Customer count average now 11 thousand was a monthly number not a non annual number or I bar move and monthly yeah I didn't quote the exact number because I actually just listened to that podcast again this morning cuz I roll but revenue annually per customer is around seventy-five thousand dollars we started to work with a lot more middle market companies as well which is brought that number down slightly yeah by the way not nothing wrong with that right it's just a strategic decision yeah so when you tell me by the way we talked about this last time we talked in terms of a CDs and you had said somewhere on 130 hundred forty which would have been about 11 or 12 grand a month what you're saying is you you wanted to expand your top of funnel you've moved downstream a little bit now let me ask you many times when companies do this it throws your salesperson pro formas all out of whack quota targets like volume demo - you know conversion trial all that stuff out of whack how did you make sure how did you update how your sales people were selling with a lower ACB well we a talk we were just launching Suzy so a lot of the clients that existed were kind of ones that we kind of reconfigure from the legacy Crowdtap business so our sales team was kind of bet built net new from scratch going to market so there wasn't really legacy issues that had to kind of pivot away from okay okay fair enough okay good so so the company in Ronis again crowd that was launched in which year crack-tip is launched in 2011 it was spun out of my ad agency at mr. youth which just also knows mry and Suzy got Suzy founded in 2018 going in what year Suzy we officially launched it South by Southwest last March March 2018 March 2010 okay good and then so I was like asking this question how much did you total spend on building Suzy before your first dollar of revenue well when we first launched Suzy we essentially took the legacy Crowdtap platform made it purple stripped out all the functionality that were in insights and called it Suzy then last summer we had the reap lat form and that was some of the hardest months of my career because when we plant for him the site actually was intermittently down and had terrible performance issues last summer so keeping the customers that we did have sticking with us was not easy we did have some churn as a result all of it because we essentially had to rebuild what is now known as Suzy today from scratch but it's been up and running and kind of blazing-fast an incredible functionality ever since how much we put in the building a new Suzie if I think s I'd say anywhere between a quarter million to half a million dollars we have a really efficient program yeah development team not that ok quantify Gross churn that quantify that churn form am curious is the reap platform happened past 12 months revenue turn was about what are well we actually have a hundred percent and that net revenues are bodacious though gross basis I would say twenty twenty percent annual churn so maybe like a percent and a half a month yeah tops so just to be clear 20 percent gross revenue insurance you have 20 percent expansion to reach net revenue retention of a hundred percent and that's we're at right now how are you driving an expansion revenue what are you upselling it's it's both upselling cross-selling we're going from one brand that you know at Microsoft to multiple brands and we're unlocking new functionality in the product new ways to ask questions as well as unlocking more specific targeting segments on the app our clients which creates upsell opportunity are there any value based upsells like number of questions asked per month or number of targets reach okay what are those yes so basically the way our license tier works is for the most part the number of questions you get on an annual basis we don't really do monthly because some companies have seasonality so you buy a certain amount of questions not all questions are created equal quantitative questions cost more than quantitative so we kind of have an internal credit system and based upon how much the client spends we give them options you can get X amount of you know quality quantitative XM have qualitative questions to come up with an annual kind of license total that's the biggest driver of the cost but then as I mentioned earlier now we're unlocking new action types and also more specific targeting we're partnering with third-party data providers who were essentially overlaying our first-party panel data with their third party panel data so we could know with one of our our panel members our Costco shoppers or if they owned a Mazda what's the source of truth on that the customer email a credit card number and a geolocation we're matching the PII personally identifiable information which by the way we never share with our clients with a third-party company and basically they have a variety different inputs for how they get their data and the culmination of that is much deeper targeting segmentation interesting okay talk to me about how you funded this bad boy so so Capital raised to date bootstrap trav you raise capital so how much yeah it so it's kind of a convoluted story so I'll try to keep it as simple as possible basically mr. youth was a company that I started way back in 2002 made an agency yep my buildings up from one employee to about 500 it was acquired in 2011 by the public��s group before it was acquired I spun out a company called Crowdtap the impetus of Crowdtap was the manage and measure student representatives which then became kind of bloggers we spun that company out when we spun out the same cap table of the agency became the cap table of the new software company oh wow did you enjoy the owner in the agency I wasn't because we had done a private equity deal in 2008 where I took some money off the table and got one of the old partners out I was the largest individual shareholder was the peon firm they called Alta communications out of Boston so they're still on the top table they're still in the cap table they already got a 3x return from the agency and now it's all gravy but was that mistake um you know it I actually closed the private equity deal on the night of the Lehman Brothers collapse I like everyone else was kind of freaking out about my future I just had my second kid you know I didn't take a lot of money out of the agency so in retrospect I wish I wouldn't have done it but life doesn't work that way you know when you live and you learn so they don't teach you about that in college or high school right what to do about private equity eat deals and secondary offerings things like that so spun it out I'm spun-out Crowdtap the CEO of Crowdtap was my original product manager from the agency he went with the business and I helped him raise the series a in 2012 and found your group at about 6 million they raised an additional round I guess you can call it a be round a couple years later of another 6 to 7 million foundry led that again and then when I came into the company the company had also a where were you though I was can I ran the after I sold the agency I was at pupusas group Meyer I was gonna say that beautiful fort was it before you turn out there's a three year or now and then I I have some friends this company summit series which is a big entrepreneur conference that I ran for a year is almost like an externship just to kind of get away from the corporate world for a little and then I rejoined and then when I joined the company also some venture debt when I came up the idea of Suze I needed a little bit more of a leash to basically build the business so we got an extension of the B round for another five mil you raise the the six million debt round and 2015 or that was before you I was before I joined yeah got it so when I joined that six million of venture debt was already there we got an extra five million on top of the be just so I had a little bit more of you know leeway to basically build Suzy and we restructured that that ventured at the end of last year which freed up a little more capital and now at the end this year we're gonna be raising a growth round so so real quick when you came in you would not take that extra five from foundry in 2017 take that dilution unless you were like in a position where like crap like we I want more runway to feel comfortable here with a reap lat form for example right I mean basically we're walking away from ninety percent in the revenue to stop driving it the crew to focus on what was 10% of the revenue to build into a new business so yeah you're not gonna go two steps forward without taking one step so what when you joined after that debt round what was a range is fine but what was the run right at that point well it wasn't really a rum rate because Crowdtap was more of a tech enabled service business so it didn't really have recurring revenue so didn't really have a high renewal rate it was highly unpredictable and become it was almost like a media type business and it was shrinking right so and and the costs have blown out of control there was a second CEO would come in and between the guy who I put in and when I joined and it just wasn't being run the right way not necessarily his fault but just the market conditions what is the 2016 even on that model that's not really SAS we're talking like 10 million 5 million 100 million between 5 and 10 million between 5 to 10 it was burning a ton of cash and then in 2017 we actually had to cut about 70 percent of the staff be along with raising that capital I just needed to basically conserve capital refocus on this new business a lot of which was gonna spit out revenue right away so it was like the heart of the pivot so to speak and it was really hard coming out of 2017 we had the vision for Suzy right around when we last spoke launch it in 2018 and been off to the races ever since now we're we're cranking I mean is this great can I take MRR & ARR those 200 customers times that ACP you gave me earlier 75 grand now puts out like a million to a month something like that so Rommel will be in and this year probably little higher yeah and ends which you can see would you consider all that 1.2 million a month Pierce ass at this point or pure sass in fact feels good right yeah it feels great I mean we've simply stripped out things that Margaret believed was no I guess he crowd type revenue which we could have called SAS because we just don't want to screw around with that like SAS assess us we want to have you know we're gonna be benchmarked against other best-in-class SAS companies we want to have the gross margin profile the renewal rate profiles of other companies in our space ok good so you hope to break one point to by the end of this year we're gonna buy one point two at the end of this year we're yet today about one yep just around them and where Suzy 2018 Revenue were you exactly a year ago just pure SAS uh we were I think around 600,000 we're growing about eighty percent right that's I mean considering every I mean everything going on that's pretty damn good actually can she had a little misstep in q1 I mean it's funny because when you take a step back and you say we launched this product last year yeah and at a point right now where we're gonna be at a place where most US company takes 5-10 years to build its it's good to think of and we had a misstep in q1 because we had you know some churn in terms of our employees and we had the product going down last year but without that we'd be in over a hundred percent and and the renewal rate is actually accelerating it I mean the growth rates actually accelerating yeah so and by the way like you so the most successful like I've interviewed about 3,000 alsace SEOs so I like to look at patterns the most successful I'll just measure it purely based off just capitalistic ARR right the one is north of a hundred million almost all of them start off as an agency because you get unique insights into all the customers problems and then you've gotta find problem so like you you the actual store in my opinion coming to no sorry we're cutting in and out but I'm just saying you my opinion your story is actually like most companies will move from like an on-prem to assess your story is actually moving from mic a low margin cash like agency media business to pure place ass going to a million you know twelve million dollar run rate essentially in under 18 months yeah and I should say our agency was pulling 25 percent EBIT the margins at the end of the day you know it because we we had that that Crowdtap impetus but that IP was built into the services model but yeah I mean I think it's because you understand the customer pain points I mean I worked with CMOS for 15 years I understand what they need especially with our business I'm not coming at it from a market research standpoint I'm coming at it from a business build their standpoint and I think that curse of knowledge can sometimes hurt people who sort of are you know part of the industry that they're going into where I'm coming in from the outside looking in and now we're actually bring on market research experts actually help us cuz we're going up against companies like Qualtrics and Survey Monkey you know Qualtrics obviously we know about the big acquisition SurveyMonkey just went public those companies are in our space and that's who are competing with what's your team size today how many people we Employee count have 65 full-time employees how many are engineers 15 to 18 how many quota carrying reps quota can grabs eight eight what do you set when a when a salesperson is fully on board what's your salesperson profitability when you compare their quota relative to their full complement 5x okay so if someone's full earnings or 200,000 we want to see them bring in a million in license revenue that doesn't count project revenue because sometimes we'll do projects for clients for 20 25 grand actually show them the value before they sign a license I don't count that I kind of look at as pause the cost of acquiring a customer do you ever sort based off quarts or 200 customers based off who you put $25,000 professional services on and what their retention rates look like compared to people that you did not touch with professional services so it's not even professional services because we will they're paying us twenty five thousand dollars to do a project for us to actually prove the value it's not we're not spending it on them but we do compare customers by cohorts by how you know enterprise customers versus mid market customers customers who have them some type of managed service component versus pure-play self service customers we're always looking at that data our whole mantra at Suzy is kid tested mother approved the mother is the is sort of the expert survey research person the kid is the person that just needs the data and doesn't really care about market research we kind of need to appease the master market researcher while being easy and kind of intuit enough for the everyday person that just needs to get consumer feedback yeah you you took care it sounds like you wiped out the debt a year to ago it was yeah we restructured it okay so what is not maybe yeah so what so when you first who did you raise him was this an SV beacon alone uh yeah it was the the venture that original did venture that was through Trinity capital and we restructured it through a company called North Atlantic capital out of Portland Maine the biggest difference with the second round of debt and the first is this is an interest-only component where there's no principle pay back and then there's good of a balloon payment at the end so it basically takes away a lot of sort of the drain on cash flow tell us what is the rate are we talking like 6% or like 12% to the higher end I don't know what I'm able to disclose I know that's fine I asked because there are so many diesel own offerings now and it's so hard to compare them all equally because they throw in all these weird freaking terms and it's not normalized so actually the other place where you know yeah you'd be the place where you know you can pay it back listen if you can't pay back that balloon payment your company is gone but you know with the terms we had in the growth that we have in the business it's for us there was kind of a no-brainer and it really bridged us we were sort of in the tweener phase last December we're thinking about growth round phrase but growth round investors won a million mr are right they went a little bit more of an operating history and we were so they're too big to be early-stage and too small to be growth stage and now we're right in the heart of growth stage we have a ton of inbound interest and we want to get the right investor to come in and help us grow to do that next round we're doing we're gonna do in the fourth quarter okay and q4 and what do you think the right target is in terms of what you wanna raise I'm gonna raise around 20 million you know if where it concern you know we could get eight to ten X revenues so you know you're looking at anywhere between 100 to say 150 million valuation and based upon the ownership state that most growth round investors want will probably raise 20 to 25 million about site capital could part of that could be secondary yeah yeah yeah and you know so you'll sell call it you know 10 ish percent of the cut maybe it may be a little bit more personal the company 15 percent that's what growth investors need for it to move the needle for them yeah yeah interesting okay very good let me just make sure I've got nothing else here do you have more you didn't have a lot of insight of this last time cuz it Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) was new but do you know what your fully weighted CAC is to get a new $70,000 ACV account up it's about fifty four thousand okay good I mean so healthy payback period there - yep yeah good stuff all right man let's wrap up with The Famous Five! the famous five number one favorite business book I hard thing about our things by Ben Horowitz number two is their CEO you're falling or studying I actually love following Jason Lumpkin who's more of a kind of sass expert but he obviously sold this company to Adobe but I get a lot of insights from him number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company I love a tool called insight squared that we use it sits on top of Salesforce that gives a sort of real-time information about how our sales team is performing number four how many hours of sleep you get every night six to seven that's good in situation married single kids age two kids I love that all right and how are you I'm forty four forty four wins the wedding by the way November oh that's excited let her do all me there I'm gonna be going I'm gonna be asking like you know revenue questions and then the scenes of all your SAS friends right last question alright last question what he was your 20 year old self knew a couple things I think first and foremost to think more long-term don't chase the small deals you know think big picture your time is a huge opportunity cost if you're not spending on saying that is really realizing your vision guys Suzy calm built on top of crowd top again helping big brands really get intelligent feedback from customers via surveys or even prospective customers now doing caught 12 million bucks an AR are up from six hundred thousand dollars months just a year ago healthy growth rate two hundred customers pain call it 60 $70,000 a CVS they raise twenty six million bucks to do this 65 on the team hundred percent net revenue more attention with a payback right now of about 10 months to land on you $75,000 a CV account alright Matt thanks for taking us to the top thank you