How Swooptalent grew Swooptalent to $1.6M revenue and 27 customers in 2020.

hello everybody my guest today is Stacey Chapman she's a CEO and co-founder of swoop talents Stacey's been in the talent systems industry for decade as a vendor practitioner and implementer and all of those situations talent data has been a huge challenge and every year data gets more important so our current company solves that Stacey are you ready to take us to the top that's good all right tell us about Soup talent what's it doing how do you make money so we connect data silos inside large enterprise so we're able to connect all kinds of different systems to each other companies usually have about 7 and different systems with talent data in them we connect all of those and then we connect them to available public data about talent so you end up with a single source of talent data as a service which we then strive to make as easy as possible for you to consume name a few resources just to put a face to the name so it could be anything from the patent database to github to blogger all kinds of places that you can find data about talent and inside it's going to be Oracle systems you like systems like Taleo like workday all kinds of places active and also a lot of inactive data that people lose in data migrations and revenue model wises is a pure place SAS business price along kind of how much data you're using or what yeah it's how much tidier using and how much systems you have connected typically customers pay us annually in advance okay and give me generally speaking we talk in 10 grand a hundred grand a million which general contract size big companies are gonna be a hundred grand and up medium sized companies you know in 50 to 100 grand we doesn't generally apply for small enterprise okay if we try I'm gonna ask you to generalize for a second I know you have different cohorts but across you you're just speaking about your customer base the split between medium and enterprise would you say good averages call it 60 70 grand an ACV 85 I'd say 85 okay good so you're leaning more towards enterprise yeah yep I've got a bigger problem and it's an easier story to tell yeah and the sale cycle probably the same as it is selling a 10 grand a year contract right look and that's the thing a lot of companies don't seem to get it is exactly the same yep yep okay give me more your story here when did you launch the company so we have kind of a two stage company we originally launched back in 2012 and then we worked away till 2016 just doing external data for people to do for like finding talent and it just increasingly was becoming commoditized so in the second quarter of 2016 we went through a process of saying we either gotta burn this down or we have to really look at a different way we can do it so in 2016 we really moved it into the enterprise and started applying it to internal businesses and its makes it a lot less sticky so that's sort of deal so I did not require a total product rewrite or just tripling your price point basically just tripling the price point changing the story you've heard that before huh yes and you said it's more sticky now or less sticky more sticky I mean once you have 15 million other companies or records you're not so much they're not so much a customer as your hostage yep yep that's interesting and what have you scaled to how many customers are you working with now we actually have got fewer than half that we had before we did it but the deal size is about tenfold it's a beautiful thing that's less support cost so what is it what's the number today I would say 27 is the number today so it was slow getting through 2017 we more than doubled in 2017 but we're also going to more than double again in this quarter so I think we're amazing hit our stride yeah that's amazing I mean if I take 27 clients times at 85 grand a CPU told me I mean you're cranking past 2.2 million in air are at this point or about 190 per month right we're getting there we're getting there okay yeah but but I mean within 20,000 of that somewhere I mean that super close ice yeah yeah so when you say you were doubling you over a year it's fair to say if I go back 13 14 months to December 2016 you were doing somewhere around call it 60 or 70 grand right and monthly recurring revenue even 5050 okay good good good okay good so your 50 back then call it you know one tennis something like that right now when do you think you'll it will actually have you done this bootstrap have you raised we did 125 K and friends and family back in 2014 and how was that cold that bootstrapped it's fine they're very nice they're very understanding are they all in the cap tables individual lines or did you make them all go into under a syndicate they're individual lines which is proving to be a bit of a challenge we should have we should have done that the other way around nope hey how many so it's 140 grand total I think you said how many people for okay that's not horrible I've seen horror stories where it's a court of a million and across 25 people and it's like a nightmare yeah okay so no so basically bootstrap scaling 27 customers now but paying you way more than they were back in the day you said churn has also gotten better what is churn down to today we haven't lost a company since April okay okay got it so since let's move over the past twelve months or so you haven't lost I lost a company and yeah it's not long enough to really call that data yeah yeah it feel it feels really solid yeah how's that that's good what if I asked you to give me a a revenue churn number so maybe didn't lose a customer but maybe some downgrade some upgrade what's revenue turr��n look like they've all gone up about 15% I've just put on a head of customer success whose revenue focused who is scolding me that it should have been a lot more than that so hopefully I'll have a better story for that in a year okay so what is revenue retention today is like 115 percent hundred twenty percent yes hundred fifteen hundred fifteen percent interesting what is your head at your new head of customer suggesting it should be well he probably thinks that should be the right but that the base contract size is about half what it should have been so he fits in 160 yeah for a while and then come back down to 110 115 what do you have to make sure these customers use the term hostage earlier people can start resenting you if they feel like they're a hostage so what kind of actions do you have to see your customers taking on a monthly basis to know that they're happy using you and they're happy to pay you it's actually that they come up with other ideas of how to use us so what we're finding in terms of building customers sat is they're having as I get into like year two of working with us they are having ideas about how they can use data in different ways and so we absolutely have to adapt to that and respond to what their needs are really well so what happens is they're like well you know you have all our data so we have to use you for this so can we do X handily nine and a half times out of ten it's been a really good idea so we have to deliver them what they need to do to be able to continue to innovate spending to acquire these customers in the first place not nearly enough up until I'm gonna say three months ago almost all of our customers were customer of new customers were customer referral soon so well that's quite nice from a customer set it's bit embarrassing for growth sure so we're sort of starting to market interesting so what will you take fully weighted CAC though like how many what's your total team size today I don't I well we just put on eight new engineers and that takes us up to 20 so up until the January it was 12 people that's pretty significant if you bring on 8 engineers and assume a conservative salary of call it 60 grand a year eight times five grand per month I mean it's 45 grand a month and Newburn how are you mean are you yeah Oh interesting my founder is from Hyderabad Oh interesting so you're getting really nice leverage in terms of much lower cost of human capital yes but customer success is here you know marketing will be here sales obviously is here but engineering is gonna be mostly and where is here by the way where's here I blend oh very cool Oakland I love that and so do you maybe let me ask this a different way is there a number of months that you like to get your money back on a new customer so payback period I look I can't even answer that effectively DaCosta acquire customers to give if I was going to be a real answer I would have to capitalize what the whole history of those years of us having done the wrong thing with the product were so that sort of depends whether I count the life of the company and the life of what few customers we have in that time I would say we should have paid back the cost of the customer in three months that the maximum yeah but we'd start with the weight the way growing now we're actually adding new integrators and new connectors all the time so we should be able to bring that down further as we get a stable set of sort of plug-and-play system connectors yeah that's interesting I mean for a bootstrap company you have to keep a tight payback period but for a company like you sometimes people look at and go wow they're going their money back so fast...