How ThreeKit CEO Matt Gorniak grew ThreeKit to $21M revenue and 220 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is matt gorniak he's the ceo of three kits 3d and augmented reality visualization software for products he leads the company by building effective go to market strategies teams and partnerships prior to three kit he served as cro chief reference officer and was co-founder of g2 a leading marketplace for business software reviews it has raised over 100 million dollars he's also head of global sales leadership positions at steelbrick and big machines cloud configure price cpq platforms that were acquired by salesforce and oracle respectively matt you ready to take us to the top let's do it i'm amazed how much you can compact into this this is great nathan yeah i know we'll have fun so what what guy you go from software reviews to visual commerce explain that leap for me yeah i mean there's actually as you met my uh my business partner glitter evil and there's actually a couple of us who've done companies together led by him you know anyway but there's actually two threads you know g2 as you spoke to him was i won't go deep into that but that was more like scratching an itch of like hey how come this is happening this way and you know i know you're really keen on entrepreneurial stories and that's one of those like wow like why is this not fixed why is it not fixed but there's like another thread in parallel as well like to build companies which is a company big machines got sold to oracle and steel brick to sales for us those were you know basically product configuration companies so kind of like how do you sell complex products and that's kind of where three kit falls in so who's paying for the product today give me a customer example if you can uh tailor-made let's say telling me golf drivers and and maybe let me give you the inside what happened to us because i find the best ideas come from seeing things you know you know i also do uh entrepreneurs and and ideally it's something you have an understanding of right you have to be an expert but you see some patterns and the pattern we saw in the configuration space so think of our customers with big machines is like manufacturing company they need a quote for a very complex product right this is like 2005 and six with big machines right okay you put this together well what's it look like what we can show you it's too complicated okay that's early you're like this message you're like maybe one day people want to see the product you know but it was sort of like not a must-have and then when we got to steel break we got into salesforce um i was there for a couple years would go to integrating this you start seeing this demand this is really obvious nathan honestly but it's one of those things you have to need signals people start demand to see the product like let me give you a specific example when you go on e-commerce websites right well matt so can we get more specific can we talk about one of your current costs so creighton barrel uses you so let's be really specific you're trying to buy a couch on crate and barrel what are you what is three kit doing to help create and barrel yeah so visualize the product digitally so so think about you have every product that microphone that you're talking into has many many um options and when you go on the website or create a barrel you have couches just the complex products you have to be visually beautiful you want to see the actual couch and therefore you have to see all the images of all the options and therefore lies the problem most so that's we help them we have a tailor made with the golf clubs a golf club has a hundred thousand options it's just different colors it's just different grips just different shafts but really what that means is if you don't want to represent it you got to do it digitally otherwise you just have a picture of a club a picture of a couch of that microphone and that was sort of like acceptable he like but started we saw the trend right before covet and after that pandemic it's like wait a minute i'm online let's see that microphone i just chose a blue one i'm making it up with a sticker maybe you want to personalize it nathan's special microphone how come i don't see that how come i still see the stock one and that's kind of the thing we're solving 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 gonna 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 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 to 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 than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to 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 understood so yeah just because you're buying a thousand dollar aries sofa on creighton barrel there's a bunch of metrics you can change how big are the cushions what's the fabric material what's the hardware finish what's the color you change all these things and 3k enables creatine braille to show you an accurate visual representation which ideally increases conversion rate what are these brands paying you matt to use the software today on average maybe per month or per year yeah it differs very much i mean like we have an smb segment we want to democratize this and so it's really primarily based on scope like our smb customers are much smaller they have one product let's say and they're typically starting points eighteen thousand a year okay big brands just in general where the scope is just massive you're talking 100 to half a million so your biggest your biggest customer paying around half a million a year how many like are they are they paying based off number of skus or like what's the utility metric right again it's like a total transformation like yeah oh it's skews mostly like basically the scope is just giant right whereas like an sap customer they have one product right you could have one you know not even microphone a lot of them make like let's see a dog crate we have a great customer making dog crates and how do you sell a high value usually these are high consideration items because you kind of want to understand you know if i'm changing things what does it look like it's a high consideration so in that case the impact dog crates right the wonderful uh um dark rates in that case to bring them to life you know they're a very small startup really you need digital but understood so democratizing it started at about a thousand or 2000 bucks a month all the way up to you paying 500 000 bucks a year who are total change management you know hundreds of skus thousands of options etc that's right millions actually millions of options yeah okay and put this on a timeline for me what year did you write the first line of code for the product so the platform so that is a cool story the to make this work you have to kind of bring two worlds together so basically ben houston is the founder of the company he started 2012 and he was a top supplier of visual effects to hollywood so like movies like you know ilm or movies like star force force awakens t-rod utilities he got a lot of credit for that and then in 2015 he met um a couple folks from a small company called shopify who joined the company and they said hey let's make this for e-commerce so the the the knowledge that the sort of the the the ip has been built over many years but the platform itself...