How Turtl CEO Nick Mason grew Turtl to $15M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Nick Mason he his background is in software engineering and product development for customers including LexisNexis and the University of Oxford he co-founded turtle with the aim to empower anyone to create beautiful interactive content get simple simple analytics based insights and dramatically improve the performance of their content over time Nick are you ready to take it to the top oh yeah all right so tell us about turtle and its Gurt elko for those who don't want to follow on but what's the company doing what's your revenue model how do you make money so well so starting with revenue model we're a monthly license subscription SAS business so we essentially rent our software out to large enterprises to help them solve their marketing challenges and and those as you said in the end really around content so how we see it is that and you know large enterprises spend an awful lot of money on content creation on content marketing but actually doing that in an efficient way in a measurable way and in a way which means that you know you're getting the best bang for your buck is not an easy challenge so our software really helps people to solve that problem and you mentioned it's it sounds like a pure place a smart I'll give me a general sense what's the average customer paying you per month so average contract value per month is around two and a half thousand you see you're paying a man to kind of mid market enterprise space then yes that's right that's right obviously for our larger enterprises you know that that's where pricing really starts at the larger enterprises is there buy more seats and as they buy more features it goes up from there got it and when did you launch the company 2014 yeah and Nick what's that founding story look like I mean were you like on the street had to make something work so you did this or you quit a big corporate gig what was it no I was I was doing a lot of consultancy and it was kind of interesting because several things came together at the same time so I became aware of content marketing and the fact that this was growing a growing area of the market and but whenever I saw the the content that people were making I was really disillusioned with just the way it was presented so static PDF static web pages and my job at the time was really doing UX and I kind of thought like people spending all this money but the results just looked really really bad and at the same time I was working at University of Oxford on a project for them work development project came across some really interesting research to do with how we actually consume information and how we retain it how we engage so putting all those things together and like obvious growing market problems as I saw them and you know a starting point for solutions in terms of scientific research around how we might actually get people to remember content and engage with it more sort of a perfect picture of starting the business and how these chemicals are there two to two of you guys you put a 50/50 DMZ way to start with yet we have investors now and it's obviously got a little more complicated but ya have windows how much have you raised so under a million under my own yeah so we're trying to do it and you know keep control of the company and so everyone who's invested is someone who we know and someone who has a direct impact on the business on a day to day basis so we want to kind of steer clear of doing it the VC way and you know try and maintain control and keep it that way did you take on this capital as convertible debt or actual price to equity they're on the cap table priced equity price - interesting how did you go about setting and kind of getting a lead investor if org I mean did you have one person that makes it more than 50% of the round yes I'm trying to remember back in the first round we did so it was it was actually it was actually a good story we we went in to pitch to to this guy and [Music] well after mark at mark a spree and one of our investors so he went in to pitch to him at his former job and he and his sales director liked it so much that they actually said well we want to get involved and we don't want to buy the product for our current business we want to buy equity in the product and leave our jobs and come and work for you in one year was that that was that would have been in 2015 early 2015 and scale size where were you at that point in terms of maybe revenue or your blue revenue we had two customers so our revenues about 10 10k well so very early you must you must be very charming to walk in and convince two people to quit their jobs and give you money to do it I couldn't possibly comment all right and what's the team size today so we are split across lavinia in the UK so we have five in Slovenia that's our development team they're great guys and we have 15 in the UK but we're hiring quickly and the number changes all the time so that's probably an accurate right fight to go but at least 15 yes and then what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers you're serving so we have in the region of 50 customers ranging from bloomberg Cisco Oracle The Economist people like that down to smaller businesses our kind of strategy is ready to try and get some big names and so that you know other people can follow so Nick I mean is it fair to say at a $2,500 monthly are poor you guys are with somewhere in the 120 akk per month range yes yeah yes that's about it and generally trying to move upstream how do you mean sorry larger larger larger accounts yeah well it's kind of interesting we what we found is that if we go in too high to start with you know we struggled to demonstrate value quick enough for people to really get what we're doing so our strategy at the moment is to go in a tiny bit long and to grow value over time so you know get in get a beachhead in a company you know build up usage get a critical mass and then you can start to go to other parts of the business and say we'll look your colleagues over here we're doing this great stuff about you take a few licenses as well and trying to get basically get a foot in the door and grow that's a strategy give me an example like Bloomberg right when you say grow usage most companies know the number one usage metric they've got to get to get people to spend more money with them what is that number one metric for you it actually varies between companies because people have different objectives for their content so it can be any any one of the number of things so for some companies its leads generated and for other companies like Bloomberg it's gonna be insight generated what is that and what's in and say well so for example you know through using our using our technology people can see how people consume their content on a really really granular basis so for Bloomberg's use case if they're using it in a sales context being able to send out you know a piece of collateral and see you know this guy read this page for five minutes and skipped over the pricing page but was really interested in these particular pages about features you know that on a very granular is incredibly valuable to the salesperson and so you know the downstream effect of that will be that you know the the you know we improve the performance of their sales team you know and that would be the metric that they're looking at to work out whether they buy more licenses so it really varies gotta and Nick what do you give me a sense of growth so you launched only two three years ago you're at about 120 grand a month today where were you twelve months ago Oh crikey um some 50 so you've more than doubled yes so we're trying to we're trying to stay on the doubling path that's our objective that's the magic number right exactly yeah as I understand it yeah now obviously a key thing to doing that is keeping churn and control what's your churn look like and how do you make sure to try and control that so I don't have an exact number of churn and it's always a number which you want to get down so we we've started in the last six months doing a proper like customer success function and I think that if I had one thing that I wish we'd invested in a bit sooner it would have been that because you know it takes time to get up to speed and you know it's also a tremendous opportunity for upsell and growing accounts if you're doing that well so and you know really implementing that and using every trick in the book to get closer to your users because at the end of the day you know those are the people who buy our software they don't sign the cheques but those are the people who and you know we'll be demanding more licenses and saying you know you absolutely must not take this thing away from us and so those are the people who need to influence and get good relationships with so that's something we're investing a lot in and I mean so in the past six days have you lost any customers no Lola okay do you know yet if you're at net negative turn because you're driving so much expansion revenue that's hard to say I think I think the idea for this year is that you know our conservative goal is that the to balance each other out and but we'd like to do a lot better than that because we've got some really good accounts that...