How Upfluence CEO Anne-Julie Gros grew Upfluence to $35M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is is kevin cruzy after launching three companies in e-commerce he identified an opportunity in the influencer marketing space he grouped up with three other entrepreneurs and became the founders of his current company called upfluence they then spent the next five years building the company into an industry leader we'll talk about it today kevin are you ready to take us to the top i am ready nathan okay so first off so industry leader is a big word how do you know your industry leader well i mean you have a couple of different ways to think about leadership right you have a technological leadership that we definitely have we've been in here longer than almost anybody else um and then there is a market share leadership which um according to service we are too so it's a very important tool according to service we are too i mean like client service we have a thousand customers and paying customers for industry most of them enterprise um that's not something most of our competitors can even get close to okay and and tech well actually let's back up here for a second so for people that are not familiar with influence or marketing help them understand what you do of course so i think a very easy way to understand what we do is think about coca-cola right they have a new product they want to launch on your drink and to talk about that drink today uh you want to go to social media influencers people on instagram people on facebook people on youtube that can talk about your product the same way celebrities used to do that 20 years ago baseball players and so on so they won't really find these people to do that today it's really finding a needle in a haystack it's really about finding the one person that matches exactly what you want them to say on the right network on exactly the right audience to do that manually is almost impossible so you need softwares to help you out you need a way to easily search for the right person amongst millions and millions of profiles find the right person go after them partner with them and then of course structure a deal to make them talk about you so if you're coca-cola we help you basically find the right guy we help you work with them we provide you with all the tools to draft a contract pay them in the end and monitor how good they're doing so it's it's really what we do as a as a software a foreign and just to be clear this is a sas model or is this something more like professional services agency model uh this is 100 sas so all our clients are independent they're actually um they're actually using the software on their own and using it to do everything they want and kevin give me a general sense here so in terms of what customers are paying on average per year we're talking you know 100 grand or a million or 10 000 what is it usually our alpine is close to 30 000 uh so it gives you one month per year yeah per year okay yeah so it's an expensive piece of technology uh but once i mean once again the oppa has been growing really a lot this year so people that came onto the software let's say two years ago would have had a much better deal let's say yup yup yup now that makes sense well well hold on so okay so it sounds like that is your that's your 30 000 acv is your starting price point today but if you look at your historical you see your entire customer base today on average you're saying they're maybe paying you more like 10 grand a year or something like that yes actually the overall the entire company over five years a thousand customers i believe the average the average card value of all our years was about nine thousand dollars still inexpensive software our smallest price that we have ever done was about four thousand dollars a year uh for a yearly contract which is how we sell uh our tools today the most expensive we've ever done is in uh in the high six figures yeah i mean yeah a little more than 150 000 bucks so an average acv across a thousand customers of of nine grand obviously we can kind of do backwards math there would just put you at about 750 grand a month in revenue or 9 million in arr is that generally accurate this is generally accurate correct if you take away the a few other factors correct what other factors well some of our users have one license that is used by let's say 16 different subsidiaries for example and it's not exactly structured the same deal we see them as one customer but as 16 users i see well if we ignore customer count and ignore our put generally speaking in terms of ar range you're right that nine million range today we're closer to six closer to six okay by the way thank you for correcting me i know it's always tricky to like correct lower than correct tire but listen a lot of people listen and they would know they go we know kevin was lying now they know they're gonna oh kevin's a good guy he's accurate we are pretty we're pretty proud of what we've done i i think the story of a prince is interesting too because we started as a tech company uh five years ago so we built the entire technology we have today but at the time and i think a lot of people can relate you had no influence on marketing it wasn't even a keyword on google right so we had to go and try to sell the tech but nobody wanted to buy it so we had to actually do service for three years build the service business from zero to three million dollars of revenue kind of like an influencer marketing agency powered by our own tech so only two years ago i actually asked my i was ceo of the company for that time i asked my co-founders to step up and and and take my job give me a budget and send me to new york where i would actually launch uh the software division of the company so what we see in software usage today is really two and a half years old which is great it's very new it's very 2016 last launch date correct yeah for the software actually yeah that's june okay and just be clear the 500 you just told her six million in er today that is pure sass there's not agency revenue built in there there is agency revenue about uh two million dollars and ar in size is four million so it's like uh yeah if we if we cut that out so if we i want to get a sense of just the sas component here right so 4 million bucks in ar that puts you about 330 grand a month today where was just the sas business a year ago in terms of mrr so we hope next year we're going to be to 8 million ar next year in 2019 uh pure uh only software licenses that's what we want to go for company as a whole a little higher obviously we still have service components especially for enterprise customers it's something they usually want to go for looking backwards though so if you're at 4 million say where were you a year ago actually if we were we just passed the 100k mr like 12 months ago so it's actually pretty fast growth okay so about 12 months ago then 100 grand a month now you're doing 340 grand a month or about 4 million bucks in ar so you're reacting forexing you're over here yeah i mean we hope probably not sustainable uh over the very long term but we hope we can double up next year a little more like three two yeah six to eight million is definitely the target that's great how are you walking through how you're getting these customers so signing up a thousand customers is not easy do all of them come through the agency or do any come directly into the sas product so 99 i mean maybe not i don't have the exact number we said 90 of our customers plus our new customers that find us online we have a bunch of acquisition channels that we use obviously cpc adwords you know all these kind of lead nurturing and lead acquisition strategies what's interesting is we actually structure the sales team that's completely automated in terms of calendar booking so i think when you have a sales team the hardest part is actually to motivate them to kind of always be on top of things like make calls like go close leads we actually took all that first part away so it's a team that's based in new york here actually right behind me and they had come up they show up in the morning and these leads have generated like eight to nine calls for them to do demos with people that want to talk to them they do these calls with these people and then they convert about ten percent of the people they actually speak to a lot of people are still interested in what convert them into a paying customer paying customers correct yes okay that's paying 10 grand a year or 30 grand a year yeah these days more 30 hopefully yeah that's great and what's that what's the team size today total company-wide uh it's going to be 62. i'm not if i'm not mistaken we have offices here in new york where we have 25 people and the rest are is spread out across um paris in france leo and switzerland where we do a lot of tech development over there and of course like european customers management and how many of the 62 are kind of marketing sales doing demos things like that i think it's 16 people brutal but i might be wrong that's right how did 16 220 when did you start kind of the inside sales model and did you start with a co-founder leading it or did you hire an external vp of sales or what so it's actually funny so as a european there is a big fear going to the...