How Velocidi CEO Paulo Cunha grew Velocidi to $36M revenue and 500 customers in 2017.

$15 million raised serving under 500 customers again pay paying you know call it they're doing well more than $3 million per month he won't admit that but the big smile confirms it over 90% annual retention rate again helping these agencies these marketing folks these analysts better understand how to capture use and gain insights acual insights from the data sets they're pouring over every day this is episode 729 coming up tomorrow morning we'll learn from cam Miller and how he and his co-founder left a AP Morgan job to sell $600,000 Plus in baby clothes how' they do it but first here's today's episode this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per to 5 and6 million he is H bent on global domination we just broke our 000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka hello everybody Nathan here my guest today is David Dunn he's the CEO and co-founder of velocity a marketing intelligence company that harnesses data for leading Brands and agencies in the seven years since founding velocity has enabled marketers to make datadriven decisions that optimize marketing spend D is current currently leading the firm's next chapter into artificial intelligence David are you ready to take us to the top thanks Nathan very nice to meet you and thanks for taking the time you bet so people throw around Ai and artificial intelligence all the time right now because it's sexy why are you convinced that's the direction your agency needs to go in yeah so um as a company we're focused on how artificial intelligence can speed up insights know path to insights and so our technology is has always been enabling that process but up until now it's been analysts who derived the insights and what we realize is there's the amount of data is just growing exponentially so the need to help those analysts walk in the door in the morning to a set of insights that are based on the things they're looking for will greatly speed up their work and in turn speed up optimization describe to me what one of these analysts might be doing so like first off are they here or they based over ceas somewhere I think it's both but um there's there's a lot of high-end analysts and uh data science folks across the US and Oh I thought these were your own you're talking about your customers correct yeah got it yeah no platform is a a a technology platform that customers licensed to use with their data scientists data analysts okay and is it a SAS model or an agency model it's a SAS product got and we we license it and uh we do provide some manage services for certain customers who have very special needs but for the most part it's it's out of the box can I translit that to the ones that pay the most sure all right good and what is the average kind of customer paying you uh customers start about 3,000 a month and go up it varies greatly depending on if a customer has a global footprint we have customers operating with us in over 20 countries with a lot of Brands and so obviously that that increases the cost significant and before we go back to kind of the the founding story and how you got into this though what would you say the averages across your entire customer Bas in terms of you know monthly arpo I would probably say it's about 6,000 a month okay cool and and is that pricing uh people pull different levers to get more you know get customers paying more based off utility what are some of those levers you pull like number of seats or additional products what are those levers yeah so so unlike a lot of the folks in the industry who charge by the line of data or by seats we choose not to do either of those things instead we charge by the data uh Stream So how many sources of data and how many specific streams you might pull so for example if you're pulling in Google uh data you you might have 20 brands that would be 20 streams of data um same Source but 20 different streams for 20 different brands and why do a stream versus like an API API call or number of seats or these other metrics well the API call is how we bring in the data so so we use API calls our customers can also manually upload load the data bring it in from email bring it in from many other ways FTP calls and whatnot but but um regardless of how you bring it in it's the number of data streams determines the volume of data that you're ultimately going to have in the platform how much is moving around and therefore how much it should cost got it now take us back to the founding story you said seven years ago so what was it 20 20 2010 something like that yeah we we we started my kitchen with sketching it out at the end of 2009 and then we launched in 2010 and like a lot of young companies we we started with a very clear idea that we want to use data to make marketing smarter better faster but um you know we had to kind of find our way to the right product that the market would actually uh adopt and um and the way we did that was to work very closely with customers over a period of of years to actually develop a product that met their was tailor made for them really who who is we by the way do you have co-founders I have a couple of uh folks who've been here from the beginning yeah yre who's a Norwegian chat has been here from the very beginning and then series of people came in in 2011 and 12 you laughed when I asked that why yeah well we've been grinding the sausage for a long time together got it got it what does that mean like were you at your previous company together or how' you meet yeah he and I worked together uh he he I ran a global business prior to this for Edelman I built their digital Business from The gr up and uh couple years prior to starting this business y came in we we had bought a couple of businesses mer and I merged three or four different businesses together over a fairly short period of time he came in to help me to get everybody on the same H sheet that's so funny and why I mean that sounds like a pretty sweet gig at Edelman what was the final plug for you why give all that up good question I get asked that quite a lot uh yeah it was a great gig I loved it I was there for 11 years um that that was uh then and continues to be their fastest growing business um and and you know it was it was a role in which I probably reinvented myself every couple of years um what what was fascinating to me however was um the way technology was going to change the way we conduct marketing and I you felt at the time I'd helped a lot of young technology startup companies uh by being their first customer there and companies like buzz metric uh radiant 6 buddy media others we were literally among the first customers you should have took Equity yeah seriously and uh but but as as I was doing that and helping them uh build their businesses the role they played was to help us to different iate our services right so we use technology to really get a jump on the competition and it worked very very effectively for us so um at some point I thought you know this be really fun to do on my own um and I'd had a couple of startups previously so I thought let let me try that and so that's how bosi got born so how old were you when you left your Edelman job oh we don't disclose age here it's come on give me give me a Range if you're not comfortable Century on the planet so I'm over half a century on the planet now well what I'm curious because we have listeners of all age types and they like to kind of compare to get a sense of where you are in life compared to them I mean do so how seven years ago how old were you 43 43 okay perfect this is a you should celebrate age it's a beautiful thing are people laughing around you are you lying to me no not at all not at all I did my first start up when I was in my uh early uh late 20s and then early 30s I did I did three Al together and then started the Edan digital business which was really starting a business inside of a business so I suppose I've always been doing startups and and uh now you know I guess it's a little unusual to see uh but actually more frequently you see folks like myself who are actually still doing early stage businesses as we enter you know our midlife and so un usual but but yeah some of the bigger ones and I think it's it's a kind of a different mindset you know you're either an entrepreneur you know who who is you hear this term of of Serial entrepreneurs I always think it's a very strange term but but people who actually for whatever reason go back and do it again and again um and they find patterns and things that they find work and and they just keep doing that and I suppose to some degree I've done that as well inside large companies and outside them as well so where did you give me a sense of where your brain was at when you launched this company like had you already a lot of people say your first kind of million in terms of personal wealth is the hardest and after that you kind take big risk because you're set had you already kind of had a financial event whether it was an exit of...