How Winmo CEO Dave Currie grew Winmo to $29.6M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

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 talk 5 and6 million he help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka many of you who have met in person have seen my unbelievable dashboards that I built you know I'm an anal analytics like crazy person I love the data and I love presenting the data in beautiful dashboards that my team can use on their mobile devices their phones and TVs throughout the office now the way I do this without having to hire a big development team is at Nathan ler.com analytics it's using a company called clipfolio and I'll tell you more later on in the show how I use them it's naa.com analytics all right guys I talked about this earlier but I schedule like so many meetings it would blow your mind I mean all my podcast interviews right hundreds ofers I talk to monthly I schedule and you know what I do it so efficiently I get them all to agree to my calendar so all the calls are back to back to back that means I'm not switching in between tasks all day long I get them to batch so I can be very efficient it's so critical and I use a tool called Acuity scheduling to do this at Nathan la.com schedu it eliminates back and forth between me and people I'm trying to meet with it makes it very simple and most importantly they help me keep my noow rate very low because they send out reminders helps you look very professional so go to naa.com schedu to sign up and you get a great deal you know you guys know this I hit people hard I make great deals and Gavin the CEO has given us a great deal if you sign up like normal people okay on their website you only get a 14-day free trial if you use my link na.com schedu to get 45 days free okay it's the best it's free go to Nathan la.com schedu right now to sign up and I'll see you there Nathan L here this is episode 624 and coming up tomorrow morning you're going to learn from Josh mcarter Josh mcarter of Booker they raised $80 million and did $3.5 billion in 2016 transaction volume and over $1.5 million in monthly occurring Revenue helping 10,000 spas and salons manage their businesses more efficiently he's 44 a father of two and still manages to get 6.5 hours of sleep every night how does he do it good morning everybody Nathan lad here and our guest this morning is Dave Curry he is an entrepreneurial leader in the sales intelligence space specifically for advertising media and the tech industry since 2014 he's directed the company on a rapid Innovation and growth trajectory one recognized by their customers and the industry at large as one of the most agile fast growing private companies and bl best places to work in America the company is called theist in.com Dave are you ready to take us to the top thanks very much Nathan thanks for having me good yeah thanks for jumping on now now that's your official company name is the list but you people might know you better by some other names what are some of the products you're working on yeah so we have a couple of sales intelligence platforms that we're well known for that have been in market for 20 years or more ad data Express and the list online we've recently launched in the last 12 months a replacement product which is the evolution of those two which a lot of people now know as winmo winmo great so let's focus I assume winmo is your your largest success in terms of Revenue as well right absolutely the lead brand so let's let's focus on winmo tell us what it does and what the business model is how does it generate Revenue sure the the business model is quite simple it's a subscription-based sales intelligence platform and we cat that sales intelligence specifically to the media sponsorship agency and adtech Marketplace so we provide sales intelligence for those who Target National advertisers and their agencies and give us the link just so everybody can go check it out how do you spell it yeah the link is w nmo wo.com w nmo and guys we'll link to that in the show notes just so you can follow along and verse engineer and then is this uh Dave is this just a SAS business is that how you describe it it is a SAS business so we're a subscription based platform uh our users sign up for a 12 month subscription and are able to access the platform from uh from any device okay 100% of people are signing annual no monthly that's right oh wow that's great helps pulling cash forward right it certainly does yeah theity to defer that out is a is a great growth driver of the business and uh increases the valuation of a company like ours exponentially as you might imagine speaking about valuations have you raised capital or did you uh bootstrap no we're completely bootstrapped from day one uh We've we've not had any outside investors at all so we're still a privately owned and operated uh company based here in Atlanta and what was day one when didd you launch it uh the the company itself goes back to 1995 and we went online in the early 2000s and progressively moved with the with the technology that's uh that we've all seen advance in the space to where we are today so 1995 you founded it what were you doing right before you founded the company I came in in 2005 with the uh with the then then owner Todd newon so prior of that my background is in the agency marketing Services space hey let me sorry Dave let me nail that down so somebody else had founded it in 1995 you joined in 2005 that's right okay and how did that happen did he acquire one of your companies or what uh I was through a a joint venture with a a company out of the UK that I was working with um the the the accent's Australian but I happen to be working in London at the time so combination of things that Drew me to this opportunity in the North American Marketplace being the just advertising Market uh in the first world sort of side of so okay you got winmo obviously a bootstrap based in Atlanta how many team members we're currently at about 85 people and the vast majority of those are based here in our headquarters in Atlanta we've got teams in New York and Scatter throughout the the country as well and what is the I don't want to get into like like every customer cohort because I'm sure you have a bunch of them but on average what's the what's the customer paying you per year uh average subscription rates relatively low is is nice low entry fee of around $6 to $7,000 based upon the uh the sub the subscription level they're signing up for and then we we charge an additional user rate uh between $4 and $500 per user per year and uh just like a lot of SAS platforms the the account base is built up by user or seats commonly known but but if I again I don't want to go that's helpful to understand the levers but if I just average across your base you'd say on average it's 7,000 per year that's about right okay and what is the you know understanding that kind of annual contract value help us understand some of the economics so what are you willing to spend to acquire a new customer so we look at customer acquisition a couple of different ways um given a relatively low ACV we uh were very deliberate in our marketing efforts up until 2014 we were spending a lot on paid search and a lot of the traditional advertising Norms what's a lot like how much uh on average uh on an annualized basis somewhere in the vicinity of 100 to 150,000 okay this was in 2014 yeah we we we rapidly declined that down to um around 50,000 so you know third of that and placed the remaining dollars into content marketing so we made a deliberate move toward uh inbound marketing with uh with content marketing and we experimented with having outsourced people writing that content But ultimately found that it was much more successful to bring those resources inhouse see that essentially went to salaries 100 Grand exactly okay and when you're you're student now in 2017 you you plan to spend about 50,000 on paid acquisition right where are you spending that that would be specifically on Google AdWords uh very little from display advertising we do a little bit of retargeting but um the the cost for customer acquisition has to be doesn't really work for traditional advertising platform what is your target for that number so a target for the for the number is somewhere under $150 per customer for qualified customer lead okay qualified customer lead is but okay so and then leads have to convert to customer so if you if you right if you average it how many how many do you need to convert to one new customer Dave did I lose you yeah just sorry I dropped out there for a quick second no no no I was just saying so so to get a marketing qualified customer it cost you 150 bucks how many marketing qualified customers do you need to actually get a new paying customer so we're typically looking at about a 25% conversion rate to customer okay so you need about four so so if I take 150 bucks times four it's 600 bucks so that's a back of the napkin CAC Target yeah back of the napkin that works quite well okay industries that we serve slightly higher in media properties and Publishers than it is in at agencies for instance but that's a pretty good back of the envelope tell me more tell me more about those cohorts you're targeting what are some of the other ones we've got four key markets that we sell...