How Winmo CEO Dave Currie grew 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 to in North America in the UK but we also have the wio platform so we sell to Media properties and Publishers so anyone who sells time and space to a national Advertiser uh within that you've also got sponsorship which are things like sports teams large nonprofits they're still selling time and space it just happens to be on a foot of an Nascar or the jersey or a stadium naming rights that type of thing um we also sell to marketing Services agencies so anyone who buys plans or creates content that is that lives within media properties and then the fourth one our fourth pillar is Tech adtech and more recently mtech companies and we Define those as anyone who has a technology that enables the buying selling placement uh content creation or analytics around how content operates and lives within media properties interesting um good and then walk us through so obviously we have a good sense of of CAC how long are these customers staying with you in terms of in terms of years or months retention is great um we're not uh we're not quite as high as something which is embedded into the sales and marketing ecosystem like CRM or marketing automation fuel we're the fuel or the food for that ecosystem so the dependency on our platform for accurate contact information sales intelligence um is is is really strong um in all markets but we also find slightly stronger in the media space over agency um primarily because media companies are set up as sophisticated sales organizations and agencies are more more of a Professional Services category of which sales is not as uh complex or or highly valued as it is in in the media space so Dave when you say retention is high though what do you what's the number what's high so I mean we look at it in a couple of different ways both revenue and account we certainly we aim for the 90s in terms of Revenue attention rate on an annualized basis and um on an account basis it breaks out quite differently into different pillars and typically we don't go into that on a public for okay uh is it fair to say it's about the same though as as Revenue retention well L lower than Revenue retention because of the ability to upsell during the course of a year got it yep from expansion Revenue okay so so you're not at a point yet you're not at a point where you guys are at net negative Revenue turn right oh NOC expansion Revenue higher than everything you you lose right yeah okay uh good that's good to know um okay and then what about yes that helps us back into LTV now do you do you assume when you're again doing this this customer acquisition cost kind of calculations do you assume a lifetime value in terms of dollars obviously it's a guess but but how do you think about that lifetime dollars we've never really been able to get a great handle on it um couple of the reasons some of the when we started working in the agency space exclusively there there's a lot the cycles that come and go within agencies and uh the way that we look at retention rate is also really important we calculate retention both revenue and account on a 90-day cycle so if a customer doesn't renew within 90 days they're considered a new sale um say that again if if say that one more time if a customer contract it does not renew within 90 days we consider that at day 91 we consider that a new sale oh interesting yeah it's look we've we've talked to a lot of people in this in the SAS and Das sales intelligence space about what the right term for when do you consider a customer truly terminated versus Net new everyone's got a slightly different answer the way they measure it that's just the business decision we've made at this point to uh have consistency in how we measure retention yeah it's one of the big questions actually a lot of folks Focus another question which is the opposite of the one you just articulated which was when does a customer when's a customer considered terminated is when you actually consider a new customer to be a new customer uh many people would say well Nathan of course it's when they start paying you but many people actually only measure new customers based on one if if they're paying already and two if they've hit the usage and stickiness metrics they need to hit to to actually get value from the the platform that's an interesting one we haven't uh added usage in terms of a uh a customer we do can't log in and we want to make sure that the studies that we've done are that uh login is absolutely required there's a direct correlation between login within the first two weeks and overall account Revenue retention throughout the term so um yeah there is a there is a driver there certainly in terms of the first login and then of course ongoing um ongoing UC time of the contract yeah no makes good sense and then hey before we wrap up into the final questions here uh and it's q1 2017 how many total customers are you serving uh it's not a number that we put out there but there's uh tens of thousands of users uh and thousands of accounts across those those marketplaces that we we serve yeah you know Dave you know users is is like one of those terms people just throw around there no one really understands what that actually means give give us a range in terms of customers if you don't want to be specific yeah so between uh h and 25,000 users or customers users sorry customer yeah custom customer R between two and 3,000 okay God okay so that's a pretty healthy that's a pretty healthy conversion rate from from free to paid yeah and it's a it's a really good um indic there's a really good qualifier there as well we look at a a holding entity as a customer um so for instance you've got someone like um a big magazine publisher we look at the publisher as the account and then we've got sub accounts under that so within those couple of thousand accounts you've got um several different several additional accounts in under there nested so we look at parent accounts we look at child accounts and siblings so yep well is there anything wrong with the math that I'm about to share here so you said $7,000 the annual contract value divided by 12 gives us to about 583 bucks in terms of average monthly recurring Revenue obviously you guys pull that forward times a minimum of you said 2,000 between 2,000 3,000 customers let's just assume 2,000 you guys are running a pretty healthy business at somewhere around a million bucks per month in Revenue right you're you're about spot on bit healthy we've got a couple other service lines but uh yeah north of that it's a very healthy business in terms of um annual growth rate and Incredibly good margins which is what do you expect by the way for growth a company your size year-over year what's considered healthy well I think you could if if you were speaking to VCS and investment bankers in this space anything north of 20% is usually looking pretty healthy um I think with a with a legacy business like this without outside um investment uh which would looking steady compounding year-over-year growth anything north of uh we consider anything north of 12% compounding annually to be uh to be healthy um and looking at making you self-funded investments in Innovation yeah now Dave are you because of when you joined I mean the other folks look at you as kind of a Founder in the business or no uh probably not a Founder but certainly the uh as part of the succession team in where we're going moving forward yes okay well so I asked that question because I'm curious I mean you guys are on a tear I bet you could get a crazy a like cheap cash basically because of your growth rate have you looked at raising capital is it something that's interesting to you guys given now it's not something we've looked at given our healthy margin we haven't we've got the the luxury of not having to go outside for that uh for that Capital so we can still continue to bootstrap this business based upon the the tight margin um or the tight expense we look at and the healthy Marin that we maintain yeah if if Salesforce came in and offered you guys $90 million for the company would you sell no 120 keep going good stuff Dave like I told you guys at the top of this episode I have amazing data and you guys know from my interview style I love data but what I love more than data is making it actionable via beautiful dashboards that I can view on my phone on my TVs in my living room or on my laptop as I'm traveling and the company that I use to create these dashboards which pulls in data from my Libs in back end my Google analytics backend Salesforce and other data sources is called clipfolio you can see an example executive dashboard or my social media Command Center or my web metric dashboard at naa.com [Music] analytics that's naa.com analytics and you can try it there for free for 3 months it's clipfolio you can try it free fre for 3 months everybody else has to pay so you get it free for 3 months Allan's a good friend he's a CEO of the company he came on the show I said I love your product can I feature it so Nathan la.com analytics go check it out now guys I get asked all the time Nathan you host all these interviews hundreds of them per month how do you do them efficiently and guys the answer is simple people always agree to my calendar backtack meetings I batch my interviews to stay very efficient and the way that I do it is I use a tool called secuity scheduling at Nathan lat.com schedu and the reason I use them is very simple they keep my noshow rate very low because they send out reminders about when the interview or the meeting is coming up and also they make it very easy to schedule time right I don't have to go back and forth through the email 10,000 times with people I'm trying to meet with okay at Nathan lea.com schedu helps me so much and by the way look I like have so many meetings I'm the best meetings okay I do them back to back very very efficient you guys know me many people say I'm the most efficient they I've ever seen okay so I use the tool it's so efficient and by the way I got Gavin I said Gavin he's the CEO I said I want a great deal for my people he said Nathan well most people get a 14-day trial isn't that great I said no he's giving us a 45-day free trial at Nathan la.com schedu that's not going to stay up forever so go get it now Nathan lat.com schedu all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number number one what's your favorite Business book favorite Business book is actually one I'm reading right now it's uh hard thing about hard things Ben whr W yeah my favorite line in that book is if you're gonna eat don't nibble right I love it number two is there a CEO that you're following or studying um I'm part of an organization called vistage I've got a group of CEOs that I I've work with on a month-to-month basis um the Atlanta Tech uh Village and the Atlanta tech industry is really strong so I work with a diverse range of in the tech space and then more diversely through vist pick one though pick pick a CEO you're studying CEO that I'm studying I'm G to be honest with you Nathan there not one that I'm studying who do you respect most who who I mean who who has the most excited right now I tell you what I've established a really good relationship and uh and working respect for Kyle Porter at sales Loft um local entrepreneur he's done an incredible job with David Cummings and the team at ATV and the invest group in taking just the kernel of an idea over the last 3 four years and really building into sustainable business model I'd say in the same breath Eric SP at Terminus has accomplished the same type of uh um respect in the Atlanta Tech Community and Beyond it by being able toh take a different look at it at how um targeted display advertising is taking uh taking track in the B2B space number four do you get eight hours of sleep every night absolutely and what's your situation married single do you have kids married to a fantastic Canadian wife with two kids uh two boys wow and how old how old are you Dave I'm um 37 birthday's coming up 38 in May so very cool yep so last last question take us back 20 uh sorry 17 years what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew balance is as important as now as it was when as you thought about it then um being healthy is number one uh work and everything else fall into place when you've got your uh your priority stacked up the right way there you guys haveen it balance is key from Dave Curry focused on building the wimo platform which is part of the parent company uh the list which we discuss now serving well over 2,000 customers doing somewhere around a million bucks in monthly uh Revenue super healthy annual contract value average of about 7 Grand super healthy again uh churn sorry retention per year somewhere up around 85 95% spending and doing some testing on customer acquisition cost ranging in the $600 range again their team of 85 people Bo M based mainly in Atlanta helping folks understand better track and really empowering sales professionals to Target advertisers more efficiently to win more business Dave thank you for taking us to the top thanks very much Nathan appreciate it if you enjoyed Dave today go back and listen to Richard brassler yesterday of our factor which is raised $9 million and pass $900,000 on monthly occurring Revenue helping 220 customers with social selling it would mean the world to me if you guys got any value from this episode if you would go leave a review on iTunes right now and then subscribe you know I hustle like heck to get these episodes out every freaking day for you guys and trust me I love it I would do it with no listeners but boy oh boy makes my day and it makes my team's day when we see great reviews and get your feedback so thanks so much top drive I love giving away free money I feel like o are giving away cars and I have something special for you today how many of you have heard our super sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook and Google ads well all of you listening right now yes if you're listening you get $100 in free AdWords here's how you get it okay again thanks for listening get the free $100 from Google right when you sign up with my website host provider HostGator go sign up now to get your free money hostgator.com Nathan again that's hostgator.com Nathan