SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1055 Utah CEO: We've Doubled YoY to $10m in ARR
14 Jun 2018
Chapter 1: What is the growth story behind Grow.com?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Rob Nelson.
He's the founder and CEO of Grow.com, a cloud-based analytics software company for small to medium-sized businesses. Grow helps companies accelerate their growth by accessing all their data and measuring their business results in real time. He's an entrepreneur at heart and a technology enthusiast. His previous company, Logica, was acquired by AFS in 2012. Rob, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, let's do it.
I love it. A CEO on the road. That means he's hustling. He's driving to close his next deal. Thanks for joining us, man.
That's right.
You bet, man. All right. So we had you on back in November of 2016, and you were very gracious and being very transparent. At that point, you had about 70 employees. You'd raised $13 million in funding, about 600 customers, doing somewhere around $330,000 in monthly recurring revenue. I want to get an update on those numbers.
But first, for newbies to the show, tell them what you do and how you make money. What's your business model?
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Chapter 2: How does Grow's business model cater to small and medium businesses?
Okay. And then in terms of fundraising, have you raised additional capital or are you still right around 13 million?
No, we're just wrapping up the Series B and we're coming out and doing a whole press release with that in about two to three weeks.
Oh, good. This episode actually will not go live. In fact, everyone hearing it right now, it will be June. Are you comfortable sharing what that amount is? If I promise you, no one will hear it until then. You know, I need to keep that. I need to keep that one under wraps until we, we launch. That's okay. Not a problem.
Uh, we can, people can check that when this, when they hear this, they can just go Google and figure it out, but good stuff. What about economics in terms of churn? What's your logo churn at currently monthly?
You know, we're about 2%. Um, you know, I think healthy SMB churn. So, um, yeah, that's what we've been targeting. And of course we're, we're trying to get that down a little bit lower, but, um, That's where we're at.
Okay. And, you know, as you're ramping up, you know, the fundraise, I mean, a lot of times people ramp up fundraising when they have dialed in economics where they know they can plow money into a channel and generally not see diminishing returns. What are you spending right now to acquire customers and how quickly do you like to get your money back in terms of payback period?
You know, we've got a payback period of about six to seven months.
Okay. That's pretty good.
And so that's why when I say we've got healthy unit economics, I'm thinking about that CAC payback period.
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Chapter 3: How does Grow manage upselling and expansion revenue?
So, um, You know, we've got data consultants, a whole team of data consultants to help stand clients up, to help them be successful and really get the insights that they're going for.
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It's been fun chatting with both you and Alan as you both grow because you're pretty neck. I mean, you're pretty neck and neck. He's obviously raised a little more, but you guys are about equal in terms of revenue and customer bases. So it'll be fun to watch that as that goes.
I mean, are you seeing those or anything when your sales were on cause and they're saying, well, I'm thinking about Clipfolio and grow. Is there a single thing that's winning you these deals like a feature or is it just great onboarding and stickiness and customer support?
It is. I think, you know, in that kind of scenario or Power BI, I mean, a lot of these where it's totally self-serve, it's like, hey, go try it out. You know, test it out and run a scenario and test grow at the same time and just do a side-by-side comparison. Yep. I think being open and transparent is kind of our best approach in that way, in that regard.
You do a great job. I'm looking at your executive view on the page right now in terms of presenting the data, but people can get lost in this. Have you moved this stage further yet in terms of building machine learning and AI to actually make recommendations on what people should do with the data?
Yeah, we're starting that process, right? I mean, we're not really getting into the business of, you know, this is what the numbers are telling you. So take this action. we're not so interested in that as we are like, what, what's the most effective thing to track in your business?
And what we're seeing our customers, our most successful customers track is, um, all around the customer acquisition process, right? With, you know, and B in the B2B world, it's, you know, starting with ad spend, uh, leads generated, uh, sales opportunities and the conversion rates and deals close that ultimately trickle down to revenue. and sales generated.
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Chapter 4: What strategies contributed to doubling the customer base?
Let's wrap up here with the famous five. First one here. Um, what is your favorite business book?
Oh, sheesh. You know, this is a hard one. I have to go off the one that I just finished, which is, um, extreme ownership and I've loved it. Jocko, right? Yeah, that's right.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying someone that's not mainstream?
You know, I mean, uh, I love Ryan. You know, he and I chat on occasion.
You're talking about Qualtrics, Ryan, right?
Ryan Smith at Qualtrics. Yeah. And he's doing great things for the community and what he's building. I'm a big fan of Jeremy Andrus, CEO of Traeger. He's a consumer products guy, but knows branding, knows how to scale a business. And he's on our board. He's fantastic.
Number three, besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for building your company?
Oh, you know, I don't know how we'd survive without Salesforce. Everything we do is piped into Salesforce. And because of that, I can slice and dice. I can answer any question. It's amazing.
All right. Last few here. How many hours of sleep are you getting every night?
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