SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1111 How She Cut Customer Base in Half, But Still Grew 100% YoY
09 Aug 2018
Chapter 1: What was the turning point for Swoop Talent in 2016?
world is bigger and tougher and i am too there you guys heard it from stacy again launched her swoop talent back in 2012 had a really come to jesus moment in 2016 or come to whoever you worship moment okay that's what we'll call it stacy come to whoever you worship moment 2016 refocused Cut her customer base in half down to 27, but more than doubled the price point.
She's now got about 27 customers doing about, call it 112 grand a month in revenue, up from 50 grand 12 months ago, so 100% year-over-year growth. Looking to break easily 2 million in ARR this year. That's 160 grand per month. 115% year-over-year annual revenue retention with her team of 20.
Based in Oakland, helping these enterprises keep all their talent data streamlined so they can actually use it. 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 of 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.
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Chapter 2: How did cutting the customer base impact revenue growth?
are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Stacey Chapman. She's a CEO and co-founder of Swoop Talent. Stacey's been in the talent systems industry for decades as a vendor, practitioner, and implementer.
In all those situations, talent data has been a huge challenge, and every year, data gets more important, so her current company solves that. Stacey, are you ready to take us to the top?
Let's go.
All right. Tell us about Swoop Talent. What's it doing? How do you make money?
So we connect... data silos inside large enterprise.
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Swoop Talent implement for customer retention?
So we're able to connect all kinds of different systems to each other. Companies usually have about seven different systems with talent data in them. We connect all of those and then we connect them to available public data about talent. So you end up with a single source of talent data as a service, which we then strive to make as easy as possible for you to consume.
And name a few of these sources just to put a face to the name.
So it could be anything from the patent database to GitHub to, um,
blogger all kinds of places that you can find data about talent and inside it's going to be oracle systems like systems like taleo like workday all kinds of places active and also a lot of inactive data that people lose in data migrations and revenue model wise is the pure play sass business priced along kind of how much data you're using or what
Yeah, it's how much data you're using and how much systems you have connected. Typically, customers pay us annually in advance.
Okay, and give me generally speaking, are we talking 10 grand, 100 grand, a million? What's general contract size?
Big companies are going to be 100 grand and up. medium-sized companies, you know, in 50 to 100 grand, doesn't generally apply for small enterprise.
Okay. If we try, I'm going to ask you to generalize for a second. I know you have different cohorts, but across your, just speaking about your customer base, the split between medium and enterprise, would you say a good average is, call it 60, 70 grand in ACV? 85, I'd say. 85. Okay, good. So you're leaning more towards enterprise.
Yeah. They've got a bigger problem and it's an easier story to tell.
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Chapter 4: What is the revenue model for Swoop Talent?
It's fine. They're very nice. They're very understanding.
Are they all on the cap tables, individual lines, or did you make them all go under a syndicate?
They're individual lines, which is proving to be a bit of a challenge. We should have done that the other way around, but hey, you learn.
So it's 140 grand total, I think you said. How many people? Four. Okay, that's not horrible. I've seen horror stories where it's a quarter of a million across 25 people, and it's like a nightmare.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that doesn't sound good.
No. So basically bootstrapped scaling 27 customers now, but paying you way more than they were back in the day. You said churn has also gotten better. What is churn down to today?
We haven't lost a company since April.
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Chapter 5: How does Swoop Talent ensure data integration for clients?
I've just put on a head of customer success who's revenue focused and is scolding me that it should have been a lot more than that. So hopefully I'll have a better story for that in a year.
Okay, so what is revenue retention today? Is it like 115%, 120%?
Yes. 115.
115%. Interesting. What is your new head of customer success thing it should be?
Well, he probably thinks that should be the right, but that the base contract size is about half what it should have been.
So he thinks it should be 160?
Yeah, for a while and then come back down to 110, 115.
Okay.
What do you have to make sure these customers, you used the term hostage earlier, people can start resenting you if they feel like they're a hostage. So what kind of actions do you have to see your customers taking on a monthly basis to know that they're happy using you and they're happy to pay you?
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