SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1143 Eloqua Founders Launch New Relationship Tool, $600k ARR first 5 Months, $7m Raised
10 Sep 2018
Chapter 1: What was Paul Tashima's journey at Eloqua?
was there early at Eloqua with one of the founders, Dave. They built that, obviously sold that to Oracle, stayed there for about a year, then left, took a two-month break, partnered up with, again, a former colleague in Dave. They didn't get sick of each other through the Eloqua story, which obviously makes sense because it was a successful one.
Now they are jumping into relationship intelligence. Basically, you connect up your feed. I say, yes, Paul, you can have access to my network. Paul can then see who I'm close with and ask for more appropriate intros from stronger people. signals than you really can get anywhere else. I love the business concept. They're scaling. They're now at 22 people. Launched in 2014.
Spent about two years building a product using their own money.
Chapter 2: How does Nudge.ai leverage relationship intelligence?
They've now raised $7 million, serving about 2,000 seats across 30 logos. Doing, call it, say, $60,000 per month-ish right now in revenue and scaling quickly up there in Toronto. 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, everybody. My guest today is Paul Tashima.
He's the CEO and co-founder of Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform that helps businesses find and grow the right relationships to drive revenue. He's a successful technology executive who has run services, customer success, account management, support, and product management teams.
As part of Eloqua's executive team, he helped lead the company from zero to over 100 million revenue, then through IPO and a successful acquisition of $957 million by Oracle. He's a big believer that culture trumps strategy every time and that storytelling is an essential part of creating a business.
He's had a successful track record as a leader with a strong focus on sales and customer engagement. Paul, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. Thanks, Nathan, for having me on board today. You bet. So I love it when someone who came out of taking Eloqua to zero to 100 million, right? You had the corner office. You were doing the big thing. You say, you know what?
I'm going to go and start all over from scratch. I'm going to go back to the foldy tables and the computers that don't have all the specs on them because they're trying to save some cash. So tell us about Nudge.ai. What's it doing? How do you make money?
So Nudge.ai, we are a relationship intelligence platform. So what we focus on is tracking the strength of relationships within the business network and finding ways as a salesperson, particularly a B2B salesperson, use those relationships to get access to accounts and then ultimately close deals. And that's where our focus is.
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Chapter 3: What unique signals does Nudge.ai use to measure relationships?
So today we've raised just a little over $7 million U.S., and we have put some of our own money in, but it is a good way to test the business to see if you can go raise money. Even as second-time entrepreneurs, it's still a good way to test the business.
How do you ā because we have a lot of second-time entrepreneurs that listen to the show, and they always go, Nathan, you need to ask questions like this one. So, Paul, when you go out and raise additional capital, after it's clear and everyone in the market knows you just had a big win ā
How do you overcome the obvious, which is the investors going, Paul, why do you need us to give you $7 million? Use your own. You just made a killing.
I don't think they ever come with that objection. They actually want to be part of the second one. So they're actually looking at it as an opportunity to de-risk another investment with entrepreneurs who've done it before. I think, to be fair, probably the question they may ask is, how do we know you have fire in the belly anymore?
Yeah, it's hard to motivate a guy once you make him rich.
Yeah, and so that's all up to you as an entrepreneur to prove to them you still have passion. I mean, we could have... we could have retired if they're staying at Oracle for four years, probably, but instead we're going to go back at it and, um, we want to do something big and we explain why and our passion for it. And I think they, that's why they buy into it. I love that. Okay.
So, and what year was that? So we, we, we didn't do the, uh, the VC financing round until 2015. Sorry. I meant, when did you, when did you, when did you launch the company? Oh, well, we started coding probably back in late 2014, but we didn't come out with a product. It was a pretty long build for about two years till we came up with something that we thought people could play around with.
Wow. And, and, and so you basically funded it with your own money for two years before doing that race? Yeah, effectively sat in some friends and family.
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Chapter 4: How is Nudge.ai different from other relationship tools like Conspire?
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you?
So we only launched the commercial product around four months ago, five months ago. Which would have been, what's that, December 2017? Yeah, a little before that, probably beginning of Q4. And so we now have over 30 customers. Our largest is 1,000 sales seats.
That's amazing. What are those customers on average? How many seats would you say? Four, 500 or 10, 20?
Yeah, in that range. But it ranges, to be fair, we have a self-service offering on one end where you can plug in for 10 users and never talk to us ever again. And then we have our managed service offering with sales and customer success and Yeah. You're over 200, 304 seats into the higher end. Let me ask that question differently.
How many seats would you say are on our, on your platform today across all your logos? Oh, we have well over 20,000 seats. Oh, that's amazing. Okay. So you, you definitely see kind of the 80, 20 rule where you have some big customers that make up, you know, well north of 10% of your revenue currently. Yes. Interesting. Okay, good. And how are you signing these folks up?
Are these ex alcohol relationships, people that have left and joined other companies? I mean, how are you getting these initial customers?
It's a spectrum of everything from, yes, some relationships that were from the past to some of the users who are in the product who are in a trial or free and us helping them upgrade and go through that process from the product-led side.
Okay, but I imagine you're too early in terms of you don't have any engines spun up where there's direct paid acquisition. You're calculating CAC to pay back all that jazz, right?
Yeah.
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