SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1196 How CloudCheckr Drives 145% Net Revenue Retention Annually
02 Nov 2018
Chapter 1: What inspired Aaron to start CloudCheckr?
He's had three startups that he started and sold, two in the database space, one in the social media space that grew to about $100,000 in AR, then sold it. The tech was so good for about $6 million. Then he saw the pattern. Everything's going to the cloud. So he jumped into that space, 2011, launched CloudChecker, bootstrapped it up to last year.
They've now raised $50 million, serving 600 customers, paying at least $2,000 per month. So they're well north of $1.2 million per month in revenue right now, 140% net revenue retention annually with their team of 150 people between Rochester and other remote locations. Again, helping you not only organize your cloud spend, make it more efficient, but also keep it nice and secure.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did CloudCheckr achieve 145% net revenue retention?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Aaron Newman. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called CloudChecker, the cloud management company. He's a serial entrepreneur and has founded and sold three successful startups. He's an acclaimed speaker and author on technology topics, Enterprise 2.0, and the Oracle Security Handbook.
Aaron has been awarded multiple patents in database security and social media. Aaron, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right. Tell us, first off, there's not many people that get excited about writing a Oracle Security Handbook.
Chapter 3: What unique challenges does CloudCheckr solve in cloud management?
So what is going through your brain? What excites you about this space?
Well, I mean, the Oracle Security Handbook was probably about 15 years ago. So I love to find spaces, brand new spaces, and really be where you're inventing and innovating. So that's what excites me. So this was back in what not 2003, 2004, when security was a brand new.
And so for me, that was all about kind of pioneering, you know, vulnerability assessment, activity monitoring in the database world. And that's where, you know, I had two startups around database security. Then I had a startup around social media when that was hot. Well, hold on, Aaron, take us back. What were the names of the two database companies? One was DB Secure. So that was 1998.
And what happened to that one? That one got sold to a public company in Atlanta, ISS. Okay. And what year? That was 2000. Okay. And for how much? It was about $2 million. Okay. Actually about $4 million. Yes. And what about the second one? The second one was a company, Application Security Inc. Raised a bunch of money there. Raised about $20 million. Sold that.
I stayed active for about five years. And then it ran for another 10 years after that. And that got sold to Trustwave. Okay. which got bought by Singtel, Singapore Telcom.
What was general size of that deal when you sold it? It was about 35 million. Okay, good. So investors got out, a little bit of return there for common holders, and then you stayed with them for a couple of years.
Yep. And then I went and did a social media listing platform. So that was kind of the first SaaS one. So people were taking what was on, marketing companies want to monitor what was on Twitter, what was on Facebook, what was on blogs. And they were doing social media campaigns. They wanted to measure it. They wanted to measure sentiment, demographics, geographics around it.
So we bought, and this is 2006, we started ingesting all that content and putting analytics on top of that.
So this is almost like a sprinkler kind of tool, something like that. Yes, absolutely.
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Chapter 4: How does CloudCheckr's pricing model work?
45.
And take us home. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew?
I wish I would have gotten into tech earlier. I graduated with an accounting degree and never did a day of it. I stumbled upon technology. And I never took a class in tech, and probably the programmers that read my code laugh at it because that's what it looks like. But I wish I would have gotten into tech earlier. Guys, there you have it from Aaron.
He's had three startups that he started and sold, two in the database space, one in the social media space that grew to about $100,000 in AR, then sold it. The tech was so good for about $6 million. Then he saw the pattern, everything's going to the cloud. So he jumped into that space, 2011, launched CloudChecker, bootstrapped it up to last year.
They've now raised $50 million, serving 600 customers, paying at least two grand per month. So they're well north of 1.2 million bucks per month in revenue right now. 140% net revenue retention annually with their team of 150 people between Rochester and other remote locations. Again, helping you not only organize your cloud spend, make it more efficient, but also keep it nice and secure.
Aaron, thank you for taking us to the top.
Thank you.
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