SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1246 What the hell does "We revolutionize everything" mean?
22 Dec 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode.
Chapter 2: How did Nicholas Kimla start his journey with Uptime Technologies?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Nicholas Kimla. He's the founder and managing director of Uptime since its inception in 1994. He's also responsible for WorldCheck, the banking financial crime prevention software used today by most of the world's banks, bought by Thompson Routers back in the day. He's the CEO and founder of Pipeliner Sales Today, the sales company for Pipeliner.com.
He's author of over 100 ebooks on sales, sales management and entrepreneurship. He studied Protestant theology in L.A. and Vienna, graduating with a master's degree, married and father of three children. Nicholas, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Wow. It's a lot. It is a lot. All right. Let's double down and focus on Pipeliner. So what's the company doing? How do you make money?
Well, first of all, it's great to be on your show. I'm happy to participate in that. Out of my accent, you can see, even living in California, I have a little bit different, even we are the same country as Arnold is coming from, from Austria. And I moved six years ago to build our pipeline in the U.S. because I realized our CRM,
Uh, if you want to start it from really from the scratch, uh, in Europe, especially in Vienna, it will not work. The market is too small. Uh, there's too many things going on over there. And then you have the language barrier because you see I'm traveling, let's say not even an hour and I have to speak Slovak or I have to speak Hungarian or I have to speak Italian.
And so this is really contextualizing, very complicated. So I came here six years ago to build Pipeline. And I think the unbelievable story on that is that we really had an absolutely phenomenal concept that we have delivered and we did that. And so we were growing and we are expanding. We are right now with hundreds of companies around the world in 35 countries already.
So wait, so Nicholas, so how many customers do you have? We have over hundreds in different countries. Is that 100 or 300 or 700? No, it's over 1,000. It's going in that direction. Niklas, just to be clear, you have 1,000 paying customers or more or less? More than that. What's the actual number?
Well, this is happening, you know, in the SaaS business, it's always moving in different direction, what you can see, because I give you an example. We have universities right now, even under contract,
are and we have other outlets they are going in that direction if you really go to big companies in that area and not are using the single individual users we have over 700 paid companies b2b in 35 countries that's what i was looking at so in terms of paying companies using you you have about 700. yes more more than that yeah around seven okay good and how do they pay you i mean are they paying you per month per seat and if so what's the average price
No, we have a tier structure. Our tier structure goes from our, we have our business version. We call that a starter business and enterprise. And so it depends on the tier structure, what some companies having are. And so it's our paid, not monthly. We are doing that by yearly. Our approach is very different than I would say than any other companies today.
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Chapter 3: What makes Pipeliner CRM different from other CRMs?
And I will not do that, especially in the public. And the point is on that area, because it's very mixed. We have enterprise customers like AG Gallagher is one of the biggest insurance company in the world, broker company in Australia, where I have not even salespeople there. I have not even anyone and we have 40 companies in Australia, really like AG Gallagher with almost to a thousand licenses.
So it's very different. It depends on the company, on that. We are going very good in insurance and manufacturing companies. And having great companies like ToolGawk and others are there making manufacturing stuff for Boeing. Nicholas, what year did you launch the company in? Well, as I said, the company, my team and I have created and revolutionized already one industry.
And that was acquired by Thomson Reuters for half a billion dollars. Nicholas, my question is just simply, when did you launch Pipeline or CRM? Well, there is not a simple answer to a question because when you have a team together, we launched, I came here 2012. Okay. September 2012 from Austria. So end of September 2012, I arrived in Los Angeles and started with Xero. But the point is our...
Um, the, the, the story that is behind my team and I are, we are working, some of them almost are close to 20 years together. And as I said, we're not young. We're really very experienced. I'm, I've turned 57. Yeah. A couple of months ago, uh, we have revolutionized one industry and we are right now in the process to revolutionize another industry. What do you mean by that though?
Everyone says they revolutionize industries. What does that actually mean? Well, very good question. Very fair and good question. So here we go. When we started in the banking compliance at that time, there was no databases out there. They put the people, the terrorists, the fraud people, the money laundry people in a database. We did that technically.
and hosted that for a long time for over 15 years before it moved over when Thomson writers came in and we moved over then to AT&T. But the point was, and that was amazing in itself from a story where it was done in three data centers simultaneously. with technology from Oracle that you have the database.
Because when you were going, let's say, to Bank of America or Citibank, and you wanted to open an account, it was matching our database. How we did that, we revolutionized because nobody was doing that. And the compliance issue became very high end after 9-11. Because George W. Bush, 10 days after 9-11, gave out a list of 19 most wanted terrorists. And we had in the database, WorldCheck,
17, they were there. And we were the technical company who put all together, hosted, programmed, and everything. It was amazing. And then it exploded. When we speak about what is that correlated right now to pipeline or to CRM, well, then I will tell you, I was by coincidence invited by IBM International to a big conference. And I realized that CRM, everybody has hype words.
As you said, what is revolutionizing? Everybody's doing the same. We were really interviewing over a thousand salespeople around the world. We were looking at every system that was out there and saying, what is the difference? And I figured it out. I figured it out. What has to be the difference? I created, even if you go, you were saying correctly, I'm writing a lot.
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