SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1344 9000 Building Owners Use This To Track Temp, Seating, Usage, $200k in MRR, $6m Raised
30 Mar 2019
Chapter 1: Who is Deb Noller and what is Switch Automation?
Hello, everyone. Today, my guest is Deb Noller. She's the dynamic CEO and co-founder of Switch Automation, a smart building software company specializing in building performance optimization.
With 20 plus years of experience in real estate, technology and sustainability, she's passionate about helping enterprises leverage next generation facilities, management technology to execute more efficient business operations. Deb, are you ready to take us to the top?
Hi there, Deb Noller.
How are you, Deb?
I'm fantastic. Thanks.
Good. Okay. Tell us about the company. What do you guys do? And what's your revenue model? How do you make money?
Sure. So we are in the world of transitioning buildings from the old world of disconnected assets, disconnected data, disconnected systems into a whole new digitized world. So it's about connected buildings, smarter buildings, because not all buildings are smart, but we're aiming to make them smarter. So if you look at the way real estate's been managed for the last,
20 or 30 years, it's like 1980s out there. All the information is in, it's locked up inside buildings that people are making decisions without access to good quality data. And that's the problem that we're solving.
And give me an example of a company using you right now, just so we can put a face to this problem.
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Chapter 2: How does Switch Automation improve building performance?
Okay, so at WeWork, when you talk about data tied to those buildings, what kind of data? I mean, are we talking like AC usage data? Are we talking like some kind of electronic check-in data? What are you talking about?
Everything. So if you think about what WeWork cares about, they care about the tenant or the occupant and the occupant experience, and that's about how hot or cold the spaces are, how that space is being utilized, what's the feedback from the tenant, what's the lighting levels like, but also they care about the cost of maintaining those buildings. So there's a two-sided equation there.
One is how do I run my buildings at the cheapest? But the second one is how do I provide the best possible user experience?
Is this a pure play SaaS model or are you installing some kind of physical piece of hardware to measure things like temperature and light?
We have an IoT gateway. So IoT stands for Internet of Things. So we connect to on-premise systems like smart thermostats, lighting systems, sensors. But our model is not to sell any of that. It's to connect with what people already have connected.
But in the case of WeWork, a very important data feed is just their ticketing system because that gives them insight into buildings where they have problems and they've got lots of complaints.
Interesting. In terms of A, it's too crowded here.
Or it's always hot. And so that particular suite might be in the southwest corner of the building. And so that means different ventilation or different temperature controls to, say, the other areas of the building.
What is the number one device you're connecting to? Is it like a Nest thermostat?
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Chapter 3: What types of data do smart buildings utilize?
Are we talking like four customers or 10 or what?
More than 20.
Okay.
More than 20, less than 30. And most of those, most of our customers are in the US, but we do have quite a number of buildings because we started in Australia. We've got quite a number in Australia, New Zealand. We've got some big customers up in Canada. We've got a partner in Israel. We've got a partner in Belgium.
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Look, if you have 9,000 buildings across a minimum of 20 customers, I mean, these are like 450 building deals you're selling on average. These are big deals. Yeah. Yep. And then if I take 20 customers, again, you said between 20 and 30, but let's say 20 at your minimum price of 10 grand a month. I mean, you guys are north of 200 grand per month at this point, correct?
Correct.
When do you think you break like, you know, half a million a month or what's your next big revenue milestone?
I would like to think that we'll be there next year because of the stage that the company's in now. We've kind of gone through re-headquartering into the US. We've gone through our whole fundraising. We are really expanding our sales team now in Denver. We've got a really experienced engineering services team who are helping our customers to get maximum value out of the platform.
So I would expect to see that the growth the growth of our company would really ramp over the next two years.
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