SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1460 Social Listening Tool Breaks $22M in ARR Responding to RFP's
24 Jul 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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He grew his company Scoop It to about 2 million bucks in revenue, then recently was acquired by a much larger company called Link Fluence that was founded in 2006. And in 2012, that company transitioned to a full-fledged SaaS company. Still early on, really growing through RFP, is now doing about $22 million in AR combined between the two companies, $45 million raised, 500 customers paying.
They've got about 220 folks between San Francisco and other remote locations, again, helping to make social data more accessible, more relevant, and really social listening more more simple or simpler. 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, everyone. My guest today is Guillaume de Cougas.
He is the CEO of a company called LinkedFluence, a SaaS platform that turns social data into valuable insights for global brands using AI and the human expertise from 100 plus data scientists and analysts. He's also the co-founder and CEO of Scoop.it, a web content monitoring SaaS platform, which was acquired by LinkedFluence. He's been an entrepreneur since 2000.
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Chapter 2: What is the story behind the acquisition of Scoop.it by Linkfluence?
But number, you know, adding like number of seats, it's a pretty typical pricing axes to drive expansion revenue. Why weren't you able to figure that out at ScoopIt? So at ScoopIt, what, you know, what we found is that if you want to drive the number of seats, you need to do more than software. And that was a limitation. We didn't have the resources to build a service team.
And that's what LinkFluence did really, really well. The company actually started not as a SaaS company, but more like a traditional agency model. And they built the platform that they felt they needed from a technology standpoint. And I think if you want to scale and be able to have 2,000 people using your software, you need to have a very simple, very
bottom-up approach or you need to bring services like project management consulting Uh, and the other thing links once now is it's, it's also capable of operating the platform itself for its own customers.
Chapter 3: How did Linkfluence grow its revenue in the social listening space?
So what it does is it's able to derive insights, uh, and operate the platform on behalf of its clients. So that's the beauty of the model. And that's how they were able to scale to that level that, you know, we felt to do at ScoopIt to be really honest. Interesting. Okay.
So now when you put it all together, so you're looking at like average contract values called like a hundred grand, 200 grand, generally, where are they falling? Yeah. So we have, you know, we're, you know, we're doing a recurring basis. We're doing about 20 million a year of AR with about 500 customers. Yep. Okay, good.
So we can obviously just take 500 and divide that into, into your AR to kind of get a good sense. Each customer is paying about what, three, four grand a month, something like that. Uh, yeah, that's more 40. Yeah. Yep. It's about $40,000 ACV, something like that. Interesting.
And, and, and what are they, and obviously that might be maybe first year ACV when they're signing up originally, are they starting with one specific sector of the business and then expanding to different, like, uh, other, other departments or silos? Are you really going for a full deployment right off the bat? So that's very interesting. They usually start with one part of the company.
But the interesting part with social data now is it started with digital marketing. Obviously, all of the digital marketers want to listen to social data. But now what we're seeing is that as those clients get more mature, they also want to use the social data for consumer insights, which is the traditional marketing. market research teams. They want to use that for social care.
So all of the customer relationship, like, you know, when you tweet at an airline because you're complaining your flight is late, they want to listen to that. And it informs even their product strategy. And so it usually starts with one team, but our role is to evolve this maturity model and to help those clients get more mature and get into more teams. Yep.
So what is typical expansion year over year on a single account? So we've got some clients who started with a 50K engagement, 50K average contract value, and now are like multiple 100Ks. And that's what we're looking at doing. And that's why we focus on large enterprise with global brands, because it gives us an opportunity to work with multiple markets.
A lot of those companies, if you take Danone, for instance, they're also multi-brands, which means each of the brand companies will want to have their own implementation of our platform. So if you multiply that by brands, by markets, and if you cross from digital marketing to consumer insights to mark home, you get a lot of expansion capabilities. So get home.
If you look at kind of net revenue retention annually, it sounds like you might be above a hundred by a, by a good chunk. If your expansion machine is working nicely, what is it today? It means like net revenue retention. Um, so I don't have that number in mind, but you know, the company's been, you know, growing through negative churn from, you know, over the past, uh, three years already. Okay.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Linkfluence face in entering the US market?
So it hasn't used the traditional, you know, SaaS playbook marketing acquisition and CAC. Most of those deals came through, you know, being diligent, doing some networking with those big accounts, being in RFPs. So it doesn't have a good visibility. And that's one of the things that I want to, you know, be more disciplined into understanding is like, you know, what are the,
What's the payback period? What's the CAC? What should we focus on? So there's a lot of things that the company's been doing, which is outside of the typical SaaS playbook, but have been, you know, successful at doing it.
I think now that we're expanding and, you know, obviously want to be strong and disciplined in our acquisition in the US, we're going to have to measure a lot more of those metrics. Of the 220 people full-time, how many of them are dedicated to marketing or sales or AEs or SDRs or things like that? So the whole sales and marketing part is about 30%. Okay, 30% of the 220? Mm-hmm.
So about 63 people, something like that. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you could add up all their salaries per month and then divide by the number of new customers per month and kind of back into a fully-weighted CAC. Do you look at those kinds of calculations or no? Yeah, that's what we're going to be putting in place to get a better understanding of this. But it hasn't been in place since you joined?
No. No, it's, uh, it's actually interesting. Um, you know, the company has been having, uh, you know, pretty, uh, pretty good growth, but outside of the playbook, you know, of doing everything, you know, by the book and, and in terms of following this guy, the SAS metrics like CAC, like, you know, um, uh, met churn, uh, retention and so on. Interesting.
Well, it sounds like there's a lot to optimize. That's a lot of fun. All right. Let's wrap it. Let's start with key home with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? Um, that's funny cause you asked me the question last time.
Um, you know, there's a, there's a business book that I loved, um, back in the days, which was, um, you know, uh, built to last, um, I can't remember the author, um, but it dates back to a long time ago. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Naturally. That's okay. That's okay. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own?
Um, so one of the tools I really love, um, it's called, it's a tool called, called a full story. Yep.
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Chapter 5: How do customers utilize social data for consumer insights?
Uh, it's really helping, you know, understand how people use your product. I would really recommend it. Number four, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night? Seven to eight. That's good. And which is a situation married, single kiddos, married, three kids, three. Very good. And how old are you? So all this one is 18 and then 15 and 13. Sorry. How old are you? I'm 47, 47. All right.
He says, as he squeaks a little bit, all right, last question here, take us back to your 20 year old self. What do you wish he knew? Well, I would say, um, I don't know if I wish I'd known more, but the advice I would give myself would be to get out of my comfort zone. That's what I told my daughter as she started college.
There's a lot more to learn if you go out and you push yourself on the red and you get out of your comfort zone and You learn new things. I don't know if there's one thing, you know, I wish I knew, but definitely would push myself to get out of things that are easy. Guys, get out of your comfort zone. He grew his company scoop at just about 2 million bucks in revenue.
Then recently was acquired by a much larger company called LinkedIn. Fluence that was founded in 2006. And in 2012, that company transitioned to a full-fledged SaaS company. Still early on, really growing through RFP is now doing about $22 million in AR combined between the two companies. $45 million raised, 500 customers paying.
They've got about 220 folks between San Francisco and other remote locations. Again, helping to make social data more accessible, more relevant, and really social listening more simple or simpler. Guillaume, thank you so much for taking us to the top. Thanks, Nathan.
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