SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1464 GDPR Compliant Analytics Hits $3.6M in ARR, Raising Soon
28 Jul 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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They've just passed 300 grand per month in revenue, up about 60 to 70% year over year, serving 400 customers. Again, paying on average about 750 bucks a month for this tool. They've got a team of 105 people.
building it in Poland and other remote locations, willing to spend up to call it 80% of first year ACV on acquiring customers and hoping to get more aggressive with that as time goes on, willing to spend up to 18 or maybe even 24 months of ACV on acquiring the customer just because lifetime values are so long.
Founded the company in 2013, gross revenue turned 7%, 95% net revenue retention annually. They've raised 2 million bucks of outside capital arrests. They've funded all from their agency. 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 two point seven million. I had no money when I started the company. It was one hundred and sixty million dollars, which is the size of the IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like twenty two thousand 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 Maciek Zawadzinski.
He's the CEO and founder of a company called Piwik Pro, a GDPR-compliant analytics and marketing platform for enterprises and ClearCode, the world's leading software house specializing in building custom advertising and marketing technology. Maciek, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, sure. I'm really excited to be here. That's great. Well, I appreciate you making time to join.
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Chapter 2: What is the purpose of Piwik Pro and how does it differentiate from competitors?
Plus, on the way, we raised additional $2 million, but it was a small round compared to our size at the time. But just because we had another $1-2 million coming from the profit from the agency business, so we didn't want to rise too much. So Maciek, am I understanding you correctly? You got $2 million from outside investors and about $2 million from the agency so far?
No, because it's like the agency where we are spending from the agency's money, one to 2 million additional million a year. So how much total from the agency have you put into the company today? I think this will be in upper like 5 million. Okay. And you've raised an additional 2 million from other investors. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So call it 7 million bucks to fund the company. That's great.
Now does the agency, like how's the cap table work? Does the agency actually sit on the cap table of Pwik Pro? Yeah, that was actually a difficult thing when we were fundraising because typical VCs want to invest in one thing and have a super return or zero. And we had to find the investors that would be fit.
So we have a private angel who is Tim Schumacher, who is behind Adblock Plus, which is very great because this is the privacy space and it works very well because he's an insider. Plus, we have a private equity fund that does not have the term of the fund. So they invest in the long term like growth. That's great. Speaking of growth. So you're doing 300 grand per month today.
Where were you about a year ago? Uh, we were probably like we, we, we, we grew like 60 to 80% over the last few years. So, uh, I don't have exact figure in my mind, but, uh, beginning 2017, I think we were somewhere around like, uh, less than 200 or around 200 K. Yep. And what about churn? Churn is critical in a SaaS company. What are you guys at today?
Um, so, uh, that's interesting because we also analyze it per cohort. So we, we see very low churn in this enterprise sector and that's what we are actually like mostly focused now. So the enterprise cohort, uh, it's, For us, it's an enterprise cohort because it's mostly on-prem, but there are a couple enterprise customers that are on the cloud.
And the medium-sized business cohort that we actually like is treated as our legacy business. There we have very high churn, probably like 10%, 15%. But in the enterprise cohort, it's under 5%. So let's look across your entire customer base.
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Chapter 3: What revenue models does Piwik Pro utilize for on-premises and cloud services?
Over the past 12 months, what percent of your revenue have you lost? What was gross revenue churn? The gross revenue trend was probably around in this year, so year to date, because I think that's easier for me to just remember. It's somewhere around 6.5% to 7%. Okay, and when you add back expansion revenue on top of that, are you guys above 100% net revenue retention?
No, we are not on top of that. So we don't have negative churn, not at least yet. Are you close? We started doing successful upsells because we are adding new products to our platform. So now it's called Pwik Pro Marketing Suite. And we have nice upsell coming in, but it wasn't enough to cover the difference yet. The 7%. Yeah. So, so magic, what, what is net revenue retention right now?
Like 98, 99%, something like that. Uh, it will be a closer probably to nine 95 to 97. Uh, just because we did the app, the really absence started kicking in, in the, uh, Q2 this year. So, and Q3 is low for the, for the enterprise size. So, uh, it's still low. I mean, we expect this to grow really well in the next year. Yeah.
Now, to acquire one of these $25,000 per year enterprise accounts, what are you willing to spend fully weighted on acquiring them? We would be willing to spend probably much more than we are spending today. So we would be willing to spend as much as one and a half or two times a yearly contracts value because we know now that these enterprise accounts have very high lifetime value.
uh but uh currently since we we are quite cautious as a european company with the spending and i think this is like maybe you know a bit of our nightmare uh but also a bit of our mentality not to like you know overspend so if you if i think for example for the uh fundraising that we did in 2017 we we we had so many upfront payments for subscription 12 months of
subscription that we haven't touched this money, which means probably we're spending not fast enough. So we are spending less than the yearly account value for acquiring them, probably anywhere between 50 to 80%. I cannot give you the right number right now. That's fine. Yeah. So you're across your entire base, right? It's about 750 bucks per month.
You're saying you're totally willing to spend, you know, 700 bucks to acquire that customer. That's about eight, nine months of ACV, but you could, and you would be comfortable setting it up to, you know, 18 months or maybe even 24 months because of the lifetime value. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's great. And where are you getting most of your new customers from? How are they finding you?
So we are very big on inbound marketing. So probably like that was primary channel that we grew, generated the growth. So 80% is inbound. It's of course supported by paid marketing. But now that we got certain scale, we are growing the partner channel and the outbound channels. And that's something that we started earlier this year and plan to expand in the following months.
Maciek, any little golden nuggets here, things that are not common strategies for customer acquisition that you're doing, even if it only got you one or two customers? Um, I would have to think of that. Um, I think that there isn't many things that like none of the companies, uh, tried out. Something besides like inbound and Google ads. Okay, okay.
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Chapter 4: What is the current customer base and revenue for Piwik Pro?
Or the last book you read? I would say I've read quite a bit recently on the... purchasing like a split second, I think is the book called. Split second. Very good. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
Um, I'm currently following, but that just out of like, you know, curiosity, what's happening, Elon Musk, uh, just because of, uh, you know, uh, all the, the recent, uh, uh, things that happened at Tesla. Um, so, uh, that's probably the, the one tweet feed that's, uh, goes on in my background. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business?
With online tool, I would say I'm a huge fan of HubSpot. It helps a lot on aligning sales and marketing. Number four, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night? Somewhere around six to seven. Okay, that's pretty good. In which situation? Married, single, do you have kids? It's single with a girlfriend and two cats. Okay, not married, girlfriend, two kiddos, and how old are you?
So not two kids, two cats. Oh, two cats. Okay, zero kids, two cats. And how old are you, Maciek? 31. 31. Last question. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew? I think when growing the company, focus more on sales and marketing earlier, at earlier stage, and hire more for this position because I was doing it myself too long. Yep.
Guys, privacy-focused analytics focused more on sales and marketing earlier on. Machik joining us again. They've just passed 300 grand per month in revenue, up about 60 to 70% year over year, serving 400 customers. Again, paying on average about 750 bucks a month for this tool. They've got a team of 105 people
building it in Poland and other remote locations, willing to spend up to call it 80% of first year ACV on acquiring customers and hoping to get more aggressive with that as time goes on, willing to spend up to 18 or maybe even 24 months of ACV on acquiring the customer just because lifetime values are so long.
Founded the company in 2013, gross revenue turned 7%, 95% net revenue retention annually. They've raised 2 million bucks of outside capital arrests. They've funded all from their agency. Maciek, thank you for taking us to the top. Thank you very much.
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