SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1629 Will a Rebrand Help this $500k MRR Company Break 30% YoY Growth?
09 Jan 2020
Chapter 1: What is Interweave and how does it generate revenue?
interweave founded in 2006 a crm tool that essentially it will integrate or interfaces with crm specifically in a billing and financial capacity tying these data sets together erp web services along with databases really honestly in a hub and spoke model today they've scaled to about 4 000 total customers paying on average 125 bucks a month so that would put them obviously at about 500 grand per month right now in revenue up from about 375 grand just about a year ago so caught 30 year-over-year growth
Still maybe a tad cash flow positive as Bruce continues to fund the business, but they're doing this all bootstrapped, which is impressive. 18 people based between Toronto and Russia, 25% revenue churn annually. That's gross, 40% expansion. So net revenue retention, about 115%. Not sure what CAC and payback period is right now because he's focused on a big rebrand with Gartner. Hello, everyone.
My guest today is Bruce McGowan. As the Chief Executive Officer, President, Board Member, and Investor in Integration Technologies and the creator of Interweave Smart Solution, Bruce brings customer-focused solutions in response to customers' needs to the digital age.
He served as CEO, President, Board Member, and Investor in Secure Digital, the company that developed Secure Voice, the voice data and video encryption solution designed to pass
Chapter 2: How does Bruce McGowan describe the company's growth strategy?
FIPS 142 certification in 2000. Bruce served as CEO, CFO and head of the audit committee and investor and board member of the Uncommon Media Group and also served as president and chief operations officer of Noah Corp, a privately held company focusing on interactive and media rich solutions. Bruce, are you ready to take us to the top? I hope so. All right.
What is Interweave and is it a pure play SaaS company as you focus on the CRM space?
It is a pure play SaaS company. The originations were competing with TIBCO, WebBeyond, a number of very large corporate integration engines. And we morphed from about 2004 to 2006 when we met Salesforce into a SaaS pure play company. It took us about actually three years to convert that to a pure SaaS environment.
Chapter 3: What challenges does the company face with customer churn?
We are currently at Rackspace Managed Hosting. Been there since 2006.
Sorry. Okay. So what do you mean by that? You were acquired by Rackspace? No, that's our ISP. Okay. I got it. Yeah.
Chapter 4: How is Interweave adapting its business model for future growth?
So let's just focus on the company right now. And by the way, there's a lot of companies named Interweave. You're interweave.biz, correct? Correct.
We are. It's NWE Smart Solutions DBA. The company is Integration Technologies.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So give me a customer story. I mean, how's a customer using you?
Chapter 5: What role does rebranding play in the company's strategy?
I think a good customer story, there's a number of others. When we came into Salesforce, Salesforce, the financial applications, QuickBooks, the Sage mass line, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, all that. The original customers were folks in QuickBooks. In 2006, at that time, there weren't that many solution providers out there. So we came forward and worked with a number of them.
to create what they wanted, but in a configurable way. That's the distinction here. So what we've done is it's all objects, all transactions in Salesforce, all objects, all transactions in QuickBooks, and it's your choice via configuration. So that's what quite distincts us.
So as far as business process and workflow, the customer can implement theirs as opposed to buying a pre-programmed business process workflow from another vendor.
Chapter 6: How does the company plan to enhance its product offerings?
Okay. Try and break this down. Well, help me understand, Armin. Are you after SMB, mid-market, or enterprise?
SMB mid-market, typically. I mean, the smallest customer is one, the largest customer is five. It really is. We are CRM focused. We are a CRM integration platform with intelligence.
So, Bruce, try and break this down to a price point for me.
Chapter 7: What factors influence pricing for Interweave's services?
What's the average customer pay you per month for access to your tech?
The annual is anywhere from $9.99 to $14.99, typically.
$1,500? Yeah. Yes. Okay, so $1,500 per year is a good average? Yes. And why would they pay more or less? What are your pricing axes that you price on?
It really is, we have four models.
Chapter 8: What insights does Bruce share about long-term business goals?
So we have pro, premier, small business, and enterprise. And it really goes to the type of integration the customer is looking for. Is it just AR focused and specific? Is it AP focused? Sorry, try not to use acronyms, yeah. Accounts receivable versus accounts payable, or the combination of both. I mean...
Some customers get into very heavy multiple QuickBooks company files by currency, by line of business, multiple price books. We go very heavy into inventory, warehouses, locations, all these types of things. So that's kind of one of the distinctions coming forward that Interweave provides over others.
And would you say your main focus is kind of billing and financial platforms, or is it more towards kind of databases and other web services?
No, it's really focused on, number one, being financial integration solutions. Second would be billings and subscription. We currently integrate with about 47 merchant service providers. So we do quite a lot in subscription-based billing, bringing that forward between the solutions itself. And then additionally, e-commerce database.
We have typically, I think right now, 27 protocol-specific adapters. So if something has a protocol, the way to work with it, we can work with that.
And Bruce, put this on a timeline for us. When did you launch the company? What year?
2000, 2006.
2006. Okay. And over the past, what is that? 12 years. How many customers have you scaled to?
We've done about 8,000 to date.
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