1649 How He's Making Push Notifications Smarters, $75k in MRR, 35 Enterprise Customers

0.031 - 16.571 Nathan Latka

Launched his company back in 2015. Again, open back, reinventing push notifications. Now 25 customers paying about three grand a month, doing about 75 grand per month in revenue. Up from 30 grand a month just about a year ago. Burning caught 10, 20 grand per month. They've put in about two million bucks to build the company. Team of 10 in Dublin and San Francisco.

16.611 - 23.999 Nathan Latka

Too early to talk about churn, but in terms of aggressiveness on customer acquisition, he's totally willing to spend up to 12 months or even more of ACV to get those customers in the door.

24.019 - 28.705 Nathan Latka

They're enterprise customers. They'll scale nicely as they usher in a new way to do these push notifications.

29.14 - 57.409 Nathan Latka

hello everybody my guest today is david shackleton he's the ceo of openback the mobile engagement platform which uses edge computing machine learning to make push notifications smarter he also co-founded ding.com the 500 million dollar business that enables millions online and from 600 000 stores top up uh top up the family of a loved one back home in over 120 countries david are you ready to take us to the top sounds good okay so first question you mentioned ding.com in the intro it's a 500 million dollar business why are you not all in on that

58.233 - 74.61 David Shackleton

Yeah, so we've been building our business for quite a while. And, you know, I think where I most enjoy stuff is kind of creating products and bringing them to market and bring them to scale. And we kind of rolled Ding out. Ding is active in 125 countries. Got a really good experience management team in there.

75.07 - 87.882 David Shackleton

And it's kind of on its own path. We did some M&As. We bought anybody in the space that made sense. And the business continues to grow well. So, you know, I was kind of had an itch to scratch to build something new.

87.902 - 97.708 David Shackleton

And we'd been working on OpenBAC for a while as a sort of a side project, but it's got real potential for kind of real scale to change part of how the internet works.

97.768 - 101.217 Nathan Latka

What is top-up? I've never heard that term before, David. What's top-up mean?

101.72 - 114.684 David Shackleton

So mobile top up is like cell phone minutes. So outside the US, you know, you top up your phone. So you add value, you buy value for your phone. And then as you use the internet or make calls, it depletes your balance.

142.961 - 144.484 Nathan Latka

And is it a pure place ass company?

145.156 - 161.383 David Shackleton

So yeah, so it's pure play SaaS. You know, we kind of fit in that world between kind of SaaS developer tool and then kind of marketing engagement. And so Openback is kind of a mobile engagement platform. What we, you know, where we focus, we've kind of created this new segment, I guess, all about push notification delivery.

161.884 - 180.793 David Shackleton

So there's lots of engagement platforms and ways for mobile apps to send push notifications to their users, but they all do it in the same way. So it's very much server side out. So you blast it out to whichever users you want to hit. And we think that paradigm is broken because actually those notifications don't always get through to the user.

180.913 - 196.711 David Shackleton

So if you haven't opened an app in a month, 50% of notifications won't even get through to you. And so we wanted to solve that, but we also wanted to solve the moments that notifications are delivered to you. Like you should never get a notification in the middle of the night. You should never get a notification when you're driving.

197.171 - 213.587 David Shackleton

It makes no sense for an app to send you a notification if you've got like 5% battery left, right? And so we wanted to flip it and actually change it and kind of use edge computing. So use the app on the device itself to control it all and then do a really good job. And so for us, a good job is,

213.922 - 221.337 David Shackleton

deliver a notification at a good moment. That's helpful. And somebody wants to engage with it, but also not piss off users. Right. You know, I think sure.

221.518 - 228.893 Nathan Latka

Yeah. High utility moment. Yeah, exactly. So break down the pricing model. What's the company pay on average per year for, to get access to your technology?

229.7 - 249.486 David Shackleton

Yeah, so it kind of starts a couple hundred bucks to get going up to 100,000 users. So we basically charge based on the number of mobile apps that are currently installed out on people's phones. So up to 100,000 users, you're paying like $500 a month. And then you can send as many notifications and use all our tools.

262.573 - 276.908 David Shackleton

Average probably more three, $4,000 to be honest. We have quite a few large customers, but we kind of have a good entry point. Like our goal is to fix notifications for the, for the world. So we try and make, you know, any app can get access and start getting the advantage of the software.

276.989 - 279.231 Nathan Latka

When'd you find, when'd you start the company? What year?

280.156 - 296.336 David Shackleton

We started working on it back like end of 2015. A bunch of engineers and myself, we're kind of working away. We've just started really to scale up probably in the last four or five months where we've kind of added some extra folks to the team. We're starting to raise our profile a little bit.