1676 Why 850 Farmers Pay Him $127k/mo To Manage Livestock Feeding

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Top Founders 17 min 2 speakers 5 chapters transcribed 2 months ago
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Nathan Latka 0:00
Dane is now working with over 150 farmers that pay $150 a month, so doing about $127,000 per month in revenue, helping them manage and measure and automate and understand the data related to feeding and cattle and just managing all the head of livestock that they're managing across these farms. He saw this opportunity after being hyper-focused on really optimization of row crops back in Silicon Valley. Now launched this company, capitalized with $2.7 million in capital, 20 people on the team between Iowa and remote locations, about 5% or less than 5% revenue churn per year, getting ready to add additional products, drive upsells. And in terms of acquisition, spending about 300 bucks to get a new $150 a month customer.
Nathan Latka 0:37
So two month payback as he looks and doubles down on market adoption via channel partners. Hello everyone, my guest today is Dane Cooper. He's a PLA co-founder who brings a breadth of experience and vision to performance livestock analytics. He currently owns a progressive agricultural enterprise that consists of raw crops and livestock based in Northern Iowa. Now he's building cattlecrush.com. Dane, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, you bet. All right, so tell us what Cattle Crush is and what the business model is. How do you make money?
Dane Cooper 1:05
Yeah, so we're a SaaS platform for the livestock industry. So we provide a software platform that livestock operations manage their data on.
Nathan Latka 1:16
And tell us again, tell us about how an average customer might use you. Are you talking SMB, like smaller farms, mid-sized farms, or enterprise scale efforts?
Dane Cooper 1:22
Yeah, no, it's all the above. Initially, we worked with a lot of small, medium-sized, kind of the SMB market as far as the livestock operations because they were just operating offline. when you look at how they're operating their farms or agricultural enterprise. So overall, it was a market that was really addressable and accessible and really was lacking the technology they needed to manage a multi-million dollar business.
Nathan Latka 1:48
So when you look at your companies today using you on average, what's the company paying you per month for access to your technology?
Dane Cooper 1:53
Yeah, so we charge $150 a month per subscriber for individual farms.
Okay.
Nathan Latka 1:58
Okay. And when'd you launch the company? What year?
Dane Cooper 2:00
We launched it in 2015.
Nathan Latka 2:01
2015. Very good. And now were you already running your own row crops, things like that before then? And then you built this for your own need or?
Dane Cooper 2:08
Yeah, that's right. So I, you know, out of college, I went and spent seven years in Silicon Valley, working for different ag tech companies out there. And really we were focused on revolutionizing the row crop industry. And really from the efforts out there, working with a lot of different software companies is livestock was a missed opportunity that nobody was really focusing on. 40% of the agricultural GDP in the world is through livestock. So it's a huge, still niche market that was just lacking focus and needed digitization. So it was a market we targeted and focused on as we launched in 2015.
Nathan Latka 2:46
And what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers on the platform?
Dane Cooper 2:50
So we have about 850 customers that individually subscribe to $150 a month. And then we have several enterprise agreements. So we have several channel partners that we look through our go-to-market strategy that we have partnerships with from an enterprise level that we're doing some software integration and some hosting and branding type revenue model type stuff within the business too.
Nathan Latka 3:09
850 folks at 150 bucks a month puts you at about 127,000 bucks a month right now in revenue. Is that accurate?
Dane Cooper 3:16
Yeah, that's right. I mean, our MRR from our direct customer base is right around that $130. Okay.
Nathan Latka 3:22
Yep. And then take us back a year. Where were you a year ago per month?
Dane Cooper 3:28
We were right at, let's see here, it was right at $7,000 a month.
Nathan Latka 3:33
Oh, wow. Okay. So you really just turned things on about a year ago. We launched the platform roughly about 18 months ago. Got it. Okay. So how are you supporting yourself between 2015 and, you know, 2017?

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