SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
3 Customers and $3m ARR, How this Drone Mapping Startup Landed Enterprise Deals
13 Feb 2023
Chapter 1: What is SaaS Open and who are the speakers?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have 1,000 SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit. Again, hundreds of speakers, 1,000 plus attendees.
And we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, founders, heads of product, head of finance and BD, CMOs and CROs, and then people in HR stage. It's going to be special. Prices are increasing every week, so you don't want to wait. Go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today.
Again, that's sasopen.com, March 16th and 17th in New York City. Tickets are almost sold out. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
Guys, he cold emailed 1,000 people at Comcast and said, buy my drone mapping technology. We can inspect your telephone lines faster than anyone else. He got that contract on day one back in 2015. Today, he serves a lot of government agencies. This is the Air Force, military, et cetera. Doing about $3 million in revenue today, but highly concentrated.
Looking to expand that to $9 million this year, growing. He's got $25 on the team to the $6 million Series A back in 2019, in addition to a couple million bucks in convertible notes that transitioned over last But again, scaling nicely here. Team of 25, high revenue per employee. We'll see if we can triple this year. Hey, folks. My guest today is Joel Sullivan.
He's the founder and CEO of Mapware. He was previously at Offerboard, which exited, and has three little startups now at home. He's homesteading, a big flannel aficionado, and a sick beard game. Joel, you ready to take us to the top?
Let's do it, man.
All right. So drones are interesting right now. You're seeing what's happening in Ukraine. I don't know if there's a defense approach to anything you're building, but walk us through what Mapware does.
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Chapter 2: How did Joel Sullivan get his first customer at Comcast?
Yeah.
Yeah. And so how do you are you typically signing up one person at one agency or are these, you know, whether it's government or anyone else buying agriculture companies, are they buying, you know, 30 seats at once? You know, what's the average customer paying in terms of number of seats?
So it's a land and expand strategy. And what we've seen within the U.S. drone marketplace is that it's mostly single owner operators. So it's typically one guy buying one license. We're seeing that within the government agencies, we're getting 1,000 user orders or several hundred users at a time, which has been great.
But the commercial market, I feel like, is still feeling it around, still getting their hands on it.
I mean, if you've got one group coming and buying 1,000 seats at $200 a pop, I mean, that's a $200,000 a month contract. Am I doing that math right? Yeah. Yes. I mean, is that, I mean, don't obviously name the customer, but do you have people paying 200 grand a month? Like one entity?
That's a yes. Yeah.
I mean, so if you're driving and you can't read Joe's body language, that's a yes. So it's, it's a little bit tricky, right? Because I, you know, I can sort of talk about some of my contracts. Um, and I can, I can go into some details on like the use cases that we've been doing in environmental monitoring. Um, so that maybe is a little bit easier to kind of get our arms around.
I mean, look, let's just say, let's just, let's just ignore the government for a second. Let's say there was an environmental company, right? That, that had a thousand seats, right? At 200, sorry, 200 bucks a seat per month. I mean, that's 2.4 million bucks of ARR. I don't know how big you are, but that feels like a ton of customer concentration risk. How do you manage that?
Yeah, it's I mean, it's an issue. It's a real problem. And the way we do that is by being very hands on and focused in a direct outbound kind of sales process. Right. So I'm meeting with the customers. We have these this very high touch sales process for that customer segment. And then at the same time, we have this like super low touch automated SaaS thing.
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Chapter 3: What unique technology does Mapware offer for drone mapping?
And we pivoted through a bunch of different answers to that question. It originally started as, OK, maybe I can do subscription crop dusting. And we looked at all the different ways that that could work, then realized, wait a minute, trying to bang my head against two regulatory agencies would be a total nightmare. And within the first year of our business,
we had kind of said, okay, we'll structure this more as like a solution, get our arms around it. And we started with kind of a fully integrated disaster response package. So right out of the gates.
Well, Joe, here, we got to go faster because we only have five minutes left here. So disaster recovery, 2015, and then you eventually pivot into the space. Now, just, I guess, maybe walk me through who your first customer was. How'd you get your first customer?
Yeah. So our first major customer was Comcast. And we got that customer by emailing a thousand employees at Comcast. And then finally getting in touch. Oh, God, I don't even remember. It was something like, you know, drones are awesome and we could save you guys a ton of money. On what? Why would Comcast need drones?
So I had worked the numbers on what it takes for them to do an inspection of telephone lines. and realized that drones could do it at like a 10th of the cost. And we figured that out. And we actually ran a prototype and we did it. And it was awesome. That's smart.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Okay, so that's Comcast. And fast forward today, how many customers are you working with?
So the bulk of our customers are concentrated in the US government. We basically have... We basically this year made a decision to almost ignore the commercial market in order to satisfy the government market.
Oh, so you have like three or four. It's like Comcast, the U.S. Air Force and one other one.
Yeah, it's like U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army and maybe U.S. Navy this year. And that's good.
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Chapter 4: How does Mapware's business model work for government agencies?
Sure.
Yep. Yep. Fair enough. Looking back now, would you change anything? Was that the right move for where you were at the time?
I think, yes, I would change some things. I'd probably want to have a more comprehensive plan. And I think, you know, if I'm being honest, we went kind of piecemeal convertible note, but, you know, kind of just one step in front of in front of the next. Um, and if I could do it all over again, I probably would have said, here's a comprehensive plan on how we would spend 10 million.
Not here's something that gets me to next quarter. So, yeah.
Yep.
So, yes, there are lots of things I would have done differently.
Yeah. Well, guys, a big lesson you can take from Joe is how we got Comcast on day one. That's a big enterprise account. Look, Joe, I'm sort of I'm sort of guessing today. Do they only they don't I assume they don't need one seat. Right. They probably buy one seat for every geography or something.
Well, yeah. And our pricing model was totally different there. We were doing by a square mile at the time. And so we basically said, hey, we'll map an entire city for you for like a quarter million dollars.
Oh, interesting. And then they just said, we want to buy all of these geos and then boom, you have the price.
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