SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
643: Nimble Passes $1.5M In ARR Last Year, $200k MRR now as CRM space heats up with CEO Jon Ferrara
28 Apr 2017
Chapter 1: What inspired Jon Ferrara to create Nimble CRM?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. I just finished traveling Southeast Asia for 41 days, and I usually always get sick when I travel, and quite frankly, eating is difficult for me. It's hard to find a restaurant, and I'm spoiled in Austin with my personal chef. Well, I took these little packets with me this time, 30 of them, in my carry-on suitcase.
Chapter 2: How did Jon's experience with GoldMine shape his approach to CRM?
They kept me totally healthy with 11 different secret ingredients. You can see them at nathanlaca.com forward slash juice. I'll tell you more later on in the show. That's nathanlaca.com forward slash juice. And this is episode 643. Coming up tomorrow, you learn from Tyler Tate. He's a tech CEO that's now taking on coffee.
He's raised $325,000 into $17,000 in gross merchandise value in January 2017, helping 715 buyers find their coffee with his company crema.co.
good morning everybody our guest this morning is john ferreira he is a crm and relationship management entrepreneur and noted speaker about social media's effects on sales and marketing he's reimagined the crm by building a simply smarter social sales and marketing platform his most recent venture is called nimble.com which we'll talk about it's the first crm that works for you by building an updated contact data for you and then works with you everywhere you work he's best known as the co-founder of goldmine software
one of the early pioneers in the Salesforce automation and customer relationship management and software categories for small and medium-sized businesses.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Jon face after selling GoldMine?
He's recently been recognized on Forbes as one of the top 10 social CEOs and top 10 social salespeople in the world. John, are you ready to take us to the top? I was born ready, Nathan. Let's go. Let's do it. All right. Goldmine Software, real quick, let's close that loop. Did you sell the business? Did it wind down? What happened to that before Nimble?
Chapter 4: How did Jon leverage social media for business growth?
So the idea behind Goldmine was that there was no Outlook back in the day. There was no Salesforce. There was no CRM or SFA or market automation programs at all. There wasn't a program that integrated email, contact, and calendar or that blended sales and market automation for a team.
So I invented it, started on $5,000, no bank loans, no venture capital, ran it for 10 years, had 5 million customers around the world, and sold it and retired at 40.
Okay, so now was it a software platform?
It was. It was a disk that you'd actually get mailed out to.
A disk?
Yeah, yeah.
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Chapter 5: What unique features does Nimble offer compared to traditional CRMs?
This is like AOL. You're like Steve Case for CRM. Yeah, back in the day, it was actually a floppy disk.
Oh, my gosh. And then it became one of those hard plastic ones. Then it became a CD. And, uh, yeah, man, this is back before, uh, before outlook was even there. So we were people's outlook combined with their Salesforce.
And I actually think that was a better solution because today you really live in your inbox and now more and more social media, and then you have to go to your serum to work for it. And that kind of blows.
Chapter 6: How does Nimble achieve customer retention and low churn rates?
Yeah. Okay. So goldmine software, what you're just selling it again. Started in 89, sold it in 99. Okay, so 10 years there, you said it reached, and I just want to get the data on your last year there. So you passed 5 million total users?
5 million total users, about 70 million in annual revenue, about 250 team members worldwide, about 5,000 bars and 500 third party add-on products.
Got it. Awesome. Good stuff.
Chapter 7: What funding strategies did Jon use to grow Nimble?
So 70 million bucks in AR back then, how'd you value the business when you sold it? I mean, is it your typical kind of five to seven X top line?
Nah, it didn't. They didn't really work that way back then. It wasn't necessarily annual recurring revenue because it was kind of like new revenue that we're selling every year with some maintenance recurrals, etc. So back then, this is imagine there was 1999, literally months before the technology bubble burst. And I didn't really trust the market and didn't want anybody stock.
And so we took cash back in the day and it was about $125 million in cash. But no strings attached. Nothing.
Chapter 8: What life lessons did Jon learn through his entrepreneurial journey?
That's good. Right. So call it, call it, you know, 1.7 X top line, but no earn out, no stock and some other pet, you know, pet.com company that's going to go crashing two years later. Right. So good exit. Were you the only, were you the only founder? There's two of us. Okay, good. Two of you guys. And you said you had 250 people on the team. Good. Okay. So you sell that 99 boom, that's done.
What happens after that?
So about a year after I sold gold mine, I got a head tumor and I spent about a year, you know, getting treatment and going through the journey of health. And I'll tell you what, Nathan, I think the most important thing you have around you is your health. Next is your family. And then it's your passion, your business.
And if you don't have the foundation of your health, it's hard to do the other two well. And I got through that journey. John, how old are you? I was 41 years old and I was literally facing death. So I got past that journey and I came to the conclusion that we're on this planet to grow our souls and help other people grow theirs.
And we do that by simply doing what you and I are doing right now, sharing our passion, plan, and purpose in life and finding ways to add value to each other. And that's it. That's all we leave the planet with. You don't leave it with the house you got or the money you made.
You leave it with the vibrations of the moment you spent with other human beings, ideally adding value to them, because I think that's what we're here to do. And so I spent the next 10 years of my life being a present father, husband, a member of my community. And I'll tell you what, it was amazing being able to be there raising my kids and doing that.
Three. Dad of three. Okay, good. So from 1999 to 2009 for 10 years, you were raising your kids, dad of three. So not doing anything full-time, no other venture, no full-time work, no nothing else?
I went back to school and got a degree in photography, and I was a photographer for USC football for 10 years. Oh, cool. I shot Carson Palmer all the way to Sanchez and everybody in between, and it was an amazing journey being part of that legacy.
That's great. Okay, take us up to 2009. Then what? So I started to use social media in 2006. Hold on, John. Hold on. Elephant in the room. Head tumor solved by 2009 or are you still battling this?
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