SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
746: Bill Gates Was Great to Work With, But This Founder Wanted His Own Thing
09 Aug 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
launched this company guys back in 2015 after a long stint not a stint actually a 10 year at microsoft almost two decades he launched the company called komiko which is helping folks enrich their crms it's a plug-in it really it's an add-on to crms it's complimentary not competitive they're up to 10 people now full-time based up there in seattle doing about 60 grand per month they get to that number because they've got about 2 000 employees across a large set of customers using their tool and they charge about 30 bucks a seat so it's about
Chapter 2: What does Komiko do and how does it enhance customer engagement?
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.
Chapter 3: Why did Hal Howard leave Microsoft after 20 years?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 4: What is the average pricing model for Komiko's services?
I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 5: How does Komiko maintain customer retention?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
Chapter 6: What strategies does Komiko use for customer acquisition?
This is episode 746.
Chapter 7: How much capital has Komiko raised and what are the funding details?
Coming up tomorrow morning, Derek joins us.
Chapter 8: What are the gross margins and revenue targets for Komiko?
He is a six-figure poker player who quit to launch his own agency. Why did he quit such a lucrative poker game for a startup? Hello, everyone. My guest today is Hal Howard. He is the founder of a company called Comico. Now, before that, he was a leader of the Microsoft Dynamics ERP development team from 2004 to 2014. So he's seen it. He's been there. He's done that.
Hal, are you ready to take us to the top? Sounds great. Let's do it. Very cool. So start from the beginning. Tell us first what Comico does, and let's hear about how you exited Microsoft and got into it in the first place. Sure. Comico is a sales intelligence tool that basically helps our customers understand what engagements with customers are working.
It uses a combination of data mining machine learning techniques to understand what patterns of engagement with a customer are working. And it does it by going directly to primary data sources, not just your CRM, but things like email, calendar, phone logs, et cetera, to understand what's going on.
Do you pay for kind of other data sources just to check that, like full contact, clear bit, things like this? We have integrations with all those kinds of services as well, yeah. And quickly, what is your revenue model? It's a subscription service. It's cloud service, classic per user per month type fees. Sass. Yep. Yep. All right. Take us back to the launch story here.
2014, it sounds like you're killing it at Microsoft. You're having a ton of fun there. What was it like working there, and then why'd you leave? Yeah, well, I mean, if you look at my history at Microsoft, I mean, I was there for 20 years and worked on essentially four version one products. And I like sort of building things and building things from scratch.
And in 2014, we had reached a point with the Dynamics ERP business where I felt like, hey, I had a great team around me, people that were capable of moving the business forward and keeping going forward. And I was interested in starting over again and building something new. So, you know, I looked at opportunities to do that within Microsoft.
felt like the best opportunities existed outside and so founded my own company and went for it. You could have done anything. Why choose this concept? Well, essentially, you know, my time in business applications, I became convinced that there were a lot of new technologies that weren't being exploited very well in business apps.
You know, business applications typically are, you know, form in front of a database with some kind of a report being run at the end of the day. And most users of business apps
view them more as a burden than an actual benefit right now if you're a salesperson and you have to do a bunch of data entering the crm you don't love your crm system right and that's their stuff but it should be something that helps you day to day understand what's working with the customers and so the whole idea you know whole idea behind kamiko is to do that is to make it useful for the people that actually use it and what's the average customer paying you
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