SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
954 Launched in 1991 How is Agiloft Closing $1.8m Deals?
05 Mar 2018
Chapter 1: What does Colin Earle share about his background and Agiloft's mission?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Colin Earle. He's the CEO and founder of Agiloft.
Before the company, he worked at IBM, GE, and startups as a developer, product manager, and CIO. His vision was to dramatically boost the agility of business applications by removing the need for manual coding. And the company has now become the market leader in no-code enterprise software. Colin, are you ready to take us to the top?
I certainly am.
All right. Market leader in no-code enterprise software is a big title. Quantify that for me.
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Chapter 2: How has Agiloft achieved significant growth in customer base and revenue?
How do you know?
There's a very limited number of applications out there that are truly no-code. We're leading the way. We were recently chosen by PC Magazine as providing the world's best contract management software. And The Infotech Analyst Award said that the Agiloft Service Desk product was the market champion and best value.
Can you give me a sense of usage? So how many folks do you have using your suite of tools?
Wow. In terms of companies, we have something north of a thousand in terms of users, well into the millions. 2.5, well between 2.5 and 3 million at this point.
Okay, and give me more of the back story here. So for people that are not familiar with the company, what do you do and what's your business model? Is it pure SaaS?
Yes, it's pure SaaS, but we also allow in-house deployments. So the vast majority run on our SaaS service. For some, such as the US Air Force, that have a highly secure deployment, run inside their own firewall on the secure network.
Got it. And walk me through some of the backstory here. When did you launch the company?
I launched the company back in 91, but the no-code application, the Agiloft product that's a flagship these days, was launched seven years ago.
Okay. And did you bootstrap the company or have you raised capital?
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Chapter 3: What is Agiloft's business model and how does it serve its clients?
Yeah, so you're between 10 and 25 million. That's wonderful.
Yeah, really between 10 and 50, but yes.
10 and 50. That's wonderful. So tell me more about, I mean, are you only serving these enterprise folks or do you have kind of mid-market and SMBs using you as well?
Actually, that's one of the things I'm proudest about is that we serve the SMB market as well. The same code that provides Sarbanes-Oxley compliance for one of the world's largest and most sophisticated company is the same code that's being used by a 20-person startup to manage the distribution of organic lunches to school kids in Marin. So yeah, it runs a gamut.
Now, that said, the majority of our customers are between 250 and 500,000 employees.
Maybe this is a better question. On average, what's the average customer paying you per month? Are we talking a dollar or a million dollars?
The average customer is paying us in the order of $1,000 per month. The average deal size is about $45,000. A year? No, for the initial implementation plus the first year of service.
Okay, got it. So you have a kind of a setup. Do you do any on-prem stuff or no?
No.
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Chapter 4: How does Agiloft differentiate itself in the no-code software market?
Is that accurate? And if so, what does your annual retention look like?
It is certainly accurate. Annual retention, it depends upon whether you look at the customer count or the seat count. In terms of customers, it's about 94%.
In terms of logo retention or revenue retention?
Logo retention. In terms of revenue retention, it's over 100%. The existing customers purchase more than enough seats to make up the drop-off from the customers that we lose.
So said differently, you are very much in the net negative revenue churn range.
Yes.
Makes a lot of sense. Where are you finding these new customers? How are you closing new deals?
They're coming to our website. They're coming to our website saying, we have a need. Can you provide a solution?
How do they find your website, Colin?
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Colin face in bootstrapping Agiloft?
I just haven't found one that I really liked. I don't know if you guys are the same way, but they're just so tricky. And a while ago, I had a guy named John Lee on my show. He's the CEO of ProsperWorks. And he told me they just passed 40,000 customers and 24 million in annual revenue. So they're doing about $286,000 in revenue per employee. And I said, wow, why is this working?
And I said, you know what? I'm going to try it. So I went to prosperworks.com forward slash love your CRM, signed up, and it immediately became clear why it worked. Those of you that love growth hacking, you should go to that link just to see how they do the onboarding. That's prosperworks.com forward slash love your CRM. In short, it's like magic.
You know, I'm not the guy that, you know, finishes the sales call and then takes the time to actually put data into the CRM. They have this magical way of just doing it. And it's a beautiful thing. So every morning when I wake up, I just go, okay, what leads are prosper works telling me to reach out to because they're most likely to close and it works so well.
And you guys know, I love money and I love only focusing on the leads that are going to close. So I encourage you to try prosper works or sponsoring the show. Check them out at prosperworks.com forward slash love your CRM folks. That's again, prosperworks.com forward slash love your CRM. Now, these guys, their business model is you can pay for placement. Do you pay Capterra or G2 Crowd anything?
So we pay, in some categories, we're paying for placement in the list, and in other categories, we're not.
Got it. Yeah, no, I just brought up, by the way, this PC review. Yeah, you guys are at number one, then you have kind of updraft, Concord, Onnit, ContractSafe, Coupa, ContractWorks, a lot of these other guys. So yeah, that placement, I can see where that drives you guys a ton of traffic.
It does, yes.
Yeah. Interesting. So are you spending anything? Well, I guess you are a little bit for categories you're not in, but in a given month, what is like a total amount you're spending on paid acquisition only?
It varies, but typically something in the order of $30,000 to $50,000 a month.
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