Collabogence Pivoting from $300k Agency, Raising $1.5m on $5m Pre?

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What inspired Peter Smit to start Collabogence?

Peter Smith 0:00
First year was about 70,000. Okay.
Nathan Latka 0:02
Yep.
Peter Smith 0:03
And probably in the hundreds last year. And right now, because we've done a major shift toward helping organizations with the workplace strategy, both the work from home and new office environments, we see that going up to probably a run rate of close to a million by the second half of this year.
Nathan Latka 0:25
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews. And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
Peter Smith 0:57
We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Nathan Latka 1:01
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Lookers CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
Unknown 1:13
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
Nathan Latka 1:17
If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Peter Smith. He spent half of his life on the other side of the Atlantic and lived in seven countries and also speaks four languages. He was raised in the age of matrix management, running programs, initiatives, projects, and businesses globally. He's been a long proponent of collaboration and tools which enable it.
Nathan Latka 2:00
He's today the CEO and founder of Collabogens, a Toronto-based firm which uses data to measure the changes in effectiveness and productivity of people and spaces. Peter, you ready to take us to the top? Yes, absolutely. So just to be clear, is this sort of a consulting company or is there real software powering what you do as a SaaS business?
Peter Smith 2:18
Oh, in an earlier phase of my life, I spent... Doing consulting work. And this is now a pure play analytics company. So it's a tool which either companies use directly or consulting companies such as facilities management or HR strategy consulting or workplace strategy consulting companies would use to implement and do larger projects with their clients.
Nathan Latka 2:40
And what do you sell it for? What do they pay you per month on average to use the tech?
Peter Smith 2:43
So this is something that depends on the number of data sets or applications that data is pulled from and the number of people that are used. But it typically ranges in anywhere in between $2 to $5 per month per person. So it's a typical SaaS application that in the longer term, the value for the client comes out of the dashboards and the insights that they can derive from that.
Nathan Latka 3:07
Now, are people usually buying this directly or is it usually a company logo signing up for 100 seats or something like that?
Peter Smith 3:13
No. So we're still in an early stage. So we're looking at largely or larger organizations from this perspective. So we're looking for projects with 1,000 to 2,000 or more people. But we're talking to major banks, pharmaceutical companies that are all looking at 50,000 plus per year. So in the first phase, we'd be looking at typically a large building, which would have anywhere between 2,000 to 5,000 people. And when did you launch the company? What year? The company was launched about five years ago as a name. We went down a road first in terms of, since it was focused around measuring collaborative performance, we were looking at the HR space. The frustration back then was they weren't comfortable with data.
Peter Smith 4:00
They weren't comfortable with de-identifying. They didn't have the authority or the power to actually implement what needed to be done. So we then switched.

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