SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Daisy intelligence on track for $10m in 2021
21 Nov 2020
Chapter 1: What is Daisy Intelligence and its financial performance?
Now, last month, recurring revenue was 500K a month. It was a slight decline with a few losses. Customers that went out of business, like a couple of customers, really struggled.
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My guest today is Gary Saranrota. He's the former head of IBM Canada's data mining and data warehousing practices and is passionate about AI and its ability to transform how retailers grow their businesses and establish an edge in an increasingly challenging and competitive environment.
Under Gary's leadership, Daisy Intel, it's daisyintelligence.com has established a track record for delivering verifiable financial outcomes for a rapidly growing list of global clients. Gary, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. So obvious question when we talk about anything retail is, is COVID good or bad for you?
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Chapter 2: How has COVID-19 affected Daisy Intelligence's sales?
We trimmed a few sales reps. We trimmed that because we changed. We also took this time to retrench like a six month pause. We kind of, you know, updated our sales process and our sales team and changing the way we go to market a little bit. So, so there's some changes in that. So there's a couple of direct sales positions that we eliminated, getting different kinds of people involved in sales.
So more of the senior leadership team being involved in sales and trimmed a few client positions.
client people and a few kind of uh general and administrative staff really you know kind of you know trimmed the excess really but didn't didn't uh take away any staff that's directly contributing to customers sat or bringing new sales i think that was the so how many quota carrying reps do you still have today then so today we have i'd say we have like uh
you know, three quota carrying reps, but the process now, but we've added with the leadership team being more involved in sales, I'd say before our sales team was about eight in total. Now it's like 11 in total with a different mix of skills, right? So I think we sell enterprise software. The realization was that we're selling a partnership wrapped around a product, not just a product.
And so getting the people who deliver to our customers more involved in selling, that's been the big change. And so that mix of quota-carrying rep versus subject matter expert. That's where we really brought in more subject matter experts and gave them a role to participate in sales more.
So let's dive into the product here because what you're doing is interesting. Now, from what I understand, your theory of retail product, which is for retail solution, you're actually managing and looking at transaction data and sorting it in a way that these retailers can use AI to make better sort of product and urgent decisions. Do you consider yourself sort of a fintech platform?
I mean, are you like second measure? You're reading statement descriptors?
Yeah, I mean, we deliver, the goal is net income growth. I mean, we do have an insurance fraud solution, which is more traditional fintech. So in the same way that we help retailers make smarter merchandising decisions, we help insurance companies with fraud detection and underwriting and claims automation.
So our system, it says, what are the best operating decisions you could make to grow net income? That's really the deliverable. And although retail and insurance sound wildly different at the core, it's If I make this decision, what's going to happen? And these are the core decisions in retail. Merchandise planning is the core, kind of weekly promotions, prices, inventory allocations.
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Daisy Intelligence use to raise additional funding?
So that's, that's a number we cover the total, you know, the total, the business plan by, you know, double, right, figuring that the average versus the dollar, though, Gary, I mean, what's the dollar? So it's a million dollar a year quota, two million, like a million and a half quota for that. And then the team leaders got a team quota, you know, that goes above that, right.
So the plan next year is to, you know, grow revenue by more than 5 million in ARR, right? So right we're going to grow it from you know six to twelve right uh you can also You know, we have like three quota carrying reps who and then our leadership team is like they're comped on the total company. It's not like they're carrying a sales.
So you don't have 11 quota carrying reps.
You have three quota carrying reps. And the leadership guys who are the four of us who get involved or there's like six of us who get involved there where we're more comped on the total company profitability, you know, are from our shareholders. Right. Yeah. It's a different comp.
you're still burning out to invest in growth right how much are you burning per month absolutely yeah we're burning today you know we're both 300k a month you know so we dialed it back from the 500 yeah five million we raised that gives us like and we have some debt financing you know from expresso capital and we have a commercial bank oh tell me about that how did that work i mean we have we've had an espresso capital facility for several years so we've got a five million dollar facility that's shared between a commercial bank and espresso capital so the sum of the two is
$5 million based on multiples of MRR. And so we have access to another $3.5 million in that facility on top of the $5 we have as long as we keep growing. So that gives us enough runway to burn on average $300K for the next 18 months.
How much is in the bank right now, though?
Oh, we just did the $5 million. So we're pretty close to the $5 million.
So you actually pulled the full $5 million. That's $5 million in your bank equity.
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