SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Ep 483: Pipedrive Passes $10M ARR, Helping 30,000 Customers w/ CRM with CEO Timo Rein
19 Nov 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: What inspired Timo Rein to create Pipedrive?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 3: How did Pipedrive evolve from zero revenue to $10 million ARR?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 4: What is the current customer base and pricing structure of Pipedrive?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Ferron. He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it. For your chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter.
Chapter 5: How does Pipedrive manage customer churn and acquisition costs?
Guys, if you want an easy tool to use to book your meetings back to back, to batch your calls, to make sure people actually show up when they schedule, you want to use Acuity Scheduling. It's what I use for all my podcast interviews at NathanLatka.com forward slash schedule. I'll tell you more about how I use it later on in the episode.
Chapter 6: What funding has Pipedrive secured and how does it impact growth?
Nathan Lack here, and this is episode 483. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from crowdfunding CEO of StartEngine. His name is Ron Miller and Snapwire CEO Chad Newell.
Chapter 7: What is Timo Rein's vision for the future of Pipedrive?
StartEngine has raised over $7 million to help people raise more capital, companies specifically, and it's all totally legal, and unaccredited investors can invest as little as $500 to own equity in these companies. Top drive. Good morning. My name is Nathan Latka.
Chapter 8: What advice does Timo have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Our guest this morning is Timo Rehn. He is the CEO and co-founder of Pipedrive, a provider of sales CRM software that gives sales teams control over their selling processes. After spending 50 grand on a CRM, by the way, Timo, I want to know which one that was. We'll talk about it in a second. For his own business, that ended up being a total waste of money.
Timo brought together a few engineering friends to create a better CRM solution for his own needs. This was the genesis of Pipedrive. Pipedrive, which now has over 30,000 small business users worldwide and has raised over 13.4 million bucks in VC funding. Timo, are you ready to take us to the top? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Thank you, First Nathan, for having me here.
Yeah, we're going to have fun today. 50 grand on a CRM. What year was this and who'd you spend it on? I think it was 2002 or three. I'm not wrong. And it was, um, one of the biggest, uh, Microsoft, uh, with the, with the dynamics program, um, which at that time we thought was, was really, really good and functional.
I think it is, but it just turned out to be a big investment with not as much rich. Yeah. So you walk us through what, before we get into some economics, walk us through what pipe drive does and how you generate revenue. Yeah, what we do is we help small businesses around the world to control the complex sales process. And then we build a tool for that purpose.
And people usually find it online and they get up and running in a couple of minutes and they're off to the races. You've raised $13.4 million. I want to understand, first off, what year you found the business in. And then I have some questions about current status. Sure. We founded the business in 2010 in June, and the product went out in March 2011. And then what's current team size today?
I actually don't know the exact number, but it's slightly over 200. You know, Timo, that means you're growing. Whenever a CEO says, I don't know the exact number, that's a good sign. Usually, right? Let's say, well, there's one way of looking at it. Yeah. Good. That's good. So 200. And where are you guys based? So we have two offices, which are the biggest ones.
We have a talent office in Estonia, which is the bulk of the office. And then your New York office in Manhattan, which is a smaller office. Okay. So, so Estonia, Estonia and New York city, where is Estonia? As a country? Oh, sorry. The country. Sorry. I thought maybe it was a city in San Francisco or something. You're talking about actual Estonia, the country. Yeah. So it's in Eastern Europe.
It's very close to Scandinavian countries. I know where Estonia, the country is. I just, I wasn't sure. I thought you were referencing a very specific city somewhere. So no. Estonia. Okay. Got me mixed up. That's okay. And are you based in New York? I'm actually still based in California because our first ever U.S.
office was in California as we went through the angel plant incubator in San Francisco in 2011. And so we landed here, but then we moved our office to New York last year. Okay, got it. So let's fast forward. So your first year was 2010. This is always an embarrassing question, but what was your first year revenue? Do you remember?
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