SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 591: Now Interact Closes $5M Round On $18M Pre Money Helping Enterprises With OmniChannel Data with CEO Magnus Astrom
07 Mar 2017
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. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 2: What is Now Interact and what problem does it solve?
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.
Folks, many of you reach out to me and you say, Nathan, so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching. But whenever I try and batch, you tell me this. You go, Nathan, they don't book back-to-back times. Or they don't show up after they book. It's frustrating. The answer is, guys, you have to use smart tools.
I use a tool called Acuity Scheduling at NathanLatke.com forward slash schedule. I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode. Nathan Latke here. This is episode 591. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Bugsy CEO. They've raised $1.2 million and launches pricing to help you know why your mobile app crashes, okay? Why your mobile app crashes.
It's kind of like Hotjar for mobile devices with the CEO, Alex Fishman. Good morning, guys. Nathan Latka here. Our guest this morning is Magnus Astrom. He's the founder and CEO of Now Interact, a machine learning SaaS platform for omnichannel optimization. He's also the founder of Inlead, a business consultant and sales operations company, which was sold in 2010.
And prior to that, he was founder of Primelog, a transportation management SaaS platform, which was sold in 2006. Magnus, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I'm ready. So you've been doing this whole SaaS thing for a while, huh?
Yeah, long before it called SaaS. The first company was then was ASP, Application Service Provider.
So what was take us back real quick before we get into now interact in 2006, Primelog, what did that platform do?
Yeah, we started that company 2000, right off the crash we had here in Sweden, I think we had an international crash as well. But we started that company 2000. And what we did was, you know, connecting transportation providers with transportation buyers. to help businesses to control their flow of goods in a better way.
And also the cost of transportation and divide cost per package, you know, get better control and visibility over the, over the logistics. So that was what we did. And we started with the big, you know, bigger companies like Ericsson, SKF, and those, those types of companies to get, get started.
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Chapter 3: How did Magnus Åström transition from Primelog to Now Interact?
2010. All right. And have you, have you kind of self-funded or have you raised capital?
So we, we, we raised, uh, about a hundred K in total. And now in the beginning, and then we built the first version of the first product and we, we took it to 190 K and monthly revenue, but that product was not scalable enough.
What day did you hit a hundred? Like how many years?
November, 2012. But the product that we had at that time was too simple. And we went international. We founded in Sweden. And when we started the UK and the Netherlands, we found that this product is not scalable enough. The competition is too hard. So we decided to do a Pivo. And, uh,
We did that 2014, we launched this product that we have right now, which is based on machine learning and it's channel agnostic and worked on top on other products. And now we have 19 customers on that product and we are on a MRR of 220K. And what is, so how much total have you raised? We have raised 7 million.
We just raised a series A round and we got the money on the count, you know, late November. That's total?
7K total, yes. Sorry, 7 million total? 7 million, yes. That includes money you raised including the previous round?
Yeah, so we did 2 million in total in a couple of seed rounds, and then now we did an A round with 5 million A round.
Got it.
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Chapter 4: What lessons did Magnus learn from selling Inlead?
I would say LinkedIn. Probably a boring answer, but for me, it's LinkedIn.
Number four, yes or no, do you get eight hours of sleep every night? Yes. And what's your situation? Married, single, do you have kids? I'm married, have four kids. Wow. And how old are you? I'm a bit more than 40. Okay. You got the kids working in the business yet?
No, the oldest is 15. She's been actually with me at the office and asked me, why do you try to get those customers? You should go for these customers instead. And half a year later, we took that decision in the board. So she's pretty clever.
Future CEO. So last question, Magnus, take us back 21 years. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?
I mean, it's all about focus. You have to focus. You have to be persistent. You have to, you know, When you're younger, you're a little bit more unfocused and you see a different option coming in and you spend too much time on distractions. So that's something I would have wanted to know at that time.
Top Tribe, there you have it from Magnus, the founder of Now Interact. It's all about focus and being persistent. Launched the company, founded the company back in 2010, pivoted after one or two years. years. Has a team of 20 today based between Stockholm, UK and the Netherlands.
Customer-wise, they've got 19 folks paying on average $10,000 per month, doing around $220,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Currently, they spend about $30,000 to get a new customer. Did about $3.5 million in 2016 revenue. Recently raised $5 million on a $13-ish million pre-money valuation. Again, focusing on investors that were in and as invested in the company as Magnus is.
Magnus, thank you for taking us to the top. Thanks. If you enjoyed Magnus today, go back and listen to Zach yesterday. He's the CEO of Particle.io, which has raised $14 million, past $5 million in revenue, and they're helping usher in the Internet of Things connectivity age. They're connecting coffee makers like Keurigs to the Internet, and they have four very interesting revenue streams.
Top Tribe, I love giving away free money. I feel like Oprah giving away cars, and I have something special for you today. How many of you have heard our super sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook and Google Ads? Well, all of you listening right now, yes, if you're listening, you get $100 in free AdWords. Here's how you get it, okay? Again, thanks for listening.
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