SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 597: Nova.ai Passes 100 Customers, $2.2M Raised To Help SDR's Sell More Using AI with CEO Will Dinkel
13 Mar 2017
Chapter 1: What is Nova.ai and how does it help sales teams?
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.
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Chapter 2: How does Nova.ai generate revenue and what is its pricing model?
The answer is, guys, you have to use smart tools. I use a tool called Acuity Scheduling at NathanLatka.com forward slash schedule. I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode. Nathan Latke here. This is episode 597, and coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Oliver.
His company's called FizzUp, and they've raised $3.7 million helping 2,500 retail locations track in-store visits from advertising. They've got a team of 25 people and are growing fast. The question remains, though, how are they tracking between digital phones and computers, and if that person actually walks into a retail location? Well, it's genius. Tune in to find out. Good morning, everybody.
Nathan Latke here. Our guest today is Will Dinkel, and he is the CEO and co-founder of Nova. Prior to founding Nova, Will developed his passion for enterprise sales while working in various technology and sales roles at Cloudflare, Flare, and HP. Will studied engineering and business at Cal Poly and Harvard Business School.
Chapter 3: What inspired the founding of Nova and its journey since 2015?
Will, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Very cool. So tell us first, what is Nova.ai and how do you generate revenue? Yeah, so Nova AI is a sales product that uses AI to help SDRs and AEs set appointments more effectively.
So today, a lot of sales orgs, they're either doing a lot of kind of high volume spamming or they're doing a lot of hand personalization and research. What Nova does is it helps sales reps have highly personalized one-to-one individual messages that they can create in just, you know, 10, 20, 30 seconds rather than 30 minutes using AI technology.
And are you also helping with getting the lead in the first place? We don't do that. We don't get leads. What we do is we just help people convert it about a four to five times higher rate than they are without our product. So I'm going to try and dumb this down real quick. I think you're probably way more powerful than this.
But people listening, you can think of this like hyper-personalized mail merge.
Chapter 4: What is the current customer base and growth status of Nova?
Is that accurate? Yeah, you can use it in a one-off context, a mail merge context, an inbound context, but exactly. It's just kind of hyperpowering your ability to send emails, sales emails. All right, Will, and we're all capitalists. What about the money? How do you make revenue? So it's a SaaS product. You're a Harvard guy. You really like money, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, it definitely keeps the lights on. SaaS product, you know, pretty standard. You pay by the seat kind of thing. And on average, what is it per seat? So, I mean, it comes in about, you know, similar to competitive products.
Chapter 5: How does Nova.ai differentiate itself from competitors?
I mean, it depends on the deal size. You know, what we do is very unique, but the types of products we go up against are pretty well known. You know, so we go up against dumb workflow products. We call ourselves a smart workflow product, an intelligent sales product.
i think you know today where the market is there's a lot of products that are just built around mail merge like um you know built around phone calling so things like inside sales you know um things like yes where like that's what the lay salesperson today is using so which is great for us because you know it we love being compared to those products and what is the so so just give us an average because i don't want to go into every single different type of customer but on average what's uh what's the seat what are people paying you per seat
Yeah. So list price is 150. Um, and, uh, but you know, depending on the deal size, you know, you know, the standard stuff for, for enterprise SAS, uh, you end up with a blended price point, but that's the starting point. Great. And then let's go back. Let's capture more of this story. So you were at CloudFlare NHP. What year did you leave and start, uh, start the business?
Yes, we started Nova in Q1 of 2015. So we've been around almost two years now.
Chapter 6: What strategies are in place for customer acquisition and marketing?
And really the inspiration came when I was running the enterprise sales team at CloudFlare. So we used to do a lot of this personalization manually. And we saw, number one, how effective it was. But number two, how incredibly hard it was to scale, to measure, to track, to institute across a team of more than a couple people.
so what we said is hey well you know there's got to be a better way to do this um can we do it with software and and that's really what what led us down this road um my co-founder he's somebody who whom i'd known from undergrad uh he was going to mit when i was at hbs uh thankfully got him to take the plunge with me and uh it's been off to the races since this is brian exactly yeah brian puddle very cool and what's your team size today
Yeah, so we just crossed 10 employees. So we're a seed stage startup, you know, pretty small team, but grown pretty quickly. All in San Francisco? A couple remote, but eight of the 10 are in San Francisco. So you're not paying everyone $300,000 salaries then, right? No, $400,000. $400,000, oh my God, it's crazy. It is crazy. That doesn't even cover rent. San Francisco's like a different world.
Chapter 7: What challenges has Nova faced regarding customer churn?
You know, I go there and I'm like, this is just crazy. I feel like I'm in a game or something. Yeah, it's bizarre. I mean, lately, you know, I grew up in L.A. and I go down to L.A. and I'll be down in Santa Monica and I'll look at the menu at a restaurant and be like, oh, my God, this is so cheap. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. OK, so 10 people, mostly in San Francisco. You said your seed stage.
How much total capital have you raised to date? Uh, so we raised a few million. We haven't announced it yet. We're going to announce it in a few weeks though.
Chapter 8: What advice does the guest have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Hey, so, so we'll, everyone's going to hear this obviously, but this will go live the middle of March. Uh, so I'm happy to keep it off the record until then, but you're welcome to share it. It'll again, no one will hear until mid March. Oh yeah. So, uh, so we raised two and a quarter so far. Um, Salesforce ventures is one of the investors among a few others. So, uh, yeah, pretty exciting stuff.
So 2.2 you said? Uh, yeah, two and a quarter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And, uh, and, uh, was that a price round or was that an EC or a, uh, uh, convertible note? Oh, man. You know, in true YC fashion. Oh, our safes? Yeah, we do it all on safes. Yeah, that's great. I'm shocked. You know, there's a trend happening as I interview these CEOs.
These safes are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And investors are totally comfortable doing many, many millions of dollars all on a safe. Well, you know, it's an interesting it's a really interesting thing because a lot of my friends, you know, they'll they'll do like a one million seed round or even less maybe and have a price round and, you know, establish a board.
You know, we don't have a board. We we kind of just cobble it together from our advisors and people we pull in. But but it's an interesting question. You know, you see what's happening in the market, but it's definitely different. Yeah. From your perspective, why did you choose to do that? And instead of trying to nail down valuation now? You know, when we started, we did an angel round on notes.
And so it was kind of just keeping with the same tradition. And then, you know, going through YC, they taught us a lot. I mean, you know, they're pretty knowledgeable about a lot of things, and they pushed really hard for the safe. And much of our fundraise came on the heels of just finishing YC. So it just kind of naturally developed that way.
So fast forward, as you launched in 2015, you go through YC, you raised, you know, two and a quarter. How many kind of customers or logos are you serving to date? Yeah, so we just crossed 100 customers. Oh, great. So, yeah, so got some pretty good traction going, and we're really excited to expand quite a bit this upcoming year.
And a lot of people, I mean, this varies drastically depending on which enterprise B2B company you're talking to that uses number of seats as a lever to drive ARPU increases. On average, how many seats does one of these 100 companies have with you? Yeah. So that's been actually that's been what the whole I'd say last six months are about. You know, we're going through YC.
We're we're mopping up, but mostly in kind of an SMB context, you know, working with really small teams, you know, one, two, three, four salespeople, sometimes 10. But but generally, you know, smaller teams. And, you know, we went through a pretty deep process.
dev cycle just to kind of support teams to support the features that vps of sales need to scale our product and their orgs and now we're coming in we're looking at seat size deals of 15 20 on average right now for our new deals so um so we've been moving up market a bit very intentionally okay so i mean is it uh i'm gonna do back the napkin math if we do like you know 10 seats for your 100 logos is it fair to say you have somewhere around a thousand sales reps using you
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