SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Looking Back: Listen to Founder 3 Years Before Exiting for $450 Million
26 Mar 2021
Chapter 1: What is the current scale of Brandwatch in terms of customers and revenue?
So what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you?
Just under 1,500, 1,500. You know, this year we'll do more than $60 million in revenue and there's 420 staff in the business, so...
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We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
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My guest today is Giles Palmer. He's the founder and CEO of a company called Brandwatch, a leading social intelligence company. Formerly of BSkyB, Giles started Brandwatch and since its launch in August 27, it has grown to become one of the world's leading social media analytics and listening companies. Giles, are you ready to take us to the top?
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Chapter 2: How did Brandwatch's founder decide against selling the company in 2012?
We didn't start it to just sell it. We started to build a company and we didn't feel like our job had changed. It even been half done at that point. I mean, and actually, if you look at those acquisitions, none of them really have gone on to meet to be meaningful.
I mean, wildfires shut down. Who even knows where buddy media is and that, you know, I mean, in Salesforce, right? Who knows? Vitru, who knows where they are involved or where are they? I mean, mostly they got shut down.
Yeah. And that would indicate to me that they were bought prematurely. They weren't mature businesses. They hadn't figured out why they existed and what they were trying to solve for. And I don't think we totally had at that point either. So if we'd sold it, it would have been a kind of, oh, look, somebody's come along with a big amount of money.
And actually, one of the reasons why we're still around and we're doing pretty well is because there's an honesty in what we're trying to do. We're not trying to build and sell. We're trying to build a great company.
company and and i don't think that we were ready to to sell it at that point so what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you uh just under 1500 1500 um you know this year we'll do more than 60 million dollars in revenue and there's 420 staff in the business so and it's profitable so we've got it to a good a good spot are you so where's growth at so you said you're gonna you will over the past 12 months you did 60 million ar that's what you will do
uh last year's record recognized revenue is around 50 so this year we it'll be above you know well above 60 okay and take take me just so we can get a growth rate take me back 13 months ago december 2016 what was your run right then i can't remember but last last year we we you know we grew it healthily it wasn't 40 50 but it it wasn't like it was like 30 percent ish right
It's around there, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so if you ended the year at a 50 million, or you're going to do, or you're on a 60 million run rate today, right? You were somewhere, call it, in the 48, 49 million run rate December 16.
Something like that.
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Chapter 3: What is the revenue model and pricing structure of Brandwatch?
Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. How much have you raised? We've raised 50 million bucks. Five zero?
Yeah.
Yeah, not all of that's gone into the company, but the majority of it has.
How much of it went to secondary versus operating?
I mean, four fifths of it went to operating.
Oh, good. Oh, okay. That's healthy.
Yeah. I mean, the reason why we're not totally bootstrapped isn't because we've scaled sales and all that kind of stuff and been super aggressive. It's because we had to build the back end way ahead of actually being able to monetize it. And that's an expensive exercise. That's hardware, software, and data. So, you know, it's a big... We've got something...
like a thousand servers that sit behind the live application. I mean, we could put it on the cloud. It doesn't, you know, either way it's going to, it's an expensive machine to run because it's a massive data processing storage, um, game that we're in.
It's a nice moat for you now, now that you're at scale, it's hard to compete.
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