SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Supermetrics $40m Raise Included Secondary at $200m+ Valuation
30 Oct 2020
Chapter 1: What is the current revenue and growth status of Supermetrics?
Well in ARR we are now at 27 million euros and in turnover I think we'll get to 24 million maybe.
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We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
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He's the Supermetrics founder and CEO. Mikael, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes. So you come back on last year in 2019, and I'm just falling in love. I'm going, oh, he starts in 2010. He bootstraps. He has a great mousetrap with Google Sheets. He's passed $12 million in revenue. This is great. And then I get news this year, he'll raise us $40 million. What changed?
Where was the breaking point where I said, you know what? I should go down the VC route for this thing. Let's go raise capital.
Well, our numbers have been pretty awesome lately, as you know, and there was a lot of inbound interest from VCs, top names from all over the world. So I just figured it's probably a good time to raise some money. Um, so that's, that was the kind of reason why I started thinking about that. And, and to be honest, part of that was secondary. So I also sold some shares. So it's, it's a company.
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Chapter 2: Why did Supermetrics decide to raise $40 million in funding?
But still, I was having my hands quite busy. So I figured maybe it's a good time to start hiring. And of course, the revenue had come to the point where I could do that quite safely. Of course, here in Finland, when you hire a person, you're kind of tied to that person. It's not very easy to get rid of the person. So I also wanted to be sure that I had enough buffer there.
Even if things don't go that well, I can... Keep paying that person's salary.
Yep. That's, that's how it makes a lot of sense. Now, did you go from 300 grand in 2015? Did you break a million dollars in 2016? Um, I, or do you remember what year you broke a million? I can check. Let me see. He's got his dashboard. He's cranking up the dashboards, folks. We can hear the server fans running.
So the total turnover was 1.6 million in 2016. And I think 2015, it was like maybe 600K.
Since you have the chart open, what was it before 2015 and 2014?
Well, this one only shows the last four years.
Okay, what was 2017 then?
The official figure is 2.2 million, but there we did some adjustment in bookkeeping methodology. So it was really more like 3 million.
And what do you think you'll finish here with in 2020?
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Chapter 3: What does secondary funding mean for Supermetrics and its founders?
set up a marketing data warehouse with our system. It's very easy to get all of your marketing data into a data warehouse like Snowflake or Google BigQuery, and then you can run all of your reporting on top of that data warehouse.
And so Mikael, how many customers are paying you today?
we have in total around 15,000 customers, but then half of these are marketing agencies. And if we look at the end clients behind these agencies, then we are approaching a million companies using our tools.
Yep. Yep. And can you, just so we can understand growth, if you think you'll break this year with about 27 million in terms of euros, in terms of run rate, where were you at in terms of run rate exactly a year ago?
I'll have to check that number for you. Sure, sure. Yeah, take your time. So at the end of last year, we were at 17.9 million.
Okay, so about 21 million United States dollars. So you basically, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, you went from essentially a $2.5 million run rate in 2017 to 10x-ing that to about a $27 million run rate in 2019. Is that accurate? can you repeat that? Sorry. Sure. Yeah. You know, you went from about 3 million in terms of run rate in 2017, right.
Or call it 20, sorry, 2.5 million run rate in 2017 to 10 X in that in 2019, when you broke about 25 million United States dollars in terms of run rate. Is that accurate?
Yeah. That was something like that. Yes.
Yeah. I mean, can you try and decode that for us? It can't all just be sort of accidental, an App Store placement in the Google Data Studio App Exchange. This was intentional. You're an engineer. You plan this sort of thing. Yeah, I'm actually not an engineer, but... You're not an engineer? No, no, I'm not, no. Who coded the first version? Me.
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Chapter 4: How did Supermetrics evolve from an Excel add-on to a major player in data analytics?
I think a lot of things. So... Obviously, we've been very successful with our marketing efforts. I think they're very well known. We do a lot of content that is producing a lot of inbound leads for us all the time. We have a very successful affiliate program.
Tell me about the affiliate program. How does it work? What commission do you pay out?
The details, I'm not the best person to go into all of those. I think it's 20% for most affiliates, and then they have some tiers on the best performing ones.
And those include all the marketing agencies that are signed up for you. You pay them an affiliate fee.
Yeah, some of those, yes.
Yeah, yeah. And is that 20% paid in perpetuity as long as the customer keeps paying, or is it only for the first year?
It used to be in perpetuity, but I think there's now a limit. I don't remember exactly how long that limit is. I think it's more than a year.
Talk to me about your content strategy right now. Do you run this internally or have you hired an agency to do it for you?
We do it internally. So we have a really good team to handle that. Of course, we do use outside writers to produce content, but we coordinate all of that internally. influencers in the field who write content for us.
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Chapter 5: What were the significant turning points in Supermetrics' growth journey?
as you look again to continue scaling into this cohort, serving again, a big chunk of marketing agencies, 15,000 customers total. Mikel, thank you for taking us to the top. Thanks.