SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Supermetrics Does $4.3m in March, $51.7m Run Rate Helping Marketers Get All The Data They Need
01 Apr 2022
Chapter 1: What is Supermetrics and how does it help marketers?
What is the average customer paying today in terms of ARPU or ACV? So the ACV would be 2.7K. Oh, you knew that right off the top of your head. The easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Mikkel Thunberg.
He is the founder of a company called Supermetrics, which gives marketers easy access to the data they need. Mikkel, are you ready to take us to the top? I was so impressed when we spoke in October in 2020, because you said, Nathan, we start off as this little extension. And then Google said, please, please build an app for our partnership store, our marketplace. And you resisted.
And then you said, yes. And revenue sort of took off. You had broken, I think, about $35 million in 2020 in AR. But I'd love, before we get into the metrics, to talk about product. So what are you guys today? And where are you thinking about Supermetrics two, three years from now in terms of product?
Yes, so we want to give all the marketers access to all the data that they need to be able to do their jobs well. And that's hands-on marketers, hands-on analysts who need to analyze all of their marketing data. Marketing data is really split up in very many different places, many different systems. So you use a lot of different advertising networks, CRMs.
marketing automation tools, all kinds of different marketing technology, very difficult to get the big picture. So we bring all of that data together for you. And what makes us special is that we don't have our own reporting UI, but we let you use whatever tool you already have in your organization.
So we can bring the data for you into an Excel file or into Google Sheets or Google Data Studio, Power BI, Tableau, whatever you want as the destination. So we kind of support all of these destinations for the data. And recently, we've also added a data warehousing product. So you can also set up a marketing data warehouse very easily with Supermetrics.
Now, when we look at... Well, actually, just take us back. When did you launch your first app in the Google Workspace Marketplace? Do you remember the year? That was 2014. And that was at launch, right? That's when they launched the Marketplace. And so now I'm looking here, you've got 757,000 downloads through this marketplace. You're updating it constantly.
I can see that the last update was actually like today because they tag it in the extension. So I assume, is this still your most powerful distribution channel in terms of where you're getting the most new signups from? Yeah, we get a lot of signups from there. A couple of hundred every day. Same with the Google Data Studio Marketplace. So that's also a really good source for leads for us.
So those would definitely be the top two. Now, you've done all this, branching into your team a little bit.
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Chapter 2: What was the growth journey of Supermetrics from extension to app?
What year did you hire your first sales rep with the quota? That was 2018. And what was revenue around that time? Let me check. Because that was, while you're looking that up, I mean, that was right in the range. Because you told me this last time, you broke about $2.2 million in revenue in 2017.
And that was seven years, basically, because you launched in 2010, where you're below $2.2 million in revenue. But then you exploded after that up to $21, $22 million in 2019. So I'm curious how much of that was because of the partnerships with Google? Or did you start to really hire a sales organization that helped drive a bunch of that growth? I don't have actually the monthly numbers here.
I should probably look them up for me to talk about that level of detail. But for sure, we both did that. So when we launched the Google Seeds add-on in 2014, we started monetizing it in 2015. That really took off. Then we launched the Google Data Studio product in 2017, and that was another immediate success, even more like a rapid trajectory then.
Then 2018, we were on a really good growth path and we started building the sales org. And of course that accelerated it further, but we were already doing pretty well with the product-led growth. So flesh out the full team for me today. How many folks are full-time? Around 260. 260. Okay. And how many are engineers? That would be around 70. 70. Wow. Okay.
And then I guess looping back to the sales conversation, how many sales reps do you have that carry a quota? That's our own seven days long. Interesting. So that team's almost doubled since the last time we spoke. So tell me about how you're doing that. That's 40 sales hires with a quota in the past 24 months.
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Chapter 3: How does Supermetrics integrate with existing marketing tools?
Did you get it right the first time in terms of the on-target earnings to quota ratio? Yeah, I think we've done pretty well. The first salesperson I hired was an experienced sales leader from Meltwater, actually. And he, of course, has a ton of experience and has been building sales org with Supermetrics. You said from Meltwater? Yeah. And who was that? Martin Ilman.
So if people are looking to hire their own version of Martin, what was his title at Meltwater? Was he the head of sales or was he a junior guy at Meltwater that he wanted to leave and join you to be the guy at Supermetrics? No, he was the head of Meltwater in Finland. And then he was head of a product area for Meltwater in the Nordics. And for a while, he was also...
In some role in the San Francisco Office of Meltwater, I can't remember exactly what. Okay. So 70 quota carrying reps, do they all have, when they're all ramped up, do they all have the same annual quota? Not exactly. I think we do have some, like we have the basic kind of inbound rep quota, and then we have outbound reps who are on a different quota. Which one's higher?
I should check that with Martin. I can't remember. Okay. And the outbound reps are also on a quarterly cycle versus the inbound reps are on a monthly cycle. And then we just hired our strategic accounts director. So, a more senior salesperson who has been doing higher value deals for Bloomberg and will be driving the higher ACV deals with us as well.
Because the vast majority of our deals are still rather low, like 10k, 15k deals. So I think there's a lot of potential in getting more of these 50k to 100k deals as well. So we hope that this person can accelerate that. Don't obviously tell me the customer name, but your largest customer today, what's their contract value? Have you broken anyone that pays you more than a million per year?
No, no, nothing close to that. I got it. Okay. Do you have any more than 100,000 per year? No, we are very close. So we have some like 85K ARR and I think we are in negotiation with some that would be over 100K. So what clues are you learning from your big accounts already in terms of what you might be able to upsell very effectively to the base that's currently paying you lower ACVs?
Is it number of seats? Is it product upsells? What's the lever you think? Yeah, so partly it's expanding their usage of the core products, as we call them. So if they use Google Seeds, selling more seeds on that. If it's Data Studio, selling more seeds or more data source connectors, that's also a pricing factor for us.
But where we see a lot of good traction is going to the customers who use Google Seeds or Data Studio really heavily and then saying,
we also have a data warehousing offering so as your data amounts are very large you would get a lot of value if you add a data warehouse to your your kind of marketing data stack and and there we see see a lot of uh good upsell and of course these clients they they often then end up having a data warehouse but they also keep the data data studio or google sheets products so we we can support the kind of full full range there so you
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Chapter 4: What role do partnerships with Google play in Supermetrics' success?
Yeah. Okay. And then, I mean, can we take, uh, Michael, can we take 3,200 USD times 18,000 customers? It puts you guys right around 58 million in ARR right now. In the USD terms, I don't have actually a number, but it's around 46.5 in euros. In euros. Okay, fair enough. So depending on the conversion rates each morning, it changes a little bit, but 46.5 million euros, which is great.
Now, what is that in terms of growth rate over the past 12 months? So we are seeing still rapid growth. So we are at around 50% year-on-year. 50? 50, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, I remember last time I interviewed you, you were excited because you got your deal done. I think it was $40 million on 400.
You shared some of that was secondary, but you were also kind of bummed because you felt like you took a bit of a hit on valuation because of COVID. We're now 19 months after that round. So are you about to announce a new fundraising, a new secondary to create some liquidity for early employees? Well, of course, there's a lot of interest towards us.
And these concerns are ongoing, latest today, just before this call, actually. So let's see. But of course, you know the market situation. The multiples have gone down. Maybe it's not the best time to do anything. So let's see if we get to where we want. It's possible. On the other hand, we are in no hurry to do anything. So if we don't get a good number, we can just wait.
That's what I was going to ask you. So from a unit economic and P&L and balance sheet perspective, can you afford to be very patient? Are you guys profitable today? Yes, we've been profitable throughout the company history and never used one euro of investor money in this company. Wow. That's very impressive. Okay.
So I guess you don't have a valuation because you haven't raised since we last spoke, but what would you value the company at today? I can't tell you because that will affect any discussions we may be having. But the last valuation, I think, was pretty low considering we did the valuation at the worst possible time when COVID started. And of course, we've grown a lot.
The multiples have increased. And just to be clear, that was 40 on 400, right? So in Euro terms, the valuation was 250.
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Chapter 5: How has the sales team evolved at Supermetrics?
In Euro. Okay. Got it. But a big chunk of that was secondary, you said, right? Most of that. Most of it was secondary. Yeah. And I would agree with you, by the way. So I think you guys traded at something like an 8 to 12x on that last round. When I'm seeing companies that don't have anywhere near your performance, that even have a little lower revenue trading at like 30, 40x here in the States.
So it's just not fair. Or maybe it's just a timing thing. Who knows? But meanwhile, the competitors have been racing rounds with much worse numbers than we have at pretty good multiples. Who would you put in that bucket? Who would you say are your top three competitors? So who we meet most often would be Funnel, a Swedish one, Adverity, Austrian. Adverity? Yeah. Okay. And 5Tran, a US company.
some extent competitive as well we don't meet them that frequently but still so when are we going to hear about you raising a large round and just buying out funnel.io and bringing the two companies together I'm not sure if we would want to buy them. Interesting. Okay. Shots fired. You heard it. No, no. But, you know, they're looking at acquisition targets, but they're not on the list.
Do you have you guys acquired any other companies? Is that part of your playbook moving forward? Do you have any acquisitions on the table? So we've done a couple of very, very small acquisitions. So one-man business is nothing major yet. We are looking at options. Of course, we have the balance sheet. We could do something, but we need to see a good fit. Yeah. And so what would be a good fit?
How are you thinking about M&A? So what we are mostly thinking there is we have a huge client base, a lot of very big companies. big agencies. So what could be a product that we could upsell to these clients that we already have? Yeah, and I mean, for context, right, if you this is gonna be a very small number, right.
But if you buy a company that you feel like your 18,000 install base, you can convert 50% of them right to a new $1,000 a month plan. That's that's 9 million a month in new revenue. So I mean, it's significant if you can if you can do it, you know, Yep. Very compelling. Okay. Well, as we wrap up here, any product stuff you want to chat about in terms of where you're going?
We know about the data warehouse. What's next on the roadmap? So we are also looking at expansion beyond the marketing data. So that's quite interesting. We've developed some new technology so we can expand the data source integration side very fast so we can do more experimentation on different types of data sources. So we have... all kinds of interesting data sources coming out.
For instance, we just released a Slack connector just to see like MVP to Fed Slack data and then we see if there's traction or not. And maybe there's not, but we'll do a lot of these and then see where we can get traction and then invest more. And it sounds like customers are loving it. They're sticking. What's net dollar retention today? So across the whole business, it's around a hundred. Okay.
Around a hundred. So that's actually about, you told me last time you had about 12% churn, but 13% expansions, about a hundred percent net dollar retention. That hasn't changed much. No. Yeah. Okay. And is CAC still about 400 bucks or are you willing to spend more to get a customer today? So we are investing more. Okay. We hired a CMO a year ago and definitely we are investing for sure.
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