SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders 746: Bill Gates Was Great to Work With, But This Founder Wanted His Own Thing
Aug 9, 2017
17:56
Hal Howard, 20-year Microsoft veteran who gave up a stable, secure position leading the Dynamics ERP development team to satiate a spark of creativity. Today, he's the founder of Komiko, a sales intelligence tool that helps their businesses understand what engagement with customers is working.
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? – Execution
- What CEO do you follow? – Satya Nadella
- Favorite online tool? — Vinfolio
- How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
- If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Don't worry man. Everything's going to work out just fine"
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 01:45 – Komiko is a sales intelligence tool that helps their businesses understand what engagement with customers is working
- 02:12 – Komiko is integrated with different sources
- 02:20 – A cloud-based subscription-based model
- 02:37 – Hal was at Microsoft for 20 years
- 02:59 – left Microsoft because he wanted to build something new
- 03:16 – "There are still unexplored technologies around business applications"
- 03:54 – Customer pays an average of $30-35 a month per user
- 04:00 – Team size ranges from 3 to 500
- 04:11 – There are currently 2000 paying seats across 50 businesses in total
- 04:33 – Average MRR is $60K
- 05:19 – Team size is 10
- 05:37 – 8 are engineers
- 05:48 – Hal and his co-founder are doing both sales and product engineering
- 06:00 – Hal is more on the design
- 06:30 – Komiko is now a complimentary CRM
- 06:38 – Partnered with Salesforce and most of their customers are using Salesforce
- 07:19 – CRM is in a different decision set compared to Komiko
- 07:40 – Komiko works with corporate clients to help them understand what engagement works and what doesn't
- 07:59 – "We don't lose customers"
- 08:05 – In Komiko's lifetime, they've only lost 4 customers so far, 1 was acquired
- 08:28 – CAC is mostly inbound and Komiko was listed in AppExchange
- 08:44 – Hal and his co-founder alone were able to drive a lot of customers, mostly from referrals and the businesses they've worked with before
- 08:51 – Just started an outbound campaign in early 2017
- 08:59 – Has a partnership with GameSite
- 09:20 – GameSite's focus is how customers engage with the product
- 09:35 – GameSite is building a platform for customer success and Komiko's metric will help the overall customer solution
- 09:48 – Komiko raised some capital
- 10:03 – Total fund raised is around $2M
- 10:23 – Initial round was convertible note and then the seed round is priced round
- 10:37 – 2017 revenue target is at least a million dollars
- 11:04 – 2016 revenue is $15K
- 11:23 – Gross margin is around 75%
- 12:09 – Hal won't easily sell Komiko, but he might consider for at least $25M
- 14:43 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
- Nurture the network that you have, it will always help you in some way down the road.
- You have the option leave your comfort zone, you can explore and create something new.
- It's possible to not lose customer IF you consistently help the customers see value in your product.
Resources Mentioned:
- The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
- GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
- Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
- Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
- Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
- Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
- Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives