EP 506: Klipfolio $7.9M Raised, 7000 Customers for Smarter Business Dashboards with CEO Allan Wille

Allan Wille, co-founder and CEO of Klipfolio – a SaaS dashboard company headquartered in Ottawa. He's focused on making it easier and faster for SMBs (small to medium businesses) to monitor the health and performance of their businesses and they're taking an interesting approach. It is self-served, in the cloud, right to business users, eliminating them the need to work with IT procurement or make huge upfront investments. He has over 59,000 customers including Jet.com, Zendesk and Lifelock just to name a few. They also have the funding to back them.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Good to Great
• What CEO do you follow? – N/A

• Favorite online tool? — Mixpad
• Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "I should have spent more time understanding people"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:31 – Nathan introduces to the show
• 02:15 – Klipfolio is focused on SMBs or businesses that really want to grow
• • 02:36 – There's a lot of difficult data a SMB just doesn't monitor
  • 03:09 – Klipfolio helps SMBs monitor their business to make the best decisions
• 03:28 – Klipfolio is 100% SaaS and a subscription based business
• 03:35 – Average customer pays per month $70-80
• 03:57 – Klipfolio does not have outbound sales people
• 04:34 – Klipfolio is serving 7,000 customers for November 2016
• 04:57 – Average MRR
• 05:07 – Customers can start Klipfolio with payments as low as $24 a month
• 05:40 – Klipfolio was launched in 2001
• • 05:56 – The cloud version was launched in 2012
  • 06:03 – "We're always into monitoring real-time data"
• 06:30 – Klipfolio started out bootstrapped
• 07:06 – By the end of 2012, Klipfolio had 350 customers
• • 07:12 – In the end of 2013, Klipfolio had 1,100 customers
• 07:54 – Klipfolio had their first seed round at the end of 2014
• • 08:02 – Klipfolio did their Series A at the beginning of 2015 with a $6.2M
• 08:55 – Klipfolio is continuously raising capital
• 09:05 – Team size is 70
• 10:03 – Klipfolio is currently on Series B
• 10:55 – Allan thinks that they are in a good space
• • 11:16 – SMB is a good field market for Klipfolio
• 11:50 – Allan shares why he thinks Dasheroo didn't do well in the dashboard space
• 13:30 – Allan shares his thoughts on their competitors
• 14:10 – Gross monthly customer churn
• 15:45 – CAC
• 16:00 – Lifetime value
• 16:46 – Klipfolio does webinars to educate their customers on their data
• 17:30 – 2016 revenue goal
• 18:22 – Connect with Allan through Twitter and his blog
• 20:30 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• Focus on the needs of your customer in running their business AND be a part of their growth.
• It's important for businesses to have an editor or someone who can handle things that need to be customized.
• Spend more time understanding people, especially how they work in a team.

Resources Mentioned:

• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Drip – Nathan uses Drip's email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel
• Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn't have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal.
• 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 to listen to audio books
• 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
• @Awille – Allan's Twitter handle
• Klipfolio.com/Blog – Allan's blog site
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives