SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders 736: How Mobile Analytics Company Went $0 to $4 Million in 12 Months
Jul 30, 2017
19:44
Sunil Thomas. He's had a ton of experience working in tech companies and decided in 2013 to take the plunge himself and go all in with his 2 co-founders. They've since raised a total of $9.6 million – $1.6 million seed and $8 million in series A. They launched revenue in 2016, broke $1.5 million in total sales and this May 2017, broke $400,000 in MRR out of about $5 million ARR. He wants to double that by the end of the year, amounting to $800,000. They have a team of 45 based between California, New York and India—again, making it easier for mobile applications to understand what the heck users are doing in their apps.
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? – Play Bigger
- What CEO do you follow? – Satya Nadella of Microsoft
- Favorite online tool? — Slack
- How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7-8 hours
- If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – I wish I knew as much as my kids knew at 13, I had no clue what I was doing at 20
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 00:44 – Nathan introduces Sunil Thomas to the show
- 01:32 – Sunil Thomas is the co-founder and CEO of CleverTap
- 01:46 – CleverTap combines people-based analytics with user engagement, it can be used in your mobile app and website and you get to understand what they are doing
- 02:23 – It is like a combination of Mix Panel plus App Boy for mobile apps and websites
- 03:17 – The average customer pays them $2500 – $3000 a month based on event data
- 03:37 – The top cohorts pay $10,000 to $20,000 a month
- 04:21 – CleverTap is one of the few companies that has both Accel and Sequoia as their funders and they have raised a total of $9.6 million dollars with a seed of $1.6 million and $8 million in series A
- 05:18 – CleverTap started in 2013 and has 3 co-founders—Suyin has had various work experiences in the tech industry
- 05:56 – CleverTap came about because of the need to engage users
- 06:47 – Nathan says there are only a limited number of apps a person engages with on a daily basis
- 07:02 – Sunil says their business is targeted on the companies and not the consumers
- 07:28 – There are more than 10,000 apps that go into the app stores every day
- 07:53 – The pricing starts at $1000 a month
- 08:23 – An average monthly active user does 15 to 20 events in your app
- 08:54 – They currently have 200 paying customers and 2000 apps that are sending them live data
- 09:13 – A plan of the company is to cover 10 million events a month for their free plan in 3 years
- 09:31 – The conversion rate is 30% for those who are using the free plan to a paid plan
- 09:44 – Nathan computes the revenue is at least $400,000 a month
- 10:05 – In terms of competition, there are three sets of apps: apps that get app data for sales, attribution provider apps and the one about user engagement and app analytics where CleverTap is
- 11:19 – Their growth churn is very low with everyone on the less than 1,000 plan who are still sticking around
- 11:51 – The company started to monetize just a year ago and has a 400,000 growth rate
- 12:15 – They have 45 people globally – 11 are in the US and 32 are in India with the core engineering team in India
- 13:10 – To acquire new customers, they have marketing qualified leads from websites and they hit bigger accounts on the outbound, focusing on direct sales rather than marketing and advertising
- 14:41 – The biggest expense is in the hosting
- 15:18 – It was hard during the early days, but it has now come to a point where they are benefitting
- 15:55 – In 2016, they broke $1.5 million in revenue and are targeting to get to $10 million by the end of the year
- 17:04 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
- Look for a need and fill the gap in today's current technology.
- Know your target market well!
- You may start slowly at first, but it will pay off in the end.
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
- 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