Nick Candito. He is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the company called Progressly, championing the company’s mission towards becoming the new standard for how teams find and execute business processes. He previously served as Relate IQ’s head of user success and business operations which was acquired by Salesforce, the first automatic and intelligent CRM solution. Nick founded Progressly to address how large industries operate, innovate and share around core business processes.

Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Weiner, Satya Nadella, Dick Costolo, Jeff Bezos
Favorite online tool? — Hubspot tools for email, Pocket
How many hours of sleep do you get?— less than 8
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – be patient, ask more questions and optimize by being around the best people

Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:07 – Nathan introduces Nick to the show
01:49 – Nick thinks Salesforce will win the CRM space, as well as Microsoft and LinkedIn
02:25 – Nick is impressed by Base CRM and Social Capital
02:57 – Nick stumbled into tech as he was originally a finance major
03:15 – He started by joining a small software team building technology for the pharmaceutical industry and learned about the manual system of the tech industry
04:04 – Nick then joined Crimson Hexagon and he learned how to take a company to the next level using tools like Salesforce
04:38 – With RelateIQ, Nick learned how to create a sales system of engagement
05:18 – Nick thinks the best founding duo he has ever encountered is Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin
06:29 – Progressly is the operational system of records with a focus on the Fortune 1000 CROs or contract research organizations
07:24 – The company has a mobile first strategy (people who are working outside of office)
08:01 – Progressly works with a variety of companies; big companies that include Shell Oil and those in the mid-market segment
08:25 – The highest price is $49 per user, with the IT Group of Chevron they have 60,000 employees within the company
09:31 – The company was founded in 2014 and started to fundraise aggressively in 2015; they were able to raise $10 million in the seed, series A and after
10:22 – They had a very specific profile for their seed round and focused on a large institutional investor, a micro VC, and some high value angels—it played out the way they planned
11:17 – They are looking at getting a positive net churn and at how they can accelerate the growth of their accounts; for example, from site-wide deployment to regional deployment to enterprise deployment
13:28 – They are now in the hundreds in terms of customers; the energy and utilities sector has a high network effect
14:05 – Nathan just interviewed Geoff Moore who said the more specific or weirder the sector, the better
15:24 – The utility metric depends on what the user is running on operationally
16:03 – The active number of seats are in the thousands
16:46 – The first year revenue was pretty low because they did a paid pilot offering
17:10 – They were looking into the pilot to use case expansion
17:55 – They want to have a 100% growth, year over year
18:10 – It is easier to drive a high growth rate rather than have customers who can refer you to others
19:41 – Nick will celebrate when he gets to $5 million in ARR or accounting rate of return
20:40 – Currently, they are doing less than 300 grand per month
21:16 – Having an enterprise cycle in your business is slower upfront, but has the ability to experience significant growth in the long run
21:31 – They have 30 employees with some in product design and engineering
22:31 – The payback period is significantly lower than 12 months
24:38 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:
Target a specific group for your customer base to increase the chances of referrals.
An enterprise account may prove to be slow at first, but it will pay off in the long run.
Ask your customers to promote your business to other people.

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

767: With $10M Raised Will They Be Sytem of Record for Your COO?

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders