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

736: How Mobile Analytics Company Went $0 to $4 Million in 12 Months

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders