Mike Winn. He’s the CEO and founder of the company called DroneDeploy, the leading cloud-software platform for commercial drones and he’s on the mission to make the sky successful and productive for everybody. The company focuses on the agricultural and construction industries, but its large customers are from almost every industry across 130 countries. He has collected more than 8M acres of aerial imagery. Prior to joining Deploy, Mike worked at Google and was a RC helicopters hobbyist.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Effective Executive
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Gmail
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “You can pretty much do whatever you set your mind to”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:26 – Nathan introduces Mike to the show
02:20 – DroneDeploy has raised $31M from VCs
- 02:26 – DroneDeploy had 3 rounds and the last one was in July 2016
03:00 – DroneDeploy was launched in 2013
- 03:05 – It stated in Edinburg, UK and was moved to the USA
03:25 – Mike got married in the middle of the incubator program
04:03 – Mike’s wife, Carrie, has always been supportive
04:15 – Mike was an account manager and selling AdWords at Google
- 04:30 – After 18 months, he moved to another team
04:56 – Mike was 27 when he started DroneDeploy
- 05:24 – Mike had £100K grant money to back him up
- 05:39 – Mike was paying himself £1500
05:53 – DroneDeploy’s Twitter has unbelievable aerial imagery
06:05 – DroneDeploy make software for drones
- 06:13 – Primary industries are agriculture and construction, but they also touch other industries that exist
06:43 – DroneDeploy only focuses on software
06:56 – DroneDeploy is a SaaS business
- 07:08 – Customers can try DroneDeploy for free
- 07:12 – For commercial use, pay is $100 a month
07:26 – DroneDeploy has 2 channels
- 07:34 – To get more accurate data and large 3D plans, try the business plan which is $300 a month
- 07:44 – The other channel is to expand by the number of seats
- 08:21 – One seat is $100
08:30 – DroneDeploy has over a thousand paying businesses
08:56 – The drone market is still young, but growing really fast
09:52 – Team size is 60
10:15 – Nathan publishes on Youtube—Check it out!
10:36 – Mark Cuban predicted that the first trillionaire will be from the AI space
11:00 – Mike’s co-founders have PhDs in machine learning
11:10 – Mike sees the path of DroneDeploy becoming a trillion dollar business
12:03 – In the future, you don’t only want drones to collect data but to take action as well
13:07 – DroneDeploy currently works with B2B
13:32 – What is interesting about drones is the technology community
13:50 – Drone provides the bird’s eye view for the farmers
14:23 – One of the farmers who used DroneDeploy found a fungus when he saw that a certain part of the land was different in color
15:02 – In construction, it easier to work around with a drone especially when there’s a disaster, like an earthquake
15:47 – CAC
- 15:55 – DroneDeploy has a successful blog
- 16:17 – DroneDeploy has an NPS of around 40
16:52 – 6 people in the team are on sales and the rest are engineers
17:15 – Churn
- 17:45 – The use of a drone is seasonal
18:01 – DroneDeploy is looking at what the customers want to do and how they can get consumers to use drones throughout the whole year
18:36 – MRR is around $100K
18:58 – DroneDeploy still burns cash monthly
- 19:30 – DroneDeploy can still manage until 2018 without additional capital
20:27 – Mike would bet on DJI winning the drone hardware space
21:38 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

The drone market is still very young, but is growing rapidly.
The future of the AI industry is promising and it’s very likely that the first trillionaire will be from the AI space.
You can turn your hobby into a business, just put your mind to it.

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
Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
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
Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

676: $30M raised, will DroneDeploy create first Trillionaires w/ Drones + AI and Machine Learning? w/ CEO Mike Winn

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders