Hal Howard, 20-year Microsoft veteran who gave up a stable, secure position leading the Dynamics ERP development team to satiate a spark of creativity. Today, he’s the founder of Komiko, a sales intelligence tool that helps their businesses understand what engagement with customers is working.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Execution
What CEO do you follow? – Satya Nadella
Favorite online tool? — Vinfolio
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Don’t worry man. Everything’s going to work out just fine”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:45 – Komiko is a sales intelligence tool that helps their businesses understand what engagement with customers is working
- 02:12 – Komiko is integrated with different sources
- 02:20 – A cloud-based subscription-based model
02:37 – Hal was at Microsoft for 20 years
- 02:59 – left Microsoft because he wanted to build something new
- 03:16 – “There are still unexplored technologies around business applications”
03:54 – Customer pays an average of $30-35 a month per user
- 04:00 – Team size ranges from 3 to 500
- 04:11 – There are currently 2000 paying seats across 50 businesses in total
04:33 – Average MRR is $60K
05:19 – Team size is 10
- 05:37 – 8 are engineers
05:48 – Hal and his co-founder are doing both sales and product engineering
- 06:00 – Hal is more on the design
06:30 – Komiko is now a complimentary CRM
- 06:38 – Partnered with Salesforce and most of their customers are using Salesforce
07:19 – CRM is in a different decision set compared to Komiko
- 07:40 – Komiko works with corporate clients to help them understand what engagement works and what doesn’t
07:59 – “We don’t lose customers”
- 08:05 – In Komiko’s lifetime, they’ve only lost 4 customers so far, 1 was acquired
08:28 – CAC is mostly inbound and Komiko was listed in AppExchange
- 08:44 – Hal and his co-founder alone were able to drive a lot of customers, mostly from referrals and the businesses they’ve worked with before
- 08:51 – Just started an outbound campaign in early 2017
- 08:59 – Has a partnership with GameSite
  - 09:20 – GameSite’s focus is how customers engage with the product
  - 09:35 – GameSite is building a platform for customer success and Komiko’s metric will help the overall customer solution
- 09:48 – Komiko raised some capital
  - 10:03 – Total fund raised is around $2M
  - 10:23 – Initial round was convertible note and then the seed round is priced round
- 10:37 – 2017 revenue target is at least a million dollars
- 11:04 – 2016 revenue is $15K
- 11:23 – Gross margin is around 75%
- 12:09 – Hal won’t easily sell Komiko, but he might consider for at least $25M
- 14:43 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Nurture the network that you have, it will always help you in some way down the road.
You have the option leave your comfort zone, you can explore and create something new.
It’s possible to not lose customer IF you consistently help the customers see value in your product.

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

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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

746: Bill Gates Was Great to Work With, But This Founder Wanted His Own Thing