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