A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Cooper Harris: Hiring. We went out and we hired really fantastic folks. At first, you, as a founder, are forced to draw upon your own circles of awesome people you know. We were able to get one of the heads of design from Yahoo!. That was very cool. It allowed us to up the game. We mainly hired engineers, product, and design.

Sramana Mitra: Who was doing sales?

Cooper Harris: Me and two team members. It was a lot of work. We also felt really strongly because now the platform had grown to a SaaS play where we could onboard a huge number of brands. We didn’t want to become an agency. We were just interested in keeping it a lean technology company for obvious reasons.

Sramana Mitra: How do you go to market? You sell directly to brands or do you go through advertising agencies?

Cooper Harris: Both. Last year was all about building out that SaaS platform. We launched the new and improved version backed by a ton of machine learning that we’ve been working on. We released that last November. It ended up being successful very quickly. We had almost a hundred brands organically onboarding themselves every month.

We were getting slammed above and beyond what we expected. It was 300% over our expectation. That was all of last year. This year, we’re still working with that very heavy tech and product team and a leaner sales team. That allowed us to work directly with the brand one on one. Our customers are brands that we work with directly, which is great. You want to own the relationship. Now, we’re moving into a new phase. We have rolled out an agency partnership program. Now we can take that one-to-many approach.

Sramana Mitra: When you worked directly with the brand, what was the average deal size from a SaaS deal point of view?

Cooper Harris: There are two revenue streams. It depends partly on the size of the brand but it also doesn’t. The SaaS model is roughly the same for everyone although there’s three tiers. Tier one is the largest and tier three is the smallest. The beauty of having a platform like ours is, it isn’t enterprise SaaS. Think of it much more like a comparable as a Hubspot. On the payments side, maybe PayPal.

Sramana Mitra: You charge them $2,500 a month kind of deal?

Cooper Harris: Exactly that range. That’s just for the platform. On the other side, we have the success fee also. Brands are also paying on a success rate basis. It really motivates us to actually perform really well.

Sramana Mitra: A certain percentage of the transaction?

Cooper Harris: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage do you charge?

Cooper Harris: Whatever they want. They set it themselves. It’s anywhere from 1% to 100%. Even my investors said, “It’s a terrible idea. Everyone will give you 1%.” Not at all the case. Every single brand is very different. They all have different margins. They have different tolerances and they’re all very unique.

We absolutely had to allow them to choose whatever was comfortable for them. We’re not going to promote as much for a brand that gives us a lower commission. We base that on an algorithm. It has to do with revenue potential and all of that. We created this crazy model where the brands get to choose themselves.

This segment is part 6 in the series : A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly
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