Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution? Is Boston engineering?

Spencer Pingry: The Engineering team is split between Boston and Virginia. It’s pretty even right now. All of our sales and marketing and CS employees are in Boston.

Sramana Mitra: You now started getting your team more organized in terms of functionality. What happens next?

Spencer Pingry: We’ve been in growth mode for the last 12 months where we’ve been scaling quite quickly.

Sramana Mitra: How many retailers and e-commerce companies are there in the sweet spot that you’re describing – above $10 million in annual revenue? If you take the $10 million to half a billion band, what is the number of target customers?

Spencer Pingry: We still have a high number of e-commerce and retail customers but we also have other customers. If you take that mid-market band, it’s about 450,000. We would probably address two-thirds of that market. Shopify has 500,000 stores on their platform. Some percentage of those are in the $10 million plus range. It’s really in the hundreds of thousands of companies.

Sramana Mitra: Shopify works with the lower end of that spectrum. The larger e-commerce companies are on platforms like BigCommerce and Magento.

Spencer Pingry: Yes, and we have integrations with a lot of e-commerce platforms. Shopify Plus is a section of Shopify that’s a great market for us.

Sramana Mitra: What is the product portfolio in the sense that when you get into one of these accounts with one of your products, is there upsell or cross-sell opportunity in there?

Spencer Pingry: Our core product is a platform that is the basis of a CRM if you think about the ability to collect all the user behavior and data from both online and offline systems. We only target B2C companies. B2C and B2B are very different from this standpoint. We then expose that into executions.

The core platform is a product that people can buy by itself. Campaign executions comes along with that, which plugs into other delivery systems if that’s what people want. If they want to add channels that are essentially OEM through us, we can add that in. Capacity is added on top of that. The more capacity they add, the more users that we track. That’s how the platform is priced and packaged.

Sramana Mitra: Are there other strategic moves besides what we’ve discussed so far?

Spencer Pingry: This last year, we closed another $30 million round. Our other investors are Insight, Matrix, Underscore, and Leaders Fund. We have been fortunate to add some great partners that are really interested in building something for the long term. Product and strategy-wise, we really continue to be focused on that bigger CRM opportunity while we tactically release and roll out things out address the needs of people today.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have at this point? What do you think you’re going to end 2018 at in terms of number of customers?

Spencer Pingry: Under 500.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size are you at?

Spencer Pingry: Our average deal size for the mid-market are in the $24,000 ARR range.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. I’ve got your story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry
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