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Supermetrics Helps Marketers Crunch and Analyze Data across channels
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Free VBA Code Led to First 100 Customers. Today, 10k customers
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Supermetrics Hit $20m in Revenues, 30%+ Profit in 2019 (104% yoy growth)
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$3.5m in Funding from 2017 Is Still In Bank
Enterprises generate a lot of data.
Particularly with marketing – you have different ad platforms, different databases, and probably even different historical data as people have come and gone from the team and changed the way you do things.
The idea with Supermetrics is to consolidate that – a simple-sounding solution to a problem everybody knows is one of the hardest in data analytics.
Mikael Thuneberg seems to have found a solution, or at least his ten thousand customers think so. He was just on the podcast at the beginning of January and shared his experience and business insights with Latka.
How Supermetrics Came To Be
Mikael Thuneberg was 29 in 2009 and working in Helsinki as a web analyst. His job required a ton of copying and pasting from Google Analytics to Excel, and he was not happy about that.
So, without having written a single line of code before, he applied himself to Visual Basic and wrote a script inside Excel to copy the Google Analytics data he needed. He posted that solution on a Google developer forum, and within a couple of months he was featured on the Google Blog.
That drove traffic to his script, and it ended up as one of the best-rated scripts for Excel online. In 2010, it became a standalone product and then a SaaS product for ease of support. In 2013, he was actually hired by Google to create an add-on for Google Sheets, and that’s when the Supermetrics name became famous.
The Snowball Effect: From $42k in 2013 to $263k in 2014
As more and more people got word of the product, the faster things grew, and the more time it started taking away from Thuneberg’s own life. After five years of running the company himself, he finally began hiring some more staff.
However, that just made things grow faster. Today they have fifty employees in Helsinki, Lithuania, and New York City. Although the development happens in Europe, the United States is the main market and it’s important to keep an office there in order to facilitate face-to-face meetings.
In the last two or three years, Thuneberg’s been looking for more and more engineers and sales agents but been unable to keep hiring fast enough to meet demand. They could be growing even faster if they could just get the right staff!
$3.5m Funding From 2017 Still In Bank… Why Raise at All?
Thuneberg is a very level-headed guy, and from the start he ran the company to be profitable.
There was no reason, then, to raise capital. All operations were bootstrapped for the first seven years.
But then in 2017, out of a desire to get some of the non-tangible benefits of backing, Supermetrics sought out and received funding from a Finnish firm. It worked out as expected, with access to professional networks and consultants that made an impact on the company.
Get this, though – Thuneberg hasn’t touched a cent of that Series A funding round! He’s kept the company very profitable and has simply invested that money into a fund for any later necessary use.
How Supermetrics Revenue Hit $20 Million USD
Although they spend $100,000 per month on paid advertising, a lot of the massive growth they’ve been seeing – in the neighborhood of ten thousand inbound leads each month – has been totally organic.
That’s from word-of-mouth, or rather the stellar reputation that Supermetrics had for years as a go-between from Google Analytics API and Microsoft Excel. People wrote books with chapters on Supermetrics and talk about it at conferences.
It’s also from search engine placement and ranking inside the addon galleries for Google Sheets and Google Data Studio. Although Supermetrics sells a standalone product, the free trials of these addons bring in considerable numbers of new clients regularly.
Today there are ten thousand paying customers, averaging $100 per month but sometimes up to $5,000 or $6,000.
What 104% YoY Growth Means
According to Thuneberg, their 2019 goal was to hit a $20m revenue run rate (they did!). A year prior, they were at $10 million and have enjoyed consistent year-over-year growth of more than 100%.
In fact, says Thuneberg, “we’re trying to grow fast enough to not make a profit, but we can’t hire people fast enough.” Right now they have expansion pretty much exactly making up for their 12 or 13 percent churn annually.
They’re also looking into acquisitions. “Obviously, we’re looking for some talent that we don’t have here.”
Gaining Talent To Plug Holes
Supermetrics has always had a good reputation for pulling data from one place and putting it into an easy-to-understand metric in another place. However, as customer numbers continue to grow and client companies continue to look for more data solutions, the amount of data processed regularly begins to become unmanageable.
That’s why an acquisition sounds like the right move, to find another company doing something similar in a slightly different space (focusing on data presentation, perhaps, instead of data collection) and use that talent to streamline their process.
On top of that, they have been slowly adding new products and levels of products for their sales team to work on advertising. A new company might come with a ready-made product that would be perfect for reducing churn by keeping an employer locked in to the Supermetrics system.
In a Nutshell
Supermetrics is a company spun out of a one-man idea to integrate Google Analytics with Excel.
Today they’re a SaaS platform offering a unified place for marketers to see all of their sales and metrics in one place.
Founder and CEO Mikael Thuneberg projects that the enormous growth of the last five years will only continue, likely leading to acquisitions for their ability to bring in new data pipeline expertise.
About the CEO Mikael Thuneberg
Favorite Business Book: Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed
A CEO he follows: Jason Lemkin, SaaStr.com
Favorite Tool: Google Sheets
Nightly Hours of Sleep: 7
Family Status: 39 years old, married, 3 kids
Advice he would give to himself at age 20: Maybe consider forming the business earlier.
Data
Revenue (figures are in euros)
2012 – 120,000
2013 – 42,000
2014 – 263,000
2015 – 500,000 [This is when Thuneberg hired his first employees]
2016 – 1.3M (63% profit margin)
2017 – 2.2M
2018 – 6.2M
2019 – 12M
2020 – Hit $20m run rate in USD
Customers
2014 – 1000
2015 – 50,000 new trials per week (estimate) [Driven by excellent publicity from Google and ease of use]
2020 – 10,000 paying customers
Funding
2017 – Series A, $3.5 million
Source
All information comes from the interview and this source:
https://mb.cision.com/Public/18694/2895118/a46b4e93392e6ba4.pdf
Author:
Yassir Sahnoun is the founder of YassirSahnoun.com. He helps SaaS companies like Castbox and FluentU attract sales using content strategy, copywriting, blogging, email marketing, & more. If you want to up your content marketing game, you can schedule a free discovery call with Yassir by clicking here.