Growing ChartMogul to ~$10M ARR via strategic partnerships

Nick Franklin raised $3.7M early on with ChartMogul, but then he did something unusual. He found product-market fit and stopped raising.

Seven years since its last round of funding, ChartMogul is bringing in somewhere in the ballpark $10M ARR.

Here's Nick on how he did it. 👇

Craving creative freedom

It’s important to take risks. In fact, the riskiest life strategy is probably to never take any risks

Ten years ago, I was working at Zendesk as their sales director for the Asia region. It was a fun role, but my heart was always in designing and building products.

I wanted the creative freedom — and hopefully financial freedom — that comes with being a successful company founder. I’d tried to build my own startup three times before, but I never truly went all-in on an idea until ChartMogul.

Seizing an opportunity

We were measuring some subscription metrics internally at Zendesk using a business intelligence tool called GoodData. The UX wasn’t so great, as it hadn’t been designed for subscription businesses, and I figured there were probably other subscription businesses out there that could benefit from a dedicated solution. So I decided to build it.

I didn’t really validate the idea before starting to build, I just learned Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js, then started coding up an MVP. The first real validation for the idea came when a competitor launched their product before me and started getting some traction.

That showed me that I needed to go all in to have a chance at winning this market. By that time, I had already gone part time at Zendesk. I soon quit and went full time on ChartMogul. We didn't even have revenue yet, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity window, so I took a risk.

Launching a second product

Now, ChartMogul is in the ballpark of $10M ARR. There are two products under its umbrella:

1. ChartMogul Subscription Analytics

2. ChartMogul CRM

Our subscription analytics product is what we’re best known for. You connect your subscription billing platform (e.g. Stripe, App Store Connect, Recurly, etc) and we compute all your SaaS metrics and give you a really powerful set of analytics tools that help you deeply analyze and understand your subscription business.

We just launched our CRM about 18 months ago. After years of being unsatisfied with the available CRMs, we decided to build a modern CRM that is purpose-built for B2B SaaS companies like us. It lets you analyze your self-service and sales-led funnels in one place and get a complete picture of any customer including their communication history, billing history, MRR history, etc.

The CRM is fully integrated into the same platform as the analytics. Using both together bring a lot of benefits, such as automations that can be triggered off events in either system and analytics that draw on both datasets. So it’s really the same platform, just two products from a pricing, packaging, and positioning perspective.

Raising money

All of this started with me working solo. But I built a team around me from very early on — at first using my own savings, then using money from investors, and then customer revenues. We now have around 67 full-time team members.

My goal was always to try and build a large business, so taking investment made sense for me.

My old boss and good friend at Zendesk, Michael Hansen, knew that I was working on something and emailed me to offer some investment. Michael then suggested bringing in his longtime friend Tom James who was also an angel investor.

Then, I asked Christoph at Point Nine if they’d be up for leading a seed round along with Michael and Tom, and we went from there.

We were pre-revenue so I just presented the vision, the product, and the very positive traction data we had from our initial users. Thankfully that was enough. The deal was done fairly quickly at the end of 2014 — we got $600K. That was a great day because we brought on great investors, we now had the capital to invest properly into R&D and growth, and also because I was able to stop eating away at my savings.

After that, we raised another $3.1M. But we haven't raised any capital for over seven years now. People say to "always be hiring, always be fundraising", but I'm not into that. There are more interesting and impactful things to spend my time on.

How to hire and lead well

I can't stress enough the importance of only hiring really great people, and how the benefits of having great talent on your team compounds over time. The inverse is true of a bad hire.

You have to have a rigorous hiring process. Always do reference checks. And “if there’s any doubt, then there is no doubt.”

Once you have a team, one of the most important things you can do as a leader is to keep doing the actual work yourself. You can own some of the responsibilities of the team. They'll see that you’re pulling your weight and that’s motivating for them.

A leader who spends all their time doing one-on-ones, performance reviews, and meetings (most meetings are pointless) just doesn’t sound like a leader I would be motivated to follow.

Trying everything

For the first two to three years, I just tried everything. What worked best were the following:

• Leveraging my personal network

• Leveraging the networks of our investors

• Content marketing

• Partnerships

• Paid ads

• Answering questions on Quora, Twitter, etc.

• Product Hunt

Investor networks

The advantage of taking investment — aside from the money — is the press and exposure. Point Nine is very well networked in the SaaS world, so they were able to introduce us to many potential customers early on.

Content marketing

We had a few content pieces go semi-viral early on. I’m not sure I can tell you exactly how much they helped us, but I know they did bring in some paying customers. I remember at least one or two people letting us know they’d found us through our SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet, which was one of those viral pieces.

We optimize all of our content for search engines, but that's never the goal of the content. The purpose of content marketing should always be to provide useful or insightful pieces of writing. Don't sacrifice quality for SEO!

Partnerships

To name a few partnerships, we're listed on Stripe and Recurly’s partners pages, and we do co-marketing efforts with Braintree and Chargify.

Every partnership has come from networking and reaching out to folks. I went to events like SaaStr, SaaStock, and the Point Nine Founders Summit. I would book flights to the Bay Area from Berlin to meet with folks who worked at Stripe, Recurly, Braintree, Chargebee, etc. I was constantly trying to build relationships and see how we could work with people.

In the early days, we got as much as 40% of our customers from partnerships. Now, I think it’s below 5% in terms of where folks are hearing about us.

Word of mouth

Word of mouth has always been big for us. Probably the biggest thing, actually. To get that, though, you need users. Product Hunt is where we found some of our first users.

Getting good at sales

It also helped that I was good with sales. That just comes with practice — I have a lot of experience with it.

Sales for me is really about:

1. Listening and understanding the customer’s needs

2. Asking questions if there’s anything you don’t fully understand

3. Being an expert in the product you’re selling so you can say if it’s a good fit for someone or not

4. Explaining how it is going to meet that person's requirements

5. And knowing alternative ways to achieve something if you don't quite meet a requirement

I think anyone who is strong at technical support can also be strong at software sales.

Set your sights higher

Someone once told me that regardless of whether you try to build a small business or a large business, you’re likely going to put the same amount into it — i.e. most of your time and effort. 

So, you might as well try to build a large business as it's going to be the same time investment, but the rewards are usually going to be much greater than building a small business.

That's what I've been doing. My goal is, and always has been, to grow ChartMogul into a world-leading software company.

You can follow along on X. And check out ChartMogul.