Cloud Cherry

Cloud Cherry was founded by Vinod Muthur Krishnan, who came to entrepreneurship after a career that began in the merchant navy and moved through a mobile-first financial technology startup. The company is built around a simple observation: millennials have complicated journeys with the brands they use. They move between mobile, web, stores, and social, so a company that wants to understand its customers in 2017 has to be present in every one of those channels. Vinod describes the product as a feedback platform that works at speed, letting businesses talk to customers in real time across all platforms.

The company launched around 2014 and went to market in 2015. Vinod describes it as a pure SaaS business. It grew to a 74-person team split mainly between India and Singapore, and it opened a new US office in Salt Lake City, where the first batch of five people was being trained on the product. Funding came in rounds, with the most recent roughly $7 million closed in September 2016 and a total of about $9 million raised.

Cloud Cherry started in Asia, and by the time of the interview it had close to 100 customers, many still there. The bigger push was North America, where the company said it had seen a lot of inbound demand that it had not been able to serve effectively. The team focused on mid-market and enterprise customers, where Vinod said the true value of the platform shows itself. He estimated average revenue per customer at a few thousand dollars a month for mid-market accounts and $15,000 to $20,000 a month for enterprise accounts. Customers under about $1,500 a month were classed as SMB, and the split was roughly 35 percent mid-market and enterprise and 65 percent SMB.

Retention was the standout. Vinod said SMB gross churn was close to zero, with customers staying 18 to 20 months and none leaving, while enterprise gross churn was in the low single digits, around two to three percent. He credited this to a deliberate focus on customer delight, which he said was more important than tweaking metrics. The company's acquisition economics were less rosy. Vinod put customer acquisition cost payback at seven to 12 months and the LTV-to-CAC ratio at roughly 3.5 to 4.5, but he admitted these were estimates built from extrapolation. The company was also burning some cash, though he said it was run efficiently across its three locations.

At the time of the interview, the company was doing about $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue, according to the host's summary, and aimed to reach around $330,000 MRR by December 2017, roughly tripling year over year. Vinod said he would publish public numbers in January 2018.