Drone Deploy
Mike Wynne left Google in 2013, at 27, to start Drone Deploy. He had worked in sales at Google selling AdWords, then moved to a team building sales tools. He was also a longtime RC helicopter hobbyist. The company began in Edinburgh, and the team moved to the Bay Area after getting into the Angel Pad incubator. Mike said the founding team had only a small amount of personal savings, and the company was backed by 100,000 pounds of grant money from the Scottish government.
Drone Deploy sells software, not hardware. Its product turns drone imagery into maps, 3D models, and analytics, and customers pay monthly. Anyone can use the basic product for free, and commercial use costs about $100 a month per seat. The business plan costs $300 a month. Mike said the company sells by seat rather than by drone, so teams can share the data.
The company's growth came mostly from inbound demand. Mike described a blog that shows how people actually use the technology, along with a freemium model that lets people try the product and pay by card on the website. Larger prospects are scored (MQS scoring) and then contacted by the sales team, which accounts for less than half of sales. The team has 60 people, six of whom work in sales.
The company's net promoter score was around 40. Churn is seasonal: farmers in the Midwest stop flying when crops stop growing, cancel, and then sign back up. Mike said the team is looking at packaging and pricing to keep customers active year-round. The company is still burning cash and says it has enough runway through 2018.
As of the interview, Drone Deploy had about 1,000 business customers and roughly $30 million raised, with its last round raising $20 million. The host estimated minimum monthly revenue at about $100,000, based on 1,000 customers paying about $100 each. Mike confirmed this, but the figure is an estimate rather than a reported number.
- •A free tier combined with a blog that documents real customer use cases creates a steady flow of inbound leads without heavy paid acquisition.
- •Pricing by seat rather than by drone lets revenue grow as customers add team members who share the data.
- •Scoring inbound leads and sending only larger prospects to sales keeps the sales team small relative to the company's revenue.
- •Selling to farmers and construction firms, where drone data saves time and money, gives the product clear and measurable value.
- 1.Publish detailed customer case studies and how-to content that show exactly how your product saves time or money.
- 2.Offer a free tier that lets prospects use the core product before paying, and make the upgrade path obvious.
- 3.Price per seat so that adoption spreads within a customer's organization.
- 4.Score inbound signups by company size or fit, and route only the strongest leads to a human sales rep.
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Source quote for monthly revenue
You're doing at least 100 grand per month in revenue correct. Yeah OK good.
AI-extracted from the linked source. Monthly revenue can include one-time sales or donations, and may describe a later stage than the first-customer story.