Now Interact

Magnus Ashton had already built two companies before Now Interact. He founded Primelog in 2000, a transportation management SaaS platform connecting transport providers with buyers, and sold it around 2006 while heavily diluted after the post-dot-com crash in Sweden. He then founded InLead in 2010, a sales operations business that helped companies sell to C-level executives. InLead grew to about $1.5 million in trailing revenue, but most of it came from professional services, so Ashton sold his share because it had become a consulting business rather than the software play he wanted.

Now Interact was founded in 2010 with roughly $100K raised. Its first product was simpler and reached about $190K in monthly revenue by November 2012. Ashton says it was not scalable enough once the company expanded into the UK and the Netherlands, where competition was harder. In 2014 the company pivoted to a machine learning product that is channel-agnostic and works on top of existing tools. It analyzes visitor behavior such as clicks, scrolling, and mouse movement, combines that with call tracking and chat data, and decides which channel to offer each visitor.

Now Interact sells to large companies such as telcos, insurers, e-commerce, energy, and travel firms. Ashton's stated goal was to win a major carrier like AT&T or Verizon. Deals are sold through BDRs and salespeople who meet customers directly. Acquiring a new customer cost about $30K, with roughly two-thirds spent on sales and one-third on marketing, mostly content marketing and events. The company planned to spend about half a million dollars on marketing that year, aiming for around 50 new clients at $10K ARR each.

The pivot worked. Ashton said the new product grew almost 100% year over year while the old product was wound down, and the company had 19 customers paying about $10K per month on average. Churn was low, with only one customer lost in about two and a half years. The company raised a $5 million Series A at roughly $13-14 million pre-money. The original product, however, had to be abandoned despite its revenue because it could not scale internationally.

At the time of the interview, Now Interact had about 28 employees, split between Stockholm R&D and sales and customer success teams in the UK and the Netherlands, and was preparing to launch in the US. Recurring revenue was about $220K per month, and the company reported about $3.5 million in revenue for 2015 and 2016 combined as it shifted from the old product to the new one.