Griffin Parry, founder and CEO of Meter talks about how their usage-based pricing SaaS has acquired over 30-40 customers with ACV’s in the range of $100K.

Here are the talking points,

Meter's Mission:

• Meter aids B2B software companies in deploying effective pricing strategies for growth.
• Offers a pricing operations platform for companies utilizing usage-based pricing models.
• Helps in distributing customer spend and usage data seamlessly across the organization.

Differentiation:

• Complementary to subscription management platforms like Chargebee.
• Provides necessary data integration and processing before billing systems.

Product Overview:

• Offers a primary usage data tracking mechanism via API.
• Assists scale-up companies in coping with increased complexity by ingesting data from existing sources.

Customer Base:

• Focuses on scale-up companies facing growth challenges due to organizational pain points.
• Targets finance personnel handling billing complexities in expanding businesses.

Metrics and Customer Profile:

• Approximately 30-40 paying customers, with ARR ranging from $50 million to $200 million.
• ARR exceeding $100K per customer, indicating critical business value.
• Targets companies at Series B funding stage or beyond.

Pricing Model:

• Utilizes usage-based pricing, charging based on data delivery and bill calculations.
• Offers predictability with significant minimums and overage charges for exceeding allowances.

Growth and Sales Strategy:

• Utilizes inbound, outbound, and partner channels for lead generation.
• Engages in high-contact, value-added conversations to address customer skepticism.
• Sales cycle typically spans six months, involving reassurance and guidance through complex transformations.

Zero to One Journey:

• Founded by repeat founders with prior experience in cloud infrastructure and usage-based pricing.
• Conducted extensive discovery conversations with potential customers before product development.
• Collaborated with design partners to co-create the platform and validate its effectiveness.

Funding and Team Size:

• Raised $31.5 million in external funding, leveraging favorable market conditions.
• Currently employs a team of approximately 60 members.

Next Milestone:

• Focuses on efficient and profitable growth, with a potential Series B funding round on the horizon.
• Aims to achieve $100 million in ARR, fulfilling the vision of building a successful B2B software company.

Hello, everyone.

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Welcome to the B2B SaaS podcast.

3

I'm your host Upendra Varma.

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Today we have Griffin Parry with us.

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Griffin here is the founder and

CEO of a company called Meter.

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Hey Griffin, welcome to the show.

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Griffin Parry: Hey, very nice to be here.

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Upendra Varma: All right, Griffin,

so let's try to sort of get a sense

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of what your company does, right?

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And what your product does and why

customers are willing to pay you money.

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Griffin Parry: So meter exists

to help B2B software companies.

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So there'll be many

listen to this podcast.

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Um, deploy pricing is a growth leader

because it's highly effective, helps

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you grow faster and more profitability,

profitable, profitably, um, in terms of.

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How we do that, we provide the

operational capability they're missing.

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So, um, our products, we call a pricing

operations platform and it helps B2B

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software companies who are using usage

based pricing strategies, which is most

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of them, they'll painlessly distribute.

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about customer spend and usage wherever

it's needed throughout the business and

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to make pricing changes, um, easily.

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Upendra Varma: Yeah, that

makes a lot of sense, right?

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So, and I just want to get a

sense of how you are different.

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So most of these B2B

SaaS companies, right?

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So they use one of these subscription

management sort of platforms, right?

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You heard about Chargebee or

all of these platforms, right?

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Where you can sort of do all

of this, where you can bring

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in all of your customer data

and sort of have this, right?

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So where exactly do you

sit in this space, right?

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So how exactly are you different or like,

what exactly are you sort of doing here?

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Griffin Parry: We're complimentary,

um, to those type of players.

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Uh, so charge me, you mentioned

they're, they're a good partner of ours.

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Um, essentially we help them work in

a scenario where the customer is, um,

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using usage based pricing strategies.

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And I'll tell you why.

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Um, you need to feed those systems with

the amounts that need to go on the bill.

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And if you're doing usage based pricing,

um, you need to bring usage data together,

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usage data together with pricing data

and combine them to work out what the

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amount should be for each customer.

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Um, so that needs to happen

before you get to charge me.

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So that's, that's what we do.

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Upendra Varma: And let's talk

a bit about the product here.

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And so how exactly are you doing this?

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I could imagine, I mean, if

I'm a software company, right?

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So my data could be sitting

at any layer, right?

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It could be at the database level, or

it could be, it could just be sitting

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in some other external platform, right?

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I could just store that data anywhere.

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So how exactly are you solving

this from a product perspective?

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Griffin Parry: So our customers

broadly fall into two camps.

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So, um, some of them are looking for a

primary usage data tracking mechanism.

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And so they'll deliver

us usage data by our API.

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And we do all the process of ingesting

it and transforming it and cleaning it.

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Um, Other companies and remembering

that most of our customers are scale

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ups who already been successful.

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So we're helping them sort of cope with

increasing complexity in their business.

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They already collect this issues data.

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Um, and so we can just take

it from wherever it exists.

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The last thing we want to do is ask

people to rip and replace something.

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So if it's sitting, for example,

in an analytics database, we

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can ingest from there as well.

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Upendra Varma: Makes sense.

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So just talk about these customers

that you've been mentioning, right?

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So, so who are these customers, right?

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Who are you primarily

trying to serve, right?

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So just talk a bit about, you know,

your existing customer base today.

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Griffin Parry: I'll tell you, I'll

tell a story about the individual

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because that'll bring it to life.

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So the broad comment is that, um, we, uh,

our particular area of focus is scale ups.

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So it's companies who are being

successful, but their, their

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success is creating pain in their

organization, which is an obstacle to

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further growth and further success.

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But I'll, but I'll make it

specific to an individual.

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So imagine you are a finance person in a

company like this, and you've got to do

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billing, and Every month, and your your

business is getting more complicated.

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Like, you know, a couple of years ago, you

know, you had only had a few customers.

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You only had one product.

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You're only in one year.

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Um, you didn't do much private pricing.

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You didn't really have a sales team.

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Now your world is much more complicated.

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You've got, you know, Hundreds

or thousands of customers, um,

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multiple products, multiple geos.

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You've got creative sales teams doing

all this private pricing, and every

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month you've got this offer process

where you've got to go and get usage

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data and ask an engineer or a product

person to send you the right usage data.

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And then you've gotta get the pricing

data from wherever it is and make sure

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that it's all up to date, depending

on any renewals or, um, new deals.

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And then you've got this.

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Painful spreadsheet that you've got to,

um, set up all this complex logic in and

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you process it and then you work out how

much you need to charge each customer and

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then you've got to feed that information

into your revenue stack wherever they sit.

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It's a nightmare.

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So it's incredibly painful,

but more importantly, it's,

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um, It's very error prone.

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And so, you know, you're making errors

on bills that undermine customer trust,

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but also, and you really care about

this because you're a finance person

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causing a lot of revenue leakage.

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You're not billing for

stuff that you should be.

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Sometimes you're aware of it.

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Sometimes you're not aware of it.

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So anyway, so that's, that's

the person who we help.

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The, the, the burning pain point that

our customers have when they first

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come to us is always about billing.

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We go on to solve other problems,

but that's the first key pain point.

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And.

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It really becomes acute when

the customer's being successful.

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So that's why I describe our ICP or

our target customer as a scale up.

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Upendra Varma: Makes sense.

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And it just gives us a sense of what,

you know, these customers, it's how

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many paying customers do you have on

your platform today, approximately,

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Griffin Parry: So, I mean, we are,

so in terms of our company stage,

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we're at classic series A business.

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So, you know, we did our

series A raise nine months ago.

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Um, so, uh, we've got 30 or 40 paying

customers in our ICP type of stage.

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Um, and.

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You know, they, they, they tend to be

$50 million plus arr, got some that

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are slightly smaller, but, you know,

a hundred or 200 people, plus they've

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got some complexity in the business.

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Uh, they're probably at series B or

series stage funding or, or beyond.

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Um, and they pay us a reasonable amount

of money because this is a big problem to

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Upendra Varma: how much is that

rates and how do you price, right?

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So just give us a sense.

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I don't want the exact number.

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So, so I'll ask you three questions.

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Is it thousand dollars per year?

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Is it 10, 000 per year?

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Or is it like a hundred

thousand dollars per year?

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I'm just getting a sense of, you

know, Uh, this, so that we could

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understand your sales motion better.

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Griffin Parry: it, um, so the ACVs

are higher because we have a direct

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sales motion and we need to, um, be

able to support the cost of that.

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So it's, it's.

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Far to the extreme of the

scale you just described.

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Upendra Varma: so it's more around

a hundred thousand dollars, right?

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Something like that.

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Griffin Parry: Yeah, yeah, this

is an important problem and it's

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business critical for our customers.

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Upendra Varma: And then how

do you sort of charge, right?

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So like, how exactly do you charge

your own, uh, software, for example?

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Right.

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So is it again, usage is

metrics or is it based on the

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number of customers they serve?

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Like, how does it work?

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Griffin Parry: So, I mean, I would

preface the answer by saying we're still

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a relatively early stage company, so we

have experimented with, you know, various

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different ways of pricing, but we do seem

to be settling on sort of a standard.

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Um, now our customers all

deploy usage based pricing.

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of some description.

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That's the reason they're coming to us.

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So you'll be, you'll be

unsurprised to hear that we

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also have usage based pricing.

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So we basically price based on the

amount of data that you deliver into the

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platform and the number of times you're

asking the platform to calculate a bill.

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So if you, uh, if you only ran billing

Um, if only use me to run billing once

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a month, it would be the number of

customers you have multiplied by, um,

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um, basically one by one for each month.

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But, um, it can, the number can be much

higher than that because if you're using

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me to deliver up to date bills in mid

month to sales teams who want to know.

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What the latest is or customer success

teams, or maybe the product team is using

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it so that there's a, there's a billing

dashboard exposed to the end customers.

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That's always up to date.

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So basically it's, it's amount

data or bill calculations out our

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customers are those slightly mature

businesses, they value predictability.

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So almost all our deals involve

a significant minimum that

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includes a generous allowance.

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And then if they exceed the

allowance, they'll pay us overages.

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Upendra Varma: And so just give us a

sense of how you're growing, right?

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So last 12 months, right?

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So how many customers you had

around 12 months before ago, right?

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Today, right?

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So approximate numbers.

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Griffin Parry: So, so they, I mean,

so we're in that, we're in that

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phase where we know we've got a

product, we know we can sell it.

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Um, we know that our customers love it.

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So I'm in tinkering mode at the moment.

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Like my whole focus is how do we

scale the business effectively?

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How do we grow quickly and efficiently?

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So yes, we are, we are

growing fast at the moment.

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Um, and my role as

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Upendra Varma: you had more than

20 customers 12 months before.

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Is that how it was?

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Griffin Parry: sorry, I didn't, I

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Upendra Varma: how many, how many

customers you had 12 months before today?

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Right.

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So is it like 20, 10, 15?

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So I just want to understand like at which

stage you are right in terms of, you know,

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number of customers that you're acquiring.

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Griffin Parry: I mean, we're

kind of in the sort of.

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We are growing fast, basically.

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So we're sort of like revenues

that sort of like the plane,

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um, year to year or more.

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So it's, it's at that kind

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Upendra Varma: that's, that's a

good number that I can work with.

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Right.

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I think let's, let's move

on to other things here.

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So like where you're, where

you're growing, right.

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So I just want to get a sense

of how your top of funnel works.

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Right.

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And then we'll talk about

your conversion as well.

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It's so just from these

are big deals, right?

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So how are you finding them?

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Like, what's that first

touch point for you?

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Right.

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In terms of, you know, reaching out

to these leads, like what channels.

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Are you really, you know, working on

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Griffin Parry: so we have, um, we have

three channels, which is probably quite

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a lot for a business at our stage.

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Um, so underpinning it all is like,

we do quite a lot of work around

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branding and Messaging and content

because that supports all of our

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channels and then the three channels

are we have an inbound channel.

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So we capture the demand mostly via, um,

by the website, but it's generated by.

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All the work we're doing in branding,

messaging and content, and that's,

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um, creates a steady drumbeat of

opportunities, um, and some of our biggest

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customers has been acquired by that group.

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Um, then we do some, uh,

we do targeted outbound.

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So, you know, we, we do the work

of working out who, which customers

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we'd like to, to win, um, working

out what's a good indicator of a

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good customer, creating lists, and

then finding ways of reaching out and

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starting a conversation, um, with them.

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Um, In the early days, it was

actually mostly focused on asking

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venture capitalists to introduce

us to companies in their portfolio.

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It's an easy conversation to have,

because we're a B2B company, it sells

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to B2B companies, so B2B are interested

in talking to us as a potential

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investment, but it allows us to ask for

introductions to their other companies.

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So, um, but then it sort of, uh,

it progressed into a more sort of

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standard BDR, Progressive BDR approach.

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And then the third channel

is, uh, is partners.

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And so you mentioned in your first

question, like, you know, how do we work

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with subscription management and revenue

management platforms like ChargeBee?

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Well, we partner with them.

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So, um, and ChargeBee is

a great example of that.

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Upendra Varma: that makes

a lot of sense, right?

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So I think at this stage, right, I

think you're more worried about your

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conversion and how it all works, right?

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How do you convert that customer to

convert that potential lead or the

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customer that you know, would be

converted to an actual, actual customer.

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So just give us a sense of, you know, how

your sales cycle work and also just talk

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about who these customers are, right?

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How, what exactly are they doing

today to sort of solve this problem?

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Are they using something else

or they're hacking it up or.

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What's what's happening?

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Who are these customers and

how are you acquiring them?

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What's that sales cycle look like?

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Griffin Parry: so we're selling into

the, the CFO or the office of the CFO.

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Sometimes we just sell them

to product, but it's mostly

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into the office of the CFO.

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Um, there are other people on the buying

committee, so engineers are important

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because they are the people who implement.

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And, um, and it needs to be built in a way

that they respect and want to work with.

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Uh, and.

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various operations teams around

the business, other users.

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So rev ops, sales ops, then ops, billing

ops, you name it, but we're really

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selling it to the office of the CFO.

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Um, in terms of what they're doing now,

uh, they are, they're either doing this.

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Based on spreadsheets.

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So very manual based process using

spreadsheets, um, which can't cope

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as they scale and a successful.

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It just doesn't work anymore.

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And the consequences of it not working a

really significant like revenue leakage,

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for example, it was a big problem.

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Um, or they have built bespoke

tooling automate this, but the

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problem with bespoke tooling is.

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It's expensive, not just

to build, but to maintain.

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Um, and it's also pretty inflexible

and you're asking an awful lot of your

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engineering team to anticipate everything

that that tooling will need to do.

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Whereas we're a specialist vendor

and we've got lots of customers.

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And so we, you know, we're much more

fully featured and we can deliver

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the capabilities as they're needed,

but yeah, so they're either replacing

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a spreadsheet or a bespoke piece of

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Upendra Varma: It's mostly not one

of your competitors, I'm assuming.

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Okay, so let's talk about

the sales cycle, right?

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Now that we understand where

they're coming from, right?

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What happens once you

reach out to them, right?

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How long does it take to close a typical,

you know, 100, 000 deal for you, right?

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How many touchpoints?

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What do you do during those times?

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Do you have any Implementation, right?

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Any paid demo?

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How does that even work?

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Just give us a sense of how it's working.

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Griffin Parry: um, so the sales

cycles are relatively long.

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but it's not necessarily to do

with Us as a product, but more

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the customer understanding the

business process transformations

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they'll have to be going through.

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So the implementation of meter will

be part of a broader change in the

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business because our customers have

worked out that operationalizing pricing.

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usage based pricing is, it's quite hard.

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You need to change the way you

do things in various places.

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Um, and it's not just about billing.

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It's about making sure that usage data

is available wherever it's needed and

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you can make changes to pricing easily so

that they're changing a bunch of stuff.

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And so a lot of what's going

on in the sales cycle is.

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Explaining that meter

can do what they need.

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And so there is quite a lot of high

contact, sort of high value add, um,

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conversation because naturally a customer

will be wary of whether a vendor can

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meet their business specific complexity.

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And it's one of the things that

differentiates me to that they

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can, but then they'll reach

a point where they go, right.

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I want to buy this.

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And then, and then it's sort of,

you shift into a slightly different

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phase where we're basically providing

them with reassurance that, They

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can minimize and manage the risks

of what looks quite complicated.

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Remembering this is

critical infrastructure.

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So, so yeah, so there is, I mean,

look, it's not usually long, but it's,

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um, you need to hold the customer's

hands because they're going through

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quite a scary transformation.

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Um, and once they've committed that there

is, you know, the implementation depends

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on, uh, Whether they're doing this in

a greenfield basis where they haven't

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had anything like this before, whether

they're replacing an existing tool, most

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of our customers are replacing something.

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So, you know, there's a little bit of work

to do to make sure that you're running

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everything in parallel, making sure that

it's working effectively and going live.

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But it's what we do all the

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Upendra Varma: This is

how long does it take?

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Are we talking about weeks,

months, quarters, right?

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Is it?

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Griffin Parry: It's a bit difficult

to give an average, but let's say

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from first sales contact through to go

live is probably about six months and

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sometimes the sales cycle could be a

little bit longer because they'll do

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more of their thinking and planning

about implementation before they commit.

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Sometimes it could be a bit shorter,

but then the implementation is a

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bit longer because you're answering

some of the questions in an

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implementation phase, but it's roughly

six months, something like that.

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I mean, if you're, if you're dealing

with a Greenfield customer, somebody

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who's never done it before, then.

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This and has no customers,

you know, it's a day.

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Uh, it's it's really the it's the

migration of existing customers and

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billing for existing customers onto onto a

new system that creates the the timeline.

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Upendra Varma: That makes a lot of sense.

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So Griffin, just talk about

that zero to one journey, right?

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How did it all start and how did you

get those first couple of customers?

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So just talk about that journey.

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Griffin Parry: So we're repeat

founders and you know, we have that

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classic story where we're solving for

pain when we had direct ourselves.

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So, uh, my co founder and I had a

business called GameSparks before, which

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was a cloud infrastructure business,

uh, focused on the video game space.

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And we deployed usage based pricing

strategies and We experienced

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a lot of it worked for us.

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It was great as a go to market strategy,

but we experienced a lot of operational

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and go to market pain associated with it.

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We sold that business to Amazon and

then worked at AWS in our own app for

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three years, and they're also a usage

based pricing company, and we saw that

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they had exactly the same problems.

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And we also saw the tooling that they

built to solve for those problems.

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So.

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We left, we became convinced there was

a big opportunity here and we left.

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AWS to found me to solve for it.

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Uh, We were still pretty humble though.

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We went we did a lot of discovery

conversations So, you know, we

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talked to mean, I would say 60.

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I actually think it's probably more

like 80 or 90 Companies and just

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to really understand the problem.

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Um, and then we started

Propositioning some of those

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discovery conversation people and

saying, look, we want to build this.

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Like, will you be a design partner?

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So, so we did the classic thing

of recruiting a small group of

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design partners and co creating

the platform with them, launching

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them, making sure they were happy,

using it properly in production,

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and then go properly to market.

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So that, that was our,

our nought to one journey.

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So it was actually nought to five, but

you know, you get, you get the idea.

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Upendra Varma: That makes a lot of sense.

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And how much have you raised in

terms of external funding so far

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and how big is your team today?

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Griffin Parry: We've raised about 31.

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5 million bucks in external funding.

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So we, you know, we chucked in a bit

of seed, pre seed funding ourselves.

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And then it's worth saying for context

that we founded the company at pretty

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much the best time you could ever found.

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I can't be doing our kind of thing.

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So like we founded it

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And so, yeah, we were just, that was

just getting into the go go times

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where, you know, it was very, there

was a lot of money around and it was

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relatively easy, relatively easy to raise.

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And because we were repeat

founders, we found, we basically

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raised quite a lot, quite quickly.

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So, so we raised the initial two and

a half million dollars seed round.

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And then eight or nine months later,

we got a preemptive offer for another

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10 million from a big, um, US VC.

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And then another 5 million about.

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Five or six months later

from another big U.

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S.

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B.

384

C.

385

Um, and then we raised a 14 million

series about eight months ago,

386

led by motion capital in the U.

387

K.

388

So it's one of those because because what

we're doing is critical infrastructure.

389

You have to build quite a lot of

product to reach a genuine MVP.

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I'm not sure whether we would have been

able to build me to had we not found it

391

in those funding conditions, but we did.

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So we are where we are.

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Upendra Varma: Makes sense.

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And how big of a team are

we talking about today?

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Griffin Parry: Oh, sorry about 60.

396

Upendra Varma: 60.

397

All right.

398

So, so just one last question here, right?

399

So what's that next milestone you're

targeting as a company and right?

400

How do you intend to get there?

401

Griffin Parry: What goes back to what

I said before, like my whole, my whole

402

world at the moment is about tinkering

and tuning and building a machine

403

that can scale for a long period.

404

So, I just want to, we're very

focused on the business at the moment.

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We just want to continue to deliver

that growth and for that growth

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to be efficient and profitable.

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I suspect the next big milestone

will be raising a series B.

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I mean, we're, we're relatively, um,

committed to the VC funding path.

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Um, it's different from

what we did last time.

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Uh, we're very lucky.

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We've got some great, we've

got some great investors.

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So yeah, I think that's the obvious.

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Next milestone, but we'll see.

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Upendra Varma: And what are

the internal goals, right?

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When, when you actually

take that money, right?

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So what do you, what are you looking at?

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Is it in terms of revenue or

what exactly are you looking at?

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Griffin Parry: I mean, there's some,

there's some rules of thumb out there

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in the market about, you know, how

much you, what kind of ARR you need

420

to have to be sort of in the Series

B zone, which is sort of, um, might,

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you'll know better than me, but it's

about sort of 10 million ARR is sort

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of where you need to be for Series B.

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But for me, it's not just that we

are, um, hitting the marks that

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would, uh, allow for us to raise.

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I also want to feel really confident

that I knew what we would be doing

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with the money that we would raise

because, you know, it's just a, it's

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just a milestone on the journey.

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It's not the destination.

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Upendra Varma: And what do

you plan to do with that money

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that you're going to raise?

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So it's

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Griffin Parry: Well, I mean, the

goal is to build, you know, a, uh,

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properly decent B2B software company.

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So, like, the goal that I have

in my head is 100 million of ARR.

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That's where I want to get to.

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We have some unfinished business

from our previous startup.

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We didn't get to that level.

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In fact, we, we, we didn't get

that level by, um, quite a way.

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So I would like to experience the journey

all the way through to that point.

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At that point, I've got no idea

whether I'd be suitable for the

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business anymore, but I would love

to go on the journey to that point.

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So, so yes, that, that's the, that's

the goal in the middle distance for us.

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Upendra Varma: all different.

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Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

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Hope you scale meter to

much, much greater heights.

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Griffin Parry: Cool.

447

Thank you.

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Thank you very much for having me.