Map My Customers Founder and CEO Matthew Sniff is no stranger to what it takes to run a business. He first became an entrepreneur when he was just 16 years old. His first business venture came alongside his father, Thomas Sniff, when the two developed demonstration boards for products to show flooring retailers across the country.
During his time at the College of William and Mary (where he was the Class of ’15), Sniff deepened his interest in technology, building platforms such as the university marketplace-slash-social network CollegeCambio and photography marketplace PhotoRankr. But it was Sniff’s father, a sales representative and manager in the flooring industry, who would again inspire his son to create his current startup Map My Customers, a business that now has an annual revenue run rate of $1-2 million.
Map My Customers—which recently closed its $2.6 million Series A funding round led by Florida-based Las Olas Venture Capital, with participation from Rubicon Venture Capital (NY/San Francisco) and the Triangle’s own Cofounders Capital—began first as an idea to help Sniff’s father with a work pain point. Namely: there was no form of location intelligence to boost his sales in the field.
“He’s worked in the flooring industry for 40 years,” Sniff said. “He approached me, like, ‘Hey, Matthew, I’ve got a problem. I want to figure out how to best organize my week for attacking as many businesses as possible in the field.’ So what started out as a really simple tool to help my dad basically grew into something that was used by a ton of other salespeople in the field.”
Map My Customers, founded by Matthew in 2015 and based in Raleigh, provides a geo-spatial productivity tool to around 100,000 people using the app. Sniff said Map My Customers allows sales representatives to optimize their routes and better manage their territory.
“It’s pretty much your eyes and ears on the ground,” Sniff said. “It helps you do everything much faster.”
The company charges monthly prices per license ranging from $30 to $65, with customers typically paying on an annual basis. Since most B2B software is developed for people who work behind a desk, Sniff said, Map My Customers is the next generation of software for field use.
“Our software has been built specifically for the purpose of use in the field on mobile—so geo-spatial-first, mobile-first,” Sniff said. “Everything about our platform is built to be fast, easy to use, intuitive. So ultimately, like Slack’s mission is to make people’s work lives easier, our mission is very similar to Slack’s. Except our mission is more explicitly: we work together to make people’s work lives easier in the field.”
Seeking Diversity As A Strength
Alongside this mission, Sniff said he put a special emphasis on building a diverse team from the very beginning. Around 70 percent of Map My Customers employees are from a minority group, he said.
“That’s something when you’re building a team early on you have to emphasize and put a focus toward because if you don’t, you won’t build a diverse team,” Sniff said. “I think diverse teams outperform non-diverse teams each and every day.”
Moving forward, Sniff wants to double Map My Customers’ size and potentially become a multi-product company.
The startup has a local impact as well. While Map My Customers has a sales and marketing office in New York City, the startup is HQ’d right here in Raleigh. Sniff said the tech ecosystem in Raleigh is phenomenal, but he hopes his startup can get even more people interested in early stage companies.
“It’s not that we’ve made no mistakes while we were building our team in Raleigh,” Sniff said. “But I think for us it’s about building a close-knit culture, a kinship between our team members. Now we’d like to be able to impact the culture in Raleigh by getting more people excited about working for startup companies and taking risks.”
