How Activtrak CEO Jana Wilson grew Activtrak to $50M revenue and 4.5K customers in 2025.

hello everybody my guest today is an Tana is idler he's 35 years old married with two kids living in Dallas Texas building a SAS built buildings a speed V product since 2003 his first startup grew from 1 to 110 employees and zero to 2 million bucks per year in four years second one to four point six million AR and six years his areas of expertise product marketing UI UX building teams and early stages of startups now building a company called active track Anton are you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely okay so what is active track do and how do you make money I feels like it's improving how company work and essentially what we are doing is we've started bringing enterprise level technology to small business and now we've learned so much about small business that's actually the required opposite you're kind of bringing drive and courage from small business to enterprise and interesting and so what's a customer pay on average per month for this on average they pay like 86 87 bucks as of today but they don't really like outrageous because you know average monthly payment it's like average tempo body temperature for like average patient in a hospital it's it's pretty much tells you nothing in our case we have very different sizes of customers different use cases and those use cases you know some of them actually pays about 50 bucks and we have cohorts in place like hundreds and thousands of officers and and how many customers have II scaled to today 45 44 56 as of now I'm sorry there's a bunch of numbers there how many customers it's a forty four hundred and fifty-six customers as a 4456 correct that's very specific do you listen to the show yes I didn't say okay so 4456 customers at a seven bucks a pop puts you about three hundred eighty seven thousand bucks per month right now in revenue is that right actually yeah yeah no no cheek no cheek sheet but is that is that accurate every bit we felt like 378,000 bucks and that's great okay and what's growth look like so a year ago today what we're doing per month we are like as of today we are growing about like sixty percent on an annual basis total gross have actually accelerated so like you know what it was last year I think it was more on fifth year and since the beginning you're growing quite consider is you wait wait so Anton the question was about a year ago today how much were you doing it if you're growing sixty percent you're brighter like three so thank you to live here at four point five million a year are and we are looking to hit five and your own January so it last year we were doing like your own see if you will give me exact date I can give you a precise number November 27th November twenty sorry November 1st 2017 what was there are three hundred that's okay so I was MRC yeah 365 days ago it was two hundred and forty five thousand point six and now you're 378 yeah that's great healthy so you're really like four fifty six percent annual growth that's great have you done this bootstrapped or did you raise capital yes absolutely boosted it that's because it took was quite a well I mean in Thompson's time it's kind of funny I've been reflecting on our numbers last month and like last month in October we've actually added the same number of MRRR as we've added in first eighteen month it's so it took us like a year in the hub to you know with like about 18 K and M our thirst is worst once that's great what's turn today depending on like would you know what kind of shirt do you mean because we kind of monitor logo churn and we monitor emmaroach or tomorrow turn a mother shown like net negative net ever returns actually negative and we're quite proud of it so like earlier I brought up the fact that you know you started actually you know gross year ago and part of the reason is because he started focusing on on churn and on customer success in January started selling new whether use cases and and and we improved the way we sell actually and the way we understand customers so now recent several months as you actually have like negative net limit us what's gross revenue turn per month gross revenue churn just a sec again open technically we were like about percent or like in October it was 1.5 negative in Yemen a net what's go it's gross Joran gross a mirage churn it was 2% in October it was 2% in September it was 2.8 okay that's great okay so about two percent gross revenue churn and then it sounds like you're expanding each month by about 3% to get to net negative one percent yeah probably true and what is underneath what is what is happening is we are technically charting our smallest customer so we have like to you can roughly divide our customers into groups small customers who are signing up for monthly plans and they stay with us for at four five six months and then you know we have a very strong three plans of elements always kind of like a choice of do I really want to pay this 50 bucks a month oh and and like Michalik data from five workstations or would I be ok if you just switch back to three plan and pay nothing and they get monthly invoices so for them like every monthly invoice it's like a point of free consideration do I want to spend 50 bucks on a district or will they rather say it like an HP or like Netflix especially especially if it's a small business it it's you know most of those guys or small businesses they can account every penny and operate in a very frugal way for large companies it's not so important so what is it companies but typically the interests of all they see analytical kind of use of the product plus they stay with us for much longer period of time and they buy more seeds so those smaller guys are kind of churning but sometimes getting back to us and sometimes I see them you know getting back and forth five six times in a row but a larger company feels like 30 50 employees and up they they tend to stick for really long time and they center tend to expand and why I don't and so so let's dive in here put this on a timeline for me what your G launch company in our first sale our first solution was sold in February 2012 but when did you launch the company the company likely legal entity was interpreted My partner in 1995 we met each other like in 2000 when I start writing the code it was probably 2011 so it since it was bootstrap it was kind of like you know hello they both works from home we had our daily classical hipster meeting and in Starbucks and do you like and I you know we were thinking what what what really to do my partnership had a tremendous expertise in everything that has to do is like system level code you mean in Windows and security and these kind of things I have with my peers start up ahead are quite some experience of beauty like the previously was called web based on just just because again we're short on time so when I try and stick here right so 2011 you start coding 2012 you saw your first plan with team size today how many people 27 guys in in our office in Dallas yeah we intentionally decided not to build the remote team so it's like it's like rule and the policy did you are you guys in Deep Ellum in Dallas no we actually it's it's like iconic powers that you've seen on the Daoist yeah do you ever go to Deep Ellum or no yes sometimes it's like a turkey throat coming up do you like it yeah absolutely absolutely have you been today have you been to the new the machine shop bar at the Deep Ellum hostel no no no but yeah again I probably going to be in a couple of weeks or like in a week or so sonic era we were just there we were just there last weekend and it's an it's growing so quickly and full disclosure I'm an investor in some companies over there so that's why I asked what your thoughts are on it what is um so you know what do you pay to get a new $85 a month customer it's a great question because on January 1st this year we've decided to almost kind of stop all over paid acquisition campaigns just to see how I dependent are we like from Google being and that kind of stuff so there's an experiment Iranian so far we Iranian it quite successfully how much were you spending per month when we started in 2008 for you 12 our idea like you know you're reading a lot of Glocks and industry kind of things and we decided that we want to spend like up to 30% of our revenue on pretty position and from first couple of years here we are breaking in this way you know nobody knew about us so we needed some attention and project at some point we realized that actually with the freemium model is our major kind of growth engine because genuinely people are talking about such solutions in the way they okay there is product a in the product B and there is active track and it's absolutely free it's not like trial it's a full-size product and it allows you to collect data from where C workstations for your charge and we have this have hundreds and hundreds of accounts basically coming to us organically and in some cases like you in super sorry how many how many people on the team are focused on content marketing our sales or marketing onboarding kind of like you know list right side we have our teams played almost equal in our office like what 13 guys are in sales and marketing and customer success and support and like 13 guys are developers ok so if you look at your fully weighted CAC you have to include those 13 people on their salaries and all that divided by into the new customers you get per month so do you know your fully weighted CAC is or no no you don't you don't track it yeah because like we also explain mentality and very the stage when you're trying to attend to see what really works like we redesigning the team constantly moving people around how are you how are you eating so much organic traffic like what's the strides in SEO play it again it took us we've intentionally designed it decided not to do any in your official SEO originally you know it it was like 2012 and everybody you're buying links and it sort of even though how are you driving your grocery you basically given like just of all we've we've concentrated on on simplifying our own board ian as as much as possible and you know gettin rid of all the obstacles and making sure that 33 percent of our new visitors actually creating an account at active track and how many came under name and then about 50% of those who created and I can actually download and install a software and it's kind of like and very importantly get important for us and then you have to download the software yes you have to download the endpoint ok down ok so 33% create an account of website visits 50% of those actually download the software how many can work to paid and probably also like depending on scale of our marketing aggressiveness it's both like 3/4 percent on average can convert to pay interesting so would you in order to drive like additional growth I mean would you go out and raise additional capital do you want to raise capital or no it's always been like ever since we were able to reach 1.5 million and any record I mean you basically stay in it like two guys in the truck mode mode like it was just two of us an AWS account and the best say and ever since that we were approached by a lot of different like you know she finally she said fine and she made sure capital groups were like you know more like mature venture guys and we never really have an idea of you know how to actually deploy capital and what particular metric do do we want to increase and improve so you always have this feeling that it would be better to grow organic yeah there's nothing wrong organically but like you used the word organically but it's actually not mean it's not organic you have a sales team you have 13 people you know what they're doing every day so it can you do more of that and get more organic like yeah yeah you know like during last six months or so I've been reflecting on this and now I think that maybe it's not about one particular silver bullet it's more about spending a little bit more on pretty much 100% yeah there's never a silver bullet it's about like little 1% improvements across many things oh yeah maybe maybe this what what you do in the wood for five years he would tend to find silver bullet well you're doing pretty well I mean you got 230 no 398 grand per month in revenue bootstrap that's pretty good but again it took us 18 months just to get like just in UK so probably if you had some capital you know and they reinvested in development and sale market from a be looked at venture debt by chance would you ever do venture debt yeah discussions is all sorts of guys like this means I knew in financing people is ensured that it's like Silicon Valley where it would be talked to you for venture debt for venture debt I guess it was like I don't know sauce capital is considered venture there guys but I think they're sort of in this realm so basically they they loan you money based on your mor matrix and there are matrix yeah that's right but again the only con this playground for like five six years so you've probably focused most of the kind of typical players in the market very good all right Anton let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book number two it okay let me ask a different question then it sounds like you've listened to the podcast are you enjoying it yes yes I previously have been I saw that a couple of times because the companies I knew mentioned and and then I can again Pinterest and started listening closer that's awesome all right number two as they're under the radar CEO that you're following or studying it's very related to like you know business books I think that you know probably but the business book this I really like and admire is outliers and they can't explain in a way it probably doesn't really make sense to follow one particular CEO number three what do you guys use for your billing system it's regularly what do you use it's really yeah and chart mobile and chart mobile and okay number four how many hours of sleep to get every night oh I have two kids the deeply into support in like third tier is coming next week so I should wait five hours five hours and three kids and you're married yes that's amazing as of today still cookies were three yeah and how are you I'm 35 35 last question Anton what he was your 20 year old self new be more confident and and gonna start things on your own as as soon as possible don't can get up alright guys be more confident there you have it again Anton founded active track free employee monitoring software and productivity measurement that was back many years ago call it let's see 2011 now 27 people based mostly in Dallas Texas 4,400 customers paying on average 85 bucks a month so doing 378 grand per month right now that's up from 245 grand just a year ago they've done this all bootstrapped which is great two percent gross revenue turin per month three percent expansions so net negative one percent revenue churn every single month that's obviously great too early or they don't really tracked kak right now cuz a lot of their growth is coming just from organically and their team of 13 sales and marketing people anton thanks for taking us to the top thank you