How Ahead Intranet grew Ahead Intranet to $3M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is pascal gross nicholas over the past 20 years he's learned hundreds of digital transformation projects that culture is the number one success factor of change with their sas internet application called ahead they're looking hard to help organizations adopt a growth mindset that fosters employee engagement innovation and customer satisfaction pascal you ready to take us to the top yes all right so if people want to follow along we can go to ahead internet.com who's buying the tool who are you building this for well these are mainly larger companies with more than 500 employees with a lot of let's say desk less workers and because at the moment they have quite a problem to to reach these people so world where we look at the global workforce 80 percent of the workforce are not working on a computer on a day-to-day basis but everyone has a smartphone in their pocket so we have the year 2022 and still the most companies communicate to these people with a blackboard or by their direct report or just by um yeah you know yeah by the direct report let's say like that so it give me an example of a of a team if you can name a customer name them but what is a desk list worker who is an example customer an example customer for it is a manufacturing company it's a big one with 8 000 employees they produce aluminium wheels and they have factories all over the world like mexico us china eastern europe and yet they the whole day these workers standing on a machine and during corona the all the desk workers the administration people the sales people they work from home so they they didn't were able to communicate to these people what is going on what's their strategy is what the measurements are so it was kind quite difficult for these companies i see and so these companies when you look at all your customers today on average what are these companies paying you per month to use your tool yes exactly per month per user in average it's around it depends on the size of the customer so the average customer size is 1200 swiss francs a month swiss francs okay hold on how do we convert that to usd yeah it's around this would say 1 300 yeah per month per month yeah okay and if someone's paying you 1300 per month how many seats is that for probably this is around 500 seats i see okay very cool let's get the back story here when did you launch the company what year uh in the year 2020 march 2012 okay so fairly before the pandemic started in switzerland yeah yeah okay so launch in 2020 when did you get your first dollar of revenue do you remember yeah it was it it was already before so maybe a little bit of background story we founded the company as a professional service company where we builded hundreds of intranets for companies but more and more i was unsatisfied with the outcome of these intranets so we started kind of a side project with a couple of friends and we already marketed before we had an actual company so we already did like mvp and sold it to potential customers oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview when did you build what year did you build manually your first internet for your first customer well this was around 2006 so 2007. it was for a large large telecommunication company and they had the idea to replace their printed employee magazine with a digital platform so pascal is it fair to say you effectively were running an agency from 2006 to 2020 manually building internets yeah exactly exactly how big did you grow that what was the your highest revenue year how much did you do well this stem this company still exists because we didn't just to internet we were a professional service provider for it projects we did software programming this company still exists and we are around 200 employees with a revenue of more than 30 million a three zero million yes three zero thirty yeah three zero thirty yeah yeah so so so that that that's what you did last year in revenue in 2021 it had 30 million in revenue yeah with the old company yes okay and so what do you mean when you say old company do you own equity in the agency still yeah i'm still the vice president of this company but i'm not actually working at this company on the operating level do you have equity at the agency is it your is it your agency yes one third is mine oh very cool okay so when you how did you have the conversation with your partners who owned 60 of the agency and say hey i want to spin this software out how did you guys spin it out well they honestly they helped to invest in the new product so the new spin of the ahead intranet they also have a stake in there financially but they are not working on it so they still run an old company my two friends and i'm fully responsible for ahead so for this spin out a couple questions there how much money did the agency invest in the new software company well this was around 700k okay hundred thousand and how much equity does the agency own in the sas company nothing okay how much do your two friends own of the sas company um one third as well they each own one third or take their own sixty percent each earns one third of it yes oh okay got it so you own thirty percent they each own thirty percent for ninety ninety five percent whatever yeah exactly exactly i see i see okay um very interesting okay um so 700 000 invested from the agency so is it fair to say you guys are bootstrapped otherwise you haven't raised any traditional capital um when we founded the company in 2020 for the go to market we raised some money from family friends and fools how much half a million 500 000 yeah would you do a five million dollar cap or something yes exactly yep and and is that all you've raised today that's all we raised today yes love that okay so you get your you have a built-in customer base from all these folks that used your agency so i'm assuming you were able to turn revenue on the sas company pretty quick how many customers do you have today on the sas business well that's a difficult story because you know the agency is still doing internet they still building internet so that that's one of the reasons why we took uh ahead out of it because there's we started the competition and we said okay that's not healthy for both of us so we almost have no customers from the agency because these are is another type of customers okay so how many customers does the sas business have today uh sixty six zero yes six zero and can i take pascal that's 60 customers times 1 300 a month average you're doing about 78 000 per month right now in revenue exactly wow okay that's still that's impressive where were you exactly one year ago do you remember uh yeah we were around 21k 21 000 a month a year ago so over 3x year where your growth if you're not growing by selling to your old agency customers where are you finding new customers that's the most difficult part so so we start we learned...