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 a lot in this process and we started to focus really on on industries like manufacturing retail wholesales and we started to build a community with our customers we call it the ahead x community and because we learned that these internal com responsible people in larger companies they they love to have an exchange how do you come communicate internally about strategy about culture about values inside a company so they are very keen to have this exchange so we we start to build this com this this ahead x community where they get so where can i find the community on your website do you link to it anywhere no it's not linked yet it's it's quite closed you'll find some webinars that we recorded out of this uh out of this event yeah yeah i see that that makes a lot i mean community is a very real asset it's it's it's a distribution channel that you own as a sas company and i see 64 minutes 62 minutes 58 minutes these webinars you've recorded with folks in that community it sounds like yes exactly exactly and this is is really very valuable because when they recommend us to potential customers that's the we have the shortest deal cycles i would say because we have we earned the trust already through the community yeah this makes a lot of sense okay so the community is up and going you're having a lot of growth there today uh you've raised only 500 000 from outside investors plus 700 000 from the agency you're about to break a million dollar run rate congratulations by the way that's exciting what's the goal for 2022 how much do you hope to grow yeah we want to again uh double our our revenue and yeah we would hope to go close one to two million by end of 2022 any plans to raise this year you want to stay bootstrapped no at the moment we would like to stay bootstrapped but at the moment we are currently active in the region of switzerland germany and austria but we plan to do a go to market in other countries spain is a hot candidate at the moment and if we do that we think about raising money yep yep tell me about your team today how many are full-time just at the sas business we are eight people full-time just for the sas business and how many are engineers uh four of them okay how many sales reps with a quota it's uh the quota is like 150 so it's me half and then one full time okay so two people carrying a quota you and them all right very cool you're too early probably to chat about i mean churn do you know what your churn is do you have do you know what your net dollar retention is so we have no churn at the moment so this can be good and bad this means that we are not too progressive in sales and not too forcey but on the other side it's also a bit in the business because when you imagine a company with more than thousand employees when they introduce something like an internal comp platform this is an internal project for them that takes some effort so they are not going to switch so fast so they are studies that normally these platforms when they are established they last for at least four years so at the moment it's quite early to say how the churn will be we're gonna see in one or two years regardless if it's a heck of a story i love that you learn about your customers through the agency before getting into the sas business uh let's wrap up here with the famous five pascal number one favorite business book uh eric reese the lean startup number two is there a ceo you're following or studying satya nadella number three what's your favorite online tool for building uh ahead a hubspot number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh seven okay and what's your situation married single kids uh married three kids oh wow how old are you how old are the uh are you oh 42 42 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. something i wish i would knew when i was 20. yep or that failing fast is a good thing guys there you have it from 2006 to 2020 and it include goes on today they built an agency manually building internets for b2b brands they do 30 million dollars in revenue annually with over 200 employees he said you know what we should spend on a sass from this agency so he said you know what his two buddies who are co-founders of the agency stuck with the agency he spun out the sas his buddies own 60 of the sas he owns 30 they're scaling they raised 500 000 bucks in a pre-seed round then 2019 to get it going and then the agency put in 700 grand to keep it scaling the company just broke a million dollar run rate up from 21 000 a month just a year ago with a team of eight love stories like this i predict big things for these guys pascal thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya