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Founder Interview

How Ahead Intranet Reached $78K MRR and 60 Customers with Zero Churn (Interview with Co-Founder Pascal Grossniklaus)

Interview Date
January 12, 2022
Interviewee
Pascal GrossniklausCo-Founder
Watch
Watch the full interview

Company Metrics at Interview Time

MRR (2022)

$78K

Customers (2022)

60

ARPU (2022)

$1,300/mo (CHF 1,200)

Gross Churn (2022)

0%

Team Size (2022)

8

Historical Snapshot

These numbers were reported by Pascal Grossniklaus during his interview with Nathan Latka recorded in January 2022 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Ahead Intranet’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • 01Ahead Intranet had 60 customers and about $78K a month in revenue as of January 2022
  • 02The average customer paid about CHF 1,200 (~$1,300) a month, covering roughly 500 seats
  • 03Revenue grew from around $21K a month a year earlier to $78K a month, more than tripling year over year
  • 04The company raised about 500K at a 5M cap from friends, family, and fools in 2020
  • 05The parent agency invested about 700K into the SaaS spinout and took no equity in it
  • 06Gross churn was zero at the time, though Pascal called it too early to judge and expected a real read in one to two years
  • 07The team was 8 people full time, including 4 engineers and 1.5 sales reps carrying quota
  • 08The company was active in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, with Spain as a planned expansion market
  • 09Pascal had been building intranets by hand through his agency since around 2006, and spun Ahead Intranet out in March 2020
  • 10The ahead x community of internal communications professionals was a key customer acquisition channel

Company Metrics at Time of Interview

MetricValueSource
MRR (2022)$78KFounder interview, Jan 2022
MRR (2021)$21KFounder interview, Jan 2022
Revenue Run Rate (2022)$936KFounder interview, Jan 2022
Revenue Run Rate (2021)$252KFounder interview, Jan 2022
Customers (2022)60Founder interview, Jan 2022
ARPU (2022)$1,300/mo (CHF 1,200)Founder interview, Jan 2022
Seats per Average Customer (2022)500Founder interview, Jan 2022
Gross Churn (2022)0%Founder interview, Jan 2022
Team Size (2022)8Founder interview, Jan 2022
Engineers (2022)4Founder interview, Jan 2022
Sales Reps (quota-carrying) (2022)1.5Founder interview, Jan 2022
Funding Raised (friends and family, currency not stated)500K at a 5M capFounder interview, Jan 2022
Agency Investment in SaaS (currency not stated)700KFounder interview, Jan 2022
FoundedMarch 2020Founder interview, Jan 2022

Growth Breakdown

Revenue

Ahead Intranet was doing about $78K a month in revenue in January 2022, up from around $21K a month a year earlier, more than tripling year over year. The average customer pays about CHF 1,200 (~$1,300) a month for roughly 500 seats.

Customers

The company had 60 customers at the time of the interview, serving larger organizations with more than 500 employees, particularly in manufacturing, retail, and wholesale. Pascal noted that almost none of these customers came from the parent agency, as the two businesses serve different buyer profiles.

Team

The full-time team at the SaaS business numbered 8 people, with 4 engineers and 1.5 quota-carrying sales reps. Pascal himself carried half a quota alongside one full-time sales person.

Funding

When the company was founded in 2020 it raised about 500K at a 5M cap from friends, family, and fools. Pascal gave those amounts without naming a currency, and Ahead prices in Swiss francs. The agency invested about 700K but took no equity - Pascal and his two partners each own a third of the SaaS personally. Pascal stated the company intended to remain bootstrapped unless it pursued international expansion.

Growth Strategy

Community-Led Growth

Pascal built the ahead x community, a closed network of internal communications professionals at larger companies. Members exchange best practices on strategy, culture, and values communication, and referrals from this community produced the shortest deal cycles of any channel.

Vertical Focus

Rather than selling broadly, the team concentrated on manufacturing, retail, and wholesale industries where deskless workers are most prevalent. This focus allowed them to build relevant case studies and credibility within specific buyer communities.

Webinar Content

Ahead records webinars from its closed community events and publishes them on its website. The community itself is not linked publicly and stays fairly closed, but the referrals coming out of it close fastest.

Agency Spinout Advantage

Fourteen years of hand-building intranets through the agency taught Pascal and his partners exactly who the buyer was. They marketed and sold an MVP before the SaaS company even existed, and once it did, the agency funded the spinout with about 700K without taking any equity in it.

Geographic Expansion Planning

At the time of the interview the company was active in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Pascal identified Spain as the next target market and indicated that international expansion would be the trigger for raising additional outside capital.

Best Quotes

“Well, these are mainly larger companies with more than 500 employees with a lot of, let's say, deskless workers. And because at the moment they have quite a problem to to reach these people. So world when we look at the global workforce, 80% of the workforce are not working on a computer on a day to day basis. But everyone has a smartphone in their pocket.”
“In average, it's around it depends on the size of the customer. So the average customer size is about 1,200 Swiss francs a month.”
“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 com platform, this is an internal project for them that takes some effort, so they are not going to switch so fast.”

What Happened Next

This interview captured Ahead Intranet at an early but fast-moving stage, with $936K in ARR, 60 customers, and zero churn as of January 2022. Pascal had set a goal of reaching $1M to $2M in revenue by the end of 2022 and was evaluating Spain as the next geographic market. These figures are a point-in-time snapshot from the recording date and may not reflect the company's current performance. Visit the Ahead Intranet company profile on GetLatka for the most recent available data.

View Ahead Intranet’s current profile and metrics

Full Transcript

Chapters

Introduction and What Ahead Intranet Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Pascal Grossniklaus. Over the past twenty years, he's learned hundreds of digital transformation projects that culture is the number one success factor of change. With their SaaS intranet 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?

Pascal Grossniklaus

00:21>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

00:22Alright. Absolutely. So if people wanna follow along, they can go to aheadintranet.com. Who's buying the tool? Who are you building us for?

Target Customer: Deskless Workers at Large Companies

Pascal Grossniklaus

00:30>> Well, these are mainly larger companies with more than 500 employees with a lot of, let's say, deskless workers. And because at the moment they have quite a problem to to reach these people. So world when we look at the global workforce, 80% 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

01:04>> these people with a blackboard or by their direct report or just by

01:13>> yeah. You know? Yeah. By the direct report. Let's say like that.

Nathan Latka

01:17So it it give me an example of a of a team, if you can name a customer, name them. But what is a deskless worker? Who's an example customer?

Pascal Grossniklaus

01:25>> An example customer for it is a manufacturing company. It's a big one with 8,000 employees. They produce aluminum 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

01:46>> during corona, the all the desk workers, the administration people, the salespeople, they worked from home. So they they didn't were able to communicate to these people what is going on, what their strategy is, what's the measurements are. So it was quite difficult for these companies.

Pricing and ARPU

Nathan Latka

02:06I 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?

Pascal Grossniklaus

02:14>> Yes. Exactly. Per month per user. What's the average though? In average, it's around it depends on the size of the customer. So the average customer size is about 1,200 Swiss francs a month.

Nathan Latka

02:33Swiss francs. Okay. Hold on. How do we convert that to USD?

Pascal Grossniklaus

02:37>> Yeah. It's around it's would say, $1,300.

Nathan Latka

02:41Yeah. Per month?

Pascal Grossniklaus

02:43>> Per month. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

02:44Okay. And if someone's paying you $1,300 per month, how many seats is that for, probably?

Pascal Grossniklaus

02:51>> This is around 500 seats.

Nathan Latka

02:54I see. Okay. Very cool. Let's get the backstory here. When did you launch the company? What year?

Company Launch and Background

Pascal Grossniklaus

03:00>> In the year 2020, March 2020.

Nathan Latka

03:03Okay. So fairly now.

Pascal Grossniklaus

03:04>> Before the pandemic started in Switzerland.

Nathan Latka

03:07Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So launch in 2020. When did you get your first dollar of revenue? Do you remember?

Pascal Grossniklaus

03:12>> 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 build 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

03:48>> customers.

Nathan Latka

03:49Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:13your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:37get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

04:59not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:25going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

05:47you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the

Agency History: From 2006 to the SaaS Spinout

Nathan Latka

06:13interview. When did you build what year did you build manually your first intranet for your first customer?

Pascal Grossniklaus

06:19>> Well, this was around 2006, 2007. It was for a large, large telecommunication company, and they had the idea to replace their printed employee magazine with a digital platform.

Nathan Latka

06:35So, Pascal, is it fair to say you effectively were running an agency from 2006 to 2020 manually building intranets?

Pascal Grossniklaus

06:43>> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

06:45How how big did you grow that? What was the the your highest revenue year? How much did you do?

Pascal Grossniklaus

06:49>> Well, this thing this company still exists because we didn't just do intranets. 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 30,000,000.

Nathan Latka

07:07A $30,000,000?

Pascal Grossniklaus

07:09>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

07:10What did it— $30,000,000? Yeah. $30,000,000. 30,000,000. Yeah. Yep. So so so that that's what you did last year in revenue. In 2021, it did 30,000,000 in revenue?

Pascal Grossniklaus

07:21>> Yeah. With the old company. Yes.

Nathan Latka

07:23Okay. And so what do you mean when you say old company? Do you own equity in the agency still?

Pascal Grossniklaus

07:28>> Yeah. I'm still the vice president of this company, but I'm not actually working at this company on a operating level.

Nathan Latka

07:37Do you have equity at the agency? Is it your is it your agency?

Pascal Grossniklaus

07:40>> Yes. One third is mine.

Nathan Latka

07:42Oh, very cool. Okay. So when you how did you have the conversation with your partners who own 60% of the agency and say, hey, wanna spin this software out? How did you guys spin it out?

Pascal Grossniklaus

07:52>> Well, they honestly, they helped to invest in the new product. So the new spin off, the aheadintranet, they also have a stake in there financially, but they are not working on it.

Nathan Latka

08:05They still

Pascal Grossniklaus

08:06>> run the old company, my two friends, and I'm fully responsible for ahead.

The Agency's 700K Investment and Zero Equity

Nathan Latka

08:12So for the spin out, a couple questions there. How much money did the agency invest in a new software company?

Pascal Grossniklaus

08:20>> Well, this was around 700 k.

Nathan Latka

08:24Okay. 700,000. And how much equity does the agency own in the SaaS company?

Pascal Grossniklaus

08:30>> Nothing.

Spinout Ownership: One Third Each

Nathan Latka

08:32Okay. How much do your two friends own of the SaaS company?

Pascal Grossniklaus

08:37>> One third as well.

Nathan Latka

08:39They each own one third or they own 60%? Each

Pascal Grossniklaus

08:43>> owns one third of it. Yes.

Nathan Latka

08:45Oh, okay. Got it. So you own 30%. They each own 30% for 95%, whatever.

Pascal Grossniklaus

08:51>> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

08:52I see. I see. Okay. Very interesting. Okay. 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?

Pascal Grossniklaus

09:04>> When we founded the company in 2020, for the go to market, we raised some money from family, friends, and fools.

Nathan Latka

09:16How much?

Pascal Grossniklaus

09:16>> About 500,000, 500,000. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:20Would you have $5,000,000 cap or something?

Pascal Grossniklaus

09:24>> Yes. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

09:25Yep. And and is that all you've raised today?

Pascal Grossniklaus

09:28>> That's all we raised today. Yes.

Nathan Latka

09:30Love 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 SaaS company pretty quick. How many customers do you have today on the SaaS business?

Pascal Grossniklaus

09:42>> Well, that's a difficult story because, you know, the agency is still doing intranets. They're still building intranets. So that's one of the reasons why we took 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.

Customer Count and Revenue Today

Nathan Latka

10:09Okay. So how many customers does the SaaS business have today?

Pascal Grossniklaus

10:13>> 60.

Nathan Latka

10:14Six zero?

Pascal Grossniklaus

10:15>> Yes. Six zero.

Nathan Latka

10:16And and can I take, Pascal, that 60 customers times $1,300 a month average? You're doing about $78,000 per month right now on revenue?

Pascal Grossniklaus

10:26>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

10:27Wow. Okay. That's still that's impressive. Where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?

Pascal Grossniklaus

10:33>> Yeah. We we were around 21 k.

Nathan Latka

10:3821,000 a month a year ago. So over three x year over year growth. If you're not growing by selling to your old agency customers, where are you finding new customers?

Growth Channels: Community and Vertical Focus

Pascal Grossniklaus

10:49>> 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, because we learned that these internal comm responsible people in larger companies, they they love to have an exchange. How do you communicate internally about strategy, about culture, about values inside a company? So

11:27>> they are very keen to have this exchange. So we we start to build this com this this aheadex community where they get so

Nathan Latka

11:36Where where can I find the community on your website? Do you link to it anywhere?

Pascal Grossniklaus

11:40>> No. It's not linked yet. It's it's quite closed. You'll find some webinars that we recorded out of this I see. Out of this events. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:49Yeah. I see that. That makes a lot I mean, community is a very real asset. It's a it's a it's a distribution channel that you own as a SaaS company, and I see sixty four minutes, sixty two minutes, fifty eight minutes, these webinars you've recorded with folks in that community, it sounds like.

Pascal Grossniklaus

12:04>> 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. Mhmm. Those we have we we earned the trust already through the community.

Nathan Latka

12:21Yeah. This makes a lot of sense. Okay. So the community is up and going. You're grabbing a lot of growth there today. You've raised only 500,000 from outside investors plus 700,000 from the agency. You're you're about to break a million dollar run rate. Congratulations, by the way. That's exciting.

2022 Goal: Doubling Revenue

Pascal Grossniklaus

12:38>> What's the goal for 2022?

Nathan Latka

12:39How much do you hope to grow?

Pascal Grossniklaus

12:41>> Yeah. We wanna again double our our revenue. And, yeah, we would hope to go close 1 to 2,000,000 by end of twenty twenty two.

Nathan Latka

12:53Any plans to raise this year or you wanna stay bootstrapped?

Pascal Grossniklaus

12:57>> No. At the moment, we would like to stay bootstrapped.

13:02>> 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.

Team of Eight and Zero Churn

Nathan Latka

13:21Yep. Yep. Tell me about your team today. How many are full time just at the SaaS business?

Pascal Grossniklaus

13:26>> We are eight people full time just for the SaaS business.

Nathan Latka

13:30And how many are engineers?

Pascal Grossniklaus

13:32>> Four of them.

Nathan Latka

13:34Okay. How many sales reps with a quota?

Pascal Grossniklaus

13:38>> It's The quota is like 150%. So it's me, half, and then one full time.

Nathan Latka

13:46Okay. So two people carrying a quota. You Alright. And 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 what your net dollar retention is?

Pascal Grossniklaus

13:58>> 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 com platform, this is an internal project for them that takes some effort, so they are not going to switch so

14:29>> fast. So there 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 it in one or two years.

Famous Five

Nathan Latka

14:42Regardless if it's a heck of a story, I love that you learn about your customers through the agency before getting into the SaaS business. Let's wrap up here with the famous five, Pascal. Number one, favorite business book?

Pascal Grossniklaus

14:54>> Eric Reece, The Lean Startup.

Nathan Latka

14:57Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Pascal Grossniklaus

15:00>> Satya Nadella.

Nathan Latka

15:02Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building ahead?

Pascal Grossniklaus

15:08>> HubSpot.

Nathan Latka

15:10Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Pascal Grossniklaus

15:14>> Seven.

Nathan Latka

15:15Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Pascal Grossniklaus

15:18>> Married, three kids.

Nathan Latka

15:20Oh, wow. How old are you how old are you?

Pascal Grossniklaus

15:23>> Oh, 42.

15:25>> 42.

Nathan Latka

15:26Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Pascal Grossniklaus

15:30>> Something I wish I would knew when I was 20.

Nathan Latka

15:33Yep.

Pascal Grossniklaus

15:35>> Or that failing fast is a good thing.

Nathan Latka

15:39Guys, there you have it. From 2006 to 2020, and it include goes on today. They built an agency manually building intranets for B2B brands. They do $30,000,000 in revenue annually with over 200 employees. He said, You know what? We should spend out a SaaS from this agency. So he said, You know what? His two buddies who are co founders in the agency stuck with the agency. He spun out the SaaS. His buddies own 60% of the

16:01SaaS. He owns 30%. They're scaling. They raised $500,000 in a pre seed round in 2019 to get it going, and then the agency put in $700,000 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.

Pascal Grossniklaus

16:20>> Thank you very much, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

16:23One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at one p. M. Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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

16:47Thursday 1PM Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition,

17:10a 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 SaaS 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

17:31saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and 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

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