How Aisleplanner CEO Christina Farrow grew to $10.6M revenue and 8K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is rob farrow he's got 25 plus years of experience in building designing and implementing strategic marketing programs and is a firm believer in asking why in challenging norms throughout his queries been fortunate to have worked with several great companies in the tech consumer product automotive hospitality entertainment sectors with a unique set of demands and needs he's taken his collective experience into his role as ceo of his current company isle planner whereas focus has been on creating a solid corporate foundation developing their brand dna and developing the highest quality customer experience through best-in-class product rob are you ready to take us to the top yeah let's see what we can do here hopefully give you something entertaining and lightning all right what's the company do and what's the revenue model how do you make money so we're a platform as a service first of all we're targeting a wedding and event industry we've been at it for about four plus years uh we saw a large demand in that space to basically upgrade the technology platforms that were currently available it was largely an antiquated and ignored field but it makes up a incredible 100 billion dollars worth of annual sales in the us and about 330 billion dollars globally and um our majority of our team including my co-founder came from the wedding industry so it was something we knew very well and we were very intimate with and we we wanted to make a change and make a difference okay so wedding planning tools what's the revenue model here is it a one-time fee or is it sas or what it's sas it's a monthly subscription fee based on the volume of weddings you plan on the platform okay yeah i was going to say so it's not the actual kind of you know folks getting married because that's a one-time thing it's the wedding planners paying a subscription fee yeah we are we talk at the back office so we're basically a hybrid between the microsoft office slash quickbooks of the wedding industry interesting okay and so what will an average wedding planner pay you guys per month to get access to the tech um average is about 40 a month right now and that provides you a laundry list of services a very impressive list i'll say we provide our marketing solutions and then we have a front-end um marketplace listing and the mid side of it we do a crm lead generation tool set which includes everything from payment processing electronic signatures um lead intake lead management communication when you say leads you're talking about people about to get married you're helping them get customers interesting we actually create a a way for you to embed a snippet of code in any type of marketing platform you're currently working with that if they fill out their information it comes directly into our platform and allows them to process that communication with that potential lead and convert that lead into a client are you actually bringing them leads they pay you for leads or no do you just help them manage leads that they're getting we just managed we don't want to charge them any more than we have to they've got their tentacles out all over the place and most of the the industry is very unique and that word of mouth is still a very powerful tool so discovery is done by referral or by uh usually visual discovery yeah so we want that once that is discovered we want to find a way to convert that individual that's discovered them and interested in them into a conversation ultimately into a client yeah you've got a lot of inspiration on the website i got a sense that that might be a big kind of driver for you guys um how many customers have you scaled to since i guess you launched 2014. we launched in 2014 we've done gosh i couldn't give you a number but i can't say it's been the hundreds of thousands when it comes to weddings that are planned on our platform wow um so it's been pretty impressive and one of the other unique features of our site is we're not wedding specific we're event agnostic as we like to say we've seen a lot of wedding planners are very unique because a lot of them do more than just weddings they'll do social events they'll do product launches they'll do corporate events whereas conversely a corporate event planner will very rarely do a wedding so we're seeing about 15 to 18 of the events on our platform right now are non-wedding events oh great um including product launches from for some pretty high profile brands that we were we were humbled and honored by we uh we had a little customer service call we value our customers privacy uh extremely so we rarely look into the accounts unless there's an issue and one of our clients has selected and we realized the clients they had were like wow is it okay if we share that they're like yeah that's fine but it was a it was amazing so who was it um catch your public like and share it around the office oh got it okay got it so wait so how many customers have you scaled today how many folks are paying you whether they are event planners or just product launch planners oh we've got oh gosh between about eight and ten thousand total on the system right now paid or just for paid that's just paid okay they it ebb and flows so there's businesses and then there's customers um businesses can can represent several customers um planners are sometimes have multiple planners work organization so we've got all kinds of different things called levels of customers yeah but just be clear you have you call it 8 000 customers or businesses whatever the verbage is either that you want to use you know paying call at 40 50 60 bucks a month something like that yes that's great talk to me about churn obviously it's critical in any sas company what's your churn and how do you manage it so our churn is is incredibly low uh we manage it by creating a very sticky product obviously that's the ultimate goal how low how low for a little over four percent right now monthly or annually annually logo or revenue what was the first parts are you like a number of like logos lost or actual revenue the logos make up lost um actual i guess not familiar with that term i'd say companies that have turned out okay what category that fall into in other words there are sometimes businesses like yours have customers that pay a grand a month and if you lose that customer it's really high revenue churn but really low logo churn oh okay this is a revenue turn we don't have any annual size subscription every subscription's monthly so all of our revenue is being recognized on on a cash flow basis uh we did that for several reasons so our turn is really due to companies that are bowing out or that have gone down into their slow period and they they leave for three four months then come back okay got it so four percent revenue churn per year yes that's healthy how are you getting i mean i i think you're gonna say like some form of content marketing or visual inspiration but specifically i mean how are you getting so many customers so quickly so a lot of it is basically um honestly driven by the origins of wedding industry marketing 101 it's word of mouth the site itself is very viral in nature if you look at the story views of what you're looking at right now the inspirations let's say you click on a story you'll see that the other participants in that event were listed on there so every time we publish a story they get notified they've been published on io planner and therefore they get to experience and discover the brand that's one aspect of it conversely our platform is very collaborative so anytime you're planning an event on averages between 10 and 12 other vendors that go into an event planning cycle the event the account admin will invite these other partners into the planning process and they'll work collaboratively in the aisle planner environment and get introduced to our planner that way so there's several sort of feeds that connect with the the industry or our customer base so our growth has been largely powered by that sort of type of organic viral uh engagement i i did word of mouth for simplicity terms yeah and in content content marketing has been a big part of it because we try to showcase the beauty of the industry and get get our customers customers excited about wedding planning and finding things so we've put a lot of time and effort into building a really amazing content base how many people are on the team your team uh seven right now okay and where's everyone based all here in san diego and how many of them are only doing content or marketing or sales three of them and what are the rest do uh three in development three in content and yours truly trying to keep the wheels that's great and are you bootstrapped or you raise capital we are bootstrapped and proud of it um we sold the wedding planning business to start this business and we took the funds from sale that into this company uh we do have some friends and family investors and interestingly enough most of the employees are also investors in this company they put their own money in to watch it grow that's great do you mind me asking the first money you put into i mean what was that sale price on that first company are we talking millions or hundreds of millions or a thousand bucks god i wish it was hundreds of millions it'd be a different conversation right now um hundreds of thousands okay but it was if enough was a small family that was a big nut that's totally amazing definitely meaningful yeah yeah that's great and then you know fast forwarding to today so 40 you know uh eight you said eight to ten thousand we'll do minimum eight thousand of them you know folks paying 40 bucks a month that puts in about 320 grand a month in revenue is it accurate um we keep that big but yes it's enough it's it's around there we'll just say that i i don't like to discuss our numbers because we're a private company and we're you know yeah no no i get that but i'm just those are two numbers that you disclosed 8 000 and 40. so multiplying them should give me an accurate revenue number and or at least generally correct yeah you're generally correct okay fair enough and then help me understand growth rate so if you're at you know 320 300 ish today where were you about a year ago um gosh a year ago we were about half of that so we've been doubling in size on an annual basis that's that's healthy especially especially for bootstrapped company and again all just word of mouth all word of mouth um some light duty advertising it's been it's been a struggle what what's light advertising we've been doing some stuff on facebook some social advertising we've done some um industry in inner industry advertising and some in our industry trade shows we're pro-centric so we focus on the pros um so we don't do a lot in the way of consumer marketing everything is really done towards the industry well i mean what would you spend in a given month on facebook ads what do i have it depends what i've left in my pocket okay so we're not talking like tens of thousands we're talking like maybe a thousand here a thousand there yeah we're spending a few thousand a month yeah yeah i apologize it seems like our local refuse company knew we were doing an interview so i thought they'd show up right now and back their truck up so i apologize that's okay i wasn't sure if it was an ice cream truck or a fire siren either one are both they're both exciting i guess so um when you uh when you do spend money to acquire a new 40 a month customer how much will you spend on them fully weighted um you know that's the customer acquisition cost has always been an interesting conversation because there's no one trigger or one conversion metric that'll give us that accurate dollar amount so it's sort of an aggregate and we do a you know we do a 30 day free trial onboarding we do commit like um and i'm going to sound vague on this and i apologize because we're still trying to figure out how we fit in like our onboarding team because they're a cost center to us and they're part of that acquisition cost and it's something we haven't truly i guess figured out yet um but i would say on average it's probably 100 bucks is is probably a realistic number right now it's a three month payback that's not bad yeah all in but then you know we the the challenge we have is we're we're in a a cyclical industry that's seasonal so we see ebb and flows in our customer base like right now we're at a lower customer time and we'll ramp up again at the end of this year when booking season starts and then it's kind of a trickle down so the way our business has been designed is really we tried to layer in additional business models along the way that's why we consider it as a platform as a service so we're not solely dependent upon the sas model for our revenue generation there's all kinds of different um from the transaction model to the crm subscription base to the marketplace listings to ad revenue there's all kinds of things peppered into the system yeah but you just be clear your sas revenue we talked about earlier 40 you know times 8 000. that's pure sas 320. that's not pierce that's partial south so i want to clarify that it's a little bit of everything oh i didn't know that sorry you're bumping them yeah yeah so i want to clarify because i i think it comes across that we're way that sounds way higher than it is the revenues are there but it's a combination of everything so i want to i feel like i'm backpedaling on that but that is a i'm just as you're thinking i'm throwing the number i'm off we're already held accountable just on basic subscriptions it's not all subscriptions it's a it's a combination of everything yeah yeah no i'm by the way i'm glad you're fixing it sometimes i go through the questions fast so thanks for fixing that all right i'm like trying to do the math on my head i'm like okay what did you say exactly and how am i saying this exactly yeah yeah well again so what you're saying is when these folks pay you 40 bucks a month that's not always just subscription no it's a combination of all facets of that user divided by the revenue i see what you're saying i see what you're saying okay so if you look at like last 12 months and your revenue kind of pi i mean what portion of that would you say is pure sas is it the majority it's definitely the it's the majority of our revenue it's not not the majority of our income it's a majority of our revenue and because we do transactions we have pastor as well yeah yeah got it got it sorry these are questions that i'm not because we don't we don't talk about this publicly on a regular basis so that's why i'm no no it's fair i appreciate it so i i definitely appreciate it so okay good that's helpful to understand um now obviously you're also bootstrapped so obviously you're running the business at cashflow positive correct you're not plowing more money in of your own money every month no we're finally turned the corner about a year ago so it's been it's been kind of nice we're starting to pay back some debt and get ahead of schedule on things oh how much debt have you raised was it like was it like venture debt or just like bank debt private debt it was friends and family convertible no debt oh i see i see yeah so you run a business for five years you run negative for three and a half years you accrue debt along the path um we were fortunate enough to be able to find ways to service that debt whether through deferment or partial payments and now we're at a point where we're actually able to turn that corner that's great um are you are you going to you're going to pay it all back out though not convert it to equity uh determined yeah i'm sure it depends on what as far as fundraising goes and if we decide to raise that's their money or not we're we're entertaining offers and opportunities along the way would you consider it sounds like you did kind of friend and family and bank debt but you know venture debts becoming very popular as a non-dilutive kind of source of capital would you consider venture debt oh absolutely we actually did a round of revenues funding with lighter capital a while back and i couldn't have been more happy what made you happy with it one the ease of working with them they were a very uh open and earnest company they basically you know we're opening up our books to them they're looking at us and they're basically betting on on our success not our the the investment isn't predicated on opportunity it's predicated on performance so it made really good sense for us we didn't need a lot of capital we needed a small amount to do a sprint that we wanted to kind of uh push ahead some product and we were just short on our ability to cover the cost and that arrangement was very fair and equitable to us yeah rob i want to just be clear i want to dig deeper here because i think it says a lot about lighter so you know i'm very familiar with venture debt you know there's a bunch of different terms lighter is typically they will go down to the smallest companies you got to be north of about 15 grand a month for them to work with you they'll typically lend you anywhere between three and kind of 5x your current monthly recurring revenues and they typically look for like a three to four year repayment period with like a one to three to 1.5 repayment cap now what they'll always say when they work with new entrepreneurs is if for any reason at the end of that time frame you're in trouble we'll we will never like be aggressive and shut the company down we'll always do like a recap we'll just renegotiate am i hearing you accurately you fell into that you didn't grow as fast as possible but they were really friendly in helping renegotiate we actually grew right on path and uh we actually were able to go back for a second tranche as needed we didn't need it initially but we got offered it we went back and were able to take more money when we needed it they've been a great partner i've never we've never missed on any of our milestones with them um so i've been very very stoked i can't speak to someone who has missed on that side um our relationship has been nothing but open and communicative we talk to them about once a month in a social capacity um if they they ask us for referrals from time to time to other companies because we've been sort of one of their um i would say probably better better customers down here i guess i couldn't say i don't know the other customer base they have but yeah i mean it's been anything but easy and and very positive good all right we're out of time let's wrap up quickly with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book ooh that's a good one um pass number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i used to be enamored with jack ma because i thought it was really neat how he was bringing alibaba to the forefront and i liked his personality i have not really been too engaged lately with anybody else other than our own business number three what billing tool do you use uh billing tool we built our own okay um number four how many hours i sleep to get every night five and a half to six and what's your situation married single kids married father uh uber driver for the child and uh support team for volleyball and surfing every day wait so any kids or no one we have a 13 year old okay i wasn't sure okay one kid and how old are you uh 50. 50. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew everything i knew today one thing one thing um just trust in yourself and breathe yep guys trust in your instincts breathe sold his first wedding company for caught a couple hundred thousand bucks used all that money to plow it into his new idea aisle planner selling into really the wedding planning industry however 15 of his user base or paid customer base actually are doing other things like product launches so they're expanding a bit now doing about 320 grand a month in revenue up from 150 grand about a year ago healthy growth bootstrap they've used venture debt and they've it sounds like used it very effectively serving over 8 000 of these planners today they've got a team size of seven based in san diego four percent revenue churn uh annually that's obviously on a gross basis when they do spend money to spend 100 bucks to get a new 40 a month customer for a three-month payback period rob thank you so much for taking us to the top my pleasure thank you so much