How Aisleplanner CEO Christina Farrow grew Aisleplanner 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...