How Badger Maps Reached $5M ARR and 4,500 Customers While Staying Bootstrapped (Interview with CEO Steven Benson)

Introduction and COVID Survival Story

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is is Steve Benson. He's building a great tool called badgermapping.com. It's routing, mapping, and gathering data from the field for field sales team. Steve, you ready to take us to the top?

Steven Benson

00:11>> Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:13Now I hope you did this as a compliment, but, like, I look at your business and I go, this company should have died during COVID, but you didn't somehow. Right? No one's going knocking on doors during COVID. Everyone's locked up. Why didn't you die?

Steven Benson

00:25>> So true. So true. You know, the so we as you know, we sell things to field salespeople, and during COVID that really slowed We probably lost forty percent of our customers during, like, revenue wise during 2020. That being said, we were able to sell to a bunch of new customers during that period. So we only ended up about down about 10% in terms Who new did

Nathan Latka

00:55you sell to though? Why were no one was driving door to door?

Steven Benson

00:58>> They well, they were. It just depends where you were. Right? I mean, you know, we were in California at the time. California was pretty shut down. But if you went to, you know Texas. I I don't wanna name names. But Florida.

01:14>> Yeah. They they were they were pretty open. And, you know, so this was really a regional thing and country by country. And and frankly, you know, people were, you know, were also the if business business kept going and people were just taking precautions, right? Like if if you sold beer to bars, you know, 2020 was was tough in a lot of places, right? I mean, San Francisco's bars didn't open till last week, right? But if you

01:45>> sold medical devices to hospitals, hospitals never closed.

Who Uses Badger Maps: Field Sales Verticals

Nathan Latka

01:49I see. What is your what is your like, if you look at the actual industry that all these field sales reps are in who use Badger Maps, what is it? Is medical device sales the top one?

Steven Benson

02:00>> That's among the top. Yeah. That that it actually might even be the top. What's interesting is there's not one vertical where you find field salespeople.

02:10>> It's but it's also not horizontal, right? It's not all over the place. It's not email or text messaging or something that you see everywhere. It's really, it's a I call it a collection of verticals. So med device, pharmaceutical, construction stuff. Really, if you walk down Main Street anywhere in the world, right? You'll see a dentist office and you'll see a tire store and you'll, you'll see a bar. So the guy selling beer to bars, field salesperson,

02:44>> the people selling medical devices and materials to dentists to fix teeth, field salesperson. The person selling tires to tire stores, field salesperson. So a lot of these little, I call them end nodes of of consumption. There's probably a better economic term for that, but I don't know what they are. But, you know, walking down Main Street, all these places, they didn't make, you know, they didn't they didn't smelt the metal to make the thing that they're

03:09>> giving you, right? They bought, you know, a semi finished good or even a completely finished good. And they're putting a markup on it if it's retail or maybe they're, you know, doing some service, but that, you know, the the tires sort of make the tires good.

Nathan Latka

03:22Yeah. This makes sense. Oh, 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

03:46log in, you connect your 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

04:11SaaS company, you're gonna get 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

04:33this 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 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

04:58the multiple. Maybe you're going 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. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here

05:21in a second, but if you 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.

Pricing, Seats, and Revenue Run Rate

Nathan Latka

05:47Let's jump back into the interview. So how how many today paid field rep seats are on your platform?

Steven Benson

05:58>> Paid field rep seats. Well, our our average price our our our price like, some people buy annual, some people buy monthly, but, you know, $69 I'm sorry, $59 a month if we're we're we're playing with our prices. They're about to go up, but but so 59 and 49 right now, annual annual and and monthly. And so, you know, I think our our average price is probably around 55. So you could you could divide our total revenue,

06:27>> which is right around 5,000,000. We're about to cross 5 either this month or next month, I think.

06:35>> And so if you divided that by $55 times 12, you'd get the I could do I could do it on my phone here if you want me to, but the 7,000

Nathan Latka

06:45so so you've got 7,000 Let me let I was gonna say 7,500 customers or seats paying $55 a month on average would be 5,000,000 run rate.

Steven Benson

06:54>> Yeah. That's and that's that's that's right around where it is. And now we most of our money doesn't come from individuals. It comes from from companies that

Customer Logos and Average Account Size

Nathan Latka

07:02might just gonna ask that. How many how many logos are those 7,500 reps spread across?

Steven Benson

07:10>> About 4,500.

Nathan Latka

07:13So So on average, two seats per company.

Steven Benson

07:15>> Yeah. But that's because a lot are half of them are one seat, but then some are, you know, 350 seats. Right?

Nathan Latka

07:23Is that your biggest customer, 350 seats?

Steven Benson

07:26>> As of right now, but a little bird on the sales team tells me that we're about to do a thousand seat one. The so for the first time

Enterprise Deal Expansion to 1,000 Seats

Nathan Latka

07:32Oh, that would be that'd be huge. What's that sales motion like? How long?

Steven Benson

07:36>> You know, it actually hasn't been well, I guess it depends how you depends how you count it. They like most companies that purchase us, they've had a few reps like 10 using it for a while. So if you want to count that as the beginning of the sales cycle, they've been using it for years, but they engaged with us meaningfully maybe four or five months ago as a company. And and it started out pretty small, like

08:02>> they wanted to go from 10 to maybe getting like 100 for this one division. And then that division, then it became the whole division, which was 200 seats. Now that's a pretty meaningful deal, right? You're talking $100k a year or something.

08:17>> And then,

08:20>> then whoever whoever that person, whoever the boss of sales of that division was, they were like, wait, what if this is so good for the Northeast? Why why doesn't why doesn't the whole country need this? Why we have five divisions. Why are just you getting this? Why aren't we looking this at this as a country? And so it expanded pretty quickly from a 10 seat deal to a 100 seat deal to a 200 seat deal to

08:42>> a thousand seat deal.

Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth

Nathan Latka

08:43Yep. That's great. Now talk to me about growth. If you're at 5,000,000 revenue today, where were you exactly a year ago?

Steven Benson

08:49>> Exactly a year ago, I we started this year at $350k in MRR, so I'd have to run that math. But what is that? 4.2 ish?

Nathan Latka

09:00Yeah. 4.2 up to five now.

Steven Benson

09:03>> Yeah. So we've we've grown. It it's yeah. It's it's it'll I I we may if if we get this thousand seat deal, we'll we'll end the year at, like, you know, between 35% growth.

Bootstrap vs. VC: Steven's Philosophy

Nathan Latka

09:13Which I love that growth. See, you can afford to grow that way without having people breathe down your neck because you haven't raised any VC. But any VC backed founder, you know, that 30% growth is unacceptable. Right? So how do you think about funding, you know, bootstrap versus, you know, a VC backed?

Steven Benson

09:28>> Oh, as you know from me speaking at your at your conference, I have lots of opinions on this.

09:35>> You know? Were you burned

Nathan Latka

09:36by VC in the past or what?

Steven Benson

09:38>> No. I've never been burned by VC. There I just and and I have nothing against VC. I don't I don't speak speak ill in their house or anything, but for the vast majority of SaaS founders, they're not the right fit. Right? They they only want to invest in a very small slice of the world of SaaS, right? The super high growth, huge companies,

10:02>> and there's 90, I don't know, you might know the numbers better than me, I'd guess north of 90% of SaaS businesses just aren't going, aren't pursuing a big enough business or they're too niche or their or their growth is too small. It's too hard to get the word out, but they're great businesses right there. And and when I've talked to VCs, I think that's basically the feedback that I've gotten from them is, hey, this looks like

Equity Ownership and Investor Breakdown

Steven Benson

10:27>> a great business. It's just, you know, it's not gonna grow fast enough or be big enough for us. We we wanna we we we're looking for we're hunting decacorns around here, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This will make you rich.

Nathan Latka

10:39So how much of the you haven't raised I mean, I don't think you raised any or maybe very little, but it's like, are you able to share how much equity you've been able to hold on today?

Steven Benson

10:46>> Yeah. So the the we've only brought in from an investor perspective. We've I get we've sold about, I think, 12% of the company to investors. So and and no there's no professional money in there. I mean, there's I mean, there's there's professional investors who are are aren't investing as their fund, Yep. Yep. People in private equity, that sort of thing that

Nathan Latka

11:09Does that mean you personally still own more than 75, 80%?

Steven Benson

11:13>> No. I mean, there's there's, you know, the we have a pretty generous employee pool.

11:18>> So What is that?

Nathan Latka

11:1910%?

Steven Benson

11:20>> No. No. I think that's closer to 20. Okay. And then then there's between the other co founders, that's another, you know, probably

11:30>> 30 ish percent. So I I own more than half of the business, but then there's, you know, there was a co founder that joined early and left and that and that's that's expensive.

Nathan Latka

11:42Yeah.

Steven Benson

11:46>> Just, you know, employees and so, but no, we've never taken, we've never sold, we've given a lot of equity away to people who have worked on on the product and and at the company. We've never we've never sold equity to an investor.

Team Size: Full-Time and Contractors

Nathan Latka

12:01Yep. Yep. Yep. I wanna come back to this in a second, but first, what's team size today? How many folks full time?

Steven Benson

12:09>> I guess, you know, including, like, contractors, we probably got about 70 employees.

Nathan Latka

12:16And what about just full time folks not including contractors?

Steven Benson

12:22>> Probably 50 just just over 50.

Philippines Customer Support Team

Nathan Latka

12:26That's correct. So tell me how you a lot of people wanna use contractors. They're cheaper, and they can usually still generate good output if they're operating a good system. So who do the the 20 contractors, what do they do for Badger?

Steven Benson

12:36>> We have a team in The Philippines, and and and I would recommend any company do this. I think there there's so much value to having a team of people really just care for your customers and be there for your customers. Written support could be I'm support, could be phone support, but just having an overseas team that is just 24/7, 365, no Christmas or New Year's, I guess, but like almost all the time being available to your customers

13:10>> is really valuable. And we treat them as employees. They're not contractors, I would say.

Nathan Latka

13:17That's what they do. They're all your customer support reps.

Steven Benson

13:21>> Yeah. And then, and then there's, there are a handful of other contractors, like if you someone specialized for something, you know, some engineering skill that you don't have in house, but you just need for a little while, that's a great place to contract Things like SEO or SEM skills, some, you know, different marketing things or Yep. That are very specialized but not a full time employee. That's a great place.

Debt Financing Strategy and Recommendation

Nathan Latka

13:42So, Steve, as we wrap up here, got about a minute left. Again, you've done a nice job reserving equity here, 5,000,000 run rate. We've obviously done a deal together in terms of debt. I'd love if you're open to to share sort of what you liked and disliked about that.

Steven Benson

13:56>> Okay. Yeah. So I I I strongly recommend that SaaS businesses that have revenue look to debt before equity. Even if you're in between rounds and you can just put up push off that next round five months, it it's it really can really help with your

Nathan Latka

14:13Can you back that up? I mean, are you comfortable sharing how much debt you've raised?

Steven Benson

14:16>> Sure. I think I've done I've done well, I think I've done about $6,000,000 in debt over the years, on and off, you know, and moving it around. Right now, I have about 2.25 with with you guys at Founderpath, as you know.

14:35>> And so that's a and I I'd strongly recommend people take a look at that. I mean, I I've Well, how long

14:42>> do you have look.

Longer Repayment Terms and Debt Providers

Nathan Latka

14:43I know the answer to this, but I want the audience to hear. How long do you have to pay the 2,200,000 back? Do you remember how many months?

Steven Benson

14:48>> Forty eight. Yeah. Forty eight eight months in assume it's quick.

Nathan Latka

14:53And I'm like, no. We do deals with companies like Steve all the time where it's a forty eight month payback.

Steven Benson

14:57>> So and and this is really important. Right? The reason they assume this is because a lot of the SaaS debt providers are doing year long deals. That's really risky because you're basically you're you're saying you're gonna pay their debt back with more debt, but, we're staring down the barrel of a recession right now.

15:14>> They may or may not give you more debt depending on what happens. Right? You may or may not be able to be credit worthy in a year. Right? You don't know what's going to happen. But so if you can't plan to pay back debt with more debt, you have to you have to be able to pay back debt with your revenue. And and to do that, you need a longer term. But a lot of the companies

15:33>> that are providing debt are like, hey, yeah, here's here's a year. Here's here's $2,000,000 and pay us back over the next year. And if you need more money, we'll give you more money. And that's a great strategy until they say, oh, we can't give you more money. So that's and I've I've done that deal with some of the bigger players in in in the space. And and I've and I've kinda chased the best deal, the the

15:56>> fastest, easiest to work with and the cheapest deal and and landed at your doorstep. And and so I've I've moved, you know, millions of dollars of debt around twice now. So yeah. So you're my third major third third major player I've yeah. Third major debt provider I've worked with.

Nathan Latka

16:13Well, I remember you and I talking years ago before there was Founderpath. I'm like, what would be the perfect debt offer for SaaS founders? And now fast forward today, we've got, you know, we've deployed over a $100,000,000 of capital out of a $150,000,000 fund and more news to come on that here shortly, but it's crazy. I mean, this is a real option for bootstrapped founders. It is not a maybe or a guess that it's a real

Steven Benson

16:32option.

16:32>> No. I mean and and very quickly and efficiently, they can they everyone that has revenue and a debt SaaS and company should check into this and and look at debt either to extend their current runway, to to get the next round later, to skip a round, or to never do a round, like I like, the which is the path that I've pursued.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Sleep

Nathan Latka

16:52Yep. On that note, Steve, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Steven Benson

16:56>> Favorite book. I I think From Impossible to Inevitable is one that every SaaS founder should read. I mean, your book, I I must have five copies of your book laying around. I mean, that

Nathan Latka

17:09That means you've got came to a lot of conferences.

Steven Benson

17:13>> I I I I I've come to a lot. Yeah. You keep giving me more, and I give them to my employees. You know? I I pass them out. How to what is it? How to make money with with without money or something?

17:23>> It's like How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital.

Nathan Latka

17:25Yep. Story of my first SaaS company.

Steven Benson

17:27>> So alright. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

17:31>> A CEO that I am studying. I've always got my eye on on on Mark Benioff because he, he bought my my biggest competitor for $250,000,000 or so. So Good reason. Years ago. So I I keep I keep my eye on that guy. He he knows what he's doing.

Nathan Latka

17:48Number number three. What's your favorite online tool for building Badger?

Steven Benson

17:53>> Favorite online tool. I mean, I guess it depends in building it in what way. I I love ProfitWell. It's a it's a great way to kinda get a good vision of the business. I mean, terms of, like, what I use all day every day, I I think there's nothing there's nothing like Google Docs. The the the collaboration elements of it that that's my favorite.

Nathan Latka

18:15Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Steven Benson

18:20>> You know, I used to the first five or six years of Badger's life, it was probably I probably averaged about four and a half during the weekdays. And today, I bet I average about seven.

Nathan Latka

18:34There you have it.

Steven Benson

18:35>> But now that I

18:37>> have now that I have a real baby, life's easier than when I Yeah. Just had the but everyone talks about how, you know, you know, you don't sleep when you have a real baby. I'm like, this real baby is easy compared to having a software company baby. That was that was a Steven and I way worse baby.

Nathan Latka

18:48Steve and I lived in a house together during COVID. He organized with a bunch of other founders, and we had, you know, dinner parties. And one time, this very nice lady came over with a cheese and her and Steve fell in love. And now they're married, and now they have a kid. And I'm just like, okay. Well, where where where's where's mine? When when when is someone gonna walk into my house with a cheese plate? I'm

19:07gonna fall in love.

Steven Benson

19:09>> I mean, may maybe maybe you've gotta walk in with a cheese plate.

Career Advice: Work at Small Companies Early

Steven Benson

19:17>> Why are you waiting for cheese plates to come in?

Nathan Latka

19:19That's my problem. Alright. I'm gonna go to Costco right after this and buy all of their cheese plates. Alright. Alright. So married, one kid, and Steve, how old are you?

Steven Benson

19:28>> I am 44 years young.

Nathan Latka

19:3144. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Steven Benson

19:35>> Wish I knew when I was 20.

19:40>> I think, you know, the career choices that I made the first half of my career, you know, was all big companies, it was Allstate Insurance, IBM, Autonomy, which got bought by HP, Google. I wish that I had worked for some smaller companies early on because I would have really, I think that you get overcompensated in this world for creating things. That was always going to be a good fit for me. And I wish that I had

20:10>> worked at some smaller companies to get a better feel for everything that goes into that. Like I look at some of my employees now who are like, you know, in their late twenties, but have been working for me for five years and they just, they know so much more than I knew when I was their age because they've worked for a small company and gotten, you just, you get bigger, you get to have a bigger impact

20:29>> and get to have a broader understanding of what's going on, you know, because there's just fewer people to do stuff. And so you get your hands in the real stuff. So I would tell the younger Steve to work for some smaller companies learn more about how to one day be an entrepreneur.

Closing Summary and Wrap-Up

Nathan Latka

20:50Guys, they're at badgermapping.com. They're doing about a $5,000,000 run rate today up from 4,200,000 exactly one year ago, serving 4,500 logos, over 7,500 paid seats at about $55 a seat. They help your field reps deliver the tires on time, take the beer to local pub on time, and also do it in a route that is most efficient. They should have died during COVID. They didn't. They just pivoted. They did very well. Now

21:10they're growing all bootstrapped, which we love. He's using debt, full disclosure from Founderpath, which we love. But, Steve, thanks for taking us to the top.

Steven Benson

21:16>> Thanks for having me, Nate.

Nathan Latka

21:19One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM 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 Thursday, 1PM

21:44Central. 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, a big

22:07fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna 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 saying. Sign up

22:29for 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 those people. We

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