How Better Agency CEO Will Shaw grew to $2.9M revenue and 260 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is will shaw he's the co-founder of better agency the first sales driven ams and the industry's top crm for independent insurance agencies they're on a mission to help agents issue a billion in new business premiums by 2024 he's an ex-professional athlete and his playing field is now the tech and software space will you ready to take to the top yeah let's do it what sport did you play uh i played uh i played football so i played with the steelers and the eagles oh very which one was which one you enjoy more uh the eagles because i lasted longer there good answer good answer all right so uh talk to me about better agency a bit here so i obviously love niche specific businesses we've had you on before i'd love to understand sort of growth from then are you still the same product or have you released something major over the past two years yeah so we've kind of grown a lot yes i know we talked previously um you know i i got i fell into the insurance niche because i was customizing tools like infusionsoft hubspot salesforce for the insurance space and what we found was hey we were using six seven eight different platforms to do the same thing wasn't working through antiquated systems and bad apis because nobody's been really focused on the insurance industry so uh towards the right at the end of 2019 we decided to launch better agency which was the first uh crm specifically for independent insurance agents and uh throughout that time we've really grown doing that and then we recently just launched our newest feature which is what we call the sales driven ams so that's actually connecting directly with policy downloads from the carriers that's been something we've been working on for almost a year now um and it's really allowing us to offer a one true system to insurance agents instead of them having to use multi multiple different platforms and you used to be did you have a rebrand you were called marketing connected i think previously right yeah so that was a previous company that i was kind of using as a placeholder um as i was figuring as i was transitioning out of doing custom implementations and into what we launched that better agency i see i see got it okay cool but same story there in terms of that was the you know that was the baby version you now sense change matured etc yep exactly okay very cool um so let's jump into this a bit um on the crm tool today i think when you last came back on i guess this would have been back again 2019 you had just broken i think 100 customers and you were charging at that point i think about 300 bucks a month still the same price point yeah so we our price points gone up uh we're a little over 400 now on our average customer uh we've been able to add some different upsell opportunities so we try to get people in around the 200 to 250 mark and now we're getting our average customer a little over 400 and we think we can get to 500 over the next 12 months and what's driving your ability to get higher price points are they buying more seats originally are you up selling more features on day one what's the story there uh both more seats coming on so as we're able to as we're able to help solve more problems we get more of the team on board to our platform um and the second thing is just adding more features one things we've been passionate about is trying to achieve that kind of net negative revenue churn and that's been kind of helped drive our growth where are you now on that um so i think when we spoke in 2019 we actually just launched in 20 at the end of 2019 in october november time frame so right now we're we're somewhere around 260 customers uh and we just broke the 1 million ar mark oh hey congrats man that's exciting thanks i appreciate it big big deal boots dropped are you raised so we we bootstrapped to this point we are tomorrow actually closing our first round so we've we've got to this far bootstrapped and so we just are closing on our first round tomorrow we love that so you guys listen you listen to podcasts you get breaking news before it happens will how much you guys end up raising so we're going to raise a total of 2.1 million um it's going to be at a 15 million post and um we're pretty we're pretty excited about that so yeah we were able to bootstrap to this point um and so that made fundraising pretty easy and it just made sense for where we were at 15.2 posts so i mean that's essentially 13 pre right or about 13 next your your arr i mean does that feel fair to you or do you feel like it could have driven a higher or lower you know what do you think we could have totally have driven it higher i mean the market you know better than i do the market's pretty frothy right now and we could have driven far higher but we were really my biggest problem with fundraising was telling people no and the reason being is we want to be as strategic as possible we were in a position where we had bootstrapped this we necessarily have to raise money the only money work you know we're burning and some of the original money we put in at this point are saved along the way and we're using that to drive some marketing so we really want to raise money to start bringing our our development talent our our product team in-house because that's been outsourced previously and to grow our sales and marketing team uh and what we're doing there so we we wanted to be as strategic as possible so that meant staying a little bit away from the vcs because we're not going the traditional fundraising route and going more towards angels which is a little bit different valuation so how many how many people are participating in the 2.1 rates so we uh we probably could have got away with doing it with two um but we ended up getting a uh we have about fifty percent from our lead investor and the other fifty percent is divided between insurance specific um strategic investors and the and then the other half of that would be through strategic other verticalized crm founders or some people that we know that you know have gone through whether it was infusionsoft's fundraising or different fundraising events here locally in arizona that's very cool um is uh is clayton put anybody in uh no he's not but i have had some conversations with him nice nice um and then the lead that put in about 40-50 percent did they set the terms or did you let the whole sort of like without a traditional vc or just a wealthy individual so that was an angel here locally so we let them set the terms we thought it was more than fair for playing with the you know staying out of the vc realm and coming and staying with more angels priced round though right not not a credible note yep it's a price range okay and and so you mentioned burn right so before this race like last in june how much capital will you burn uh about 10 or 12k so not a ton okay i mean this isn't that bad that's you know 10 to negative 10 to 12 percent ebitda margins not not horrible in sas and and what's growth look like so so i mean if you're at a million dollar run rate today where were you exactly a year ago do you remember oh man i could look it up but my guess is we were at this time last year we were at probably somewhere between 25 to maybe 30k mrr um so you were flat then because that's what you told me you were at in 2019 or late yeah so well yeah when we talked to 2019 that was more about where we were expecting to get we didn't make our actual we had some commitments that were helping us get there but we didn't really bring in our first dollar until i think november of 2019. i see got it so your pre-revenue up into that point yeah so when we launched because we bootstrapped it we pre-sold quite a bit working with people um and so that's kind of what we were expecting we got to that number it just took us about six months longer than we thought i see got it okay so i got it zero dollars of revenue in july 2019 about 30 000 a month in july 2020 and now today passed a million dollar run rate correct and then we're growing an average about 10 a month and we've kind of been consistent about that since about august of 2020. where's the growth coming from how are you signing up new people when you came on last you said affiliates were a key growth driver for you yeah so about 30 are through our paid strategy um and about 70 are coming through uh either referrals or are organic so we spend a lot of time focus on the blog from the start and we're starting to see dividends from that now a lot of it is our cusp is customer referrals and then we have some still coming in from referral partners on the page strategy how much did you spend on paid ads in june this month um so that would be almost all of our paid budget outside of seo so if we if we burn if we spend 12 grand on marketing in june about probably close to 10k of that was specifically to paid nine to ten thousand probably specifically to paid through facebook or google facebook people interesting and and how many new customers or leads will you get on 10k spend so on 10k and spend we'll get about 25 net new customers so we'll get a bunch of trials and we convert about 70 percent of those trials so that'll equate to about 25 new paying customers that's great what do you have to get a trial to do to make sure they convert to paid yeah so there's a kind of key components that we look at one is making sure that they engage with us so kind of the first way we lead somebody else somebody out is if they don't engage with our onboarding team we look at a trial as an opportunity for a paying customer so we immediately start reaching out and trying to onboard they don't engage with us and they have no usage we'll preemptively cancel their account and let them know to try to re-engage them so that's the first thing we do but the the main key things we're looking at is getting them started on our onboarding process so we invest heavily on onboarding you charge for it is our setup fee what's that no we don't charge a setup fee we actually i know everybody's trying to reduce our customer acquisition cost we're trying to increase it heavily through increased onboarding our our view is if we spend more on onboarding we can increase our ltv and we can spend more to acquire our customers so we go through a pretty heavy onboarding we try to connect with them and we need it we want our goal is to get them to either import data connect to their lead sources get their sales team in there there's about four to four to six key objectives that we want to accomplish in a 30-day period yeah it's interesting interesting to see how that experiment pans out i remember having clayton many years ago and he told me how you know infusionsoft was assuming it was still infusionsoft now it's keep when they were seeing eight percent monthly churn he said finally the way they tackled is they just charged a setup fee of about 300 bucks which was equivalent to the you know an average of about nine months of the first year acd on the sas side of business and by charging that churn dropped and then down to about two percent but your top of funnel was smaller because not as many people pay the setup fee so it's the yin and yang yep yeah for sure yeah you can reduce the amount of people come in lower churn but again you know it's just a change of the funnel 70 referrals or the organic or blog talking about your referral program so how many affiliates made at least a dollar from you in terms of payouts in june uh about five five okay so so this is a very concentrated affiliate program very concentrated um it's very small i mean we haven't we i mean we have some good affiliates but we haven't gone large with it yet yeah and and what are your expenses each month on the affiliate payouts you're paying like are we talking 10 grand about 30 grand about something else no no we're still pretty small uh we're probably we're paying on an average about six to seven grand a month right now okay got it got it so five affiliates make somewhere between maybe a grand and two grand each per month i think one you know one's probably taking the majority and the other three are you know making a couple brand here there yeah interesting okay and and what is that what are you paying them is it 30 of the trial or the customers they bring in or something like that yeah so i think uh it's a tiered structure based on how many you you're bringing in i think it starts at 20 um and then it'll go up to 30 percent if you bring it in enough 30 in perpetuity like per month if they stay active yep oh wow in perpetuity interesting do you ever worry about in the future i mean basically if a bunch of your revenues come from affiliates your margins never going to be higher than you know 70 because of the payment out to them correct yeah so what we do is it's on the base application that they bring in and then we kind of take on charge of upgrading them and so we don't pay out the upgrades to the affiliates uh i see so it as a percent of the total acv of the account the affiliate payout drops over time because you're up selling them right because we're absolutely i see let's talk about upselling when you last came on i think you said churn was up 36 expansion was 36 percent so 100 net dollar retention where are those numbers today yeah so a little bit better so we're hovering around two percent monthly churn i believe on an annual basis correct my math what is that about 85 yeah um uh so that that's our current and then we're up selling at almost not not what is our upsell rate i believe we're somewhere a little bit higher than 100 i think we're between 105 110 um based off our upsell but our goal is to get that to 120. your net dollar retention yes got it so if net dollar retention is 105 and you first have to make up a 24 churn hole your expansion is about 30 year-over-year yeah that sounds about right based off the last numbers i looked at what are you up selling is it mainly number of seats or is it more feature-based or utility-based upselling so it's a little bit of both a lot of it originally it was user based in our user seats and we just started doing that probably at the end of 2020 and then with the release of our new features that have rolled out back in april and may and what we have coming in this later we're get we're getting closer to a 50 50 split and we're seeing the larger increase in cost because as people start adding more features we also see along with that the seats that come along so somebody that just upgrades seats they just upgrade seats but something that's upgrading features generally is upgrading seats as well i understand the blog organic versus your affiliates versus your paid spend on facebook they're all going to have different sort of cac profiles so they're different channels let's just focus on the pure paid stuff for a second what are you willing to spend to get a new 400 a month customer so we're willing to spend i mean i look i break this down in our marketing cac as well as our online customer acquisition cost including our sales rep including our onboarding and things like that so our ltv right now is is somewhere ranging between again it's a guess because we're a young company so this range is pretty significantly but i would say we're steady between 12 to 14k in our ltb so right now we're willing to spend upwards of fifteen hundred dollars to get all in to get a customer because we can we can keep that kind of ten to one ratio and that's what i was saying before we're investing more into onboarding because we think we can get our own customer acquisition costs actually up which is one of our goals get up with our onboarding um to around 2000 we think that can get us to a closer to a 20 000 ltv yeah i know it's interesting if you spend 15 1600 bucks to get the customer it's 400 bucks a month you still have a four or five on payback period that's very manageable right we're not trying to we're not trying to push our cap down we're actually trying to push it up because if we figure if we can increase our ltv then we can just outspend any competition yeah i mean that the only part the only time where that math breaks down is if you're able to increase your cac so spend more on getting people more addicted early on and you drive your lifetime by up to 20 grand but if it takes you six years or 10 years to capture the 20 grand and your payback period's really long it can it can be a cash gap issue but you don't sounds like from these numbers you don't have any of those issues not yet but i'll i'll loop back around with you and let you know down the road yeah no i mean congrats i mean all these things i mean it looks like you're you're moving the needle like in the right direction all these things and this is a tough space you're in now it's obviously niche and insurance based but it's still exciting will you stick with insurance for a while or do you think you'll expand other markets no i think we're going to be hyper focused on being a vertical-based sas company it's an interesting market uh the more time we spend in here we figure we can spend more problems or solve more problems um you know there's a lot of things we run into where companies have been in this space since the 80s and 90s and a lot of them haven't you know a lot of our competition isn't even necessarily on the cloud so we feel like we can make a be a real disrupter in the industry and what's your team size today how many folks so we're at 16 and our goal is to be at about 20 to 25 by the end of the year how many of the 16 are engineers uh six and how many sales reps with the quota one oh just one interesting what's their quota target so their quota target is about is 20 to 25 it's it's a tier but on target audience earnings should be about 20 sales a month which will equate to driving about a half a million dollars in a new business at the end of the year um and right now we're exceeding that a little bit and getting closer to 25. got it so that one sales rep if they do close a half million bucks a new ar each year what can they earn what are their what's their base plus commission total yeah so they're on target earnings would be about one assuming they're going to close about half a million 500 to 550k they're on target earnings gonna be about one 150 to 160. okay that math works that's profit that's a profitable sales rep that's great uh very very cool that makes a lot of sense all right um i guess last question here talking about equity were you the sole founder here like how much effort do you still own post post this raise yeah no actually great question so i actually have three other co-founders that are still on the company we founded this as a group so between all of us we still control um close to 80 percent equity even after this 2.1 million race correct yeah we have a pretty aggressive uh employee stock option program too but yeah we control about it almost i think it's about 70 between 75 and 80 without looking at the cap table uh for the whole team that's the foundation for me and my three other co-founders yeah how big is the stock option plan for the employees at least the allocation uh somewhere between about five to seven percent okay that's that seems like totally fair are the is that are the new investors gonna require you to increase that number or no uh we did as part of that round we increased a little bit more anyways um just because we want to we're a small team and we want to keep kind of that family atmosphere and we like uh we like being able to be open about that stuff 75 owned by the four co-founders the new raise which you're announcing now to you know 2 million they're going to own about 20 and then the employees on the other five stock auction pool you got it that's very cool great setup man hey congrats let's wrap up people famous five number one favorite business book uh favorite business book um let's go with um [Music] oh man i didn't say last time i wonder what you said last time you said that you said the upside of stress let's go with play bigger this time a little bigger recreation and uh dominating the category nice number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i wouldn't at this time i i would say more than a ceo that i'm following study is uh there's a couple people i follow a couple authors that i actually follow on on twitter uh nasib talib who wrote the black swan and um anti-fragile i'm a big-time follower of number three what's your favorite online tool for building better agency well i'm not a developer so for me it's probably all i use notion as my number one tool so all of my personal notes all my work notes all i keep track of everything is in notion my whole my whole life and probably our whole business is a notion number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night uh eight hours eight and situation married single kids uh married with a one-year-old daughter oh wow very that's that's the development from since our last fall yeah that's a yeah that's a big time development how are you will what was that how old are you uh 30. all right last question what's somebody wishing you were you knew when you were 20. [Music] uh something i wish i knew when i was 20. that that football years i imagine i really wish i would have had a backup plan after football i struggled figuring out transitioning from football into what i was gonna do and i really i was that prototypical athlete that did not have that backup plan i wish i would have listened to everybody trying to tell me that yeah you see it's brady building his own brand as he gets past 40 and 45 and 50. interesting hey actually i have to ask on the end on this question who has a better record this year the eagles the washington football team oh man the loyalty of me wants to say the eagles but uh i'm i'm a ryan fitzpatrick believer we went to the same high school i've known him for years so i'll go i'll go with the redskins and the plus the beards we've got the beards going on yeah yeah yeah epic beard over there do they take the east again or no you think cowboys or giants sneak in uh you know i i i'm kind of i'm kind of high on the giants um but i you know the cowboys you always think are going to be good but they never pull it off so it's like they're like the team that could bust but they could actually they could actually be good they have on paper they look great but i would roll with washington just because i don't i don't i can't trust the can't trust the cowboys yep guys there you have it betteragency.com again they are backing insurance providers helping them with a great crm tool he's going to stay focused on that niche they were doing 30 000 a month last year at this time now doing over 85 000 a month passed a million dollar run they had bootstrapped to that point serving 260 insurance agencies to date they're only burning about twelve thousand dollars per month as they scale and are announcing they just now say basically two point one million dollar raise at a 15 million dollar post money evaluation the founders still own 75 80 of the business uh new investors own caught fifteen twenty percent and employees have caught five to seven percent of the business sixteen folks on the team right now they look to scale net dollar retention over a hundred percent all good will thanks for taking to the top yeah i appreciate your time 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 laca.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 gotta push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

hello everyone my guest today is will shaw he's the ceo of marketing connected and co-founder of venta commerce capsule five agent up and others he was born and raised in baltimore and at his and his passions are traveling and snowboarding he originally started capture capsule five before moving on to marketing connected back in 2015 to help struggling entrepreneurs organize their sales and marketing strategies and execution will you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right ma'am so talk to me a little bit about about the company well focus on marketing connected what's the company do and is it a pure play sas company yeah so marketing connected is kind of the overall brand of where we started our new sas company so and kind of what you were talking about we have a company that was called agent up that we launched previously in 2017 as a as a sas company in the insurance network uh or the insurance industry providing uh marketing automation for insurance agents um and so what that has evolved into is we're actually rolling out our second generation of that application and under a new brand called insurtech and uh we're currently actually launching that uh as we speak we're launching it this week okay so help me understand who is paying for the technology on average what are they paying per year to use it yeah so the the client that is the client type that is paying for this is an individual insurance agent or what we call an independent insurance agent um so you kind of have two classes independent and captive um so it's usually an insurance broker that usually has somewhere of a team of three employees up to 20 or 30 employees on their team and they're paying anywhere on average uh on the low end for like a single user would be about 150 a month upward to a little over 500 so our average mrr is about 300 a month okay 300 bucks a month and when'd you launch this company what year uh we originally launched the company in 2017. oh good okay and then how many customers have you scaled to today uh to date we've scaled to uh slightly over 100 okay and with this relaunch we're hoping to take that to the next level let's talk more about the relaunch in a second but first i mean getting your first 10 customers is not easy how did you get your first 10 yeah you know to be honest we when we first rolled this out we really prep practiced a lean startup model and kind of threw out our minimal viable product or what i call minimal sellable product to get in the hands of users and start singing so we were able to fortunate enough um we're really big in the affiliate marketing space we had partnerships lined up we were able to throw out some offers to get uh clients onto the application we had our first i think 10 users within the first uh first week that we had what was the affiliate kickback uh our affiliate kickback was a 20 model okay so you pay if someone signs up for 100 bucks a month you're paying 20 bucks a month back to the affiliate in perpetuity as long as that customer keeps paying for the first 12 months and after that the perpetuity is over okay got it very cool um so let's take out your first 100 and look i can take 100 customers times 300 you're about 30 000 bucks a month right now in revenue correct and where were you exactly a year ago do you remember uh a year ago i don't know i i'd have to i'd have to go back and look we actually shut down signing up on this application about almost about a year ago before we decided what we want to do with it and about six months ago we redid our whole development team and relaunched the next generation application okay but if you had i mean are we talking like you think 10 grand a month a year ago or five grand a month or yeah we were probably i want to say we i would say if i were to put a number on i'd say we're somewhere between 10 to 15 maybe a year ago got it okay good so you're kind of doubling your over a year on it correct okay great um why relaunch um we wanted to we wanted to expand the the tech platform of it we were very limited it was simply like a zapier type of integration marketing automation not much customization what we're rolling out now we'll be able to take um what it'll be able to it's a more we've added the crm element to it we've added a more customizable marketing automation element to it and we've tailored specifically even further to the insurance network to dial in their processes okay that sounds interesting so have you trapped the company or raised we've bootstrapped it completely it's all self-funded love that that's great when you and how many people are on the team today uh right now we have uh five full time running on this right now and then not including our development team we have about three full-time developers now on it okay so you have eight people total eight people yeah hey so how did you i mean when you started the thing did you always fund it with revenue you just pre-sold people or how did you fund it in the early days i always believe in pre-selling um so i try to pre-sell whenever i can and we've used our our marketing companies kind of as a as they hold over essentially to help fund the business yeah that i mean that's look that's how a lot of people do it now how much from the marketing agency in terms of cash flow would you say you've sunk into the business um at this point for the for the our initial application we didn't have to sink much into it we're talking about our our minimal sellable product that we originally launched we stopped about less than less than twelve thousand dollars into um to get that to market since then and to go through this relaunch we're probably somewhere about 50 000 into it okay fair enough and um are you profitable today or are you burning cash still we are no we are still burning cash but not at a high rate we should be profitable by the end of july soon you say burning i mean you're talking five grand a month or more yeah we're burning right now less than five grand a month so we're currently burning i think uh i think we're currently at a burn rate of about uh 3 400 which we have enough cash reserves to handle that burn rate through the rest of the year but we should be profitable uh by the end of july so you have about six seven months of runway which means you got about what twenty thousand bucks in the bank correct yeah i think right now i think we have about 25 grand left over for additional because you have additional developments that's good so i mean what's the next step you do the rebrand are you then going to go after i mean how many customers you want to get to by the end of the year are you going to go and do a traditional fundraise what's the next step yeah so our our our next step we kind of look at this as two stepping stones we have a group that we're relying on that we're launching to we have our kind of our strategic alliances if you order relationships how many affiliates do you have so currently we have about four hype for what we consider four big players in the affiliate space one of which includes access to groups of insurance agents so most of these people have their different groups that they're associated to so our big goal is when we look at stepping stones is 250 net new customers over the next three to four months and by the end of the year our goal is to reach about 500 new customers okay you say net new and that makes me go okay what's churn look like so what's your turn look like over the past you call a month or two yeah our churn has traditionally we've been running at a churn rate of about three to three and a half percent okay so caught 36 40 percent annually yeah do you have meaningful expansion revenue yet on old cohorts or no yes we do so that's well that's part of what has shaped the redesign of the application what we're launching now in hopes that a less insurance and b add in additional revenue so we were just a very small piece of the pie now we're adding on elements like crm scheduling software some other things like that to help bring in more of the rev share that our clients seem to be using so what is expect so of the customers to sign up exactly a year ago what have you been able to expand them to like on a percentage basis uh do you know yeah i'd have to i probably don't know that off the top of my head as well as i should does it more than make up for the 36 percent of lost revenue from the same cohort yeah it does so we've been able to add in some features like sms um task management basically allowing us to take our on the old app we were able to take like if we look back to a year ago our average mmr was about 197 and we've been able to move that up to 300. but is that because new customers are coming in paying more because you upgraded older customers we've upgraded everybody here along each step of the way we've upgraded past customers to pay more for those additional features okay so if i just look at the core that signed up a year ago ignore new customers between now and back then you're saying you turn about let's say was 10 grand a month in revenue you'll churn 36 percent of that so you're down to what is that 60 400 bucks a month from that cohort you're saying but that same core you'll expand by 3 600 or more so that still cohort is still paying 10 000 or more like it was a year ago yes very cool all right uh let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh but it's usually whatever i'm currently reading right now uh right now i'm currently on my desk right now i have the upside of stress they're number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh you know i uh my background i actually um i got my start into the digital marketing game from infusionsoft that actually worked there directly um so i'm really close with uh clayton mask with some of those guys i really expect them a lot yup number three what's your favorite online i actually have to ask you uh he said when they did the 50 million from goldman he came on the show recently that he offered all early stakeholders the ability to exercise their options and kind of get liquidity did you have options and did you take that offer i did not i knew people that did and a lot of people did take that offer why didn't you take it i didn't come on early enough okay so you didn't have meaningful equity yeah i actually started working with them back in 2014 right after the funding of goldman sachs what was the cut-off that he put so he said anyone that joined the company before this year you can take advantage of this i i don't remember i wouldn't notice i didn't do it yeah i am you okay so but you were basically in the court of employees that were after whatever that cut-off date was right yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh you know i that's a really good question uh i'm we run everything off google but we run everything through asana as well we utilize zapier to automate everything so rt really maximizes zapier essentially number four how many hours i sleep to get every night uh i get seven hours and what's your situation married single kids uh married no kid two don't okay and how old are you uh i am 28. that's good and what's your uh actually no last question take us back eight years what do you wish your 20 year old self knew repeat that question what's something you wish your 20 year old self knew i guess you probably would have been what playing with the eagles at that point yeah i wish i would have appreciated i wish i would have appreciated living in the moment at that time in my life and really had the emotional uh maturity that i have now guys marketingconnected.com helping insurance agents build their businesses they currently have about uh 100 customers paying 300 bucks a month for 30 grand a month in revenue from 10 grand a month in revenue just a year ago they got a team of eight people building this bootstrapped burning just 3400 bucks a month the way they cover that burn is by investing cash from their marketing agency to keep feeling the sas growth networking retention about 100 as they look to continue to scale will thanks for taking us to the top for sure i appreciate the time 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 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 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 laca 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