How Binderr CEO Zak Rose grew Binderr to $70.2K revenue and 6 customers in 2024.

guys binder.com with two r's on the end does five hundred dollars per customer per month today they have six customers so three thousand in monthly recurring Revenue Jacob has invested so far over two million dollars of his own money in the business mainly to pay for the team there's 18 full-time he's burning called 100 000 per month but has a lot of conviction on the vision of what he's trying to build he got that money by the way from his first exit now plowing it into binder which is helping folks that survey you know accountants lawyers csps and Malta uh help them service their customers faster in a more automated fashion they're launching now looking to scale up their customer base scale up the team and obviously scale Revenue we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is Jacob apple he loves building companies had a nice eight figure exit from Bolt and 2023 and is now building his life's work with company called binder b-i-n-d-e-r-rr.com which helps you automate the workflow of csps all right Jacob ready to take us to the top let's do it Nathan real quick what's the Cs Peak is it customer service professional corporate service provider corporate service provider okay I was a little bit off that would usually be like a accountant lawyer yep now before we before we jump into that world automate workflows of accountants and lawyers you mentioned the eight figure exit from Bolt were you a founder of Bolt no I owned the franchise and uh in a few countries down in the Mediterranean and exited that last year what was the what was the URL of that company bolt.com it's a large ride hailing and food delivery company in Europe and so what do you mean you own the you want you weren't necessarily A co-founder but you bought the trademark rights in certain countries or what do you mean by you were the franchise owner yeah we basically had the right to operate that company on in a number of countries so it was it was our own setup it was our own company and we just had so we were piggybacking their technology okay and so when they exited um I mean I think from January and January 11 2022 bolt was validated something like 8.4 billion dollars so I guess to the if I if I ping the founders of Bolt will they know you will they know oh yeah I know Jacob yeah yeah they'll know who I am yes okay so so how how should my audience think about your slice of the 8.4 billion valuation from last year as fairly minimal I would say we I was running three fairly small countries Cyprus Malta and Tunisia and it was actually it was bought themselves that acquired our business back so we had I me and my partners we had the franchise right to operate in a number of countries and I guess at some point when we started making too much money they they wanted to buy the the operations and there was like a predefined buyout clause in the contract we had with them and what is that bio Clause it says something like hey we have the right to buy you out at 1X revenue or something like that yeah I I can't disclose the the exact figures because I think we're still under the the confidentiality of the of of the exit um but yeah there was a predefined buyout uh clause in the in the contract we had with them were you able to grow your three locations to above a million dollars a year in Revenue foreign yes okay and significantly okay more than 10 million I'm not I'm not because we're still like the the whole we are still waiting to get paid for some of the of of that exit uh so I don't know how close I can get to the figures above a million is definitely not saying too much I don't know how much closer I can get than that okay what percent of the deal price was not cash up front it sounds like you're on an earn out right now or something like that are you still waiting on 20 of the deal price but by far the majority was was paid right away and then there was like a percentage allocated to make sure that the the the whole operation that they were taking over was running smoothly oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to 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 here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 all right let's jump back into the interview all right let's jump into binder so when did you write the first line of code for binder three and a half years ago so were you running this while you were also doing the bolt franchises yes I see very interesting I knew at some point I knew at some point that our bot Venture would come to an end and I wondered although that Paul was a was a fantastic success for us it was never really ours it was we were just a a partner and I really wanted us to to sort of control our own destiny and and build our own thing so as soon as I realized that at some point the ball Journey would come to an end we we started our own thing okay so you start writing code for this in somewhere around 2020 um helped me understand today how was a lawyer or an accountant using your platform to grow their business so we we've only just launched the platform to the the market we spent two years actually building an accounting app to then realize that maybe there was a better opportunity and specifically focusing on this Niche when it comes to corporate service providers so are you pre-revenue today or do you have paying customers we have paying customers today but we're early in our Revenue Journey so when did you get your first paying customer in March March this year okay that's great how did you decide a lot of Founders when they launched and get the first customer they're not quite sure what pricing model to use what did you price your software at we went with uh a model where we felt there was a good opportunity learning from Big players like stripe and other companies that really have become so successful because they became part of the Journey of the customer that they're serving so they would grow their business on a on a basis of a percentage of what was coming through we felt fairly early on these lawyers these accountants were incorporating companies and who are doing corporate filings that we want to be really aligned with their revenue stream so we we charge mostly a transactional cost so every time you go and incorporate a company through binder or you appoint a new director then we charge SC for that transaction while we also charge a small subscription per client that they manage what transactions are associated with the company when they you know for example add a new director are you trying to say you you charge on a utility-based Model where every time they take an action you charge like per that action or is there actual like you're charging a percent of gmv no so imagine if you want to appoint a new director in Nathan's company you would go to your service provider and you would say I would like to appoint this director they would charge you 300 dollars to appoint a new director that service provider would appoint that new director because it's automated through binder and we charge them a percentage of that so we would charge...