How Blackthorn.io CEO Chris Federspiel grew to $20M revenue and 600 customers in 2026.

hi everybody I always like to better understand who it is that's talking to see if it'll be of interest to me you know are they at 500k or they are error they had a billion whatever so I'm going to start with our obligatory up into the right graph so we're at about 14 million ARR now I've been doing this for seven and a half years we've got 105 staff and we're a little unique we're in 25 States and 15 countries we've been remote since we started we have a big well I guess it's all relative 18 million debt facility 14 of which we've drawn so far but we have no board it's just me we have no VC and we plan to be Break Even well 23 is not it's the end of 2022 it's our fiscal 23 so soon so over the next 20 minutes I want to cover product Market fit and then once you have that going a bit wider and then growing your ACV based upon this so uh we're a pretty open company so I'm going to have a lot of pretty open metrics during this I hope find that interesting so the first thing is finding focus and how we went about this so we sell apps on the salesforce.com app Exchange in the payments and events uh Realm and we initially thought okay we're selling infrastructure it's payments and events anybody will buy this thing well what we did is over time we looked at all the leads that were coming in and we saw most of them were from higher ed and non-profit at the time we had no go to market and I thought go to market was like this baloney term but it's a real thing for sales and marketing teams to really focus on so what we did was that we flipped it over and we ended up focusing on higher ed and non-profit so with Salesforce I asked hey you know what are your metrics on higher ed and nonprofit you can see some of them are quite small but a lot of them are quite big so we didn't want to sell two three four five k subscriptions we wanted to do 50k 100K plus space subscription so we had to go up market and find out where these different customers were same thing with nonprofit it turns out a lot of nonprofits have really a lot of money and they have very sophisticated requirements you can't just sell something really basic and they really need a lot of time so there's a lot of business there and nonprofits which I never really understood and it turned out being uh quite lucrative so in order to figure out what it is that we wanted to do we started with two products to do payments and events on the Salesforce platform we ended up building nine uh products which I really don't advise you to do and over four years from about mid 2015 till early 2019 I just one by one made products and killed them and we initially had a form Builder which we call Blackthorne documents which had a lot of competition from Conga and draw Loop and it turns out that this didn't work we had a big customer portal where if you're familiar with Google App Maker before they killed it it was a multi-tenant data normalizing portal where you could build stuff like uh contextual declarative this is too many words and no one understood what the heck we were doing and it wasn't solving any problems then there was our billing app where Salesforce had steel brick which had invoice it or invoice it and then that thing got really popular stripe release strike billing and we're like okay we need to kill this thing and then we were going to do an e-commerce app in Salesforce book Cloud craze so you know all these things didn't work so what we did is we wound it down so we initially were funding a lot of the business from Professional Services you can see over the first few years we were doing about a million a year of proserve that was paying for about 10 of us to work there and we had a few apps that we later killed so a lot of our payments customers were non-profits they said hey give us a donations app this thing doesn't work for us we built it and and uh unlike Field of Dreams uh they they came but they didn't come because no one wanted to pay for this thing so if you have to have a a go to market Cadence where you're selling a 3K product you can't scale your company so we killed our donations app we killed our billing app our document link our Connect app and then we focused just on events and payments and some of our Revenue comes from our stripe Revenue share which I'll talk about so this is our org chart the reason I'm giving you some of this information is because there's a lot of things that I hate doing in the business I really don't like selling and marketing and accounting and uh Cs and I I don't really like doing any of these things so I I really like doing product and Engineering so what I did is I changed our org around and I have just two people that report to me which is going to be a third once we find our CTO so if you know someone we're hiring but it's just going to be our CEO our director of product and our CTO and the reason I wanted to do this is because I don't really like managing people I really like working with product so I took two devs that have been there for a long time and I said we're going to make some new stuff so they form like a little r d team with me and we're bringing new stuff to Market which is what I really enjoy if any of you have been on your path for seven eight nine years it gets kind of boring so if you can change it up or at least it did for me if you could change it up or go back to what you wanted to do like that's been very rewarding for me so after we found our product Market fit with nonprofits higher ed and payments and events we then said how can we take this thing a bit further so I surveyed some customers that I thought were of interest to us and it was like 40 or 50 that I thought were our Target and I said you know what is it that you need and one of them uh that was of Interest was a developer I knew who made this app called pcify he said let's partner and I said you know why don't we just buy you guys they were 130k ARR we agreed on 850k purchase price we did a down payment we paid over two and a half years I think we still have a few more payments left there he went off on his merry way he's like I hate Salesforce I never want to do this but you can have our app that's great and uh he was selling his app for like his biggest customer 6K the first deal we did we didn't change the product at all we just sold it for 60k actually because he just Founders don't know how to do pricing and I'll get into that so that ended up being pretty good but then all of our hired and non-customer non-profit customers they wanted to send SMS so I looked on the app and change and I thought who can we buy because we don't need to actually build this thing we can bolt it on where one of the benefits of all being on Salesforce is that stuff kind of all works together it just doesn't exactly work that way but sometimes you get lucky so I tried some of the apps that looked appealing and one of them was texty and all of our customers wanted the app so instead of building we didn't need to do the integration works I went went for it this was another single developer uh company uh so I reached out to Clint and he wanted to sell and this really helped us with our nrr so they were at 550k error I said hey you know what do you guys want to sell this thing for they said 6X and I said okay that sounds fair so it ended up being like three and a quarter a million and so we did 1.2 million down payment we didn't have the money to do this so we actually funded it through debt uh the other two million were to be paid over 24 months which we paid over our own uh cash flow and they were going to be incrementing payments so they started small and then they grew with the size of our company and they agreed with that they ended up taking a senior position and when we got a debt facility they wanted to pay the whole thing off so that was a little twist of events um but we actually were able to buy this through debt without dilution so uh something else that happened with product Market fit is just to be weary of Partnerships so we tried to do a lot we tried to integrate our payments app with two other app exchange apps and that took a lot of time and resulted in no Revenue a lot of payment gateways reach out to us but none of them were going to bring us any business they just wanted to integrate us to say hey we're on Salesforce but they weren't going to bring us anything so we didn't do them a lot of events applications they they have there's so many things you can do with events they all want to integrate none of them wanted to bring us business so we ended up not doing any of those and then a lot of people they all want to have contracts and conversations and Technical Integrations and it never became anything so the original thesis was to make a payment app on the Salesforce app exchange that could integrate with stripe at the time no one integrated with stripe now just everybody knows stripe but we said hey why don't we have a revenue share and we'll push everyone your way and now we're making uh somewhere in the vicinity of like a million a year off of that partnership where our customers don't get charged uh uh it's a pass-through of revenue from everything that's processed by stripe and it works like really quite well for everyone and then our main source of leads is through system integrators so when you buy a big enterprise system there's all these integration partners that build stuff they can bring the customers to you so they'll say hey we need to do events or we need payments they actually bring us the deals that's like 75 of our leads that we have now so some other stuff that we do with Partnerships is uh we give a fair bit of money away so we do one percent of our Revenue goes to stripe climate I think this goes into my own personal interests but part of our building of our company culture we've given away 120k to date and for a company that's not yet even break even and maybe this is unique because we don't have a border VC so we can do this but uh it's been able to help the world a bit and people can relate to it we also do three thousand a month to watsi.org they fund surgeries in developing countries for people that you know really need the help and this like these kind of Concepts they're not really politically charged or religion based or something so a lot of the team like no matter where they're from they can relate to them and it just it's been a nice benefit that everybody's gone for so these are like off to the side Partnerships that have really helped the culture um so in terms of what it is that we wanted to build uh Paul Graham sort of says you know listen to your customers and what it is that they want to make they're going to tell you and that's true Steve Jobs said you know if everybody said uh you know give me a faster keyboard I never want to end up with the iPhone but in the world of Enterprise B2B SAS this is just listen to them they'll tell you what it is that they want so we've more or less done that and that's taken us down the right path of everything that people want to pay more money from this is product board and we just take everyone's information that comes in we have an ideas portal and we just aggregate it all into this one platform it gets voted up and then we assess what we want to do based upon effort and the revenue that we can bring in so after you have all this stuff uh don't be afraid to raise your prices and tell the story and build the value so um Founders suck uh at pricing uh everybody almost everybody I've met undervalues their product uh particularly me so they'll say like oh it only took me four months to make let's charge like 2 000 bucks but this is not really how you're going to build a company there's a big fear of losing a deal so I discounted a lot I don't come from an Enterprise B2B sales background where I've sold five million dollar deals or something so it took me a while to to figure this out so what we did was we just kept raising prices I heard a great talk from madhavan ramanujan about how to do pricing and think about it he worked with segment to do their pricing where he said raise the price when people tell you you're crazy raise it again when they say You're really crazy you're almost there when you say we're really crazy we're never buying whatsoever then you know that you found your price and that's sort of what we did um what we what just to give you some examples our payments app is now two and a half times more expensive but the biggest customer we had for the longest time was 100K a year we recently sold one that's a million a year for a really really big deployment doing uh mobile payments uh our Events app is now four times more expensive but our average error was about 12K for the longest time uh it's now up around 45k because we started to land a lot uh bigger accounts because the application's grown a lot more sophisticated we have a bigger team it's really doing a lot so as we've gone on we've increased the the pricing there uh and just to give you an example of my Insanity I had 930 different prices that I looked in my stripe product uh price book over the first three years I had a unique price for every single customer so basically the pricing just never scaled at all uh so uh this is George in Australia I've never actually met George I've been to Australia once it wasn't then and I never even saw this booth which was a really interesting uh kind of concept about scaling uh Stuart Butterfield said I never understood the size of our company until I saw an ad in the newspaper I didn't know even know we were running I didn't even know we were going to do this that was a whole other different kind of thing anyway that's the tangent uh so play with packaging what we found is that within our Target verticals of higher ed and nonprofit they want to be told a story they want to understand how to buy stuff from you so once we had our ICP our uh ideal customer profile or whatever that thing stands for we then could find out who it is that we were talking to what it is that they wanted to buy so we had multiple products this payments paylink document link no one knew what the heck all this stuff was we just combined it into one and then we we sold it as a story rather than as a feature which was another big problem of Founders that they're technical they just focus on the feature not really the benefit uh so then within hired a non-profit we then started to tell the story about how you need events and payments and messaging so we painted this vision for them about how they can go down this road to buy all of our uh products into this platform that people really want to then be able to to use you can buy from one vendor to get all this stuff instead of going to all these different places we're launching a storefront app next month which focuses on continuing and Executive Education as sort of like a Shopify for Salesforce that idea only came out of listening to customers like we didn't magically come up with this idea it just came from them and we have just crazy demand for this thing so some key takeaways we have about 630 customers we've processed about three billion bucks through the app and we sent 31 million SMS messages which is twilio is the underlying technology here and some some big things I never really understood uh it is far better to make a decision rather than making no decision if you get stuck making no decision about what you want to do it is way worse than making a wrong decision uh kill your weak product lines uh Kyle Porter sells off did some LinkedIn post about having a line that was making six to seven million ARR a year and that's that's like a lot of people's businesses I was our business for a long time and he just killed it saying I wanted to focus on this other thing I was doing really really well so we've killed a whole bunch of stuff that was at 80k 100K 150k ARR to focus on where stuff really mattered and now it's really working uh you have to try stuff I never would have bought the um taxi company if I hadn't bought pci-fi because it was easier it was easier to finance it was more structured try to hike the pricing uh for me it was very scary scary early on and so I hired some sales people who understood the markets they knew how to tell the story and then they helped me kind of understand how to hike the pricing and try some Partnerships a lot of them won't really do anything but some of them might actually be pretty awesome but be quick to sort of like uh abandon them there's like the higher slow Fire fast kind of thing for people that is the same thing for Partnerships and listen to customers especially if you're in B2B SAS uh they'll they're just going to tell you you know what it is that you want to do and sell your journey the journey is you know everything about telling your story and and making this all happen uh so a few things we started out with this thesis of doing payments and events and we kind of knew it was right but we ended up buying all this other stuff so we went from two to nine apps and back to two so just be wary of chasing shiny things and once we had this Focus we then went a good bit wider and then we started to grow our ACB so if you have any questions um Chris at blackthorn.io I'm here in the city if you have anything uh happy to help this was uh helpful enjoyable thanks [Applause]

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is chris fettersfield he's working on a company called blackthorne.io deep in the salesforce app exchange partner ecosystem we're talking about management and processing you name it chris your idea takes the top let's do it thanks for having me on you bet okay so so a couple things i want to dive into here first are you exclusive to salesforce in other words does someone have to use salesforce in order to use blackthorne it is uh what's the expression bittersweet or is it both a blessing and a curse but yes uh that is the case salesforce is our system of record and the only database we integrate with so again blessing and a curse blessing is you're writing a freaking whale curses they've got to pay a bunch of money to sales force before they even use you talk to me about the blessing side first how significant is salesforce but in terms of driving you new customers yeah we're at four and a half million arr i think to date we've had two outbound deals closed we just started our outbound team otherwise there's a huge ecosystem in the app exchange has been great the curse side is uh we pay 15 of our licensing fees back to uh back to the dragon and i heard this expression that you're riding on the back of the dragon at some point dragon might look backwards so the fear is always will they buy or build something that we're doing um but it's also so big that wouldn't even matter because there's a lot of companies that continue to get huge even after that's happened so just be clear uh you you you just passed four million in ar like this month uh four and a half but we have a couple things going so i i think we'll be at five by the end of next month well yeah so the reason the reason i'm asking is if you're at four and a half now i'm curious where were you a year ago what does growth look like uh in it kind of started april 2019. uh we brought on cesar devoto who fixed our sales process so we had 700k arr then in mid 2019 yeah it's been now growing pretty consistently since then we've identified our product market fit with events and go to market and focusing mostly on higher ed and non-profit of the salesforce.org side we have a lot of dot-com customers but the closest match for our stack for the event side is with higher ed and with non-profits for payments it's sort of all over the places it's more infrastructure i want to get into payments here in a second uh but first do you remember what you finished 2020 with in terms of ar i know this i i think it was 3.6 and i think our goal for end of this year is 7.2 because we're trying to do 100 year-over-year yep yep yeah so 3.5 go up 7.2 so walk me through this girl you you said you launched when did you watch the company when was the first code written uh august 2015 doing only payments but we mostly looked like a services company for a while because our payments app was free largely funding the rest of our services and we didn't switch to paid anything until the very beginning of 2019 where we made our payments app paid and then we launched our events app which initially was terrible but then we federated a lot of features and it soon quickly did more and that was able to get more people since your origin story it talks about payments let's let's start there right so what does it mean when you say you had a payment school what were people like name a customer was using you back in 2015. uh we were building it for a while so i don't know if we had any uh but beginning of 2016 we had uh urban space they rent pop-up shops in new york and we built a custom event portal for them but they were doing all their payments through our payments app um we still have a lot of customers like that now like tony robbins uses us to call them up to do an event registration but the payment goes through our payments app like our events app uses our payments app as the Currently serving 9000 customers processing engine they kind of stack so i guess the right question is like uh in this year how much payments volume you think will go through your payments portal we we might hit a billion in aggregate this year okay um from inception um in the payments world though like ach volume is irrelevant uh because it just doesn't really make any money but our car volume is getting pretty significant i think our our card volume is at least 4 500 million aggregate now or something are you playing cards part volume like check out like credit card uh volume card volume okay so card volume is 400 or 500 million and how would that be different than the gmd going to your payments portal why would those two numbers be different there's a lot of ach ach doesn't a lot of bank transfer uh type funding but we don't charge by the by that we just charge per user of salesforce user and for the licensing for right yeah yeah but but your your sort of core activation utility metric is that is that payment volume you know if you do a good job people are going to do more events there's going to be more payment volume touching right they will and future requires tens i've heard the multiple they give on on gateway revenue share volume is 18 to 22 x which is you know obviously enormous Bootstrapped volume or the revenue you're making from the volume on the revenue you make from the volume which is like revenue share through gateways but the way that the way that we're tabulating and focusing on sales is more of getting customers live and selling licenses and if they happen to have a lot of volume great but that's not the main driver yeah you mean look we have a comp in the space right i mean i think build.com got a steal acquiring get divvy we had alex being on the show today for acquisition and they share they passed about 4 billion in volume um you know the acquisition price was about half that right so two point 2.2.6 billion so that's not on the net that divi was making that's on the total gmb but if we were the same number on you you could argue that you know you have a 500 million dollar company if you process a billion which could i mean it depends how much is card versus ach like ach really just doesn't make people money so just to repeat back to you since inception in 2015 you you're about to break a billion total gmv and about 500 million in credit card payments yeah about and what is it actual just for so i can understand like this year what do you think credit card payments will be through the system a couple hundred million uh yeah about that okay and so people listening around might be going well wait why doesn't he's adding value why doesn't chris take you know 10 bips or 50 bits on the spend um it's a good question we haven't decided to make our own processor only because our partnership with stripe is really really good it's really strong and the momentum that they have with stripe checkout that we've now just integrated and went live with is like what they're doing is amazing so our customers are global there's no way we're building all these integrations to all these different systems it's impossible they need they need hundreds if not thousands of developers that they're up to now to make it happen so our our goal is not to have huge margin on a small amount of customers it's more about like a land grab to get as many customers as we can and by having more capabilities for them to pay we're finding the fastest route to do that is with integrating with stripe yeah so the story here 2015 repayment school the way that you sort of survived as a company and grew if you use the payment total lead gen for your agency business you did you know you charge urban space custom you know plans to build out a custom build for them and then you eventually said in 2019 we want to launch a sas tool and that's when you launch your paid events app and your paid payments app yes yeah at the end of 2018 we almost died we had like 7k in the bank account we had seven people i think people took voluntary pay deductions and then we flipped the payments app to paid we got one customer to prove what does that mean let me get the paid if you're not taking a percentage gmv well everybody pays so when you buy salesforce you pay per user that's accessing it so we charge the same way for our payments app so we sell or license of people accessing the payments app we don't charge anything per transaction i see okay got it so so that custom business like where you were using the free tool to get legion for your agency business basically you almost almost died in 2018 and 78 so you were really forced to figure out a way to make money and that's when you launched the recurring revenue stuff yes and at the time we were building five other products all of which we killed at one time and decided to focus on events as a layer that would sit on top of payments and now they're both growing equally i think the revenue lines are about equal the go to market for events it's a lot easier because the story is easier to tell payment article is sort of all over so events tends to be like the marketing focus but the internal infrastructure what were the three or the four other things you killed we had a billing app which was some weird cross between a subscription app and and a quickbooks we had this multi-tenant portal which was sort of like a salesforce community's compete sort of like what google was making with google app maker that they sunset um we had a a form builder that was a web-based form builder that was like uh opinionated by the context so you we would have a pre-built invoice appearance so you would feed it what an invoice looks like or what a quote would look like so instead of generating pdfs you would have web-based interactions for these so that one we we stripped it down and now we have a web-based invoice that's part of our pay later functionality of our events and it also works in our payments app interesting okay so the fascinating origin story here agency payments sas later on on top of it how many customers are now serving today on the sas side of things we have about 300 customers um the deal sizes we have are sort of all over depending upon the space so and we have a lot of legacy customers too but it ranges anywhere from like 8k to 50k regularly maybe 12k average something like that like pretty standard for sass yeah i mean the 4.5 million run rate divided by 300 is what 15 grand acvs but i bet you probably have some accounts that are you know very large there's a few that are large a few that are small the ref share helps out a good bit and it's growing too um we don't charge it customers anything for that so it just helps sorry wait what's the rupture so when you when you have volume going through any gateway basically every company has some agreement with the gateway to get some kind of mutual funding that goes back and forth like authorized.net has one um braintree has one paypal has one they all have one so everybody that has an integration with any gateway that they're selling to their customers has some kind of you know mutual revenue share that what you're like a half a point there or one percent or something the percentages we have some pretty tight-lipped uh ndas that we're supposed to keep our mouths shut about but basically um it ends up being mutual to the companies because it boosts everyone to kind of make it happen got it got it okay you do make a percent of revenue then on the gmb it's just you don't deal that you don't do that for your customers you just negotiate with the providers themselves and it's you look there's 300 bits up for grabs in every transaction so it's less than three percent probably more than 0.1 somewhere in there yeah we don't charge customers but but uh you know sometimes we can get a bit more aggressive with their per license pricing which is their out of pocket if you know we see some pretty substantial volume that they're processing you know my point is the more gmb up through your platform the better you can negotiate with the actual team like the ach like the provider on the back and not your i'm not talking about charging your customers but you can say listen processing a billion a year now we're gonna move to somebody else unless you take us from point one percent cut to a point to five percent cut yeah i'm making this up that's my point sort of it's sort of leveraged like that but the reality is that a lot of gateways technologies just stink they're just really not that good like everybody can do a charge in a refund but what happens when you want to do reconciliation by web hook with a big json that needs to process in the right order like it's it's not common like what happens if you want to have a mobile sdk to do mobile payments interacting with emv certified card readers there's not many yeah interesting okay what about how you funded this business is it bootstrapper have you raised um we got 50k from a friend um a 100k from the launch accelerator the jason coloconis one that was in 2018 when we almost died kind of had to and then we had how diluted was that how much equity you have to give up for 100 grand their their agreement is pretty standard they're six percent for 100k uh i think like yc is like 150 for six percent or something now so but um yeah i pitched something like 100 investors and every single one of them said no partly because i'm not very good at sales partly because our vision wasn't nailed down as you know we had all these products so all the employees have options and at some point they said we want we want more than you're giving us which was already like 12 or 13 percent of the company or something but we had an employee round and they bought like another 180k so in terms of when a company gets funded we have 350 pays to date which you know our monthly expense now is like 450 490k so you know it really didn't do much uh so we're you know we're largely bootstrapped so when did the employees do that deal what year uh it was end of 2019 29th before covent stuff yeah yeah okay got it so 50k when you launch from a friend 100k in 2018 from the launch accelerator for 16. oh the the 50 and 100 those came uh august 2018 the first three years we had no funding at all so got it previously founded a services company and we had a bunch of customers that we sort of carried over yep okay got it so then in 2019 uh when the employees did that deal how much equity do they buy with the 180 grand investment uh there's a few points at that at that point um four percentage three three four something okay so so i mean if they bought back three percent i mean what we can do three times thirty what you were valuing the company that like six million dollars something like that uh i think it was around eight okay okay i'm getting loose numbers i don't have the numbers on top of my head no no the reason i'm asking is because there might be people listening that want to do this with their employees as well but they're not they might not be quite sure how to negotiate the valuation with their employees like oh we didn't hear the negotiation what we did is um we got a 409 a through carta okay and we asked we asked cardiff for the highest discount they could give which gave the employees um the lowest uh exercise price yeah that's the way to do it in terms of tax reasons and all that just do it externally subjectiveness then yeah it was clean there was no negotiation yeah cool okay so so again today four point five million dollar run rate 375 000 a month in revenue you just said you're expensive about 450 grand you're burning about what 50 grand a month right now as you're growing so um capchase.com i don't know if you know them they're similar to pipe.com so we have an agreement with them where we now have a bunch of recruiters full-time and we're going to hire far past ahead of our revenue and back fund it with the cap chase funding it's a new word for line of credit i think of it as so that's more or less what's going to be happening so with the trajectory we have we're going to scale to around 120 people by the end of next year where are you now right now we have 40 i think in the next two to three months we'll have 60 and then it freezes until the beginning of next year where we kind of see where sales settle out because we're not exactly sure what we're going to scale to with sales there's a bit of uh hypothesizing with formulas and then we're going to continue to hire from there and it's more or less cap chase funding it so it's non-dilutive i think i did some rough math i think over the next two and a half to three years we're gonna pay them upwards of two million whereas if we did a dilutive round now at exit that dilution would be minimum 20 million like bare minimum so yeah even though it's a lot of fees at exit it ends up being a lot less yeah we we have built uh you you don't know this because i guess we're just meeting we built founder path which competes directly with cap chase because i wasn't happy with the fees they were charging so i imagine i'm going to guess here i imagine you probably got something like a 10 or 11 percent discount on your ar is it accurate we uh we got a pretty good rate okay well i know their cost to capital because they race from i-80 so there's no way they lent you at a cheaper cost than their capital so the lowest discount rates have available for like eight or eight point five percent so again pretty pretty good deal there now you they usually have to pay that back though in a year were you able to extend your runway so that you can invest in growth and have more time to see your ar accumulate no it's still a 12-month uh payback why didn't you ask why did you ask for more we got a very good rate it is better than like anything i saw i did ask them if they wanted to do more but at the same time it ends up also being um i'll caveat this by saying i'm better at product and finance but it ended up seeming like it ended up being more fees that you end up paying when you look at it overall and even though it was a lot more time for our revenue to catch up to pay those at the end of the day it still was more fees so i'm not sure which one's better or worse but we don't we don't think there should be any fees on this stuff we'll talk more about it later but point being i love what you're doing you're keeping your equity you're you're investing in growth that's why that's how you're covering your 50k from up in burma right now you scale so i love this it's a great story now if you where would you value the company today you know you're doing 4.5 million you're growing nicely how evaluations you put on it i mean i know our i know what the numbers are in the ecosystem for other similar types of comps so if we're able to do 100 year over year i think on the lowest end it would be like an 8x on the on a on a high end i think a 12x in a competitive type of environment so if we said 10x which i don't think someone would just hand over to you but i think that you could get there somewhere between 40 to 50 if i had to guess um i had loose inquiries coming around 45 to 50 but i don't know why did you take the deal why not sell because at this point why what what's the difference what's the difference between getting millions or more millions is what's at this point it's i want to see what we can do it's it's fun i don't have aspirations to do some wild crazy things so well let me let me put a caveat out there look a lot of you know mark cuban obviously they act like they're like super smart and i mean timing is important okay these people have beautiful timing and when you look at hoppin when you look at visibo when you look at events.com when you look at everybody in the space the valuations are through the roof insane you're completely irrational if you are a smart business person in the space and you're getting crazy valuation you would use the momentum exit and then go reinvest your next thing and and laugh all the way to the bank because i don't i don't see how the event space can get more frothy than it is right now see i i gave the team a goal of hitting 35 arr by june 2024 which gives three years of a hundred percent year over year and i have nothing else i want to immediately do right now okay well that's the evening that's the key is that you don't know what else you would do if you had 40 million bucks a minute you don't know what else to go do so so a goal is if we're able to actually do this 100 year over year and we get up to 35 let's say we get 7x right that allows me to put a very large amount of money into a 501c3 and give away five six million a year while the principal still grows and that to me sounds fun and rewarding i have no desire to make some the only reason to make more money after you have a lot of money is for the fun of making the product or because you're obsessed with just getting more money on completely understood hey we got carried away here we're over time some rapid fire stuff real quick out of the 40 employees today how many engineers i'll put it i'll put it like this when we have 60 at least 20 will be engineers how many engineers today uh is around 15 including qa and how many quarter carrying sales reps do you have if any three okay so there's a motion there that's great and then turn critical in a sas business what is your turn uh the grr is anywhere from 89 to 92 and what's net growth revenue net revenue retention the nr is around 95. there's a long history around those where they're going to be increasing because we change some things with legacy fair fair that makes sense okay very good chris let's wrap up the famous five number one favorite business book uh great question the first thing that came to mind was the who book on hiring i can't say it was my favorite or that i really enjoyed it but we use it pretty religiously for hiring now number two is there a founder you're following or studying i mean it's cliche as hell but it's elon musk is unstoppable i just read everything that comes out from that guy i hate saying it [Music] get your favorite online tool for building a business [Music] honestly i i use our cash flow google sheet the post and i'd fiddle with the numbers with that number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh that's actually decent now finally uh seven and a half to eight and situation married single kiddos uh divorced but now a girlfriend of almost a year i'm moving in with that's a much better fit for me any kids no kids no plans to have kids and how are you chris i'm pretty good i got a triathlon coming up and how old are you oh how old am i i said how am i doing i'm turning 40 in october october recording last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh my god um i wish i knew i had bipolar too that would have saved a lot of pain that took a long time to figure out what to do guys there you have it blackboard io launched in 2015 as a free payments gateway they launched their sas play in 2018 after almost one growth only 7k in the bank they uh they got some funding a very little amount 100 now they're at 4.5 million bucks in terms of revenue growing almost or over 100 year over year serving 300 customers again funding the business themselves to preserve equity as they continue to scale team of 40 today thinking about 100 by the end of the year we'll see what happens chris thanks for taking the top thanks nathan 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 dot 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 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