How Boltsoftware CEO Sam Knight grew Boltsoftware to $960.2K revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is sam bolt he's building a company called boltsoftware.com his construction sas founder loves texas his family and mavs basketball sam i'm ready to take us to the top all right so what is bolt software and who are you selling to well my name is sam knight you call me sam bolt i'm okay if you want to call me sorry sam knight you're good man so software we're construction software but we're super niche we do schedulings how we get our foot in the door but we also do project management estimating for the residential home building market specifically those trades that are in that industry the electricians plumbers masonry companies so on and so forth and what got you into this did you software background first or construction background first no construction background first i painted houses to kind of uh pay my way through three unsuccessful semesters at texas a m um and then uh met my co-founder who has a background in the construction business as well and just kind of entrepreneur the company out of it so what year was that uh we started um january of 2016 is when we officially started okay and so you were painting before that 2016 you and define officially started like that was the first round of code or your first sale or what no that's when we started selling what we thought was the minimum viable product which was we quickly found out was not but that's when we officially started selling and marketing our product out to when did you write the first line of code um 2012 was when it first started being written wow okay so how were you guys paying yourselves for four years pre-revenue we weren't it was just an internal product that my co-founder josh was using at his dad's company they have a background in construction and so they took about four or five years to um start building up kind of a proof of concept at their business before we actually then spun it off we started getting some interest as a short answer around the industry in it and so that's when we spun it off into a separate product and something that we could turn into a business so how much have they invested you know cash wise in this product or four years before you guys teamed up and spun it out um good question i don't really know it was just kind of uh i mean once you're in the software business you're in the software business even if it's just internal so um that's a good question i honestly don't know what their spin was before we started the actual company what was your your co-founder's name josh so did josh's dad say hey listen fellas there's this is going to be a big company but i already spent 200 000 bucks of the construction companies money building this thing internally with you know two engineers so you got to pay me that or give me equity in the new company yeah that's basically how it is is um we kind of have a soft line of credit with him uh where we get to spend money but only if it's for a really dang good reason um so it's forced us to be really careful with our cash flow but the good news we haven't really invested much into it since then when you compare it to other companies yeah yeah but that doesn't address the the sunk costs that he and josh pretend you potentially already put in before it spun out in other words is the is the parent company josh's father's company are they on the cap table of the new software company uh josh and his dad are on the cap table of the new software cup okay got it got it got it so the dad is able to kind of be like you don't have to pay you and josh didn't have to come up with money to pay his dad and the company to spin out the software right no ner and his previous construction company has grown by massive amounts because of the software so he's definitely seen his reward well that well that would make me want to protect it even more uh that would if it was if i had a if i had this coffee mug that helped me grow my company really well and some and my and my son came to me with this other hot shot college guy who was painting out and said hey you know dad i want to spin it out i'm going well this coffee mug has driven me like 3x revenue growth i really don't want to spin it out unless you give me 60 of the company that you guys spit out then i'll let you spin it out yeah no they have they have the the majority of the equity so they there well there we go see now it's all coming together this is all making sense okay so so josh's father and and you know by nature the father's company owns a majority of the company you and josh though have enough equity where you're incentivized to build this on your own take your own crack at it have you guys bootstrapped the company uh or have you raced from traditional sources bootstraps okay great okay so bootstrapped and and um walk me through how you're pricing this thing so on average what are these folks paying you to use the tech yeah so we have a huge variety in our customer base up to a user with i think 600 plus users our small issues i think has two so we really start at about a minimum of about 500 a month regardless of if you want to use all five users so you know we kind of start at like a 100 a month for five users minimum and then we'll tear down um and we don't really we haven't really formalized like hey here's our publicly available enterprise level pricing but um we're pretty open about it during the sales process as long as we have a good buyer on the line as far as hey we have a tiered down approach starting at about five users okay so how many customers are you serving today uh 50 customers okay about 50 customers and where you at in terms of revenue revenue we finished up the year at 724. he looks over to the to the reports i love it all right so all right so about sorry about about 700 000 last year 724 000 in uh we brought in that revenue so our recurring revenue at the end of the day there was probably like 750 of them uh recurring was 750 yeah yeah in terms of run rate you're taking december 2019 revenue multiplied by 12 is about 750. yeah so today like last month you did about the 65 000 or something like that we tried to do our billing all up front but that's correct yep yep across 50 customers that means each customer is paying about 1300 per month on average yeah these we start them off at about 10 grand uh recurring revenue and then they bump up to about 15 averages what is enabling you to get them to bump up in other words what are you upselling against uh new licenses or new seats and then um additional features that we're rolling out we just rolled out an estimator and we're about to roll out some dashboards and just trying to sell deeper into our customer base yeah that makes good sense um what's the team size today how many folks uh nine plus a couple people on the dev side that we can scale up and down quickly so nine full time how many engineers um we just scaled back to three full time okay so three foot where were you at before that uh six and what made you cut half your engineering team um we're trying we're implementing a new it's popular in the construction world called eos it's just kind of an internal management system and we just need new people we need right people in the right seats so we're kind of going through a process of finding some right people for the next phase of the company okay any quota carrying sales i could use five more developers yeah any quota carrying sales reps yeah we just now launched officially kind of our first outbound like we have a full-time bdr and now a full-time quota carrying sales rep is the bdr have quota two are they incentivized based off a number of meetings set up or something yeah their quote is strictly um sals what is in a sale a sales accepted lead i'm sorry got it okay so you have your bdr who does not have quota it's just based off sales accepted leads and then you have your first kind of account executive that does have quota how would you set their quota target at right now it's pretty low um their quota is probably going to be right at 30 grand a month okay so you want them closing recurring revenue deals okay and why so over your entire company history you're at 65 000 per month right now they would have closed basically two deals to get to where you at today in other words you've never the founders have never closed a thirty thousand dollar a month account right so what do you or thirty thousand dollars a month in one month so how do you expect a new sales rep to do it we did in 20 uh with a 2017 we that was a year of just low-hanging fruit um i'm sorry 2018 was a year of low-hanging fruit and so we kind...