How Brandlive CEO Sam Kolbert-Hyle grew to $23.3M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Fritz Brumder he is an internet strategist and entrepreneur and currently the founder and CEO of a company called brand live a SAS a live video platform used by brands and retailers to create highly engaging live content from marketing training and commerce events he's been developing digital media solutions for the world's best brands for over 10 years Fritz are you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely all right tell us about this company so what do you guys do and what's your revenue model how do you make money yeah so first of all our primary customers are brands and retailers as you mentioned and they're looking to find faster and better ways to engage with a variety of audiences so everything from internal communication employees distribution partners b2b audiences and ultimately end consumers and they're looking for a visual real-time interactive way to engage those audiences for whatever their story may be and live video is the perfect arrow in the quiver for that so we enable live video for those brands and retailers a revenue model is software as a service based so we have a platform that our customers log into and they can manage and run these live video events as well as get analytics and reporting so why can we throw this actually works I'm looking at the Pottery Barn example right now it says some are entertaining have lunch with Pottery Barn this Thursday at 12 p.m. and it looks like a video thumbnail or something with a name and email opt-in which part of this is you a hundred percent of that so we basically are a web mini web site builder or a meeting event builder so some people might think of it as like a traditional meeting like you would have on skype or goto meeting or something like that but we provide that much more of a social and web-based context and mobile of course as well it's really it's really a mobile first experience so our customers use our admin console to be able to create the Pottery Barn example that you're looking at right now so that would be modules and widgets that you can turn on and off design customizations that you can turn on and off it's again sort of like a website builder or if you were building an event page on Eventbrite for example it you could do a lot of similar thing there it's for just registration and payment for us it's live video broadcasting and interactivity so for its I wanna I mean people listening right now might just think wait I'll just embed my Facebook live into a landing page and that this works for that how are you different yeah so first of all I mentioned that our use cases and the audiences that our customers are utilized in fly video to engage with our not only consumer facing but they're also internal so Facebook life doesn't really work for that kind of scenario like internal training yeah internal training and communication like sales meetings town halls internal product launches b2b sales events b2b e-commerce is a big use case for us so when you have a new product that you need to tell all of your buyers and customers about you're not gonna do that on Facebook live so one a lot of our use cases just you can't do that on social live video for our consumer facing events we still do leverage social so we have a simulcast strategy to a variety of social channels including Facebook but when you get people to your website so we we are primarily driving the owned-and-operated experience on you know Adidas comm or Walmart comm or something like that Pottery Barn comm so we're sort of the software engine that is enabling a live video experience on their website when it's on their website there's lots of different modules and features that they want to add to that experience like product merchandising and e-commerce you can't get with Facebook bot got it interesting okay very good um walk me through pricing so you said your pure place asked company I don't want to go down every customer cohort but on average what's the customer pay per month or per year yeah so with annual programs and they range from the low $30,000 range up to mid $60,000 range per year okay would you say the lower I knew that as a fare average call it 30 40 grand yeah okay and why would someone pay 30 verse 60 in other words what do you use to drive expansion revenue yeah we have add-on features and modules and then we also have services so some of our customers need additional production sir for example we have a group called friendly production partners it's a global network of video producers that we have trained and educated on the workflow of live video which is kind of brand live but you can utilize that for Facebook live or YouTube live or Ustream relax trim or anything like that so we have kind of created yes might sound cliche but sort of the uber of live video where is that where is the one I traveled like I'm in Austin now when I travel in New York and I want to do a Facebook live like a lot of like live broadcast with like a DSLR camera and the whole setup in the lighting I have troubles using thumbtack to find video people that know how to plug into like OBS into the Facebook stream API etc you're saying you have people already trained in New York I can hire on the spot to do that exactly yep and right now that is exclusively or oh you're such a TNS as there are such a tease you need to make that public but you can you can utilize it for other stuff too so be like I said these people are trained and educated on the workflow of live video it doesn't matter if you're broadcasting why make their private though what why not I mean that to me sounds like a very interesting idea to actually open up to the public why haven't you open that up that's why I came on this podcast to get some new ideas I mean is it something you're seriously considering uh yeah we've looked at it but you know we're just there's obviously as an entrepreneur you have to have focus and we're serving our customers really really well and the people that would leverage that kind of network is a totally different kind of customer so yeah we have multiple different new business models or expansions to our business model that's one of them how many how many video professionals are in that Network like across cities across the u.s. yeah globally we have 44 so so so there's a real issue if you open it up to the public that all of your inventory would get used up by people potentially that are not brand live customers which would be an issue yeah we're we are one-on-one training these folks because you know our customers are Enterprise so we we expect that when they go on site they're real professionals and they know every single step in the process yeah and therefore the price you know for like to produce a you know one day event is around the 5k range just for the production services yeah that makes sense what would be scaled to how many customers are using you today we have over a hundred Enterprise subscriptions okay and just be clear that that's not you know people cheat that question sometimes that's not like free and pay those are all paying customers yeah a hundred for us an enterprise customer is over 12,000 per year sweet it's kind of scaled our pricing up the averages over 30k now but some of those customers are about a thousand dollars per month and then we have another hundred or so customers that are using us like for one time campaign events or we have a few customers that are nonprofit organizations and stuff like that that fall underneath that thousand Kay thousand dollars a month but just to be clear the hundred you just gave me those are your enterprise folks more than 30 grand per year in revenue yes okay got it I mean so can i back into minimum there right a hundred times that 30 grand you know per your minimum that puts you about what 250 grand per month minimum is that about right yeah we're actually more than yeah again just minimum I assume you're probably well you could be well north of that yes yeah what what percent so that's a three million dollar annual run rate I mean is that your is that your mate your blar just revenue stream or are there other things that eclipse that like your services products we do have services on top of that but they don't eclipse that they just do that yeah that's great now a lot of times we will add and I see nothing I was just gonna say you know where we've submitted to the Inc 500 or 5,000 last couple years so we do have some revenue numbers published out there oh great what are those you mind sharing just to save me from looking them up oh it's over four million this year okay but that's sass plus services yes three million of that is pure place ass yeah that's great now a lot of times people might ding your valuation because you're a mix of professional services which is typically lower margin and pure-play sass but I would actually argue the counter which is if you put services on top of the pure place ass it makes that sass stickier so lifetime values increase with two questions one do you agree with that and two what is your today uh yes I I act I totally agree with what you just said I think the services not only increase the value that you're delivering to the customer and therefore they're willing to spend more with you and stay with you longer and then I also think that it's a false assumption that services aren't scalable our brand my production partner Network like you mentioned could be scaled wildly right we could we could have online training tools to get production people up to speed and and we can then transfer that to a totally separate business model that could scale very quickly like a TaskRabbit type of thing and I'm not fearful of that and we've been able to communicate that to investors as well and then our retention is you know right in sort of industry standards so we don't publish our numbers but yeah there is there when you say industry standard I mean we're talking like 80 90 percent yearly yeah okay yeah gross gross net positive over a hundred percent that's great how far over 100 every time like 120 or 105 okay that's good though so north of 100 percent net revenue revenue retention annually meeting your expansion revenue more than outpaces any lost revenue that's obviously a really healthy place to be you just mentioned your ability to communicate with investors so have you raised capital and if so how much yeah we've raised four point eight million and when was that first round uh late 2013 we closed and you know hit the ground running early 2014 so is that free right you raise that first round we actually were a spin-out products we had a little bit of revenue we had just under two hundred K and revenue at that time and we were basically a product inside of another company and then in 2016 May 2016 we raised 3.2 million okay so get so those were give me the day one day one was 2014 yep and then you've racing on your word and then that was one point six seed round and then 3.2 was May 16 yep good stuff there all right and talk to me it sounds you've already published this but talk to me about growth so if you're at kind of 3 million pure SAS AR today where were you exactly a year ago in August 2017 I don't know that off the top of my head but our our a our growth is over 70 percent okay so yeah if if it's 70 percent year growth that means what you would have been about 160 grand something like that about a year ago per month it's about right yeah that's great and it's mostly growth coming from adding new customers or from expansion revenue uh adding new customers predominantly you know yeah cuz the yes new customers and where where are you finding those folks what like which channels and specifically what do you would be willing to pay to acquire one of them yeah we have a direct sales model that is vertical based and so we're expanding our vertical as we started a lot in home consumer products outdoor products basically anything that you would find at REI or Cabela's or something like that our new verticals are things like health care is a growth category for us we're really excited about that I'm Otto is the phrase I've never heard anyone say they are really excited about anything remotely close or even related to health care what the hell is wrong with you yes yeah I mean the exciting thing about health care though is there's obviously a tremendous amount of change that needs to happen and they're very slow to adopt digital and we think that there's a lot of opportunity for one-to-many health care delivery models both communication and service delivery so one of the more exciting aspects of health care right now is online health care and they're just utilizing you know Skype resume or something like that but those business models are gonna evolve heavily you have to worry about like HIPAA compliance you do for service delivery yes yeah yeah that's a whole that's a whole big interesting thing to jump into okay so what is CAC today are you are you spending 15 grand to acquire 30 grand to your customer what's CAC no we were just over $1 per a dollar in sales and marketing cost per dollar of ARR per year that's so where were you know even in year one and then lifetime value is you know more than multiple years of course well what what do you what do you right now peg a lifetime value - well I know off the top of my head our LTV - CAC ratio is over three okay so if you're spending you know a dollar spend for a dollar of new ARR and your average you know your minimum contract there's call it 30 grand a year she spent 30 grand to acquire you're saying it's at least 90 grand in terms of lifetime value yes yeah that's great let's uh les last question here last time you raise it sounds like was about a year ago are you considering raising capital right now yeah we've talked about it I mean fortunately we've always been a really solid business model or uneconomic SAR strong and so we're pretty close to cashflow positive right now we're in control of our own destiny we're going through some kind of changes in the market and looking at potentially some consolidation and there would be buying some other companies or someone would be buying and rolling you up both buying merging art narang not murdering yeah partnering so if you did raise if you did raise how much would you want to raise over seven and why where would you spend it it would be vertical expansion sales and marketing predominantly although there's a lot of product opportunities as well audience acquisition is a big white space for us you know in order to have successful wide video events yeah I spend I'll tell you what I spend a lot of money on amp life - to juice my live events and it's really interesting they basically have a Display Network for when you go live they'll launch these things instantly and drive your traffic you're considering launching something like that maybe well I actually am fly this one of our partners so oh great yeah yeah I know we know she should buy them who's bigger I don't remember what their numbers are we're bigger okay they're you know the numbers all right very good so you think about raising seven million and break down your team for me today how many team members total and where you guys based just over 30 team members majority of them are in Portland oh that we have San Francisco and Utah and East Coast Utah use goes very good good so think about raising potentially we'll see what happens there very good Fritz let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what is your favorite business book mmm-hmm I have so many but linchpin number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now uh you know I've been listening to freakin AMA X and they had a great fine series episode interviewing five different CEOs and the woman from Pepsi who actually just resigned yeah yeah she um she was impressive there you go number three is their favorite online tool you have for growing your business mmm I don't numb there so too many to list one a number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night I try to okay and what's your situation married single kids married two kids and how old are you Fritz just turned 40 now the big four oh I love it alright last question what he was your 20 year old self new man I used to say it takes longer than you think so be patient and stick with it but now I'm starting to get impatient again I want things to happen faster you know but you realize like businesses just don't become something great overnight yeah you know size ten year process that's hard to stomach sometimes try and stay patient fritz launched brand live in 2014 to really help mainly home kind of good consumer goods services think about things in REI etc do live video whether that's you know you know REI launching their new own license product or party Pottery Barn and they want to launch the suppliers they wouldn't do that on a Facebook live they wouldn't do that on GoToWebinar homes to private so brand live allows them to set up a landing page specifically for that with night social engagement they've got 30 people in remote locations mainly in Portland San Fran Utah on the East Coast building this tool they've got about a hundred customers paying call it 30 grand per year minimum so 250 grand per month in revenue passing three million in pure place asks for million though in total revenue when you add services back on top of it economics are really healthy flirting with a hundred five percent net revenue retention annually eighty to ninety percent gross revenue retention spending about $1 on CAC for a new dollar and a are so healthy 12-month payback period they're four point eight million dollars raised considering a potential raise right now growing about seventy percent year-over-year Fritz thanks for taking us to the top sounds good thank you