How Cal.com CEO Bailey Pumfleet grew Cal.com to $5.1M revenue and 20K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is bailey pumfleet he's the co-founder of cal.com schedule infrastructure for absolutely everyone bailey you ready to take us to the top yeah all right cal.com how much does that domain name cost uh unfortunately we can't steal the exact number due to uh you know an nda uh which is which is a shame but um obviously you know well you know very expensive it was a it was probably one of the most significant purchases we'll probably ever make and you know personally i believe the most effective purchase will probably ever make when did you do it the deal was it this year or last year or what uh so it was last year um because i mean we officially launched the brandofcal.com on september the 15th last year um we actually bought it a few months prior so it was um it was very sort of like tantalizing how we had it you know sitting there in in the domain account and you know just waiting to use it and waiting to sort of push out the announcement but obviously we wanted to make sure that our because we coincided with our version 1.0 and a few other releases um yeah it was something that we sort of held on to for a little while before we made it public that's awesome um so so you get that done in uh last year uh did you guys i mean you must have raised a bunch of funding to get that deal done then yes um so earlier that year um i think around sort of july time uh we raised a 7.4 million series um series a seed round which you know really got started pretty well and obviously even to this day we have a low burn rate so we was looking for um you know a good domain name and we we wanted to invest well in that because you know we're a link sharing business um it's so much nicer to typecal.com than calendly.com or savvycal.com or acuityscheduling.com um so yeah it was it was definitely something which we knew we wanted to put some decent budget into but yeah ultimately without without the first round of run uh funding it wouldn't have been possible and that would just be clear you closed the round of funding last year in 2021 yes that was that was about june july 2021 and then since we've raised to series a which was announced about a month ago and how much was that uh that was a 25 million seriously okay so let's let's break down the sort of story here before we get too deep into the finances um what is cal if people want to use it what do they get what is cal um cal is essentially the the solution to all of our problems with calendly and you know any of the existing solutions out there the point is is you know i i used to use calendly um i did try savvy cow they're great products they are genuinely good products but the point is is you know scheduling is scheduling is like email it's one of those core foundational things that runs businesses runs the web um and the point is is that means that people from time to time have like complex use cases and things like that like telehealth or hiring marketplaces or you know anything that you can think of where scheduling takes part in um calendly and savvycal just don't really sort of fit all of their requirements i mean they're good products like if i just want to book one-to-one sales calls with me you know just a basic zoom uh setup that's great but the point is is you know if you're running a massive hiring marketplace and want to be you know integrating this fully into your platform you know have it completely white label push across 300 users it doesn't really scale well so this was literally a solution to a problem which me and my co-founder had had and it was literally just started as a side project but then we found that people actually really really liked this when did you guys write the first line of code [Music] oh so that that's a difficult i think i think i wrote the first line of coding like february it was so like i still had a nine to five job february of 2021 yeah 2021 and what was your nine to five bailey uh so i i worked at like a backup and disaster recovery company i was doing some like small in-house software engineering like customer portals oh my gosh and how how old were you last year uh last year i was 17. 17. okay so you're 18 today i'm 18 as of today yeah literally around around the time that we you know officially incorporated what then was kalenso and it's now cower.com that was just sort of around the the age of becoming 18. 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 raised they sold 22 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 valuation 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 and and sorry who is your co-founder how did you guys meet um well interestingly so it was my co-founder peer that had the initial idea of this um he basically sort of specked out what he thought you know could be a more extensive or and open source scheduling solution um and then he he published a website out there just basic with like a wait list just kind of explaining the idea and then it was right around that time where his company uh actually got bought out by uh on deck and uh he moved into a role of head of product on deck and hence he didn't really have the time to to like work on it so he was looking for somebody to actually take over um and so what happened is he's like i was one of the first people on the wait list for this like super excited about it because this was just a genuine problem which i've faced and then basically you know he reached out i i replied back um and then we like we started off literally just with pure engineering work like i built the very first sort of pre-mvp you know just connecting to google calendar working out some availability that kind of thing um and then we decided to actually you know we work well together um you know let's put an official arrangement in place well wait bailey before the original arrangement how did he incentivize you to do this engineering work did he pay you something or did you get it yeah so it was literally just on a contractor basis um you know he literally like paid me for like two weeks of development how much how much uh i think he'll be okay so it was it was five it was five thousand dollars um so i love this i love this story so he goes bailey listen you're first on my wait list i'm busy as hell if i give you five grand show me what you can do in two weeks essentially that was the idea yeah he basically sent it out to everybody on the wait list and i replied back saying yeah i'd love to to take lead on this um and you know first of all it was just kind of work as a contractor as a trial um and then you know let's see if we work well together before actually you know committing to you know incorporating with you know both of us as founders which i think is is something which we both took as a good learning you know it worked well and we sort of now do that with our employees um we might touch on that a bit more later but the idea is we don't just hire people off the bat we work with them as contractors then actually move into um you know a proper arrangement with them ironically this was the foundation of the company which pierre sold uh it was called lean higher and it's essentially like a contract to hire platform where you actually just work at a company as a full-on contract after like two weeks a month something like that and then you move on to like a formal job offer so we kind of applied that concept to to sort of trying me out as um as a founder and you know naturally we found that it worked let's come let's come back to that playbook you use with new employees but i want to get back to the origin story here so then you guys say okay let's make this official do you guys split equity 50 50 or does he keep the majority because he goes bailey was my idea uh no we essentially the the idea was is um originally it was going to lean towards him being like a minority share um just because he wasn't able to put much time towards it um obviously he had quite a committed job but then later on we actually changed the agreement once he decided he was actually going to to move to cal.com full-time that's when we decided to split it 50 50. so you were a nice guy you were gonna have 70 80 percent because he was busy on deck and then you start taking it off and he goes wait bailey let me back in i want to do this whole time yeah essentially like i i respected his position obviously you know he had a decent uh job on deck and was you know uh very occupied with that but i think it was you know um it was a clear it was a clear agreement from me to say that you know when he could devote his time to it that you know it would have been massively helpful and massively beneficial to have him on board in that you know a greater capacity that's amazing okay let's fast forward a bit what month did you guys get your first paying customer um so so that moves on to the the interesting part of the story so literally i built the like the most basic mvp you know really strain on the word mvp there like i built it for like three weeks and this thing i mean it was hard coded to google calendar you couldn't use anything else and it just about made a booking i don't actually think it even had proper time zone support i think for me like it was hard coded to like the london time zone i don't know whether it even translated time zones properly but we launched it on product on because like already there were people piling up with you know like the wait list for this screw to like i think it grew to like thousands before we'd even shared that we're actually building it um and so we launched it on product hunt and literally that day we had a whole bunch of sign ups no bailey quantify that for me a lot of people use product hunt to launch you guys launched april 30th 2021 you got 2500 upvotes how much website traffic or signups did you get that day uh i'm not actually sure on the you know arrange um to be fair i mean i think maybe up to 50 um which at the time we didn't actually have customers safety customers yeah actual paying customers um uh well i mean ultimately every sign up was a paying customer you know but did you have any free oh no no we did we didn't do a free plan wait was that a mistake you got all this traffic from product on to no way to capture their email address because you only had a paid option um we basically like it was so early stage that we just didn't you know we didn't even have a solid commercial foot for this you know um we only started to think about that at a later stage it was more of a um kind of buy if you're interested and to support the open source like obviously you can run this thing and self-host it for free you still can to this day the point is you just pay for like the sas version if you're you know if you just want an easy solution and want to support open source there are lots of companies that do that i mean like uh metabase or gitlab now has a free plan but there are a lot of open source companies out there where it's like if you want it for free run it yourself but if you want this like sas version which you know ultimately supports the development then you pay um so yeah we literally i think we got about it would have been like maybe up to 50 paying customers in the first day i don't know exactly that's amazing and real quick just to not bury the lead what is what is the average customer paying today for the platform um it's well for the most part it's all the same so our sas pricing has remained the exact same so it's 12 a month okay that's it we now have a free plan um okay which famous gives you a couple of event types restrict you on a few things but yeah it's it's always been twelve dollars a month uh i love that however something to note and we'll probably touch into that again is that we have both a consumer sas and an enterprise side to our app so obviously enterprise pricing is is different so i guess you got your first customers from this product on launch maybe a little bit before that how many paying customers do you have now today uh i don't know the number of paying customers off this off of my head but i know we've got about 25 to 30 000 users um as of right now um those are free and paid those roommates are free and paid i believe paid conversion is somewhere around the 10 mark which tends to be in line with you know general sas companies because obviously half of these free accounts you know people sign up for it and forgot it or they were spam or something like that so um you know in terms of ratio we're looking relatively on par and so if we take three you know ten percent of thirty thousand is three thousand paying customers at twelve bucks a month that means you guys are doing like 40 000 bucks a month right now on revenue something like that um i mean all of our stats pretty much as well are open uh completely open so come on share the good stuff what's the revenue yeah so let me pull it up in a tab so we don't we we love bailey bailey's gonna this is fun yeah see we we unlock all the secrets to our business and literally give you guys everything uh just ask that at the start so open startup yes we are an entirely open startup so literally like my salary is is publicly available that i love this ratio for the team you're making you're making seven i have to read some of this you're making seventy thousand dollars salary peer makes seventy thousand as well your is alex your lead software engineer makes a hundred grand uh one of the two one i have alex and um omar there um they're out like i see three level engineers damn it i wish i knew about this ahead of time okay so i have a bunch of questions out does this create conflict on the team someone goes joe's making more money than me i do more work than he does pay me more right yeah here goes into another one of our policies which has worked pretty well um so we have three payback or in in engineering which is like 90 of our team we have three pay bans and that's it we got ic one two and three like junior mid and senior it doesn't matter where the hell you are in the world doesn't matter what like you don't negotiate a deal or whatever it's fixed pay bans which means that if you're doing the same responsibilities as like anybody you're not getting paid any different so we have like complete equality on you know every um every like demographic across the world so like we have engineers in like india who are making like 1132 of the average salary and we're paying that same money you know anywhere in the world yeah that's super interesting so it doesn't even matter if it's copyrighted versus header product versus senior engineer if it's ic ic one two three four that's what determines your pay yeah yeah that's that's pretty much the fixed bands for for engineering i mean you know there's me peer and yeah who are you know not within the engineering so that's slightly different but yeah i mean for like 90 of our team which is engineering um literally it's just fixed bands and we've we've had really good feedback from the employees about that they really like that you know it's completely transparent that nobody's leveraging better deals out of us than than anybody else you closed 1300 new paying customers uh in the middle of april this year it's your big spike in our new customer signup graph what happened there i mean so every every 15th of the month you know marking from the the anniversary of you know when we um when we actually you know first released it on product hunt uh we launched a new version and you know so we we coincided the cow.com release to that we the series a as well um so yeah we announced series a then um and hence you know with that comes a lot of um you know media coverage and social media coverage that kind of thing your burn graph monthly burn in march monthly burner's 130 000 that's net burn or total expenses uh that's that's total and that was actually an unexpectedly higher month we had quite a few you know one-off expenses in that generally like without one-off expenses we're generally looking at i think about 60 70k between the team you know add-on maybe some stuff from the law firm and bits like that we're looking at under 100k generally yep and so sorry what i'm looking for the mri graph what is monthly recurring revenue today yes the the issue with that is that um stripe has some trouble exporting um so i think as of yeah i don't actually have that to hand right now um you must have a general idea what's like a general idea 40 50 60 000 a month something like that um so we're actually i think we're more towards the 15 to 20 in mind because essentially the main the main idea of where we're going to be capturing our revenue and this was the idea from the very start is that we may we plan to succeed in the enterprise side of you know business um which that is what we're launching somewhat now you know next few weeks next few months um so this is where we're really you know starting to close the pipeline on enterprise um so the real sort of cold hard cash growth of cal.com is looking to be within the next few months rather than you know this period has just like the idea for us is we we build up a good name for ourselves in consumer sas then we leverage that to then break into the the enterprise market and hopefully succeed that because the point is is there's there's no real point in just being another open source alternative to xyz it's like no you're right if you have an open source facebook alternative it's not gonna do well um like our idea is like the consumer side is almost like a promotion for us to get our name out there and then it's like say somebody at google signs up and uses it then they say to their manager oh wait yeah i'm using this personally but i noticed they have a like an infrastructure offering where we can you know implement it at google on a massive scale and then that's how we find a lot of um deals go through this makes a ton of sense hey we're running short on time here a couple quick things that maybe aren't public yet that maybe you can share you raised 25 million series 8 what valuation was that at that is one thing that we can't actually share okay we have the cap table on your site it says investors on 25 so we can reverse engineer the valuation right yeah you're more than you're more than welcome to make a guess at it but i'm just going to hold a poker face when you uh well no no sorry sorry just to be clear you have your cap table here you have percentages you have investors on 25 so right so if you raised your your it's not it's i don't have to guess right you can do the mat we can do the math together yeah it's um whether or not it will be 100 accurate um the point is you've sold between two rounds a 7.4 seed last year and a 25 million series a this year you sold in total 25 of business to investors yes yeah yeah yeah so if you sold 15 in your series a right you can effectively take 25 million times six and say that you guys raised pre-money at 150. uh close but all right bailey keeps his poker face all right we'll say somewhere around that's why i say yeah i i'm not um not sure if i can say the actual number but you get nervous though going into that valuation with 15 000 of monthly recurring revenue right now i mean you're trading at like an 830x multiple yeah it's it's not a concern because this has been the plan from day one um you know we're an infrastructure company we're here to play the long game you know we we're here to be like the best thing that we can summarize it at is the stripe for time and to become stripe you need to be around for a long time um to start then capturing that kind of market share because like in terms of infrastructure like scheduling infrastructure we are the market leader in that because there is nobody really in that market like we do we do like open scheduling infrastructure which nothing else does like there's kind of nylas and uh a few other platforms that kind of do things but nobody has the customizability that we have so already we're seeing a lot of really good signals from customers right now bailey great lessons here we've we've got to wrap up here because we're out of time so quick quick questions here number one favorite book favorite book um probably um probably the martian i like i like realistic sci-fi number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh not particularly i always think it's a bad idea to just look up to one person i think it's always best to you know combine ideas across a bunch of people number three what's your favorite online tool for building cal online tool for probably metabase i think it's hands down the best analytics platform that we've worked with it's super easy and it's open source number four how many hours of sleep you get every night how many hours of sleep uh i'd say about eight the you know the regular number uh are you skipping college by the way uh we don't really like here it's university and it's kind of optional there's no okay i didn't skip any education i did my fall all right fair enough uh so eight you're 18 today i assume uh i always ask married single kids i assume you're not married and you have no kids right no not married and no kids all right very cool and last question here i usually ask what do you wish your 20 year old self knew that doesn't apply to you so let me ask you what do you wish you knew when you were 15 um probably everything i mean at the age of 15 i didn't know anything about the startup world or anything i always knew i wanted to do you know software engineering or some kind of design um i knew what i wanted to do i just didn't know the world in which i could do it in so yeah i'd probably show myself um i'd probably put my 15 year old self through yc or something like that you know open my eyes to the world of startups fundraising and all the cool stuff you can get up to guys there have it cal.com open source version of call it calendly they they're building sort of infrastructure which is very interesting they've got over 3000 paying customers call it 10 12 bucks a customer doing 15 000 bucks a month recurring revenue uh raised 25 million series they recently keep building this for the long term everything's open at cal.com forward slash open so it's really nice you can sort of track them over time track salaries all that jazz bailey and his co-founder own 60 today they each pay themselves 70 grand salaries we're rooting for them we'll see what happens next bailey thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much 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 p.m 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 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