Cal.com Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Bailey Pumpfleet. He's the cofounder of cal.com, schedule infrastructure for absolutely everyone. Bailey, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Alright. Cal.com. How much does that domain name cost? [00:14] >> Unfortunately, we can't spell the exact number due to, you know, an NDA, which is which is a shame. But obviously, you know, well, you know, very expensive. It 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 we'll probably ever make. [00:38] Mhmm. When did you do it, the deal? Was it this year or last year or what? [00:43] >> So it was last year, because I mean, we officially launched the brand of cow.com on September the fifteenth last year. We actually bought it a few months prior, so it was very sort of like tantalizing how we had it sitting there in the domain account and 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 it with our version 1.0 and [01:09] >> a few other releases, yeah, was something that we sort of held on to for a little while before we made it public. [01:16] That's awesome. So so you get that done in at last year. Did you guys I mean, you must have raised a bunch of funding to get that deal done then. [01:25] >> Yes. So earlier that year, I think around sort of July time, we raised a 7,400,000 series plus series a seed round, which really got us started pretty well. And obviously, even to this day, have a low burn rate, we was looking for a good domain name, and we wanted to invest well in that because we're a link sharing business. It's so much nicer to type cow.com than calendly.com or savvycow.com or acuityscheduling.com. So yeah, definitely something which [02:04] >> we knew we wanted to put some decent budget into, but yeah, ultimately, without without the first round of run funding, it wouldn't have been possible. [02:13] And that was just to be clear, you closed the round of funding last year in 2021? [02:17] >> Yes. That was that was about June, July 2021, and then since, we've raised a series a, which was announced about a month ago. [02:25] And how much was that? [02:26] >> That was a 25,000,000 series a. [02:29] Okay. So let's let's break down the sort of story here before we get too deep into the finances. What is Cal? If if people wanna use it, what do they get? [02:36] >> What is Cal? 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 used to use Calendly. I did try SavvyCal. They're great products. They are genuinely good products. But the point is scheduling is like email. It's one of those core foundational things that runs businesses, runs the web. And the point is that means that people from time [03:07] >> to time have complex use cases and things like that, like telehealth or hiring marketplaces or anything that you can think of where scheduling takes part in. Calendly and SaviHal 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, just a basic Zoom setup, that's great. But the point is, is if you're running a massive hiring marketplace and want [03:37] >> to be integrating this fully into your platform, 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 cofounder had had. It was literally just started as a as a side project, but then we found that people actually really, really liked this. [04:00] When did you guys write the first line of code? [04:03] >> Oh, so that that's a difficult I think I think I wrote the first line of code in, like, February. It was so, like, I still had a nine to five job there. [04:12] February 2021? [04:13] >> Yeah. 2021. [04:15] And what was your nine to five, Bailey? [04:17] >> 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. [04:26] Oh my gosh. And how how old were you last year? [04:30] >> Last year, I was 17. [04:32] 17. Okay. So you're 18 today? [04:34] >> I'm I'm 18 as of today. Yeah. Literally around around the time that we, you know, officially incorporated what then was Calenso, and it's now coward.com. That was just sort of around the the age of becoming 18. [04:49] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 [05:12] connect your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founder Path dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, [05:36] you're gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [05:58] 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 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. [06:23] Maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founder Path. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in [06:45] a second. But if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hoveroverproducts, 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. Alright. Let's jump back [07:12] into the interview. And and sorry. Who is your cofounder? How'd you guys meet? [07:17] >> Well, interestingly, so it it was my cofounder Peer that had the initial idea of this. He basically sort of specked out what he thought, you know, could be a more extensible and open source scheduling solution. And then 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 actually got bought out by OnDeck, and he moved into a [07:46] >> role of head of product at OnDeck, and hence he didn't really have the time to work on it, so he was looking for somebody to actually take over. [07:57] >> And so what happened is, he's like, I was one of the first people on the wait list for this, super excited about it, because this was just a genuine problem which I'd faced. And then basically, he reached out. I replied back. And then we started off literally just with pure engineering work. I built the very first sort of pre MVP, just connecting to Google Calendar, working out some availability, that kind of thing. And then we decided [08:27] >> to actually you know, we work well together. You know, let's put an official arrangement in place. Wait. [08:33] Bailey, before the original arrangement, how did he incentivize you to do this engineering work? Did he pay you something, or did [08:38] >> you get out? [08:38] Yeah. So it [08:39] >> was literally just on a contractor basis. Basis. You know, he literally, like, paid me for, like, two weeks of developing [08:44] How much? How much? [08:47] >> I I think he'll be okay. So it was it was 5 it was $5,000. So I love this. I love [08:54] this story. So he goes, Bailey, listen. You're first on my wait list. I'm busy as hell. If I give you $5, show me what you can do in two weeks. [09:01] >> 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. And first of all, it was just kind of work as a contractor, as a trial, and then let's see if we work well together before actually committing to incorporating with both of us as founders, which I think is something which we both took as a good learning. [09:28] >> It worked well. And we sort of now do that with our employees. 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 a proper arrangement with them. Ironically, this was the foundation of the company which Peer sold. It was called LeanHire, and it's essentially like a contract to hire platform, where you actually just work at a [09:52] >> company as a full on contractor for 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 sort of trying me out as as a founder. And, you know, naturally, we found that it worked. [10:10] Let's come let's come back to that playbook you use with new employees, but I wanna get back to the origin story here. So then you guys say, okay, let's make this official. Do you guys split split equity fifty-fifty or does he keep the majority because he goes, Bailey was my idea? [10:21] >> No. We essentially, the idea was is originally it was going to lean towards him being like a minority share just because he wasn't able to put much time towards it. Obviously, he had quite a committed job. But then later on, we actually changed the agreement. Once he decided he was actually going to move to cal.com full time, that's when we decided to split it fifty fifty. [10:48] So you were a nice guy. You were gonna have 80% because he was busy at OnDeck, and then you start taking it off and he goes, wait, Bailey, let me back in. I wanna do this full time. [10:57] >> Yeah. Essentially, like, I I respected his position. Obviously, you know, he had a a decent job on deck and was, you know, very occupied with that. But I think it was, you know, it was a clear it was a clear agreement from me to say that, you know, when he could devote his time to it, you know, it would have been massively helpful and massively beneficial to have him on board in a, you know, greater capacity. [11:23] That's amazing. Okay. Let's fast forward a bit. What month did you guys hit your first paying [11:27] >> customer? [11:29] >> So so that moves on to the the interesting part of the story. So literally, I built the, the most basic MVP, really strain on the word MVP there. 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 zones at all. I think for me, it was hard coded [11:56] >> to the London time zone. I don't know whether it even translated time zones properly, but we launched it on Product Hunt, because already there were people piling up with, like the wait list for this grew to like, I think it grew to like thousands before we'd even shared that we're actually building it. And so we launched it on Product Hunt, and literally that day, we had a whole bunch of sign ups. [12:22] No, Bailey, quantify that for me. A lot of people use Product Hunt to launch. You guys launched 04/30/2021. You got 2,500 upvotes. How much website traffic or sign ups did you get that day? [12:33] >> I'm not actually sure on [12:35] the Do you know a range? [12:38] >> To be fair, I mean, I think maybe up to 50, which at at the time, we didn't actually have [12:45] Customers? [12:46] >> 50 customers? [12:47] >> Yeah. Actual paying customers. The How [12:49] many sign ups, though? [12:53] >> I mean, ultimately, every sign up was a paying customer. [12:55] No. No. But did you have any free? [12:57] >> Oh. No. No. We didn't we didn't do a free plan. [12:59] Wait, was that a mistake? You got all this traffic on product hunt and no way to capture their email address because you only had a paid option? [13:04] >> Stop what, yes. 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. We only started to think about that at a later stage. It was more of a kind of buy it 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 [13:29] >> just pay for the SaaS version if you just want an easy solution and want to support open source. There are lots of companies that do that. I mean, like 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, SaaS version which ultimately supports the development, then you pay. So yeah, we [13:53] >> 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. [13:59] That's amazing. And real quick, just to not bury the lead, what is what is the average customer paying today for the platform? [14:06] >> It's well, for the most part, it's all the same. So our our SaaS pricing has remained the exact same. So it's $12 a month. [14:13] Okay. [14:14] >> That that's it. We now have a free plan [14:17] Okay. [14:18] >> Which, same as Calendly, it gives you a couple of event types, restricts you on a few things. But, yeah, it's always been $12 a month. I love that. However, something to note, and we'll probably touch into that again, is that we have both a consumer SaaS and an enterprise side to our app. So obviously, enterprise pricing is is different. Mhmm. [14:37] So I guess you got your first customers from this Product Hunt launch maybe a little bit before that. How many paying customers do you have now today? [14:45] >> I don't know the number of paying customers off the top of my head, but I know we've got about 25 to 30,000 users as of right now. And as far as [14:55] Those are free and paid? [14:57] >> Those are a mixture of free and paid. I believe paid conversion is somewhere around the 10% mark, which tends to be in line with general SaaS companies. Because obviously, half of these free accounts, people signed up for it and forgot it or they were spam or something like that. [15:15] >> You know, in terms of ratio, we're looking relatively on par. [15:20] And so if we take three, you know, 10% of 30,000 is 3,000 paying customers at $12 a month, that means you guys are doing like $40,000 a month right now on revenue, something like that? [15:29] >> I mean, all of our stats pretty much as well are open completely open. So all the Oh, come on. [15:33] Share the good stuff. What's the revenue? [15:36] >> Yeah. So let me pull it up in a tab. So we [15:38] actually Guys, don't we love it? [15:39] >> We love Bailey. Bailey's gonna this is fun. [15:42] >> Yeah. See, we we unlock all the secrets to our business and literally give you guys everything. I should've just asked that at the start. [15:51] >> Open startup. [15:54] >> Yes. We are we're an entirely open startup. So literally, like, my salary is is publicly available. The I love this. For the team, the [16:04] You're making you're making 7 I'll have to read some of this. You're making $70,000 salary. Pierre makes 70,000 as well. Your is Alex, your lead software engineer, makes a $100? [16:13] >> Oh, one of the two. So you have Alex and Omar there. They're out to, like, IC three level engineers. [16:22] Damn it. I wish I knew about this ahead of time. Okay. So I have a bunch of questions now. 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. [16:30] >> Right. Yeah. Here goes into another one of our policies which has worked pretty well. So we have three payback or or in in engineering, which is like 90% of our team, we have three paybacks and that's it. We've got IC one, two, and three, like junior, mid, and senior. 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 bands, which means that if [16:54] >> you're doing the same responsibilities as like anybody, you're not getting paid any different. So we have complete equality on every [17:05] >> demographic across the world. So we have engineers in India who are making like 1132% of the average salary, and we're paying that same money, you know, anywhere in the world. [17:19] Yeah. That's super interesting. So, it doesn't even matter if it's copywriter versus head of product versus senior engineer. If it's IC one, two, three, four, that's what determines your pay. [17:28] >> Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty much the fixed bands for engineering. I mean, you know, there's me, Pierre, and Kieran 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, literally it's just fixed bands. And we've had really good feedback from the employees about that. They really like that it's completely transparent that nobody's leveraging better deals out of us than Yep. Than anybody else. [17:59] You closed 1,300 new paying customers in the middle of April this year. It's your big spike in our new customer sign up graph. What happened there? [18:07] >> I mean, so every fifteenth of the month, marking from the anniversary of when [18:16] >> we actually first released it on Product Hunt, we launched a new version. And so we coincided the cow.com release to that with the series A as well. So yeah, we announced series A then. And hence, with that comes a lot of media coverage and social media coverage, that kind of thing. [18:38] Your burn graph, monthly burn in March, monthly burn was $130,000. That's net burn or total expenses? [18:45] >> That's that's total. And that was actually an unexpectedly high month. We had quite a few, one off expenses in that. Generally, like without one off expenses, we're generally looking at, I think, about 60 ks, 70 ks between the team, add on maybe some stuff from the law firm and bits like that. We're looking at under a 100 k generally. [19:08] Yep. And so sorry, what I'm looking for the MRR graph. What is monthly recurring revenue today? [19:12] >> Yes. The the issue with that is that Stripe has some trouble exporting. So I think as of yeah. I don't actually have that hand right now. You [19:28] must have a general idea. [19:29] >> What's like a general idea? $40.50, 60,000 a month, something like that? [19:33] >> So we're actually, I think we're more towards the 15 to 20 in mind because essentially, the idea of where we're going to be capturing our revenue, and this was the idea from the very start, is that we plan to succeed in the enterprise side of business, which that is what we're launching somewhat now, next few weeks, next few months. So this is where we're really starting to close the pipeline on enterprise. So the real sort of [20:07] >> cold, hard cash growth of cowl.com is looking to be within the next few months rather this period has just like, the idea for us is we build up a good name for ourselves in consumer SaaS. Then we leverage that to then break into the enterprise market and hopefully succeed there. Because the point is there's no real point in just being another open source alternative to x, y, zed. It's like [20:34] No, you're right. [20:35] >> If you have an open source Facebook alternative, it's not going to do well. 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 notice they have like an infrastructure offering where we can, you know, implement it at Google on [21:02] >> a massive scale. And then that's how we find a lot of deals go through. [21:07] 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 25,000,000 series a, what valuation was that at? [21:16] >> That is one thing that we can't actually share. [21:19] Okay. We have the cap table on your site. It says investors own 25%, so we can reverse engineer the the valuation, right? [21:26] >> Yeah. You you're more than you're more than welcome to make a guess at it, but I'm just gonna hold a poker face when you [21:33] Well, no. Sorry. Sorry. Just to be clear, you have your cap table here. You have percent you just have investors on 25%. So right? So if you raised you're you're It's not It's I don't have to guess. Right? You can do the math. We can do the math together. [21:45] >> Yeah. It's Whether or not it will be 100% accurate. [21:51] The point is you've sold between two rounds, a 7.4 seed last year and a 25,000,000 series a this year. You've sold in total 25% of the business to investors. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you sold 15% in your series a, right, you can effectively take 25,000,000 times six and say that you guys raised pre money at a 150. [22:11] >> Close. But [22:12] Alright. Bailey keeps his poker face. Alright. We'll say somewhere around [22:16] >> That that's why I say, yeah. I I I'm not I'm not sure if I can say the actual number, but [22:23] You get nervous, though, growing into that valuation with 15,000 of monthly recurring revenue right now? I mean, you're trading at, an 830 x multiple. [22:31] >> Yeah. It's it's not a concern because this has been the plan from day one. We're an infrastructure company. We're here to play the long game. 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 to start then capturing that kind of market share. Because in terms of infrastructure, like scheduling infrastructure, we are the market leader [22:58] >> in that because there is nobody really in that market. Like, we do do open scheduling infrastructure, which nothing else does. There's kind of Nihilas and 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. [23:23] Hailey, 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. [23:30] >> Favorite book? [23:32] >> Probably probably The Martian. I like I like realistic sci fi. [23:39] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [23:44] >> Not particularly. I 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. [23:53] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Cal? [23:58] >> Online tool for build? 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. [24:06] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [24:09] >> How many hours of sleep? I'd say about eight, the, you know, the regular number. [24:13] Are you skipping college, [24:14] >> We by the [24:17] >> don't really like, here it's university and it's kind of optional. There's no [24:22] Okay. [24:23] >> I didn't skip any education. I did my fall. [24:25] Alright. Fair enough. So eight you're 18 today. I assume I always ask married, single kids. I assume you're not married and you have no kids. Right? [24:33] >> No. Not married and no kids. [24:35] Alright. 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? [24:46] >> 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. 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 I'd probably put my 15 year old self through YC or something like that, you know, open my eyes [25:09] >> to the world of startups, fundraising, and all the cool stuff you can get up to. [25:14] Guys, we have it. Cal.com open source version of, call it, Calendly. They're building sort of infrastructure, which is very interesting. They've got over 3,000 paying customers, call it $10.12 bucks a customer doing $15,000 a monthly recurring revenue. Raised 25,000,000 series a recently to keep building this for the long term. Everything's open at cal.com/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% [25:37] today. They each pay themselves $70 salaries. We're rooting for him. We'll see what happens next. Bailey, thanks for taking us to the top. [25:43] >> Thank you very much. [25:46] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM [26:11] 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [26:33] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS 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 [26:55] for that at nathanlakka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We [27:14] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright. I'll be in the comments. See you.