How Campus Tree CEO Justin Arenson grew Campus Tree to $3M revenue with a 22 person team in 2024.

hey guys recording this here on what is it Friday the 19th maybe you're seeing this on Monday at the latest but I want to let you know we are almost sold out for founder comp sorry founder 500 in Austin Texas here in about a week uh it's gonna be an amazing event 500 B2B SAS Founders I'm looking at the attendee list there's almost um there's almost 60 founders with more than six seven million bucks in ARR it's an incredible group of group there's over uh there's over a hundred over 150 with more than a million uh more than a million Revenue it's an incredible group you don't want to miss it uh grab your hotel grab your flight grab a ticket right now I'll put the link in the bio um in the description here on YouTube and I think there's only about three tickets left okay about three tickets left I'd love to see you guys there don't be bashful grab your ticket now hey folks my guest today is Justin Aronson he graduated college with a BS in business double minor in economics and computer science rode crew all four years who's competitive as hell I guess Varsity Captain for two felt a strong passion in college to help make universities a more connected Network focused place for students and so we decided to build campus tree which is what he's focused on today Justin you're ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so first off who are you selling are you selling to students or selling the universities the sales to universities the students are the end user okay so how does the cow first off selling to school like this I feel like the sales cycle is just a pain in the button and secondly even once you settle the school the school has to convince students to use the software which is another like big friction Point how do you get through both those those two friction points yeah great point so the platform the the key success of this platform comes down to students wanting to use it right um if if students aren't this is a student engagement platform it's meant to help increase retention rates for universities by having students be more connected and involved and such and so if a student isn't getting that out of the app then that's the most fundamental point that we feel about so so what we do first is to make sure that the platform itself really connects with students and once we have that a success it's much easier than to show universities that hey this is something that students really want and can really uh get benefit from and that can help with with that process in that regard the B2B analogy is sort of you're going bottoms up here so explain to me how how you get college students excited about the product you talk to a lot of people so you show a lot of friends um you know Outreach as much as possible and just get as well but Justin what what does the my audience doesn't know what the tool does what what are you selling what are you trying to get college students to use sure so the way to think about it is right now if a student is going to college we're not talking by the way about Harvard Yale the top ivy league we're talking about most schools in the country a lot of small and mid-sized schools a lot of State schools right and for those schools they don't have the same resources as the top of the line universities and uh for them for their students um you know administrators are amazing and do great work but a lot of times they're constrained with the existing technologies that they have to engage their students make sure they're having a good college experience and so what we're trying to do is kind of replace the cold email Outreach and the mass text messaging with uh with a more collaborative peer-to-peer network of um of uh of Engagement where students can share information with each each other and that sort of thing I mean I feel like I feel like I had tools like this when I was studying Virginia Tech you know they would try to get us to use this thing called like I think scholar or Scholastic or something like that and they say they'd say message other people in your major and set up a resume and then look Facebook came along because it connected found you know students on college campuses like early on so like how do you build a wish it just feels like a very difficult thing to go after how do you build a wedge here yeah so what it really came down to for us is the design um all of what we know for the market is it's very what we call administratively centered the engagement comes from the administrators to the students right and so all of the the infrastructure and the look and feel is really meant to help make it easier for an administrator but we kind of flipped the script what for us it's more we what we found is students are best engaged by other students it doesn't really matter you know who you are how well you think you understand a student but another student is much easier is much you know more capable of convincing their friends to go go to events than other people and so the design itself is very student focused very student friendly and uh and because of that it results in much more we're expecting much more engagement and much more um you know communication and activity on that sort of uh that sort of a system 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 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 raise they sold 22 percent 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 valuation 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 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 valuations 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 I think the risk here in this interview is we're still talking like super high level so I'm going to try and ask a question that allows you to get really detailed you're on a rowing team with 20 people right campus tree comes along right you are selling to your own self on the rowing team how do you land the first unit it's a land and expand how do you land the first person on the rowing team so that then that one person convinces everyone else to come to the rowing after party four days from now using the campus Tree app sure yeah it's a great that's a great Avenue for this so um a good way to think about it is that clubs in general rowing teams a good example of this um when it's the beginning of the school year and they're trying to recruit new students um usually what happens is there's this huge exciting Club Fair where all the hundreds of clubs come and all the new students come and you kind of hope that the right people walk by each other and that you remember your school email address that you just got last month and you know there's a lot of touch points subsequent to that where the engagement can fall off you know you got to remember to come to the first event the first intro throw that sort of thing with this sort of plot from what we're doing is we're getting these students who from the beginning in the summer before they're coming to college tell us what their interests are we can connect them with these clubs so that those clubs now at the beginning of the school year they now have a hot list of leads of students...