How Capacity CEO David Karandish grew Capacity to $50M revenue with a 151 person team in 2025.

folks I am grinning big today because we have a real treat over the next 25 minutes you're going to learn the story of that grind that 12year bootstrap hustle from 0 to 5 million bucks of Revenue competitive space from Bridget Harris who cut her teeth in politics before launching you can book me about 12 years ago they're they're about to make an announcement which I'm not going to steal the Thunder from they'll do it in a second but she has now teamed up with David at capacity who's a seasoned entrepreneur cut his own teeth teeth starting in 2011 at answers.com one of the um we'll call it one of the fallouts of the 1999 Heyday but went public went through a pipe went through a take private went through a majority went through a secondary ended up selling that business for about 800 900 million bucks before launching capacity which is now focused on helping entrepreneurs enable and get their support done quickly providing great customer support all leaning in to this AI Revolution we're living in on that note David Bridget are you ready to take us to the top let's do it let's do it all right well David first off what's the announcement what happened recently I am really excited to announce that capacity has acquired you can book me uh this brings world class online booking into our collection of AI powered uh uh platform pieces and so one of the biggest use cases we've had for capacity is when folks want to automate their booking process and now uh we're able to do that on the tune of a million bookings a month that's incredible now Bridget I thought it would never happen I'm going there's no way it's just this is never going to happen she's got profit sharing plans set up you know she's in full control she's doing this with family members this is great help us understand sort of um what what right before you guys signed the m&a deal and it closed um what did you grow Revenue to and what ultimately made capacity the right fit for you can book me um so we had we' got you canb me running at a really nice $5 million a year um profitable as you know well you know I've spoken a lot about creating uh profit which you need to do if you're bootstrapped over long term you need to start making money um uh to make it worthwhile frankly so we've got to that stage and um really at the end of the day I'm looking for how do I get you can put me to the next level how do I get this you know this um business that we have built which has has got to a point which is really exciting really something that you know means something for our team our company but also our customers how do we get it to the next level and actually it there's a combination of reasons why and and um I should say at this stage you know we didn't go through a process we weren't for sale we didn't put up some big estate sign you know up in our in our lot um capacity approached as and um we like we really liked the offer we liked we like the fact that they're in customer support and AI for customer support it's a huge problem that needs to be solved um we know it we feel it inside you can book me so I knew that you know what they um are doing what they're what they're building for their own customers is a really strong product offer that we know our customers could really benefit from there's a huge amount of synergy as David was saying that um all of those guys need scheduling and um we need you know we we need to find a vehicle to scale and grow what we do so there was a lot of synergy there and I think also that the team itself and the way approached us it was really respectful of us being a bootstrap company of us having our own you know our own engine that we grow through product L growth and self- serve and there was something very kind of obvious about the deal I mean as one of those things where as we got closer to the deal the day before we signed and everything else it got easier and it got more exciting to look forward to the day that we were closing as opposed to harder so I suppose you know when you're selling away your life you might at the point of about to sign sit there and go am I doing the right thing you know is this a disaster and actually genuinely and there's a story to tell you about it Nathan but genuinely the night that we signed it we were so happy that we just got to the point where we we know that this is the right thing to do for us and what night was that you were at a Paul McCartney concert that that we we told the lawyers on the day it was it was just before Christmas we told them on the day we have to close um today because we're going to see Paul McCartney tonight and no matter how important um you know the capacity team are and you can me team and all the lawyers and how expensive it all is Paul Paul McCartney uh is more important and so we went off to see Paul McCartney in the O2 it was obviously an amazing gig and we were on a train on the way back from London to Bedford where I am now um and the whole thing happened over a call um you know on our train back full of drunk people coming back from London but it was so it was a fantastic night for both re December what December 22nd 23rd something like that 18th 18th December 18th and then we've been in we've been in hibernation Nathan since then we've been sort of from the shop yeah no it's great now before I jump more into the story the backstory the negotiations you know things to look out for both on on both sides the acquirer and the one the group being acquired Bridget is this are we pretty much on the spot here in terms of Revenue growth or any corrections you want to stick in here uh yeah no no we hit 1 million sort of much more in the 2016 2017 Mark so it's a bit it's a bit more sort of it's less of a hockey sticker more of a of a of a nice a nice Hill but about but about five million at Exit yeah yeah yeah so David let me pivot over to you in capacity because you told me in our preall you have a thesis you built a list of 24 key items you think every company needs when they think about inbound and customer support and you said quote we're going to go build or Buy in all these spaces which of those 24 items LED you to searching for booking tools and then ultimately LED you to email Bridget yes so when we think about the 24 steps of the customer experience Journey we can kind of divide them into three buckets you've got self-service so that's where a consumer can get help from an AI agent without having to talk with a person without having to fill out a contact us form without having to place a call to a human that's where we started that was kind of capacity bread and butter it's where we have uh a lot of uh product entry points in that part what we realized as we got into it though and that was kind of the original thesis of capacity when we launched back in uh early 2017 big thing though that we realized is that no matter how good your AI system is you have to be able to handle questions the AI doesn't know how to answer so the second big pillar that we focus on is this whole agent assist concept how do we help support teams do their best work when something does need to escalate up to a person as we got into it we started working with a lot of these support teams particularly marketing and sales support teams they're like David our biggest workflow is being able to get leads into our business being able to book appointments being able to bring people in and so our third bucket are those kind of campaigns and workflows we have other types of campaigns we do uh SMS campaigns Voice Dialer campaigns we have multiple types of workflows we support but scheduling is one of the biggest ones uh that we've been handling for years starting internally and then going externally and so we looked at this and said wow if we could find a company that's doing this well at scale I think there's a great opportunity to combine our self-service Ai and our agent assist tools together Bridget I'm going to keep asking David questions while I'm doing that though can you open up your email inbox and search his email and and go when you find it read to me the subject line of the first email he sent you okay nobody's asked me that Nathan you ask me so many unexpected questions David you know this like right I mean someone like Bridget is busy right so like you're sending out these emails to potential people to acquire and you got to get the response you've got to say in a curious way that gets her to say okay I'm interested when she's like been all against sort of exiting right all against the VC world and just wants to bootstrap what what that's true well no I well I was going to say the first time they contacted me I said no so there you go em subject line was but David find out okay David do you have a process did you only reach out to Bridget or did you reach out to you know 15 companies in the scheduling space yeah so the first thing we do is we use competitive research tools uh I know a great one that has a lot of great stats around SAS companies uh that you might be familiar with uh so we use tools like get lotka to go...