How Cariclub CEO Rhoden Monrose grew to $2.6M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Rodin Monroe's he grew up in Harlem New York after emigrating from st. Lucia at age 12 after graduating Trinity College he began his career as a derivative derivatives trader at Citigroup in 2014 he founded carey club a technology platform positioned at the intersection of corporate citizenship and professional networking to engage young professionals with nonprofits Roden how are you are you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely you bet all right tell us about the company what do you guys do and what's your revenue model how do you make money sure so Cara Club is a platform that connects young professionals with nonprofit boards we work with companies like Citigroup Deloitte urge young Unilever for instance and they realize that there are millennial employees we want to make an impact and give back and we have a platform that is very much designed to make that will experience much easier and once again how do you make money the company's chaos they seek a club has an employee benefit so they it's a particular employee on an annual basis where it breached personal joints okay and are they getting access to a software platform or it's more of an information product is it it's a it's a marketplace type platform so we have you sign up and build a profile page and we you tell us a little bit about yourself in terms of the cause that you're interested in what you're passionate about and we have hundreds of nonprofits on the other side that have that similar information about their mission and it cause we throw in some machine learning and be make it easy for them to find each other I like to come to Amazon in terms of our ability to put the right organization in front of our members by just knowing what they're interested in so only the companies pay her to the nonprofits pay to be in the marketplace as well yeah okay it's just the companies and again a lot of the reasons why they're paying for this is because they see the value in terms of leadership development employee retention engaging Millennials in general it's something that a lot of companies care a lot about and one of these companies pay on average would you say I'm sure you have a bunch of different use cases but on average sure that become anywhere from 600 to 1200 dollars that's per year per month annual annually okay got it and why would what what's the difference between the two what would be 600 won't be 1200 it's fall so the more employees you have to platform the more the Lord the per employee just like to skill Russia I see and what so let's get kind of put it on the timeline now what year did you launch this n we launched our first client in 2016 I started working on the company in 2014 and we're off to the races in 2016 we ended up with like just like to clients in 2017 with 15 would run into more cities now we're not just in New York we're in Chicago or San Francisco or Boston and DC and so how many how many customers today right now we're about 20 about 20 okay good and is it just you what's the team size of like full-time team of six plus just twelve part-time slash contract and these folks our remote are all based in New York the oh great okay good now if I take 20 customers times a $600 per year or $50 per month price point that's about a grand kind of per month I assume those 20 logos they'll have multiple seats so walk me through on average how many seats are these logos signing up right so a lot of them wanted to do a smaller pilot in the first year and so they'll do anywhere from we don't do that as few as any we're going to use like 10 but like someone will go up to a hundred the idea just want to make sure that because we're dealing a platform of our kind they want to make sure that it works in our Vicodin this positive feedback and so a lot of them are rolling out from that one-year pilot and we're looking to just figure out how we launched it back more to New York and other cities so wrote in today how many how many kind of I would you say paid employees or paid seats you have on the platform down about three thousand okay good so yeah fairly healthy team sizes then yeah that's great and and kind of backing into that I'm curious kind of if you've raised your bootstrapped it sounds like three thousand seats at a minimum $50 price boy you guys are north of 150 grand per month at this point is it accurate not yet because a lot of the employer clients from like year one had looked at the price point as we tested out the actual market question five market fit we realized that our question was higher so a lot of these clients from liking sixteen are rolling onto our new price point and so I got revenue to increase okay just correct me then when I get wet yet today in terms of monthly revenue right now we're about 50 okay about 50 that's great and where were you a year ago give me a sense of growth [Music] okay okay good so healthy growth and just that's just coming from signing up more seats right yeah that's great now have you bootstrap to raise capital we raised about two million dollars to date and kind of from the first year I really wanted to raise money to build a team I found it the company got myself and when we realized that there was something there raised a million dollars and building around it and and then let's kind of fill out some of the other uneconomic before we talk more about some of the successful nonprofit case studies so economics in this kind of company churn is critical but what is your turn today and how do you manage it so we actually haven't had any churn yet we haven't lost any clients we have velocity nonprofits we are so in the landscape right now where companies are much more aware of that like engagement point from getting their employees engagement windows engaged in that way the nonprofits on there and they realize that they need to connect with that next generation of talent otherwise there's not much continuity for these organizations so we have a lot of very engaged not box in corporate party and you never ignore a logo for a second but you never had a kind of one single business go from you know a thousand seats down to 800 you've never lost a seat correct yeah I thought so I find not shocking usually usually an ending coming there's at least some churn oh that's maybe a signal that this is too cheap of a product consolation of iterating that whole process but from the early year we've not lost a new client every one of the conversations were having right now it's all around helping me and more employees in more cities our existing clients okay that's great so so no turn right now and in terms of how you're spreading that to million to grow the business what's your fully weighted customer acquisition cost to get one of these new logos I mean I'm the right now I'm the only salesperson so I mean acquisition cost is a lot of my salary since you're not doing any direct paid spend no network we have a lot of referrals and it's really interesting because we often get a lot of these employees from firms that would like to get our clients come to us and they'll basically working with us to get the character in the door at their employer yep well look if you've got 3,000 paid seats across 20 logos that means each one's about 150 seats at you know that that price point right so each see each logo is paying about 2,500 bucks per month what are some of the sales cycles looking like how long do you have to travel and fly and wine and dine and win over these corporations yeah the beauty of having a web we could do a lot of things with locally because we're based in the America land and so many nonprofits and companies are headquartered there or have a major office here we were actually able to grow through that channel so the stage one for us is like we do some sort of a pilot in year one in New York City and once they realize that oh my god it's working our boys love this and I love this we could negotiate like the expansion from New York for the most part we would certainly like fly to San Francisco and other cities like when we launched with these clients but like we don't have to give me a successful case study here so name a nonprofit that's really benefited the most from your platform there's so many so you have to put them in fundamentally understand like we're in a marketplace Plateau that's connecting these nonprofits with high achieving young professionals at all these soft arms they have never had something like this before so every single nonprofit on our platform that has received an employee from us a member there they're all doing well because before us there was no other channel so I could get be more specific and talk about like Teach for America how they were able to get a few young professionals to join their associate board and the people that we help them identify we're going to grow that group out get really high quality other board members who predict but they were also able to raise like hundreds of thousands of dollars for the New York Chapter of Teach for America but they're just at this point so many stories like that that is just it going on that's great so you I mean you've successfully a place it sounds like about 3,000 of these that's why you have 3,000 seats is that accurate 3,000 seats yeah you said you said you have 20 companies paying you you have 3,000 seats I assume a seat is when an employee gets placed into a non-profit correct a seat is just the number of spots that a company has on our platform so it's affiliated with like a number of employees we haven't placed 100% of our employees yes okay so they've bought 3,000 like credits essentially you've placed some portion of how many of you place so far what are your time where okay that's goes a little under 15 call 1300 something like that yeah last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew not understand that like if you are doing something passionate about I stay calm there's a will there's a way again he had a successful career at Citigroup before he said you know and I want to get out of here launch my own thing help connect employees of these companies with nonprofits they can add social responsibility really to their work he assigned 20 companies up they've all bought about 3,000 seats for their employees he's placed about 1,400 them to date doing about 50 grand per month in revenue these are getting companies paying for those seats that's up from 15 grand per month just a little over a year ago they two million bucks a team of six full-time based mainly in New York City too early for you know economic stuff but healthy growth rate run thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much for your time appreciate