How Case CEO Bahar Ansari grew Case to $16.9M revenue and 3K customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is bahar on sorry she's a practicing attorney and the co-founder of case one she graduated magna laude from uh jd with uh from whitaker law school where she specialized in business law and was an active editor of the law review now today she's building out a case in legal project management system in case one but are you ready to take us to the top sure all right so it sounds like practicing attorney here where did you get your software muscle to build a software company so i i found my co-founder who's the tech guy i knew nothing about technology but i've learned a lot since he's not your husband is he no okay just make it just making sure you know that happens all the time and i gotta ask all right so for people not comes for free exactly all right so for people that are not familiar with the company help me understand what you do and what's your revenue model are you pure place ass yes we are um we we actually have a few different softwares or modules we call them we started out with the case management system for legal and then we kept on building and now we have bots we have doc assembly we have knowledge management we have a lot of different softwares that integrate with each other that you can build up will be self-service robotic law firm or legal department auto okay and so on average what are companies paying you per month or per year to access the technology uh the case one subscription model it it has a huge range it ranges anywhere from let's say 100k to a million um per year per month what's that per year per month a year okay per year so minimum though every customer is paying at least a hundred thousand dollars per year and then some of them go way up north of that yes okay very cool and put this on a timeline for me when you launch the company uh we launched the company three years ago in the us we've since expanded a lot but my co-founder actually had his company in eastern europe and it existed before i came on board and he had a huge development team in place so the company itself as a whole is quite old but i consider ours only three years okay so 2016. i mean so how did you guys have the equity conversation early on does he own the majority of it because he was doing it before did you get majority or how did you have that conversation yeah he owns majority of it he owns a little bit more than i do um of course he put in the technology and the initial investment and uh i came on board as the ceo and the lawyer to contribute building the software and what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers on the platform so we have over three thousand clients now globally uh the u.s side again it's a little bit slower with with uh the traditional culture of lawyers here but overall globally it's over three thousand okay and how many of them are actually paying all of them all of them paying clients in the us two non-paying clients that were our first users other than that everybody paying okay so all three thousand clients are paying again something per month how did you get your first 100 customers signed up do you remember uh the first hundred clients uh where on the u.s side it was it was crying and tears and blood it was hard work to get the first hundred signed up and onboard it of course but what'd you do though tell me how you did it uh i still do a lot of the sales i did it personally with with my team it's some in person meetings that we squeezed our way away and we took some we attended some conferences and a lot of it just cold calling just pick up the phone and call and try to get through it well but help me understand how you actually did that so you sit down in the morning back in 2016. you're on a cold call today what do you search on to find websites of companies and then the phone numbers that you think might be great fits for your software so we actually made a big mistake our first year and we started targeting law firms small law firms which which wasn't the general international user of our of our uh platform so with that it's exactly that we looked up local law firms starting with local law firms and started calling started trying to ask for either in-person meeting or a shared screen um i had some lists uh on my own that i had gotten from having attended a couple of conferences a few months before so that was helpful not too helpful because the contact information is never really that great but really just google i mean stalking abilities have really improved since then i found better ways but i also utilized social media that was different at a time i i was able to target some younger attorneys and the cell cycles were easier but other than that just exactly how you described and bahar have you guys chosen to stay bootstrapped or do you choose to take dilution and raise capital uh we're still bootstrapped we haven't raised any we're talking to some funds but um the company overall is is profitable right now so we're not in a rush yeah how i mean when you say profitable being like 10 a month to the bottom line or just barely break even um it's a little bit over that it's it's around 10 or more but the us i if we want to separate out different countries because we launched in latin america and we launched in the middle east and now we're launching in asia and we're using a lot of the profits to keep reinvesting to grow the company so if we want to break down the the companies us is still a little bit of you know below but if you look at the whole company though 10 to the bottom line very cool what's the team look like today how many folks uh 300 okay and where's everybody based you guys all spread out or a central location it's spread out everywhere it's we're literally everywhere uh the development team is a little bit more central they're based out of europe there's 150 of them who work on product the rest of the team is spread out okay and then look churn especially with law firms i mean this is a really critical problem with sas companies right so over the past 12 months what does your churn look like and what are you doing to try and keep that low um it's it's less than 10 percent overall um that's annually revenue churn yeah we we focus a lot on engagement and we have an interesting subscription model it's we it's actually not user based so we want to encourage companies to not only bring in like their their legal team but also to bring in their outside counsel to work on the same platform and bring in more employees and the more engagement you have the less churn so we focus a lot on engagement with wine and what do you upsell based on if you don't have sell based on seats and modules modules okay so feature based do you have any utility based like usage based upsell for example number of contracts processed per month we do we do so so the way we price it is the size of the team and uh kind of usage and a couple of our modules for example we have a knowledge management and that's based on gigabytes based on data some are based on number of templates our bot has number of conversations attached to it so we kind of limit it up okay so just you do actually you just said you do price based off team size so you do have a seat based model um we do it based on company size so if it's a if it's a really large company with a really small legal department they could still fall into uh this small uh size but we max out the number of seats for example a small is considered one to 49. got it but you don't charge per license it's for that so back to the churn question if you have about 10 you know the cohort you signed up exactly a year ago let's say that 10 that revenue churns do you have enough expansion revenue to more than make up for the 10 of lost revenue again ignoring new customers you do are you how far above 100 net revenue retention like 120 130 do you know i i don't know for sure but around you know alex are my co-ceo the company and i want to tell you that i'm not the best one with numbers but is there a target is there a target for that do you have an internal target for net revenue retention or no uh sure i'm sure we do he's actually here let's get him on oh is he in the room yeah oh alex yeah bring him in what's he doing sitting over there eating like potato chips while i grill the hell out of you why isn't he here you go you go handle it and i'll stay on one second okay i think he he just went outside on the phone but i'm gonna grab one because he do all of the tough stuff yeah bring him back in after he comes back inside and we'll keep chatting in the meantime um okay so so you're growing you have module-based upsells um you said you'd passed i think you said three thousand customers those are actually paying customers correct yes and you said kind of average one is paying about again a hundred grand per year right yeah and we have an interesting um kind of client base we not only sell to enterprises for legal departments we also sell to law firms so that changes the range but we also have government clients for example right now we are working with the country of bahrain to automate their co-support system as an e-justice platform so that plays a huge part in...