How Chaser CEO Josh Martow grew to $550K revenue with a 5 person team in 2025.

try.chaseformery.com helps you send out to Do's on slack they've got a hundred companies signed up so far sending to-do lists again out to their audience he's measuring retention over the past 16 weeks coming in at 43 using some of his favorite tools like segment and mixed panel question is now can they grow that user base from 100 to a thousand to ten thousand to more funding the company with a hundred thousand dollar pre-seater under the seven million cap last year then did uh twenty thousand dollar round this year at a slightly higher cap to buy some extra runway for full time today two co-founders we'll see what they do next hey folks my guest today is Josh Martel before founding Chaser he I got an MBA from Berkeley and was not employee number one at thriver Technologies which is series B 165 employees and broke 60 million in Revenue he built the and led the sales product engineering growth and digital marketing and business intelligence practices at the organization holding three different director roles throughout his tenure that led him to identify the need for a tool like Chaser at try.chase4me.com forward slash slack Josh you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right well I guess first thing it sounds like you want to rocket ship it thriver uh how many years were you there uh five years okay so your one-year Cliff for your vest was completed huh yeah and the the bonus the Top-Up round that came a year later why I mean if if you were killing it which it sounds like you were why didn't they try and keep you with an additional option Grant um the issue was that our Revenue tank 97 when covet hit we were a catering a corporate catering company kind of like ubereats for getting food to the office and as you can imagine not a lot of people going to the office uh after a covet was hitting certainly not eating all together our slogan would gather around but at that point we might as well change it to stay away that's so funny or or Zoom around or something um okay so so what is Chaser maybe tell us what you guys do Through The Eyes of how a customer is using you today totally yeah so projects management software is widely broken right now and that's because most teams don't care enough to adapt their work go around it you know you don't wake up in the morning and say I'm gonna go look up what I have on Asana today and then at night go and marked everything you did that day and then the next morning do it over and over again with whatever projects management Twitter team's using and you know there's 172 million people working in desk jobs who have to use project management software a lot of them have to use it but two of three are not satisfied with their tooling and so we're trying to solve that problem Chaser is the only project management software that only one user needs to use and the way it works is you can delegate tasks to anybody on Chaser even if they're not a user they don't need to know what Chaser is frankly um Chaser will send them the task through slacker email and they'll be able to see like okay I've been assigned this thing I can click here to Market complete I can click here to push back the deadline and Chaser will collect progress updates from them send them reminders until it's complete and you'll be to an all-time track on your Chaser dashboard where the progress where the status of this uh task is and you can rest easy knowing case is going to follow up with them to make sure that it happens you don't have to handle that burden anymore and you never had to onboard them because again they don't have to be a chaser user for this to work with them and are you still testing the MVP or do you have paying customers already today we have a working MVP it's on slack um that uh that link you mentioned before try.chasforme.com forward slash slack is where you can get the MVP 100 for free um yeah we're not charging people today but we have a whole bunch of companies uh we've had 100 companies uh start using us um and a ton of them have been using this for many months now and keep coming back and they're telling us it's uh changing the way they work um beta users can lie to you and tell you anything you want to hear how do you actually look at the performance metrics how they're actually using your app The Click flow through your app what is the traction metric you're focused on every day yeah we use mixpanel to track our customer behavior um love that product anybody is looking for a behavior trafficking tool um and the main thing we're looking at is retention I mean you know not reventing the wheel here um and what I can tell you is that after 16 weeks of using our MVP we still have 43 retention um and again this is this is an MVP uh it has been Bare Bones we've now actually just yesterday released a major update Josh how do you define know an active user because that's how you get to retention right does that does retained mean they sent at least one task per day or per week or they just logged in I mean what does that actually mean spent one task per week yeah no great question okay okay so so over the past of a hundred percent of the companies that signed up for the past 16 weeks last week 43 of them so about 43 of them sent at least one new task out yes yeah I well it we're only the 43 of the ones who've been with us for 16 weeks not all of the hundred people used it have been with us for 16 weeks so there's a little bit of caveat into that but that's the gist of what I'm saying 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 around 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 evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 how do you know that the task being sent out is the dopamine hit that's going to get someone excited to pay for Chaser in my head my gut reaction you know more than me that would be the dopamine is actually when the task come back is completed it's a really it's a really good point uh we are starting to implement tracking for making sure the talks are actually being followed through but we're taking a bit of a shortcut and we're saying look if people are sending tasks and after 16 weeks they're still sending tasks they're getting value from it um it's doing what they need it to do um we're going to dive deeper into that to further make sure where the problems are happening Etc because you bring up a good point but you're not going to keep coming back and keep sending tasks through this if it's not actually helping you at all do you know how many tasks got sent out over the past 30 days um off the top it's a bit of a vanity metric that we don't track too much um so but it it's in the hundreds hundreds okay yeah yeah do you know how many came back complete you know 100 or 50 or I I I'm embarrassed to say that's just not something we have dove into too much yeah we've been we've been focused on on I'm curious you know I use HubSpot I send out tasks all the time to my sales team that I never hear back from I still keep sending the tasks out though even though I what I really want though is for the thing to be done and that's like the hit you know what I mean totally yeah no that's the that's the tricky thing and you know HubSpot can help um because you have those uh sales people on it and they're all users who act and engage with it sounds like they might need to engage more but I mean you have to tell us all this time sales people not uh you know using their CRM properly yeah but where we come in is when you don't have the sales people you don't have your operations people you don't have your product your engineers Etc all on the same platform what Chaser comes in is it can send and delegate tasks to anybody whether or not they're engaged with any platform and then just to be clear you're you're not in any way affiliated with with use chaser.com right okay different company yeah I just I was curious uh just I want to make sure folk my audiences get messed up so if you want to try you they go to try.chase4me.com forward slash Slack yep how are you getting customers today um we are getting through two Avenues we're approved on the slack app directory so that's actually maybe even an easier way to find us is just go on the sloc App directory and search for Chaser um rather than that kind of mouthful URL that I'm giving you um and the other way is we have been implementing a just digital marketing funnel uh using meta ads um and we're tinkering with it today that's where a lot of our users have come from um and we're just thinking about the messaging that connects the best how much did you spend over the past 30 days on meta ads um around two grand okay where do you get that money from you're just testing with your own money or you got an angel or what so we raise a hundred and twenty thousand dollars so far 100 from a VC um and 20 from a pair of angels when was that last year um the 100 was a year and a half ago and the 20 was the last six six months ago maybe yeah and I guess the 100 you raised last year I know most folks are selling you know 20 in a pre-seed round were you sort of in that same range um no um we we did that on a seven mil evaluation cap uh okay um so it of course it's you know it's it's a safe so it the exact Equity hasn't been determined yet but it the 50k you got from business school friends this year did you let them sit on the same terms as the angel that wrote that hundred thousand dollar check last year um no the terms changed a bit because it had been uh a year and a half at that point and just Cliff I was it was 20K 20K so what did you have to do you increased evaluation cap a little bit or what yeah exactly yeah yeah um yeah well that's a good way to do it all right if you're going to raise money make sure you're raising a dollar on a billion dollar cap that's a good way to mitigate dilution right absolutely all right very cool um okay so that's if you're using that money towards testing what about a team today how many folks are full time um four okay myself my co-founder um who are not paid um we're roughing it out and I just moved to San Francisco so that is tough uh to be living here without a salary um and then we have two uh developers um yeah okay they're they're on contracts but they're working full-time hours yeah yeah how did you it's always a tough conversation with a co-founder right the big Equity conversation right so do you guys just say screw it we're going 50 50 or do you really debate this out um we discussed it but we both were very happy with 50 50. we've worked together before he was actually the head of engineering at driver Technologies um while I was at a product there at the at that time and um we're actually now bringing on our head of marketing from driver as well who's joining but he's joining part-time so I didn't conclude him enough for uh I was talking about before very cool very cool so what's the next big I mean is the plan here going to be go get a million tasks being sent out per week and then launch a five dollar a month paywall or are you gonna try and maybe go Enterprise early and get a paywall going quick it's the former yeah we're really focused on growth um we are yeah we're confident that we can make this into a very valuable business people willing to pay for we just don't want to get distracted from making the product really sticky and really valuable to our teachers very good that all makes sense um did you talk to me about some of the things you learned at thriver in terms of software products that you used and you said I want to make sure when I launch my own software company I don't make those mistakes so are you talking about product development or any actually any takeaways I mean you you were sold a lot of SAS products in your roles at thriver I'm sure there are things you liked and disliked about different vendors oh I see in terms of which software we procured for thriving just in general you you can learn about how to build a great software company because you were the buyer of software companies at thriver so I'm just saying based off your own experience what did you learn about what you want to do when you build your own company versus what you want to avoid I mean I certainly loved being able to use products before um having to make commitments to it um you know that's it's not like the most insightful response and that's certainly not surprising to anybody but you know that a product LED growth um is um just really appealing to me as a consumer of course it's very appealing to the customer to the vendor as well because they don't have to deal with having salespeople on salary Etc um and uh I just I guess the big takeaway for me was I loved it as a vendor as a as a customer sorry because it meant I didn't have to also deal with salespeople I could just quickly get onboarded and use the product um and then see if it worked for me and then make a decision and move on versus there were some products where I I was you know working with a few different potential vendors to figure out which one we wanted and I would have to do three four or five different demos with three four five different sales people and just book up my week with product demos and make a decision I just took so much time um and if there was one that offered self-serve that I was able to use and it actually worked I think I always went with that one um so yeah I'm trying to be like that for sure and talk to me about sort of distribution Arbitrage and the slack app exchange you know one of the big hits that slack gets is that there is no methodology for ranking apps and sort of a democratic way in other words there's no reviews sort from high review to low it just is sort of it feels almost random at times or who's buddy buddy most buddy buddy with the slack app crew uh how do you optimize the Chaser listing to get more installs from slack app directory I hope one of your viewers can answer that question and email me the answer to it um because I am not sure I wondered that quite a lot I regret that there aren't reviews I wish that there was ratings rather well both I suppose um but my understanding is they watch how well how consistently people engage with your platform what your retention is like they're able to you know see retention from a different lens but just usage and who uninstalls it um which is you know churn so the better your metrics looked from them from there I'm sorry would indicate where you uh end up that's as far as I can you know guess yeah I guess it's just hard right because if someone wants to discover Chaser through that like either you have to work really hard to get direct traffic to the link you gave us right with meta ads or you get free organic exposure and the app director because you have so many installs the problem is when I click on categories and I go to productivity and then I sort by popularity which is the default sorting you know it's Drive Google Calendar Trello blah blah these are hard for you to like beat as a startup and so it's like what's the Arbitrage like do you go partner with the Trello app exchange instead because there's less competition for example yeah um it's a it's a tough question to answer um we're we're trying to figure that out every day what's your I mean do you have a thesis here yet or no you're still they truly are still developing it I mean our thesis today is we're trying to get as many people as we can to use it we're trying to make it as good as possible and we hope that through these results we're going to get higher on the list um you know the apps that are in there you know you you say travel for example or drive like their slack app it's that it's great and I you know I I use the drive slack app personally um it's not their like core Focus it's not like trello's actual like interface it's their interface is mostly on the website the the app is just pinging a channel every time somebody moves something I think we can provide way more value in that we can you can assign things well I don't disagree I don't deserve any of that I I get rid of all of that what I'm saying is like if nobody knows about you because you can't Arbitrage the top 15 spots in the in the app exchange then it doesn't matter that's what I'm trying to figure out totally what I think though is we can beat Trello in the App Store um and that's because yeah I've used the Trello app it it isn't sticky it doesn't it's just pinging a channel whenever somebody um you know put moves a card across the Trello board um it only it only really stayed on my uh in my experience we only really used it for a few weeks and I realized this is just kind of bugging us um and it turned it off it's not something you're engaging with all the time with Chaser our users engage with us every single day um and I hope that that's something slack is able to pick up on and we'll realize oh wow this is adding way more value and we'll catch the ride at some point and can get featured maybe they can manually put a sign on the list don't really know how they make those decisions but when we're one way or another I hope that we can prove to slack that we're adding way more value than these just little extensions of other products versus us being a very very functional product that lives fully within slack I mean look it's the unwritten language right Trello promotes the slack app inside of trello.com and drives you know the ecosystem exchange and so I think it's I don't know I just think I've never seen a startup be able to sort of crack this list you know you're coming from a purely a product Purity perspective and usually that is just sort of a it sounds really great but in terms of operationalizing it's really really difficult I'm certainly rooting for you I hope it happens I just haven't seen it work in the past that's fair if we have to get our traffic uh off of the directory for our own means for our own you know guerrilla marketing through the ads Etc then we'll have to do it yeah if we can get the free traffic from slycop directory that's a bonus yeah yeah it's just it's very expensive right if you have to keep paying meta ads right to get the insights very expensive but I think if you obviously if you can use creativity to win you always want to do that instead of money all right Josh this is this is exciting I can't wait to talk to you in a year and see where you guys grow but in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite Business book um the shoe dog just a lot of fun number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um is there a CEO that I'm following I mean I I hate to say Elon Musk but it is him and I wish that I spent less time following all of his Antics because I know what he's doing but I hate what he's doing on the side number three what's your favorite online tool for building a platform um segment this really saves me a lot of time not in my current job but in previous jobs number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night um seven and a half okay that's good in situation married single kids um I am living with my girlfriend that's great okay no kiddos and how old are you 31. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. I wish that I knew how much fun Tech is because in my when I was 20 I was still focused on medical school guys there you have it at try.chaseforme.com helps you send out to Do's on slack they've got a hundred companies signed up so far sending to-do lists again out to their audience he's measuring retention over the past 16 weeks coming in at 43 using some of his favorite tools like segment and mixed panel question is now can they grow that user base from 100 to a thousand to ten thousand to more funding the company with a hundred thousand dollar pre-seater under the seven million cap last year then did uh 20 000 round this year at a slightly higher cap to buy some extra runway for full-time today two co-founders we'll see what they do next Josh thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much this was a blast one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m 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 their 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 SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS 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 for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 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 got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya