How Chaser CEO Josh Martow grew Chaser 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...