How Chimney CEO Ryan Salerno grew Chimney to $1.8M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ryan salerno he's a cto and one of the three co-founders of chimney before chimney he was a self-employed developer building a variety of projects scheming to turn one of them into a viable recurring revenue earning business he also taught coding classes at general assembly and before that worked at news cred where he met his wife and co-founders all right ryan you ready to take it to the top let's do it all right so what is chimney what are people paying you for um so we launched so we have two products the first product we launched with our financial calculators that are embedded on bank websites so when people have questions like how much home can i afford should i rent or should i buy uh what are my retirement savings going to be we have calculators that go on bank websites that help answer so that those questions first product that we launched with and now after working with maybe 60 different financial institutions [Music] then looking at the data the data was streaming at us mortgage mortgage mortgage mortgage and so now we're building a new tool for uh homeowners existing homeowners so they can track things like how much home equity do i have can i click one button to tap into that home equity do i have expensive credit card debt that i can eliminate with home equity things like that and so how do you make that sticky i mean most people thinking about like their credit card bills or home equity they do like once and then they they don't come back right or how do you make them engaged yeah good question um and that's a that's a big question that we're trying to answer ourselves and the strategy is nothing new or secret it's it's notifications and emails and um ideally having the app embedded within another app that they do use like on a at some frequency at a monthly basis or something so is that your main use case is you're selling the ability to embed this calculator to insurance companies yeah so this this is a new product that is not in market yet and the idea here is to partner with um a big bank that had already has millions of users and they also serve up um like heat locks or other types of loans and then we'll be the tech in the middle that engages the users um and encourages them to to open up some of these products through the bank now you have pricing plans ranging from 44 to 10 dollars a month to enterprise what's the average customer pay per month uh per year it's like seven thousand per year for the calculators oh okay yeah interesting and what are you up selling against is like number of hits the calculator gets per month or something pricing is really simple so it's just um number of calculators uh so the average price is 99 per month per calculator 99 per month per calculator okay interesting very cool and then i guess put this on a timeline for me when you guys launch uh so we launched the calculator product in 2020. what about the whole business though or was that the business that was long that was yeah that was the launch so before that it was nights and weekends and we didn't have any customers yet um and so it was a long time it was actually we did we kind of in my opinion went about it the right way so before we ever made a serious investment in terms of time or money um we made sure that this was like a viable thing to do so like we went out and we asked for we told people hey you have existing calculators but they don't look great if we give you calculators that look better uh would you pay us for it the answer ended up being yes for like two or three different banks and so then um we went and built it and sold custom calculators to those banks and now we have money coming in and now we can sort of justify building out the rest of that library and building in all the other features that would make it an actual sas business 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to 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 valuations 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 valuation 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 interesting and so how many customers like those first three banks are you now serving today 60 plus 60. okay wow and and so you're obviously a c2 engineer you had two other co-founders did you guys say you know what we're just going to do 30 30 30 at the start to split it evenly or was it different i was different because i don't like that i don't think if there's two people it shouldn't be 50 50 what if you disagree um so we're 40 30 30. uh the ceo that covey it was his idea um so he has 40 and then uh chase and i reach 30. i'm so i've never again i've recorded almost through those interviews i've never had a founder just admit that but it's so true anytime i see someone split 50 50 i go you probably don't have great communication with you you avoided the conversation basically is what happened before they avoided the conversation what if what if uh they they both like truly believe something and now they're kind of screwed like how do you make that decision yep that's right so you guys are 40 30 30 which is cool i think that's great um now have you guys bootstrapped or did you raise capital yeah so um i was pretty adamant about like bootstrap bootstrap bootstrap for a long time and so we made it to like about 300k in revenues um by being fully bootstrapped um and that was and then so in 2020 when we were locked down uh we were able to do it because we were working from home so i literally don't tell anyone i had two computers working on one thing and the other thing and that was and that was sort of what enabled us to be able to be bootstrapped for longer and then in december of last year in 21 we took a small seed round okay and how much was that for i was for 1.3 million and and so what did you use that money on or why did you need it to hire a team in-house because we were using um so we had the three co-founders and we had all of these different agencies we had a marketing agency and we had a development agency and a sales company that was doing outbound reach and so the first tires went for like a few key internal people a couple of developers a designer and somebody to help with like admin stuff what's the url of the developer agency that you used uh it is brights dot io right bright yeah so they were located in kiev ukraine um and so they've been unavailable um everyone is safe and we've been in touch with them um but not able to work yeah i see it i'm on their site now um you know i guess two things here one obviously we're really glad they're safe uh but this is also like for early founders this is totally what i recommend it's an outsourced dev shop and outsource sales like you know fixed expenses until you have some traction so these guys did a good job for you it sounds like it did yeah and uh the other thing that i would recommend is because i've heard...