How Clearviewsocial CEO Adrian Dayton grew Clearviewsocial to $5M revenue and 180 customers in 2024.

Clearview social launch in 2013 they scaled up to 2021 to over 2 million bucks in ARR and ultimately we're generating real ebitda 400 700k per year they sold for 13x ebitda in 2021 um Adrian owned 60 of business employees owned about nine percent of a 15 option pool so they celebrated they're about 15 folks in that option pool as well and again at the exit Adrian then said okay 70 of the cash came up front 20 in year two and then the last in year three were and sorry in year two which he's just finishing out now moving on to his next thing which is helping and Consulting companies hit that first million dollar Mark hey folks my guest today is Adrian dating his passion is helping companies scale he learned this by accident three years ago he's asked to volunteer as a coach for a group of young entrepreneurs as part of EO accelerator in Utah he was hesitant because he was building his own SAS company but he then he agreed in his first year he helped multiple young companies grow and reach a million bucks in Revenue in the process he actually ended up selling his own company Clearview social at the time of sale they had over 60 000 users in 12 countries we had the pleasure of interviewing him back in 2020 pre-sale now we're going to get an update Adrian you ready to take us to the top let's go all right so for folks who missed that article I'm gonna give it a quick summary right you had scaled about 180 customers you were effectively HootSuite for lawyers um you had passed about a two million dollar run rate and I believe you you have to correct me on this one I think you were bootstrapped right we took we took a small amount of Angel funding you know so it's kind of 50 50. yeah like but but like under 500k yeah we said we took about a million yeah okay okay I still call that Capital Vision you took less than 1X your ARR yeah that's right that's right okay fair enough okay so I love for the next 15 minutes to effectively be a crash course on the head of how to sell your sub five million dollar SAS company right so let's start backwards what was the date that you guys announced the closing like the sale of the company sale of a company yeah yeah so March 22nd 2021 and you launched in what year uh December 20th of 2013. that's an eight year Journey here okay so again people This Is What It Takes right it's the long slow Journey right so eight years um now talk to me about why you decide to sell and how you met the buyer yeah absolutely so um I kind of got to this point where I had put my team in place we had a great product and we kind of hit up against a tam problem so the industry just wasn't that big and we'd eat most of the market and after trying to Pivot into other other sectors I just realized I just wasn't having fun anymore you know and it was so much fun building it that it just kind of was time right uh so that's kind of what made me decide and also we had turned the corner in in terms of positive ebitda and so it was like not only am I kind of feeling like I'm ready to sell we have something that someone might buy you know yeah so how did you do that right I mean you you were bored so you wanted to sell but you don't want everyone to think you want to sell because you get that price yeah you know what I think it's a fire cell right so honestly what I did is I reached out to a few friends that had sold their companies uh just to get advice and one of those people said to me told me their whole story and they're like by the way I think you know I think our platform might want to buy your company after I told him my numbers and I said okay that's great and then at the same time I had a kind of follow-up podcast with you where you said what's your ebitda and you said I think someone would write you a check for your company right now and I was like let's go and and I I came on your program and you lined up three buyers and actually so this I haven't told you but it was like a perfect storm so this other friend who had sold their company his private Equity Firm was interested in us they're kind of dragging their feet and then you brought to the table another buyer who right on the program made an offer they sent over a term sheet we had another term sheet from these guys and and the the crazy thing is the buyer you introduced me to um their numbers their terms were terrible but the other guys didn't know that right yeah the ball going it doesn't matter it's terrible that's right and they didn't know all the terms they just knew the price right so so they had much better terms and they bumped up the price and you know structured a two-year earn out so that I could get all the money I wanted for the company and yeah we we had a deal and that's um that's amazing 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 round 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 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 if I had to sum that up if you're listening right now and you're also tired and you've been working for eight years and you're doing two and a half million bucks of AR and you want to sell but you want to look desperate the trick is really to get your numbers out there in a way that is enticing that doesn't say hey we're for sale here's our numbers it's more like hey here's our numbers we're on a podcast like Nathan's or some other reason hey where I'm catching up with old friends sort of thing yeah yeah that's right I mean and that's the thing is everyone's so guarded about their numbers but if you can find some ways to get them out there I think what you want me to say Nathan is trust Nathan with all your data give them all your numbers no but but it did help to get it out there right because I found other buyers now look if my company had been a little bit bigger or we'd have you know I've been to a million in ebitda it would have been simple we could have hired a banker we could have done a full process they could have shopped the product but really like when you're under a million in ebitda you you have to be you have to do a little more selling right like I had to get out and talk to people and find the right buyer for for where we were yeah no it's important I mean getting this fomo thing going is is critical I mean I full disclosure have I won't name them but I have found I should call on my show specifically because they want a reason to share their numbers live where it looks like I'm beating it out of them but really they want to share it because they want the market to know to induce bids right so like that's a very good way to like use me to your effectively your advantage but to your point...