How Clientpoint Reached $75 ARPU and 50 Employees Serving Thousands of Customers (Interview with CEO Andy Jedynak)

Introduction and Andy's Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Andy Jedynak. He's a seasoned venture backed high growth CEO, has led a number of digital media SaaS, IoT, mobile, and app businesses. He currently served as president and CEO of clientpoint, a top rated global SaaS platform. In past lives, he's played European pro basketball and produced television for NBC. Andy, you ready to take us to the top?

Andy Jedynak

00:18>> Absolutely, Nathan. Good to see you again.

Nathan Latka

00:20Good to see you too.

00:21You have to you have to tease us here with this NBC thing. What was your favorite show that you worked on?

Andy Jedynak

00:25>> Well, I actually worked on a show called Money Matters, which was fantastic because my, set designer won a an Emmy for design, and my producer won an Emmy for the show open, which is the thing that happens in the first twenty seconds of the show. So my team did really well with that, and that so that makes it my favorite.

What Clientpoint Does for Customers

Nathan Latka

00:46That's amazing. Okay. So how do you get into clientpoint and what is clientpoint doing for customers today?

Andy Jedynak

00:50>> Absolutely. And clientpoint's really interesting in the sense that we have a totally different view of how we do SaaS. Most solutions out there solve a problem, e sign, video conferences, document sharing, calendar scheduling. We don't look at ourselves as a solution to solve a problem. We look at ourselves as a solution to help enable relationships. We call ourselves a business relationship enablement tool, and everything a relationship needs online today, especially in this remote COVID world, happens

01:27>> all in one place called a clientpoint. So you meet with someone at one link, you chat there, you schedule meetings, you share documents, you e sign. Anything you wanna do happens at one link between you and whoever you're doing business with.

ARPU and Pricing

Nathan Latka

01:41Interesting. Okay. So that's what you're doing now. What are customers paying on average per month or per year to use your tool?

Andy Jedynak

01:47>> Yeah. On average, it goes across the board. If you look at, you know, from the very, very biggest to very, very smallest, it's probably an average of about $75 per user per month.

Nathan Latka

01:56Okay. So that's consistent since 2018. No no real ARPU expansion there.

Andy Jedynak

02:00>> Yeah. We we, I think what's happened is actually our rates have gone way way up, but also our largest customers have grown many, many, many times over. And so the bigger you get, the cheaper it is the price per seat. So it stayed about the same as it was four years ago on average across the board.

Nathan Latka

02:16I see. Can I add don't obviously name the customer, but what's the largest customer pay you today?

Andy Jedynak

02:22>> Oh, we are well, I don't talk about our specific numbers, but I'll say it's I'll say it's it's better than 7 figures.

Nathan Latka

02:28Okay. I was gonna say, you know, some these publicly traded SaaS companies, it's amazing. You see that, you know, a 100 customers paying a million dollar per year, but you've got at least one paying 7 figures, which is great.

Revenue Split Across Segments

Andy Jedynak

02:36>> Yeah, we do. We do. It's broken up. It's interesting. Our tool, our solution, we're really alone out there. There's no one doing exactly what we do. And when you look at all of our customers, one third of our revenues are enterprise, one third of our revenues are mid market, and one third of our revenues are SMBs.

Nathan Latka

02:54Interesting. What's not a curiosity, if you look at all your revenue as a percentage as a pie, is it also 30% enterprise revenue, 30% mid is enterprise 60%?

Andy Jedynak

03:04>> And that's what I meant. It's actually if you look at it a pie is all of our revenues, it's about 33% enterprise income, 30% mid market, 30, 33% small business. So a lot more small business users, which is so exciting because there's such a need even for solo players out there to be able to have a tool like this where everything's all in one place. The alternative is, you know, you wanna schedule. Calendly is a great tool.

03:29>> We'll go over to Calendly. You wanna meet? Zoom is incredible. Go over to Zoom. You wanna have an eSign? Well, go over to DocuSign. Everything's all over the place in b to b relationships, and then it's all anchored by email. You wanna share a document? Use a great tool called DocSend or something else. We just take all those tools. We put them into one place, whether it's those people that I named or if people would

03:51>> prefer to use our own version of those tools and pay less.

Nathan Latka

03:55Interesting. Yeah. That makes sense. Now you when did you join the business? What year?

Andy Jedynak

03:59>> I joined at the beginning of twenty eighteen.

Nathan Latka

04:01Okay. And the company was founded in in what? 2008?

Andy Jedynak

04:04>> Yeah. It it was actually started in 2009. It was built within a company that had a need to compete and wanted to do a better job. So they built the software for themselves then. And then a few years later, they actually started selling it to other companies about 2011.

Nathan Latka

04:20Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:43your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:07get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

05:29not 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, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:55going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All We're right, gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but

06:17if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into

Why Andy Joined in 2018

Nathan Latka

06:43the interview. And why they bring you in and what excited you back in 2018?

Andy Jedynak

06:47>> Three things. First off, one of the board members I I had more than enough going on in my life, but one of the board members pulled the friend card and said, you've got to meet the CEO. He said, do do me a favor. They're looking to level up. They're looking to bring in a SaaS guy. You know, I'm a I'm a force former Silicon Valley tech CEO board member. They've got an incredible business. You gotta meet

07:09>> this guy. And I said, okay. I'll I'll I'll have coffee with him. Fantastic guy and a fantastic group of founders. Wonderful people. That was number one. I really, really appreciate good culture and good people. Number two, they had built an amazing product over several years, and they just listened to their largest customers. And every week, every month, every quarter, they kept adding more features based on what? Based on what their customers said they wanted. And they'd

Early Funding and Bootstrap History

Andy Jedynak

07:35>> managed to build out a very, very deep and extensive enterprise grade SaaS tool. And then number three, they they didn't know what they had. I mean, literally what they had built was something that could change the face of B2B SaaS. And those three things, I said, you know what, I'm gonna jump in. So I changed my life and jumped in at the time.

Nathan Latka

07:51I love that. Now, Andy, you mentioned a board. So how much did they have? Have they raised a bunch of capital before you joined? If so, how much?

Andy Jedynak

07:57>> Yeah. Almost nothing. They'd they'd brought in about a 250,000 and and the rest they'd really done on their own. They bootstrapped the company from the beginning. They had brought in a 250,000. And then after that, we brought me on and that we we expanded it from there. But we haven't brought too much capital in, which is interesting.

Nathan Latka

08:15So so no no other outside capital besides the $250 k even after you joined?

Customer-CEO Investor Syndicate

Andy Jedynak

08:19>> We have a a bunch of individual investors. Investors.

Nathan Latka

08:23Of of

Andy Jedynak

08:23>> them them are are our customers. They're they're actually most of them are CEOs of our customer customer companies who just love our product and want a piece of the action. They've all invested, but I mean, the total investment of the company is less than $5,000,000. We've just done really, really well on our own steam.

Nathan Latka

08:38How have you structured that? Let's say someone listening right now also wants to let their customers, CEOs write checks. Do you do an individual convertible note for every single investor or an RUV and an SPV or how do you structure it?

Andy Jedynak

08:49>> Yeah. We we do a a convertible note. You know, you know, there's a lot of ways to do it. And and I think for your listeners, if they're interested in investing, there's a lot of CEOs out there who are gonna put pre money. They're gonna put a big price tag on their companies. And this is a this is a $40,000,000 idea. So you invest on a convertible note and it's a $40,000,000 valuation. I I think that

09:14>> there's a lot of people who who value the company too high. We didn't do that. We took a very fair handed amount evaluation for the company. We've slowly, you know, grown that amount to the the cap of the note, the discount to a note over time as we've shown that we've been able to grow the company. So it was very fair, very even handed. And, as we've grown, we've got a really great syndicate of guys who

09:39>> who are who are part of the team.

Nathan Latka

09:41And what do you anticipate will cause the notes to convert? Do you believe it will be on a priced equity round, or do you believe you're more likely to be, like, you know, acquired and the conversion happens at acquisition?

Andy Jedynak

09:49>> You know what? We are we're actually right now raising our very first institutional round.

Nathan Latka

09:54There we go. There's the answer.

Customer Count Today

Andy Jedynak

09:55>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:56Alright. How you wanna share? So that'll be your series a I mean, your seed. Right? Or your series a?

Andy Jedynak

10:00>> Well well, it's we gotta we make too much money to call it a seed. Call it an early a. Call it a late seed, whatever it might be. But but it it's it's a small amount. We're gonna bring in 5,000,000. Okay. We are literally just now starting to have meetings with with institutional players, potential strategics that we work with. And so I think the next step is to get that syndicate of investors converting into that round,

10:25>> which I'm really excited. I'm really happy for them because we've done real well.

Nathan Latka

10:28Yeah, know that's great. Now most people in their series A these days, you know, they're selling between 10 and 15% of the business. Is that sort of what you're targeting?

Andy Jedynak

10:35>> Yeah, I think so.

Nathan Latka

10:36Okay. So you're targeting sort of 45,000,000 pre money, something like that?

Andy Jedynak

10:40>> Yeah. We're, yeah, we're gonna let the market decide what that's gonna be. But we're pretty optimistic that this is probably the ballpark.

Nathan Latka

10:47Yeah. Okay. Back to the business. So you get going. You joined in 2018. Very little raise before that. You've obviously driven some nice growth. How many customers today are on the platform?

Andy Jedynak

10:55>> Total is in the thousands now.

Nathan Latka

10:57Okay.

Andy Jedynak

10:57>> We don't get the exact numbers out, but we're now in the thousands. So I think when I last spoke with you, was a much, much smaller amount.

Nathan Latka

11:04Yeah. I mean, can you, maybe provide a little tighter range? Are we talking like a thousand or like 99,000?

Andy Jedynak

11:10>> It's less than 10,000.

Nathan Latka

11:13Okay, perfect. So between one and ten thousand, somewhere in there. Now, is that a big goal for you guys? Mean, do you think you can break 10,000 customers next year?

Andy Jedynak

11:20>> We actually, our vision is to have 2,000,000 people using clientpoint by the end of twenty twenty three. So the way we're growing our business now is it's what we're gonna start to do is really let more and more people have free access to a light version of it. And we're really excited about that. We're in pre beta on that. We're gonna be launching it in beta a little bit later this year. So the idea here, what

11:45>> we have, especially in the post COVID world, is so, so important. Just to have everything. I mean, imagine you being able to do all your business on one link. You have one link. You give it to a million people, and everybody who comes to that link will have their own business relationship workspace with you. Every single person. That's not available out there, and we wanna make that available to the masses. So we're gonna start giving away

12:10>> a free version, so that everyone can use it. Anybody in business can use it. And then there's lots of ways for people to get more by paying a little bit of money or for them to leverage into a full enterprise version through that program.

Nathan Latka

12:23Makes sense. Now, Andy, talk to me about Team today. What's the full how many folks are full time?

Team Size and Product-Led Culture

Andy Jedynak

12:27>> We are now a little over 50 and the majority is still product and technology. I think we're a technology and product forward company. We, you know, we're you know, I'm sure a lot of folks talk to you about the idea of product led growth versus sales led growth. And so most of our team is still there in that side of the business. So we think a great experience is gonna lead to delighted customers, which is one

12:52>> of our values. And so that's really where the majority of our folks are.

Nathan Latka

12:55Mhmm. Now, I take, you said between 1,000 and 10,000. If I take 5,000 right in the middle times that $75 a month ARPU, that puts you around $400 k a month in revenue or around a $5,000,000 run rate. Is that generally correct?

Series A Raise and Valuation

Andy Jedynak

13:07>> Yeah. Like I say, we don't share numbers, but I love your math.

Nathan Latka

13:11When you raise the 5,000,000 series, and by the way, that's also consistent with what a series A company would be, somewhere between sort of 2 and $5,000,000 of ARR. It's also consistent when we take your headcount and multiply times 110,000 in revenue per employee, which is average for VC backed company, which you are because you raised $5,000,000, you sort of hit all that. But let's say you get the deal done, you raise 5,000,000 series A. What

13:31can you use that money for? How large you think you can grow with just that capital?

Andy Jedynak

13:35>> We expect to use that capital and invest pretty heavily into the business and be back to profitability within five quarters, and we plan to do a growth round right before that. So we're gonna invest hard. We're gonna get close back up to, you know, you know, kinda minus five minus 7% EBITDA range and then double down again in a growth round in that. That's five quarters afterwards.

Nathan Latka

13:59Help me understand how that works. Mean, if you're gonna raise a 5,000,000 series a and then invest it aggressively, I mean, that means you're gonna be negative for many quarters, you know, three, four, five quarters. So how do you when you say profitability, you just think growth is gonna happen, it's gonna happen rapidly so you'll be profitable five quarters from now?

Freemium Launch and 2023 Growth Vision

Andy Jedynak

14:14>> That is that's correct. Yeah. So we're gonna invest heavy into product and also into marketing and sales. And and, you know, it's basically what we've done. We've cracked the code on our new category, category one, business relationship enablement. We have built a machine to be able to pour a lot more gasoline on it in the form of cash in terms of marketing and in terms of growing and building up the product. Having a better product creates

14:38>> more virality, creates more critical mass, and that's also gonna be a big driver to growth. It's not just driving leads to sales.

Nathan Latka

14:45Yep. Very good. Andy, good stuff. We're rooting for you. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Famous Five: Books, CEOs, and Tools

Andy Jedynak

14:51>> You know, I have to tell you, my my favorite right now is Never Split the Difference. Great book. I'd recommend it to anybody.

Nathan Latka

14:58Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Andy Jedynak

15:01>> You know, I have to tell you when Jeff Bezos gave up the reins, I decided to really study what he had done from the very beginning to his final letter that he wrote to the industry. I think it's fantastic what he's done. I've been so I've been really looking at all the things he did. And he left me and I think all of us in an industry with a really great and important point. That is, you

15:22>> know, what value are you giving back to the marketplace? Are you giving back value? And if you're giving value back to the marketplace, that's how you're gonna have a successful company.

15:32>> Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

15:33Number three, what's your favorite online tool besides your own for building clientpoint?

Andy Jedynak

15:37>> Oh, man. I gotta tell you, I absolutely love Salesforce. Salesforce, beautiful CRM. We are partners with them all over the world. CRM and clientpoint are a hand and glove mix. The the CRM is where the database and all the information about the client is. Clientpoint is where the relationship itself happens. We use Salesforce. We love it. So I'll give you that one.

Nathan Latka

15:58Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Andy Jedynak

16:02>> Be between four and six.

Nathan Latka

16:03Okay. That's not bad.

16:04In situation, married, single, kids?

Andy Jedynak

16:06>> I am married with three fine young men in their twenties.

Nathan Latka

16:10Oh, wow. Okay.

16:11Busy guy. How old are you?

Andy Jedynak

16:12>> I am 59.

Nathan Latka

16:1459.

16:15Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Andy Jedynak

16:18>> Let's see. I think I think when we look at everything we need to know to be successful, we think of skills and knowledge. What do you know? How do you apply it? I think what's even more important that is is your mental and emotional strength. What is your capability to be able to have great emotional intelligence? What's your ability to have confidence and certainty? What's your ability to be able to process fear in a way that

16:44>> you use it as fuel? All these mental and emotional strengths are a lot more important than your skills and knowledge. If I'd known that at 20, I think that would have been fantastic.

Wrap-Up and Key Metrics Recap

Nathan Latka

16:55Guys, there we have clientpoint launched back many years ago. Andy came in in 2018 to help really, you know, drive additional growth, which he has. They're now between 1,000 and 10,000 paying customers. They pay on average $75 per month. They're now looking to scale raising and targeting a $5,000,000 series A. They raised about $5,000,000 to date from individual LPs who are also their customers, which we love. Very community driven approach. We'll see if growth catches up to

17:18the raising. They've got a team of 50 right now as they look to continue to scale. Andy, thanks for taking us to the top.

Andy Jedynak

17:23>> Nathan, I loved it. Take care.

Nathan Latka

17:27One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

17:52p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central to make sure you don't miss any of that. Make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the 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 SaaS world, whether it's

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18:34people are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to

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