How Collective[i] CEO Stephen Messer grew Collective[i] to $25.5M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

guys work hard when you're young he built his first company over nine years so for 425 million bucks it's called link share very nice obviously business model there and two years later went into a new business called collectiveeye.com uh think of it you know as building neural Nets really trying to help cros and companies understand what their actual pipeline looks like based off a contributor model there's a free tool they use to get this data they've got 101 folks on the team today they've quote unquote bootstrapped it but put in a lot of their own money to fund it up to date as they look to continue to scale got their first paying customer in 2012 broke a million dollar run rate in 2014. hey folks my guest today is Steven Messer he currently serves as co-founder and vice chairman of collective eye prior to Collective eye he co-founded and served as CEO of linkshare until it sailed to Rakuten for 425 million bucks he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lafayette University and his Juris doctorate from Cardozo School uh of law all right Stephen you ready to take us to the top I'm gonna do our best all right what was it like because I guess before we talk about Collective what was it like at recruiting I mean were you sort of joining it was already the Titanic you just had to drive the right way or were you still in building mode no so when linkshare got acquired I mean we had been doing it for about 10 years so affiliate marketing became a thing under link share the first affiliate marketer we became the global player I think when we when we finally sold the business to Rocky 10 it was probably 96 of the affiliate Market globally and still is today it's just behind the scenes that most people don't know so when we came there it was the first American acquisition they had made and I think to this day it's probably still the greatest Revenue producer outside of Japan that rock kitchen has ever had interesting I mean everyone's going to want to know a 425 million acquisition price you were see you I mean do you get filthy rich on this or how did that work out well filthy rich is always in anyone's eyes right uh it's whatever it depends what you want look we were fortunate in the sense that we didn't come from a lot of means uh but we had worked really hard we'd built the business that had become quite successful it had grown really quickly more importantly it enabled every other entrepreneur to make a living off their business in a way they couldn't have done today so when you look at the Creator economy when you look at people who had blogs uh podcasts well all of them were making commissions on sales from referring people to other websites and that was really what linksure enabled and and for us it was just a joy to be there so well I think we did very well and I'm very happy with how we performed um and the results we got what I'm most happy is every month we were sending out millions of dollars worth of checks to people um and changing their lives and so I hope that business continues to change lives of all the great entrepreneurs that are out there probably listening to this amazing podcast I love that yeah you found it in 1996 sold in 2005 so it's a while ago now do you ever look back and go oh gosh we could have taken that 10 billion or no it was the right time 425 was the right number you know I don't think he ever looked back as a Founder you know this right and then you speak to great people all the time you've built great things um what you know more than anything else is that there's always another thing to build and always another opportunity to scale and uh and I'm I'm really proud that Lee shirt to this day is still a dominant provider in space I'm happy that Collective eye is a dominant provider in its face as well and uh I'm happy to be associated with a whole bunch of other companies uh whether it be on their boards or helping them get started uh and I don't I don't think that'll ever stop all right let's talk about Collective IU launched I think in 2008 walk us through who who's who's paying for this and what are you giving them I mean look at the benefit of having uh the the exit that we had and a whole bunch of others is that it enabled us to fund something that probably people wouldn't have done um you know we are a neural net based technology so for anyone who's used chat GPT recently or stable diffusion you're starting it for the first time as an individual feel the power of this neural net AI that people like us have been talking about but you had to be a real practitioner in this stuff and um and we we just had a great opportunity to be on that Forefront of that group that today is you know open AI is not a young company it's been around for almost a decade as well we have all started at the same time we're all getting to this inflection point where these Technologies are just dominating the way we think about how the future of work will be 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 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 all right let's jump back into the interview so who who is buying Collective AI today what's your main customer segment yeah so we sell predominantly to sales organizations so when you're thinking about it if you if you run a sales org you probably have no idea what they're working on you have probably no idea what Revenue they're going to bring in you're trying to figure out what's changing in the market because it's always changing and you're trying to figure out how to manage more effectively well that is essentially what we saw we removed the need to log anything for those people who are suffering in CRM every day imagine a world where the AI did the work of logging all the people you spoke to the conversations you had the communications that went back and forth imagine if it did that automatically then imagine if it told you which deals were real and the reason it did that was because just like Waze it's observing other sellers in our Network and seeing how the buyers behaving when they buy when they don't buy down to the individual so it's telling you every day if this is a deal you should actually pursue and you may not know this in sales they had this saying buyers lie because you never really know if they're interested or not well imagine if the AI could tell you no no they are really interested or I mean are you buying or sitting on the same intent data that bombora and some of these other providers are sitting on or do you have a unique data set it's a unique data set so if you think about in sales my experience when I close the deal is mine I you can only find out about if you hire me to work on them again but in our model we're observing every transaction of every customer just like ways observing your journey without even exercise data confidentially well they're giving us access to their CRM through the API calendar phone video conference so just behind the scenes...