How Conveyour CEO Stephen Rhyne grew Conveyour to $1.4M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Stephen Orion he is the co-founder take witness sales job and taught himself how to code and launch a profitable SAS company in exactly one year he's a Seattle native Texas Hill Country transplant today again based it down here in Texas working with an entirely remote team across three countries as he works to build his company convey your Stephen are you ready to take us to the top I am alright so this should be really easy right cuz you listen to the show I do alright so what do you got yeah so we're a micro learning platform we are working with companies from fortune 500 companies all the way down to individual corporate trainers we started back in 2009 with our first product like you said about 2016 we launched convey you're out of beta and yeah that's that's when we started we basically what we're trying to do is kill corporate boring training right with micro learning so if you think about how typically learning is we're trying to do the opposite and do more of like what marketing automation platforms are doing which is timely relevant personalized messaging spread out over time okay and sorry just to make sure I get this right so you launched convey you're in 2016 you said yeah that's correct but between 2009 in 2016 you were doing what a lot so our first product web PDI it was a it's a sales rep relationship manager kind of like a CRM but for sales reps and that's the product that we first launched with we were building that we also had a like a voter relationship management platform we did a few other things but really our bread and butter is convey or now and and what made you pivot to that in 2016 yeah so our my co-founder had started basically like a talent agency for speakers and thought leaders in Bend Oregon and he was doing he's basically building like high-end elearning experiences for corporate trainers and they just saw a lot of problems with how elearning had been been built typically like a word large MOOC with lots of Units and bad really bad engagement on those courses simply not because of how they built it but because of the format and so we started working he and I started working together to launch convey your for his company basically like our first beta was his company and it developed into the platform and is now interesting okay very good so 2016 was kind of like the official launch and walk me through what your revenue model is is it pure play SAS company yeah pure play SAS we have a little bit of service for one of our customers but it's all SAS we're you know our lowest plan is a hundred dollars per month and then we have you know our corporate customers around a thousand dollars a month ok and what have you scaled to over the last two years in terms of total customers total customers have actually shrunk because we're going more upmarket so we're only at about 100 customers right now ok and we've been we've been slowly reversing you know like increasing our LTV so that's good I want to jump more into that in a second here in terms of how you're doing that what's revenue today though first so revenue ARR is about 8:45 and reporter 5k and that's all SAS or their big lump sum professional services stuff included in that no no there's only about 10 percent professional services ok got it so or lasts probably about 5% actually okay so so about 40 grand of 845 in ARR is professional service that's correct okay so call it 800 grand and kind of pure-play SAS revenue which comes out to about what is that seven hundred no seventy grand per uh per month right yeah that's good and so that would actually be I mean if you have a hundred customers out that 70 grand price point I mean the average is ones paying you what about 700 bucks a month yeah mm-hmm okay and walk me through so first off the moment you realize you wanted to go upstream what was that moment and why'd you make that decision yeah so we were we first started the product with our first beta customers were my you know corporate trainers thought leaders you know somebody like yourself right somebody who does a lot of speaking somebody who wants to digitize like a follow up after a speaking event okay and we still have those guys are you pitching me is that what's happening right now no no sold just the thing with with our platform is that it does require just like any marketing automation platform it takes time to like set it all up right and get the right messaging and create the correct funnels and and all that but a lot of people in that space or on planes a lot they're they're really busy and they don't have a huge team right so it's difficult for them to implement there's a lot of value there but it was difficult for them to get the time so we had to start adding like and a network of you know instructional designers and things like that to help them and it just became a little bit more involved for that price point and so we started what was beautiful is that we started having these corporate trainers sharing I'll give an example of it one corporate trainer did ran this for you know a few four to five hundred companies I'm not gonna name right now but they end up being our customers as well because they liked it so much and so we thought hey this is a great play like we can start with the hundred dollar plan of these corporate trainers they introduced the product to these these larger corporations and as those corporations become our customers now despite evolving despite you shrinking your customer base a little bit and you moving kind of upstream has revenue still grown you're over here yeah revenue as has grown and it's in kind of a Pareto principle it's grown with the largest of our customers right we're still trying to improve that 90% in terms of the revenue so let me ask you like a year if you're at like 70 grand a month today pure place s where were you a year ago um pure place s um a year ago we were at about 500 okay in ARR it's about 60 grand a month yeah okay so you've add about 10 K and what you're saying is again it's this weird balance of you're losing you're losing customers paying you less you're gaining customers that are paying you more and you generally you know you like that you can service the your customer base better now that's correct yeah yeah I mean ideally I mean I'd rather have 80 customers paying $1,000 a month for 100% yeah yeah now have you bootstrap this erased trap so it's been all bootstrapped our first product we were fortunate the web PDI our first product was you know launched in one year and we made about a hundred thousand dollars the first year profit revenue profit yeah so it was pretty great we launched it kind of in a bucket right it was internally sold to the company we had been working for and so it launched very quickly and it was real in high-need and then from there we've been building products that have been profitable ever since we never taken to that you know dead or borrowed any money and then we've been funding this with the profits from our largest customers so that's great look that makes a lot of sense so good bootstrap seven hundred seventy grand per month today about 2016 launch date what's team size today team size is five five people know we've got people in Ohio Bend Oregon Dublin Ireland Portugal just remote everywhere so tell me a story one of these how did you find the guy or gal in Portugal so that was through another developer that I found I think on and we work remotely and he worked with them as well and I tend to like great tip but I tend to like working with these micro agencies so it's like one or two developers may be a designer developer team they tend to work really well together so you get that cohesiveness right off the bat rather than trying to find your own designer find your own developer these little micro agencies are really great so are they full time they're not now just contractor hourly base that's great and you just make sure Tanner Bates right yeah yeah that's great um talk to me about churn what's your turn today and how do you think about that as you move towards enterprise yeah so churn is always a struggle we've had in 2017 it was like 15 percent now it's down on every over the whole year or monthly monthly unfortunately and logo or revenue churn that's revenue tree revenue turn okay got it yeah so I usually work on revenue turns simply because we've had this reverse user turn you know yeah so rapid going up users going down so we focus on revenue churn and this year it's averaged seven percent so we're working on that and just improving that and that's definitely how you hire your customers I think the biggest thing not just product improvements and onboarding and all that but the customers that you hire and is this this 7 percent revenue turn per month is that adding back expansion revenue in other words that net or gross that's I pretty sure that's a net you're including upsells yeah yeah ok great that's good yeah that's how so that's healthy going on from 15 to 7 is there one or two things you can credit that decline to from 15 to 7 yeah it's hiring the right customers for sure and getting them the right people so as we added more revenue you know per customer we were able to supply them with with like instructional designers even take on some a little bit of that cost so it's not a huge cost but you know the first hey we'll give you the first 3-4 hours to work with an instructional designer to get your first course or you know campaign running right so it gets better onboarding it's...