How Demandjump CEO Christopher Day grew Demandjump to $5.5M revenue and 22 customers in 2024.

guys Chris has been in many Industries gotten new investment banking before founding his own software company to manage up in 2015 grew that to a million bucks in Revenue fairly quickly first 18 months raised some Capital realized how VC worked inside of the company and said you know what man it's time for me to go give back and ultimately it was recruited in a very competitive process to run Elevate which is one of the most active seed funds in the world they've got uh caught the most active uh in Indianapolis and that Midwest region with over 500 total Investments 5 billion economic impact now focused on a giving back to entrepreneurs and supporting companies whether it's software Health Tech fintech Etc hey folks my guest today is tof today he's the CEO of elevate Adventures the number one most active seed an early stage investor in the Great Lakes region and number 24 in the U.S he's an innovator entrepreneur business Creator Community Builder job maker and wealth Creator through his Endeavors over the last 30 years you guys will respect what he did as co-founder and chief executive officer at demand jump he focused on that for over seven years so hope you're ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely Nathan I'm glad to be here let's roll all right let's roll so let's let's talk about your street cred first before we talk about your investing so street cred uh demand jump was on to I think in 2015 was that your first software company no uh my first software company went back to probably in the year 2000 ish 2002-ish when we built some billing software for the utility industry interesting and uh so did that work well or was it sort of a crash and burn and you learned take the learnings put in demand jump oh no we crushed it uh so we have eight I've started eight companies and seven different verticals over the last uh 25 plus years and those have been in uh you know hard tech and software Investment Banking commercial real estate family entertainment.com all kinds of different businesses um and uh did bottled water that was my one failure I felt at the model water business that's a hard one that's a hard one okay so what was what was demand jumps sort of texture you know is it bootstrap were you on on the equity side and raising as much as you could how did you build a business yeah we initially started domain jump uh providing largely uh Services right so we were trying to use machine learning and AI to figure out um some things we actually wrote a book uh machine was plugged we just we just released this book a couple of weeks ago pillar based marketing for those of you listening on audio only yeah it's called pillar based marketing uh a data driven methodology for SEO and content that actually works we just released that a few weeks ago but the concept was everybody writes tons of content now it's been exasperated by chat GPT right so people are re-writing more content and the there's all different kinds of use cases for Content but the use case we were trying to solve was how can I write content that people will see my target market will see when they're in research decision or buy mode drive those leads to me to give me a shot at selling my product or service to that to that Target customer so were you like I'm looking at the headline right now more page one rankings more customers more Revenue I mean are you like connecting companies with an army of writers to put out the content or is it more like ah reps or SCM Rush where it's where it's truly SEO software yep so there's so it's a one two punch so there's a there's a software there's a a platform that you enter in any pillar topic so that pillar topic could be coffee mugs or sales forecasting or whatever it doesn't matter what the industry what the business is but in the B2B use case uh you enter whatever you're selling it could be cyber security it could be uh stock 2 compliance whatever it is you enter that that topic that pillar topic into the platform the platform in less than 10 minutes out um Maps out the entire world around that pillar Topic in your website against your competitors websites to understand what is the roadmap what are the words and the questions that are most highly connected to the center pillar topic and exactly how you should structure your content that maps to how the human brain actually thinks interesting okay and you got that going in 2015 right yeah it took us probably five years to figure out that use case that we just talked about we just launched a couple yeah oh wow so like 2015 to 2020 you'd call that figuring out mode yes oh wow okay it's a beast it's about neurosciences and it's a very complex problem to solve how did you manage the storyline though because when I look at your crunch based profile you raised funding during this period so you must have had some track record to point to inside the company to say hey give us five million bucks yep yeah we were originally doing um I'll call it um analytics it's like marker to spend you know 80 of their time trying to figure out what to do and so the whole purpose of domain jump originally was cross-sector in those various marketing channels helping marketers understand what they should go do right helping them reduce the time figuring out what to do and and just get down to Brass tax on here's the next five things I should do the most powerful interesting so Chris how many years did it take you to hit him at your first million dollar year at that company uh uh probably 18 months two years oh so it's pretty okay that's pretty rapid that's not too long okay so 2017 you're doing a million bucks a year 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 evaluation 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 and then why did you decide you know there's obviously two very choice you know usually I hear the VCS thing it's usually on the coast you're in Indianapolis actually but you still chose to go sort of a heavy you know raise money route why not bootstrap um because to figure that out requires data scientists uh machine learning Engineers people that make a lot of money and um and we didn't have you know that kind of bankroll to bankroll the whole thing and so um that's why we that's why we raise some money that's fair this this will pair nicely into Elevate as we build into that part of the story but you know dilution is something that a lot of first-time Founders they don't understand how to manage until they're burned ones they go through their first whole startup and then realize okay here's how to that's how dilution actually works that's how Carter actually works that's what a fully diluted share actually means how did you manage dilution as you were growing demand jump so I you know I don't think about dilution uh there's a there's a a uh I'll call them a platinum level famous investor his name's Bob Davoli he's out of Boston he used to be on the cover of magazines back in the.com Era and and I agree with Bob's concept here I don't think about it as dilution um I think about it is the...