How DevStride CEO Phil Reynolds grew DevStride to $35.7K revenue and 2 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Phil Reynolds he's currently the CEO and co-founder of Dev stride previously he led brightcore to series B led by Warwick Pincus at 180 million post and then he's recently closed 3.3 million precede to build and grow Dev stride which is strategic portfolio management for agile teams Phil you ready to take us to the top absolutely thanks Nathan all right so no boots dropping for you huh it's it's VC or bust well I bootstrapped my last company um for quite a while and um bright core and so brightcore for was bootstrapped for quite a few years and we really enjoyed that we enjoyed growing the company in more you know lifestyle uh but what I learned at the end of it by the time I wouldn't raise money was boy I could have got a lot done a lot faster had I just gone out and raised money to begin with and what are some things you could have done faster you think and give us some context like how many years did you bootstrap and what did you grow Revenue to before you raised out outside Capital yeah so the last company we started out doing like quoting systems for uh insurance agents and we ran that totally bootstrapped for about five years didn't raise a capital from anyone I got approached my group of our customers to build a core admin system and then we did a seed round uh which helped and got us to Market didn't win another seven years before we raised the series hey and then did a series a and 18 months later did a series B and 18 months later I exited the company so we kind of did the the standard uh you know founder vc-led uh growth path in the last three years of the company's history but I did it for 16 years you know in aggregate that's amazing and how patient were I mean what did you grow Revenue to before your first dollar of external Capital yeah so for the before the first dollar of external Capital we're up to about 900 000 a year in ARR and then uh you know we raised that money took it to um about five million and then went from 5 million to about 20 million and um heading to the series B and so it you know it accelerated quite a bit quicker after we raised some money I got some more resources what was the growth unlocked there was it just more like on ads more Engineers what was it yeah it was a lot of things a lot of its product Market fit in uh so you know what I did previously was Enterprise software what I'm doing now is pretty much Enterprise software that I've tried this all about orchestrating you know complex portfolios in agile teams doing really complicated work and uh those Enterprise customers need Enterprise features and it's just really difficult to build that with you know two or three people bootstrapped in a garage somewhere uh you need real you know professionals with real resources real access to customers and so it was just unlocking all of that made a huge difference yeah a lot of Founders in 20 during covet were doing down rounds right the world is a crazy place people were like I don't care just give me the money you have you know when you look at your bright core history right 47 48 million from Warburg pre-covered right and then in the middle of coven right serious C for a lower amount 20 million that has sound signs of a Down Round all over which is not a negative thing that's your job as a Founders not run out of cash so just a curiosity I mean was it a Down Round yeah so so when Brett raised that money it was one of those hey we see winter coming and we know that it's going to be a while so it's going ahead and capitalize now and make everything um stabilize the company so we can weather this storm and we you know all the indicators I'm sure everyone else has talked about on your show we were seeing those same things yeah and that was the one that was at the One A Day post right that no that was actually uh the the series C round which is different the 180 post was a series B round and that was kind of that was only 18 months after a 60 million valuation or series a so so we tripled our evaluation in an 18-month window there got it so the 13.5 was the a the 47.5 was the B it was the B yep I see so 47 into 180 posts okay so you sold about 27 28 of the business in the B yep yeah okay okay fair enough and then did you stay with the company through exit or you left between B and C yeah so I I left between B and C I was I wasn't at the helm right at the tail end there so the sea closed a couple of months after I exited the company yeah and now is this your brother you're building this with you have this same last name it was it was my cousin it was my cousin yeah so he stuck around no he didn't actually he exited the company a year before me so he exited right after the series B he was like series B and the nature of this has changed enough and I think I want to do something else and I stuck in there for another 18 months uh you know being founder guy running the company with a private Equity Firm but it was definitely a different world 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 valuations inside of your frownerpath 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 okay so you take all those learnings you then launch depth chart why you could do anything in the world right I mean you're a Founder that had you know you built something it doesn't even matter really if it was a successful exit or not you built it you raised you had got customers you have 20 million Revenue whatever you want why was devastride the right way to use your time so I had this really nasty problem at brightcore that I was never able to solve with existing project management tools um and it goes a little something like this if you're a meaningfully sized Enterprise software team you probably have multiple products and those multiple products have their own sort of like road maps that are going like this over time but if you're an Enterprise you're also implementing those multiple products for multiple customers and they have their own timelines that they're trying to hit for their implementation if you take a layer into that a series B private Equity Firm who has their own Roi calculations on when they want to see certain things get you know they've invested as you said 47 million dollars unless you return on this you're not trying to manage kind of this this dimensional data problem uh I have these prod objects and it's just one one team one project have like an authentication module or have a payments module or whatever it is but there's all these different stakeholders that need different things out of it and they'll have different road maps and I can never solve that problem uh at medbritecore and it led to all sorts of you know pain and complication in the process I wanted to go solve that now and so Dev stride is really in many ways just...