How DevStride Raised a $3.3M Pre-Seed at an $8M Valuation with 2 Customers (Interview with CEO Phil Reynolds)

Introduction and Guest Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Phil Reynolds. He's currently the CEO and cofounder of devstride. Previously, he led BriteCore, a series b led by Warburg Pincus at a 180,000,000 post, and then he's recently closed 3,300,000 pre seed to build and grow devstride, which is strategic portfolio management for agile teams. Phil, you ready to take us to top?

Phil Reynolds

00:17>> Absolutely. Thanks, Nathan.

Bootstrapping vs. Venture Capital Philosophy

Nathan Latka

00:19Alright. So no bootstrapping for you. It's it's VC or bust.

Phil Reynolds

00:24>> Well, I bootstrapped my last company for quite a while. And What learned was that called? BriteCore. And so BriteCore was bootstrapped for quite a few years. And we really enjoyed that. We enjoyed growing the company and more of, you know, lifestyle. But what I learned at the end of it by the time I went and raised money was, boy, I could've got a lot done a lot faster had I just gone out and raised

00:45>> money to begin with.

Nathan Latka

00:47Mhmm. And what what are some things you could've 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?

BriteCore History: Bootstrap to Series B

Phil Reynolds

00:54>> Yeah. So the last company, we started out doing, like, quoting systems for insurance agents, and we ran that totally bootstrapped for about five years. Didn't raise capital from anyone. Got approached by a group of our customers to build a core admin system, and then we did a a seed round, which helped and got us to market. Didn't win there seven years before we raised the Series A. And then did a Series A, and eighteen months later,

01:15>> did a Series B, and eighteen months later, I exited the company. So we kind of did the the standard, you know, Founder, VC led growth path in the last three years of the company's history, but I did it for sixteen years, you know, in aggregate.

Nathan Latka

01:28That's amazing. And and how patient were you? Mean, what did you grow revenue to before your first dollar of external capital?

Phil Reynolds

01:33>> Yeah. So for the before the first dollar of external capital, we were up to about 900,000 a year in ARR. And then, you know, we raised that money, took it to about 5,000,000, and then went from 5,000,000 to about 20,000,000 and heading into the series b. And so it, you know, it accelerated quite a bit quicker after we raised some money, had some more resources.

Nathan Latka

01:51What was the growth unlock there? Was it just more like on ads, more engineers? What was it?

Phil Reynolds

01:55>> Yeah. It was it was a lot of things. A lot of it is product market fit. And so, you know, what I did previously was enterprise software. What I'm doing now is pretty much enterprise software. Devstride is all about orchestrating complex portfolios in agile teams doing really complicated work. And 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. You need

02:19>> real, you know, professionals with real resources, real access to customers. And so it was just just unlocking all of that made a huge difference.

Nathan Latka

02:26Yeah. A lot of founders in '20 during COVID were doing down rounds. Right? The world is a crazy place. People were like, I don't care. Just give me the money. You you have you know, when you look at your BriteCore history. Right? Forty seven, forty eight million from Warburg pre COVID. Right? And then in the middle of COVID, right, series c for a lower amount, 20,000,000. That has sound signs of a down round all over it,

02:45which is not a negative thing. That's your job as a founder. It's not run out of cash. So just a curiosity, I mean, was it a down round?

Phil Reynolds

02:50>> Yeah. So so when BriteCore raised that money, it was one of those, hey. We see winter coming, and we know that it's gonna be a while. So let's go ahead and capitalize now and make everything, stabilize the company so we can weather the 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.

Nathan Latka

03:08Yep. And that was the one that was at the one eighty post. Right?

Phil Reynolds

03:11>> That that no. That was actually the the series c round, which is different. The one eighty post was a series b round. And that was Got it. That was only eighteen months after a 60,000,000 valuation or series a. So so we tripled our valuation in in an eighteen month window there.

Nathan Latka

03:23Got 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 post. Okay. So you sold about 27, 28% of the business in the b?

Phil Reynolds

03:34>> Mhmm. Yep.

Nathan Latka

03:35That's right. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. And then did you stay with the company through exit, you left between b and c?

Phil Reynolds

03:40>> Yeah. So I I left between b and c. I wasn't I wasn't at the helm right at the tail end there. So the C closed a couple of months after I exited the company.

Nathan Latka

03:48Yep. And now is this your brother you're building this with? You have the same last name.

Phil Reynolds

03:51>> It was it was my cousin. It was my cousin Chris Reynolds.

Nathan Latka

03:53Yeah. So he stuck around?

Phil Reynolds

03:55>> 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 wanna do something else. And I stuck in there for another eighteen months, you know, being Founder guy, running the company with a private equity firm, but it was definitely a different world.

Nathan Latka

04:12Oh, 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 2,807 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

04:35your 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

05:00get 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

05:21not 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

05:47going 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

06:09if 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

06:35the interview. Okay. So you take all those learnings. You then launched devstride. 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. Built it. You raised. You had got customers. You have 20,000,000 revenue. You do whatever you want. Why was devstride the right way to use your time?

Phil Reynolds

06:52>> So I had this really nasty problem at BriteCore that I was never able to solve with existing project management tools. And it 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 roadmaps 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

07:17>> timelines that they're trying to hit for their implementation. If you take and layer into that a series b private equity firm who has their own ROI calculations on when they wanna see certain things get, you know, they've invested, as you said, $47,000,000 unless you return on this, you're now trying to manage kind of this this dimensional data problem. I have these projects, and it's just one one team, one project. I have like an authentication module or

07:40>> I 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 roadmaps. And I could never solve that problem, at at BriteCore, and it led to all sorts of, you know, pain and complication in the process. And I wanted to go solve that now. And so devstride is really in many ways just me scratching my own itch of the single biggest annoyance I

08:00>> had to deal with running and growing my previous company.

Nathan Latka

08:03That makes tons of sense. See, this is what you call a founder market fit. Right? This is a very hard thing to get, which in some some would argue it's actually more important today than even product market fit. So so tell us what you're building today. Tell us about some of the customers that are using you and how they're using you.

Phil Reynolds

08:15>> Yeah. So what we're doing is we're we're doing strategic portfolio management for for agile teams. And what that really means is what makes it different from I I know you've had Zeb on before with ClickUp, and ClickUp's an amazing product. Monday's an amazing product. They're all amazing. They're all solving a different problem than we are. They're solving sort of like, you know, project based work where I come in and click things off a task list. What

08:36>> we're really trying to solve is I I have these complex overlays on these road maps. And I have to assign work to to teams, have one team, but the one team is accepting work for many different work streams. And I have to report out on all those different work streams independently to different stakeholders. Mhmm. So so that's what we're doing. We're building a project management tool that solves that particular problem for teams who are trying to,

08:57>> you know, make multiple stakeholders happy in multiple different work streams.

Nathan Latka

09:01So that's what Who are the stakeholders that most of your devstride customers today are reporting out to? Is it the board? Is it a senior engineer? Like, who's the who's that stakeholder?

Phil Reynolds

09:10>> Yep. It's gonna be typically, it's gonna be three. It's going to be the executive at the company who says, hey. What are we doing here? It's going to be the board who says, what is my ROI on the investment that I gave you? And it's gonna be some number of enterprise customers who say, hey, when's my project gonna be live? And are they gonna be able to implement this system?

Nathan Latka

09:27That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Very interesting. And and and then give me sort of a range here. What's the average customer paying you per month to use this technology?

Phil Reynolds

09:35>> So really, really small right now. So we just announced a pre seed round last week. And so we are we turned on our subscription system to begin accepting our first dollar from our first customer two days ago.

Nathan Latka

09:46Oh, I love this perfect moment. This is such a great moment. Be what what was the size so how much did you raise?

Phil Reynolds

09:52>> Okay. So we raised 3,300,000 on a pre seed round.

Nathan Latka

09:55Got it. And now listen. Your ability to do that at at any valuation is really a 100% based on your ability to tell a story in the slide deck because you have no revenue. There's no metrics to go off of.

Phil Reynolds

10:03>> Right? Something to go off of.

Nathan Latka

10:04How good was your story? What valuation did you raise that at?

Phil Reynolds

10:07>> Okay. So we raised that at an $8,000,000 pre. And so we we negotiated the pre to be stable, and then the amount we raised would be the amount that we diluted beyond that.

Nathan Latka

10:16Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. So really, it was three into 12 post. So you sold about 25% of the business.

Phil Reynolds

10:21>> Yeah. Real real close to that.

Nathan Latka

10:22Okay. That's actually pretty freaking impressive considering, like, VC markets are shut down right now. Right? So what name how are you close to Dan Kerr? Why did he lead the round?

Why Phil Built DevStride

Phil Reynolds

10:30>> How did you get that done? Well, it's a couple of factors. One of them is that, you know, BriteCore was a very successful company. It was well known in the property casualty insurance space. So Was Dan an investor in BriteCore? No, he wasn't. But but BriteCore was originally founded in Springfield, Missouri, I'm located in Kansas City, Missouri. And so regionally, we're, you know, three hours apart from each other. I live in Kansas City now. So so

10:53>> part of it was they knew of the story. They'd watched, you know, me from a distance for a while. Another part of the story is that, there are a number of companies in the local regional area here in Kansas City who are struggling with this exact problem right now and through a whole sort of like, you know, serendipitous series of conversations and circumstances. Some of the gentlemen from FlyOver happened to be in a room with some

11:15>> people at a big company that were trying to solve this exact problem. They're like, that's weird. I just talked to somebody who's trying to solve this problem too. And so, you know, that's dumb dumb luck on my part as much as anything there. And then I think also just, you know, trying to be able to put together a really thoughtful projection, you know, all of the the why now, why this, you know, all of that. So,

11:36>> you know, it's not my first time putting together a deck that a VC would wanna see.

Nathan Latka

11:40Yep. Yep. So what does in that projection, you know, towards the end, maybe even in the appendix of that pre seed deck, what what does it say you're gonna test out in terms of the pricing to start?

Phil Reynolds

11:49>> Okay. Yeah. So at the moment, we have two SaaS tiers. There's a third SaaS tier coming next year. At the moment, it's professional and business are the two. And so professional, we're very much indexing off of other competitors in a similar space. So professional starts out at about $8 a month per license and business starts out at about $24 a month per per license. Yep. So it's it's really it's a very, low price point, low barrier

12:18>> to entry, and that's by design, because this particular space is one that's very crowded. There's a lot of lot of players here, and you you can't come in and charge, you know, thousands of dollars for licenses or no one would use you.

Nathan Latka

12:29But, Phil, break this down for us. There's a lot of my listeners right now that have built side projects that have a good user base, but either they're nervous to ask someone to pay. They maybe don't know. And maybe if they're business person, they don't know how to launch the Paywall, like, to, you know, to use a Stripe, like, if they actually launch Paywall, or there's other reasons they don't have a paying customer yet. Do you

12:46just true or false, you do have has have you closed at least one customer yet, are you still waiting to do that?

Phil Reynolds

12:50>> I have two.

Nathan Latka

12:51Okay. So that's amazing. I love that. So tell us how you got tell us don't name the customer, but the first customer you closed, how did it happen?

Phil Reynolds

12:58>> Okay. The first customer I closed was a consulting firm who was trying to solve this exact problem. They were implementing the software, the same piece of software over and over again for multiple customers. And they just had this problem. And and I knew them through my own personal network. And they heard what I was doing. They reached out and said, hey. I'd really like to like to launch this. And so to to the point about charging,

DevStride Product and Target Customers

Phil Reynolds

13:18>> a lesson I learned a long time ago in building enterprise software is your software is worth what you say it's worth a lot of times early on. And so if you tell people it's worth nothing and you offer a freemium tier, then it's kind of worth nothing. So so so so that's something that I always try to to just price it even with what's the value and did a lot of market research on what are people

13:40>> willing to pay, what makes sense for everyone.

Nathan Latka

13:42Yep. That makes a ton of sense. Okay. Got it. So so they now how did you close them though? Right? Did they say run a let's run a project for free for three months, and if it works well, then we'll sign up for a $10,000 a month plan? Or, like, how did you get onboard them?

Phil Reynolds

13:56>> Close. Close. We actually did something a little different in our in our early group as we were in this initial build phase for the last eighteen months. We set up some advisory boards, and I strategically invited, some people to that advisory board that I knew might be future users of my software. Number one, because they're experts in the space and they know how to advise and guide the team on building the best possible tool. And also

14:19>> because along the way, they feel more and more invested in the tool. And therefore, when the tool is ready to launch, ready to be live, they're the you know, they're natural early adopters. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

14:29That makes tons of sense. I see some people actually putting this on their p and l's and what they call them as product roadmap acceleration fees. And it's the it's literally the right? It's they build advisory board. The adviser says, well, what if you had this? And you say, well, hey. We'll sell you that, but you gotta pay this fee, which is our product roadmap acceleration fee. They build it, they launch it, and there's revenue.

Phil Reynolds

14:48>> I love I there's an acronym for everything. It's making me happy.

Nathan Latka

14:51Product p r a f, praf. Praf. Praf.

Phil Reynolds

14:54>> Praf.

Nathan Latka

14:55There you go.

Phil Reynolds

14:56>> I I need to add

14:56>> that to my projections.

Nathan Latka

14:57So I know. I know.

14:58Okay. So you started coding this then it sounds like eighteen months ago at the first line of code?

Closing the $3.3M Pre-Seed Round

Phil Reynolds

15:03>> Yeah. We did.

15:04>> Okay. And so we did an angel round then. And the way we did that was I so, again, I exited my previous company sitting on, you know, some capital. And so my wife, who's also a cofounder of the business, and I, we we funded the initial eighteen months of runway.

Nathan Latka

15:21How much did you guys put in yourself? We

Phil Reynolds

15:23>> put in 500,000 ourselves.

Nathan Latka

15:25That make you nervous to start?

Phil Reynolds

15:26>> No. Not at all. I I have 100% confidence. I I I know what we're going to do.

Nathan Latka

15:30But give that context. I mean, for for to a billionaire, $500,000 is nothing. To someone that's a college student, $500,000 is the world. Right? So give us some context for you. Was that, like, all your savings, or was it a smart risk?

Phil Reynolds

15:39>> Yeah. Yeah. No. No. Yeah. That that's probably that's five to 10% of the total amount of liquid capital I have available.

Nathan Latka

15:46Meaningful, but if it fails, it's not extremely Exactly. Fine. Yeah. Exactly.

Phil Reynolds

15:51>> Yeah. I can afford for it to fail.

Nathan Latka

15:53Yeah. Everyone's different. See, some people, they won't have success unless they put everything in. Then they they're forced to make it work. Other people don't like that stress. They wanna take a five to 10% risk like what you're doing, and and so that's how they do it. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So have you

Founder Self-Funding: $500K Personal Investment

Phil Reynolds

16:05>> already spent that 500 k? Yeah. We spent that, and that was well, technically, there's another 50,000 or so that left. But, I mean, right now, we raised the seed round, the pre seed round on purpose because we needed to do that to accelerate.

Nathan Latka

16:17Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That angel round you raised in 2021, how much was that for?

Phil Reynolds

16:21>> So so that that was that was the amount I just said, the 500,000 that was

Nathan Latka

16:24Oh, oh, you were a 100% of the angel round.

Phil Reynolds

16:26>> We were the well, it was us and the other two founders kicked in a couple, you know, $10,000 each or something.

Nathan Latka

16:31I see. See. I see. Okay. Got it. So that was like pre pre seed.

Phil Reynolds

16:35>> Yeah. Yeah. Truly angel. Truly an idea on a napkin at that point.

Nathan Latka

16:40Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Did you put that in? I mean, since it was your money and you controlled the the the the paper, I mean, that a convertible note?

Phil Reynolds

16:46>> No. Actually, we we I I really am a fan of straightforward equity deals Okay. For a lot of reasons, which we won't get into in this time frame. But I I really liked that. And not only that, I did not ask for any sort of a ratchet or leverage. Yeah. And so the way we set it up, there's myself, my wife, and another gentleman, Aaron Salaf, are the founders. There's four of us. And the two of

17:10>> us kicked in the cash. We took 50% of the equity. The other two of them really brought a lot of additional engineering gravitas to the table. And they're fabulous. And so we gave them the other 50% of the equity.

Nathan Latka

17:23That makes tons of sense. Okay. But you're pricing the round here. Right? Because it's your own money and it's priced. So what valuation did you come up with for yourself?

Team Structure and Contracting Firms

Phil Reynolds

17:29>> So that would have been 500,000 for the company at that point in time. Oh, I Sorry. Sorry. It would it would have been a million for the 500,000 for 50%. Sorry. A million Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On the total valuation.

Nathan Latka

17:38That makes tons of sense. That makes a lot of sense. I love this origin story. Okay. So there's four, like, cofounders. You, your wife, and two folks that helped a lot on the engineering. How many folks are full time on the team today?

Phil Reynolds

17:47>> Okay. So today, there are seven that are full time. K. So we hired three more full time in this last month. But we also one of the things that I've done, and I think it's really powerful shift since I started my last company, which again, fifteen years ago now. There are all these, subscription based services now that you can go out and subscribe to. There's people like Pilot that do your bookkeeping and Gusto that will do

18:13>> payroll and HR for you and Corpnet that will do compliance. And so part of how we're able to do that is we have, about 10 different contracting firms that are managing different, value streams for us that you would have had to have hired for full time, you know, ten years ago, and now you can get me satisfaction.

Nathan Latka

18:30Through couple of those.

Phil Reynolds

18:32>> Yeah. So so so one of them so let's let's go, bookkeeping is pilot. Compliance is corp net. Payroll, when it's domestic US is gusto. Payroll, when it's international, is deal. We have obviously legal support through Lawrence and Sanders, our our law firm, they're wonderful there. We have, marketing SEO and all of that through a firm called Tactica. We have

Nathan Latka

18:57Tactica. Spell that spell that.

Phil Reynolds

18:58>> Tac Tactica, t a c t tactic c a t t a c t I c a.

Nathan Latka

19:05Tactica. And is that like a marketplace to hire marketing and SEO people?

Phil Reynolds

19:09>> No. It's actually a firm out of Kosovo, and one of my cofounders is in Kosovo. I have this meaningful engineering overlap in for my previous company, a large team in Kosovo. And so there it's actually an amazing place for startups and engineering talent and marketing talent going back to often more Peninsula twenty five years ago.

Nathan Latka

19:28This is this is seotactica.com. You see, I love this is the goal because so many great capital efficient founders now are doing this. It's like five full time and then 15 contractors. The hard part is finding the firm to contract

Phil Reynolds

19:40>> with right firm.

Nathan Latka

19:41>> The right firm.

19:41Right?

19:42You can

19:42go through 10 SEO firms before you find, you know, SEO Tactica.

Phil Reynolds

19:46>> Yeah. And and there are lots

Nathan Latka

19:47What are two other examples of that? So do you have one for sales?

Early Customers and Pricing Strategy

Phil Reynolds

19:50>> Yeah. So I do. We use Barnett Strategies here in Kansas City. Barnett. Chris Barnett was a he was a previous Founder slash Exiting, Sales Leader, Revenue Leader for a couple of different startups that have been successful here in the Kansas City area. Left and decided to start his own firm doing sales and doing fractional sales. And so his firm is helping support us on sales. So for example, we just set Salesforce up last month, and his

20:14>> firm can help us set it all up. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:16Interesting. Will he also give you like two fractional SDRs to take 30 calls a month, or does he do all that?

Phil Reynolds

20:22>> Yeah. We we have a BDR function going there. We have a direct outreach function. Yeah. Next week, I'm going to a fairly high profile sales event. He's coming with me there just so he can kind of learn how I pitch the product and all of that. It's just great.

Nathan Latka

20:33This makes tons of sense. Okay. Are there any other what about development?

Phil Reynolds

20:37>> Development, we keep totally in house. I do not fully trust development to go out the door at this early stage. And I'm really fortunate that in my last company, it was a very engineering heavy firm and we had very strict hiring standards, and we also hired internationally. And so I have several 100 engineers that were on my payroll before, and a 150 of them have reached out and said, hey. As soon as you can hire me,

20:58>> please do.

Nathan Latka

20:59That's amazing.

Phil Reynolds

20:59>> So, yeah, I've got a I've got a deep bench of engineers. I I don't need to engineering outsourcing for ten years.

Revenue Targets and Growth Plans

Nathan Latka

21:04That's amazing. I love this. Okay, cool. Hey, before we wrap up with the Famous Five, so what's your you know, you just launched pricing. You've got two those two customers, what they're paying $30, $40 bucks a month or what are they at?

Phil Reynolds

21:14>> No. They're they're at a few 100 a month.

Nathan Latka

21:17Few 100 a month. Okay. Cool. So, you know, it's okay. So you're about to break, call it, like, a thousand dollars a month. Right? You you you Yes.

Phil Reynolds

21:22>> That that ballpark.

Nathan Latka

21:23Yeah. What do you think you get to by the end of the year? There's, you know, three, four months left.

Phil Reynolds

21:28>> I would like to see us be at probably 5,000 a month at the end of the year, ideally.

Nathan Latka

21:32Yep. Yep. Okay. Well, we'll see what happens there. In the meantime, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Phil Reynolds

21:39>> Favorite book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

Nathan Latka

21:41Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Phil Reynolds

21:44>> Oh, I actually really, really like Zeb. I think he's he's interesting to me. He's different than me, and I like that he's different.

Nathan Latka

21:51Yeah. He's very cool. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building devstride?

Phil Reynolds

21:55>> Oh, favorite online tool for building devstride? I'm gonna pick an unconventional one here, and I'm going to say pilot because the the ability to outsource my bookkeeping has saved me an enormous amount of time.

Nathan Latka

22:06Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Most people are paying $4,000, $5,000, $6,000 for a fractional CFO. I imagine pilot probably comes in what slightly under that. Right?

Phil Reynolds

22:13>> $600 a month.

Nathan Latka

22:15Yeah. Yeah. And they they'll do taxes too?

Phil Reynolds

22:17>> Yeah. You have to pay 2,000 a year for taxes. Yeah.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Lessons

Nathan Latka

22:19Yeah. It's amazing.

22:20Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Phil Reynolds

22:22>> Three to five.

Nathan Latka

22:24How do you do that's not healthy, or you're just a superman. How do you do that?

Phil Reynolds

22:28>> It's

22:32>> Starbucks. Fair. Fair.

Nathan Latka

22:33Okay. Fair. And what's your situation? Well, we know you're married, but do you have kids?

Phil Reynolds

22:37>> Yeah. I have a 15 year old and a three year old who I love dearly and love spending all my time with.

Nathan Latka

22:42You're very busy. Okay.

22:43And how old are you?

Phil Reynolds

22:45>> I'm 42.

Nathan Latka

22:4642.

22:47Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Phil Reynolds

22:49>> It matters more who you know than what you know.

Nathan Latka

22:52I love that. Alright, guys. There you have it. Devstride.com. His first company, BriteCore bootstrapped for seven years, grew to about 1,000,000 in revenue, said he know it. It's time the pedal to the metal. He went out and raised a bunch of capital, grew it to 5,000,000 in revenue, then 20,000,000 in revenue, then left the company then recently sold. He used a bunch of that money, 500 ks, him and his wife, to put into the new company

23:09devstride.com, which is helps you manage agile practice to report out to key stakeholders like your board, management, or customers that care about the next product release. He just launched his paywall, which we love. He's got folks right now. He's got about a, what, seven seven full time, another, call it, contractors, 3.3 pre seed round raised at a 12.3 post, sold about 25% of the company, but really focused on now scaling up to $5,000 a month by

23:31the end of the year. We'll see what happens. Alright. Thank you so much for taking us to the top.

Phil Reynolds

23:35>> Thanks a ton, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

23:37One 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

24:02p. 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

24:24an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what

24:45people 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. 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 counter

25:05those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.