How Everyware CEO Austin Talley grew Everyware to $10.6M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hello everyone uh I'm Larry Talley and I am the uh founder of uh everywhere everywhere is uh located in uh Austin Texas so we just spent a good uh past week with South by going on and uh excited uh to leave that and come straight here I'm here to talk to you today about really the three main phases uh that we go through as we build a startup and how many uh Founders do we have uh left in this room I know this room is thinning out good chunk of us right and obviously out of that how many are in the uh the early stage all right how about the uh the seed stage and I'll go with the final one the growth all right still a few of us left here um and really how we apply people product and profit and as a Founder I'll probably add one more P to that which is uh which is passion I'll go ahead and uh get this Clicker foreign everywhere is really formed back in 2018 uh prior to that I was uh the owner and operator of another uh company that happened about 15 years that built Enterprise software for hotels uh hotels and if you ever stayed at a Hilton and you get a text message I invented that over 15 years ago mainly the drive upsells and show that I can use real phone numbers and a bot to replace humans and it worked and became highly successful and during that time I felt like man you know we solved all these problems around customer service and around payment transactions well to me this looked like what if stripe and twilio had a baby right I just think that everywhere was born you know based on the mindset of applying a text message conversation to a payment transaction to ultimately help companies collect faster and throughout covid the company really accelerated you know in the early stage when you really you know I would say have the mindset of like hiring folks it's about being in the right place at the right time so back then I actually moved the company to Austin Texas from Florida and the big reason that I moved the companies really um because perception you know when you're building a company you want to have the best perception as possible so if you're in Boca Raton Florida right away we're trying to raise money it was about old people or people that are traveling there are not enough talent and that would be about zero seconds going through you know a VC's head or somebody's head that really didn't know much about Florida they were in San Francisco perhaps even in New York but putting yourself in the right place where opportunity exists and that perception is perceived differently to me that was uh Austin Texas and so I moved my family there and uh ever since then everything really started clicking um and it really accelerated and you can really see that because back in 2018 we barely broke a million but after moving the company to Austin we accelerated very quickly over to most uh really over three and a half million so today the company is very profitable um we are on track right now to exceed uh over probably about 25 million in Revenue this year you know really a lot of it thank you because it's a grind and bootstrapping it um you know in the beginning in the early days is definitely tough so to get into that that 10 million ARR um you know really involved a lot of hard work and dedication from our from our team and our people during that time at the uh at the seed stage level and put myself in the opportunity I had one desk in Austin and I really didn't have any employees I was really myself I was a software engineer and really just trying to build things out and at the time I hired another software engineer because that's typically what we do and really I hired this person to beat my replacement and I thought the first thing I had to do was replace myself as an engineer and really put myself more or less in the front lines to work in other departments whether it was the accounting department to build out out but it was ultimately the HR department where I spent my time and I really leveraged you know my network and I used my network to barely make my first hires and you know at that time it's just about it's not like you just want to take just about anyone but I just really needed bodies at the time and hiring my friends what I thought was the right move or potentially would um lead to a disaster really turned out to be in my in my world a really a great thing because these people were really loyal and they spent time with me over the years so it actually worked out well I know it doesn't work out well for everyone else but um you know I really surrounded myself by what I like to think about as like family people I want to hang out with drink a beer with and spend time with but ultimately it was to really fine-tune our product right so hiring more Engineers more product design folks and really focusing now on really getting our product right because at the end of the day as a software engineer I was building too much because ultimately when I went and put this in front of VCS I had an app I had a text messaging system I had a payments company and what I was being told was you have too much these are great ideas and I had I thought probably one of the sexiest apps out there but it was too much for people's brains to absorb but as an engineer you tend to build a lot of things but ultimately I built an amazing application but the VCS and where the investment went it went into the payments that was really the engine in the driver so I had to put all my other ideas and products on the sidelines and really focus in on what we like to think of as our MVP right the one that we're all going to Rally behind and the one that's going to make us the most amount of money money and that ultimately was a pay by mobile Solution on the pay by mobile solution was really that that solution that basically assigned a merchant account a mobile number and what was really unique about the mobile number and how we did it is that um we used again like my hotel uh background real phone numbers 10 digit numbers in local area codes and we used a bot and an always personalized and so everything was like hi John this is Mary or hi John this is Ivy we gave the bot a personality but ultimately a real human can jump in at any time and it was all about figuring out why somebody couldn't pay a bill or get them to pay fast and if you think about Industries like healthcare nobody wants to call into a 1 800 number they just be put on hold or you don't want to get a statement in the mail just to put it on a desk for somebody to get to in 30 days from now right so being able to send that text message out the collected money or figure out why somebody couldn't pay a bill was extremely important and it became super relevant what I felt it was convenience that they were after but it became contactless we struck a deal with Visa throughout the pandemic and a quick quickly accelerated to a lot of their customers mainly in healthcare not only did a no you don't want to ship out and send out statements any longer but ultimately there was a shortage in paper right there was a lot of things that were happening back then and they really could not generate enough paper so we stepped in and worked with some of the largest paper statement companies to start delivering this through text messaging and guess what they're still doing it now today in fact there's more text messages going out with a lot of these companies than there are pieces of paper so I like to think that we're actually doing a good thing based on a number of trees that we're hopefully saving but it really proved that customers and or patients at this in healthcare it wasn't about not paying a bill it was about like they had a question and it could be a simple question just give them the ability to text it in get a response back and the great thing about it it just didn't have to be a live chat right or didn't get it didn't happen over the over a phone phone call everyone can do and operate on their own time and that's really was the beauty about the text message it showed that you can communicate to someone and nobody's gonna get pissed off to you if they didn't respond to you in zero seconds right um because you're not stuck on hold they're not stuck on a phone so ultimately that that idea and that product um quickly accelerated and became very widely used and even companies like T-Mobile and other large Enterprise companies really started adopting this as a payment method and then we had to take it one step further and really simplify it and make it so that you didn't even have to click on a link anymore so we partnered up again with visa and we came out with network tokenization network tokenization if you use Google Play or Apple pay you're leveraging a network token everywhere certified your phone number directly with the banks in the car networks and we're able to use a network token that's shareable across merchants and across acquires and what that does it actually lowers the cost of the fee and it makes it more of a safer transaction we proved that it's actually much safer to do a transaction through us with a phone number than it is with a piece of plastic and it sounds odd but in the sense that you know the plastic came out they added a chip to it everyone thought okay we can stop using driver's license we can just now rely...