How Findcra CEO Ben Loehle grew Findcra to $829.4K revenue and 22 customers in 2024.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is ben lowly he's uh the founder of a company called find cra which makes community reinvestment act compliance easy or cra compliance easy for banks through powerful data-driven software that cuts out countless hours of complicated manual research and delivers actual insights quickly uh he's again co-founder and ceo and leads overall company vision uh product uh and design as well as business strategy ben you're ready to take the top yep let's do it so banks are going to get pounded tomorrow with everyone applying for this ppp stuff are you playing any role in this um not on that end of it but um on in other aspects of all this mess we uh we we should be playing a a good role so walk me through that right again the people are gonna be doing lens they're like a lot of lending loans whether they're federally backed or not last year 25 billion in sba loans this year obviously gonna be definitely north of 350 billion because the stimulus package how are you playing how are you working with banks uh so right now you know our solution um helps banks find qualified nonprofits um in all their markets you know right away instantly and um it gives them consistent documentation to provide to their examiners about those non-profits to show that what they're doing is cra qualified um what does that mean what is what does cra qualified mean it means that it meets one of the uh requirements of the community reinvestment act it kind of lays out specific types of activities that banks can support to get credit during their exams so for instance the activity would need to support low lower income individuals you know it's it's a wide range of things it can be affordable housing uh financial literacy so it kind of spells out what will qualify and so we found that only about five percent of nonprofits um i should uh step back a little bit banks have to partner with nonprofits generally in order to find activities to support so um uh i kind of lost my train of thought no that's okay so just just to sum that up banks essentially have a responsibility to have some percentage right of their time and investment go towards supporting these cra labeled activities as like good for the community the way they find those activities is working with non-profits and you're helping that relationship right okay yeah and uh what i was getting at was that only about five percent of nonprofits are doing the types of activities that the cra lays out the community investment act spells out so we've gone and we analyzed all the nonprofit data um using public data sources and we've we've found that five percent and that's that's what banks come to us to find and um so banks pay you not the nonprofits that's right okay how many banks pay you today right now we have uh 22 active bank clients we've got 17 in our pipeline um and this is at the institution level um at each institution there's anywhere from two to ten users depending on the size okay and what give me a sense of what you charge banks per month to use you on average okay so are our contracts are annual um and because we really think that um and what we've heard from our clients is that um they need they're they're going to need the tool over an extended period of time so like a a monthly base subscription model wouldn't make sense for them and it helped it's it's more beneficial for our business what are the annual contracts look like are we talking like 10 grand or 100 grand or five grand um i think our highest one is nine okay so um our lowest is about 2500 okay we also just launched a new product this year to help banks research uh mark their markets so it's not non-profit based it's more getting that census data the demographic and economic data in their markets to determine what the needs are in a specific community because every community is unique especially as we're finding out during this really difficult time and um so different communities are gonna have different needs and so this tool we call it contexture one part of cra is what they call performance context and that's really that's the bank going out doing research to figure out what the needs are in a market and so we've developed a product it's sas based as well that gives an instant market reports and uh that's really driven sales as well so um banks can sign up for that anywhere from 2 500 to about 5 000 and we'll sometimes discount the pricing if they bundle it with our nonprofit search product i see so 22 of these customers paying somewhere between 2 000 and 9 000 per year we'll assume conservatively 2 000 because that's your minimum i mean that puts you at about 50 000 per year in revenue is that about right we're actually doing a little bit better than that um looking at annual run rate for 2019 we were at 72k oh great that's just sas products we also do consulting as well kind of more personalized tailored approach we'll do you know we'll review their cra program review their loan file and help them find opportunities in their that they've supported what was good in 2019 it was good it was um 62k okay so this is great so so great little business right 72 000 bucks an ar 62000 consulting and i assume small team you've kept it pretty tight yeah yeah still pretty small we have added one to staff so it's the last four people uh we have three full-time employees we have two part-time employees and uh one contractor that helps us with social media and communications have you raised any additional capital since last time we spoke we're still just nine hundred thousand uh still just about nine hundred thousand yeah we haven't done any additional raises do you regret raising that money uh no no not at all it's uh it's been crucial to get us to a point where we could hire a full-time sales person so um she's uh in an account executive role she came on last august and um we brought on 14 new institutions in the last two quarters does she carry a quota uh yeah okay okay so she's part of your three full-time yeah she's part of the three full-time we're kind of the the uh the tripod holding company up you know i love that so are you are you still investing that 900 grand or are you guys profitable at this point i'm sorry uh you broke up for i was gonna say are you still burning are you still burning money every month investing at 900 000 or you guys profitable at this point uh some months we having cash flow positive so um yeah we we are self-sustaining at this point so if you look at 2019 as a whole you are about break even um not i wouldn't say we were break even but we were close yeah yeah you think you will be this year i think so yeah yeah with uh 17 banks in the pipeline and um it looks like all these deals will close the sales cycles along with a large institution you know so um at some point this year i think we will bring on 15 to 17 new banks and um at that point we will be more than covering our uh our monthly burn i know this is great how do you you know paying a paying commission on like a two or three thousand dollar your sale is really tough there's not a lot of money to split up so right how do you like so when you're the lady you hired to lead this i mean do you say hey please only sell five thousand dollar a year contracts are higher otherwise we can't afford to pay you commission uh no we've really um let her lose to sell as much as she possibly can um we're trying to we're trying to scale this nationally and i mean get as many demos as we can once we get a a demo um with a bank like we're at about a 33 kind of conversion rate so um we want her to be successful we want her to be part of the uh kind of foundation of our team as we really look to scale this nationally all right very good ben let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book uh probably fooled by randomness by nicholas that's a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i always keep my eye on elon musk um but i think my favorite ceo of all time is probably andy grove yep um yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um probably asana number four how many hours i sleep to get every night uh try to get seven but usually it's more like six um yeah what's your situation married single kiddos engaged oh congratulations no kids no kids no kids yet all right yeah and how are you i am 36 36 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh i wish that i knew then that it was okay to fail and that you know i didn't have to have all the answers guys ben building fine cra he helps banks connect with non-profits where they can actually check off you know the ten percent the bank has to spend right on uh qualified nonprofits as defined by uh the government right so that's you know low income areas things like that he helps those banks meet that threshold he's now...