How FormPiper CEO Brad Parker grew FormPiper to $5.3M revenue and 275 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is brad parker he helps retailers automate their financing via his company form piper.com he's your 20-year veteran in the pet retail space now again helping those retailers identify the proper sas products to grow their business brad you're ready to the top let's do it so just be clear this could be like someone in kentucky that runs a little miniature shop that sells fish for example and you're gonna what do you mean when you say help them find the right software to automate their business well we start with the financing aspect of forum piper so if you're a retailer selling high ticket items typically you'll have more than one finance option you use to present uh options to your customers so we streamline that application process and since we've last talked we've we've kind of turned it into a retail management software where they're going to be able to aggregate their data and look to see which lenders are providing them with the most revenue which employees are running the most apps who has the best approval rate who has the best close ratio so you can actually turn the financing aspect of your business into a division of your business and to just to be clear what you did here i believe was you acquired a company a financing company that did about 120 000 per month because they took a one two percent back end fee on financing to pet retailers is that accurate that was actually our own company so it was where i actually started in the space and then as we grew we saw that there was an issue we would we would sell somebody financing and they would never use it so we would call them why aren't you using it well i can't teach my team how to do it now i have four lenders it's too many applications so what we did is we built the solution to aggregate that all of those lenders into one app to really streamline the process so now as we sell financing to our retailers you see them immediately using the product because it just goes right into their ecosystem and selling finance to your retailers might be if someone walks into a pet shop and wants to buy a 4 000 tank for their fish you could say the rep at that store could say hey you know and it's powered by foreign piper hey why don't you make 40 payments of 100 bucks a pop over the next 40 months and we can finance this for you yep that's a good example yep and so if you add up all of the loans you approved in the past 30 days the equivalent of the four thousand dollars that i just described for the water tank how much gmb is going through your platform monthly monthly i'd say right now about probably 15 15 million that we track that we actually represent you know and then in my system if you're a retailer and you're using lenders already you can plug your own lenders into my system and still use the system and we don't actually track that revenue or get paid for that revenue so you know the last time we had talked we were doing about 100 million in revenue that we represented um so i was kind of playing with those numbers now we're close to about 150 million in revenue through the lenders we represent but we're probably running about 300 to 350 million in transactions through form piper for our retail so you sit on data that's worth 350 million bucks of loans done of the ones that you are directly attributable to and you're powering it's about a half of that 150 million annualized that's correct are you still taking about one percent of that that's how you make money yeah it's on average about one and a half percent yep okay one and a half so yeah one and a half ago obviously 100 what 15 million a month that's what 220 000 a month in revenue there um it's close to that yeah and so is that your only model right now are you selling the sas stuff now too no we still sell the sas products so our initial plan when we work with the retailer is to educate them on our sas product and that's going to range anywhere from 1500 to 3 000 a year right now our average customer is paying us about 225 a month for the software so once they have our software we plug all of their lenders into the platform and what we do is we identify their lender lineup and look for gaps so if they don't have a near prime option or if they don't have a good subprime option we'll introduce them to the people that we use and then we'll add a lender to to their portfolio of lenders 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation 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 frowner 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 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 raised 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 see so is that is that flat fee on top of the one percent you take that's correct i see and last time i checked you had about 90 customers how many today so today we are up to 150 customers but 250 actual locations got it so average of 1.6 locations per per per brand yeah i'd say most of them are still single operators and about 60 of our customers are multi-store and then we have several that are going to be that have 10 or 15 chain we are finding uh the the data that we track is more important to the multi-store operators you know so they've scaled to a point where they're driving huge success they have 10 locations so being able to see an aggregated approval percentage for their entire um in like their whole book of business has been really huge so the smarter the operator the easier easier it is for them to purchase our product and 150 customers or brands paying 200 uh what 225 a month that's like what another 34 000 bucks of mrr uh mrr's up to 45 45 45 just on sas just on sas yeah so last time we were talking we were at 18 and so now we're at 45 so we're up about 150 percent since that's that's incredible is that your fastest growing revenue stream faster than the percentage gmv model or now yeah the the financing it's a much slower roll you know because obviously the number is much bigger but we have grown that about 10 to 20 since uh we last spoke okay so just be clear when you add both revenue streams together on a monthly basis you're doing about what 250 000 a month in revenue that's correct yep that's incredible and still well no no wait did you raise a precedent round or not nope we're still bootstrapped that's weird why do i have a note that you raised a precede right did you do a secondary early on at a 4.8 million post money evaluation in 2021 nope weird i wonder why i have that okay so great still bootstrapped um and a founding story here seoul founder or what are your co-founders look like my co-founder is ryan munson so we started the financing company together seven years ago um a marketing company and then we merged it and created form piper about three years ago now i love this you're like you guys are the kind of founders that like we should be celebrating on like newspaper headlines and stuff it's like a niche category you're eating your own dog food it's what i call sass plus or sas plus...