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Founder Interview

How FormPiper Reached $3M Revenue and 150 Customers While Staying Bootstrapped and Profitable (Interview with CEO Brad Parker)

Interview Date
July 27, 2022
Interviewee
Brad ParkerCEO
Watch
Watch the full interview

Company Metrics at Interview Time

Annual Revenue (2022)

$3M

Customers (2022)

150

MRR (SaaS) (2022)

$45,000

EBITDA Margin (2022)

20%

Revenue Growth (2022)

37%

Historical Snapshot

These numbers were reported by Brad Parker during his interview with Nathan Latka in July 2022 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See FormPiper’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • 01FormPiper reached $3M in annual revenue in 2022, all bootstrapped with no outside funding.
  • 02The company serves 150 customers across 250 locations as of July 2022.
  • 03SaaS MRR grew from $18,000 to $45,000, representing 150% growth since the prior interview.
  • 04EBITDA margin improved from 18% in 2021 to 20% in 2022, excluding founder salaries.
  • 05Average revenue per user is $225 per month for the SaaS product.
  • 06Annual contract value ranges from $1,500 to $2,000 depending on number of locations, with 90% of contracts now done annually.
  • 07The team consists of 9 people: 2 founders, 6 salespeople, and 1 head of customer success.
  • 08FormPiper processes over $350M in GMV annually across its platform, with $150M directly attributed to lenders it represents.
  • 09The company is targeting the furniture retail market, which has roughly 40,000 potential customers versus only about 200 in pet retail.
  • 10Three SDRs each make 100 calls per day, booking 30 demos per month and closing roughly 35% of those that show.

Company Metrics at Time of Interview

MetricValueSource
Annual Revenue (2022)$3MFounder interview, July 2022
Customers (2022)150Founder interview, July 2022
Locations Served (2022)250Founder interview, July 2022
MRR (SaaS) (2022)$45,000Founder interview, July 2022
ARPU (2022)$225 per monthFounder interview, July 2022
Annual Contract Value (2022)$1,500Founder interview, July 2022
EBITDA Margin (2022)20%Founder interview, July 2022
EBITDA Margin (2021)18%Founder interview, July 2022
Revenue Growth (2022)37%Founder interview, July 2022
Revenue Growth (2021)34%Founder interview, July 2022
Team Size (2022)9Founder interview, July 2022
Sales Reps (2022)6Founder interview, July 2022
Customer Success Headcount (2022)1Founder interview, July 2022
Year Founded2019Founder interview, July 2022
GMV Processed Annually (2022)$350MFounder interview, July 2022
GMV Directly Attributed to FormPiper Lenders (2022)$150MFounder interview, July 2022
Average Lender Fee (2022)1.5%Founder interview, July 2022
SDR Headcount (2022)3Founder interview, July 2022
SDR Daily Calls Each (2022)100Founder interview, July 2022
Monthly Demos Booked per SDR (2022)30Founder interview, July 2022
Demo Show Rate (2022)50%Founder interview, July 2022
Demo Close Rate (2022)35%Founder interview, July 2022
New Customers per Month (2022)15Founder interview, July 2022
Annual Contracts as Share of New Deals (2022)90%Founder interview, July 2022
Multi-Store Customers (2022)60Founder interview, July 2022
Pet Retailer Market Size (Addressable) (2022)200Founder interview, July 2022
Pet Retailer Market Share (2022)60%Founder interview, July 2022
Furniture Retailer Market Size (Addressable) (2022)40,000Founder interview, July 2022
Prior SaaS MRR (2021)$18,000Founder interview, July 2022

Growth Breakdown

Revenue

FormPiper reported $3M in annual revenue in 2022, combining a SaaS subscription line and a lender referral fee of approximately 1.5% on financed volume. SaaS MRR reached $45,000 in July 2022, up from $18,000 at the time of the prior interview, representing 150% growth in that line alone.

Customers

The company serves 150 customers across 250 locations as of July 2022, up from 90 customers at the prior interview. Roughly 60 of those customers are multi-store operators, and the company holds approximately 60% of the addressable pet retail market while actively expanding into furniture retail.

Team

FormPiper has 9 full-time employees: 2 co-founders, 6 salespeople including 3 SDRs, and 1 head of customer success. Product development is handled by an outsourced dev shop called Maker Software, allowing the internal team to stay lean.

Profitability and Funding

FormPiper is fully bootstrapped and profitable, with an EBITDA margin of 20% in 2022, up from 18% in 2021, excluding founder salaries. The company has never raised outside capital and has grown revenue 37% year over year in 2022.

Growth Strategy

Outbound SDR Calling

Three SDRs each make 100 calls per day into retail businesses, targeting furniture stores. They use Task Minions to scrape leads and Seamless AI to enrich those lists, booking an average of 30 demos per SDR per month and closing 35% of demos that show.

SaaS Plus Lender Referral Model

FormPiper charges retailers a SaaS subscription fee and also earns approximately 1.5% on financing volume routed through lenders it represents. This dual revenue model means the company earns from both software adoption and transaction volume, creating compounding economics as customers grow.

Niche Market Domination Before Expansion

FormPiper first captured roughly 60% of the addressable pet retail market before pivoting its growth focus to furniture retail, which has an estimated 40,000 potential customers. This sequenced approach allowed the team to refine the product and sales motion in a smaller market before scaling.

Data and Analytics as a Retention Moat

FormPiper tracks approval rates, close ratios, and employee-level performance data for each retailer. This scorecard functionality is especially valuable to multi-store operators and makes the platform stickier the more locations a customer has, reducing churn risk among the highest-value accounts.

Annual Contracts for Predictable Cash Flow

Approximately 90% of new contracts are now signed on an annual basis at $1,500 to $2,000 per year depending on location count. This shift from monthly to annual billing improves cash flow predictability and reduces churn exposure.

Best Quotes

Well, we start with the financing aspect of formpiper. So if you're a retailer selling high ticket items, typically you'll have more than one finance option you use to present options to your customers. So we streamline that application process.
Most of our contracts are being done annually now. I'd say probably 90%. And we're closing those in the furniture space around fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars depending on how many locations they have.
We're just I mean, we're just always on the phones. You know? I've got the SDR team. They're all making a 100 calls each a day calling into retail businesses, just trying to get on the phone with them.
My goals are so the goals are for them to book 30 demos and that's what they do on average. So 30 demos a month, we see 50% of those demos show. So 15 demos per SDR is showing and we're closing 35% of those. So on average, what we're doing is bringing on about 15 new clients a month from That cold

What Happened Next

This interview captures FormPiper at a specific moment in July 2022, when the company had 150 customers, $3M in annual revenue, and was actively expanding from pet retail into the much larger furniture retail market. The figures Brad Parker shared reflect the state of the business at that point in time and should not be read as current. Visit the FormPiper company profile on GetLatka for the latest available data.

View FormPiper’s current profile and metrics

Full Transcript

Introduction and What FormPiper Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Brad Parker. He helps retailers automate their financing via his company formpiper.com. He's a twenty year veteran in the pet retail space. Now again, helping those retailers identify the proper SaaS products to grow their business. Brad, you ready to take us to the top?

Brad Parker

00:14>> Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:15So just to 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?

Streamlining Retail Financing Applications

Brad Parker

00:28>> Well, we start with the financing aspect of formpiper. So if you're a retailer selling high ticket items, typically you'll have more than one finance option you use to present options to your customers. So we streamline that application process. And since we've last talked, 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

00:52>> 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.

Nathan Latka

01:01And 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 to 2% back end fee on financing to pet retailers. Is that accurate?

Brad Parker

01:14>> That was actually our own company. So it was where I actually started And in the 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 a solution to aggregate

01:33>> 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.

Acquiring the Financing Company Origin Story

Nathan Latka

01:45And 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 formpiper. Hey. Why don't you make 40 payments of a $100 a pop over the next forty months and we can finance this for you?

Brad Parker

02:01>> Yep. That's a good example. Yep.

Nathan Latka

02:03And so if you add up all of the loans you approved in the past thirty days, the equivalent of the $4,000 that I just described for the water tank, how much GMV is going through your platform monthly?

Brad Parker

02:14>> Monthly,

02:16>> I'd say right now about probably 15,000,000 that we track that we actually represent. 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 And the we don't actually track that revenue or get paid for that revenue. So the last time we had talked, we were doing about 100,000,000 in revenue that we represented. So I was kind of playing with those numbers.

GMV and Transaction Volume on the Platform

Brad Parker

02:43>> Now we're close to about 150,000,000 in revenue through the lenders we represent, but we're probably running about 300 to $350,000,000 in transactions through formpiper for our retail.

Nathan Latka

02:54So you sit on data that's worth $350,000,000 of loans done. Of the ones that you are directly attributable to and you're powering, it's about half that, a 150,000,000 annualized.

Brad Parker

03:05>> That's correct.

Nathan Latka

03:06Are you still taking about 1% of that? That's how you make money?

Brad Parker

03:09>> Yeah. It's on average about one and a half percent. Yep.

Nathan Latka

03:12Okay. One and a half. So, yeah, one and a half of I got obviously a hundred hundred and, what, 15,000,000 a month. That's what? $220,000 a month in revenue there?

Brad Parker

03:21>> It's close to that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:23And so is that your only model right now? Are you selling the SaaS stuff now too?

Brad Parker

03:27>> No. We still sell the SaaS products. So our initial plan when we work with the retailer is to educate them on our SaaS product, and that's gonna range anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 a year. Right now, 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

03:48>> 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 their portfolio of lenders.

Nathan Latka

03:57Oh, 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

04:21your 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

04:45get 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

SaaS Pricing and ARPU

Nathan Latka

05:07not 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

05:33going 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

05:55if 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

06:21the interview. See so is that is that flat fee on top of the 1% you take?

Brad Parker

06:26>> That's correct.

Nathan Latka

06:28I see. And last time I chatted, you had about 90 customers. How many today?

Brad Parker

06:32>> So today, we are up to a 150 customers, but 250 actual locations.

Nathan Latka

06:38Got it. So average of 1.6 locations per per per brand?

Brad Parker

06:44>> 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 gonna be that have 10 or 15 chain. We are finding the data that we track is more important to the multi store operators, 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, like their whole

07:09>> book of business has been really huge. So the smarter the operator, the easier it is for them to purchase our product.

Nathan Latka

07:16And 150 customers or brands paying 200, what, $225 a month. That's like, what, another $34,000 of MRR?

Brad Parker

07:25>> MRR is up to 45.

Nathan Latka

07:2745. Oh, 45 just on SaaS?

Brad Parker

07:29>> Just on SaaS. Yeah. So last time we talked, we were at 18. And so now we're at 45. So we're up about 150% since we got That's incredible.

Nathan Latka

07:39So that must is that your fastest growing revenue stream, then faster than the percent of GMV model or no?

Brad Parker

07:44>> 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 we last spoke.

Nathan Latka

07:52Okay. So just to be clear, when you add both revenue streams together on a monthly basis, you're doing about what? $250,000 a month in revenue?

Brad Parker

07:58>> That's correct. Yep.

Nathan Latka

07:59That's incredible. And still boot well, no. No. Wait. Did you raise a pre seed round or not?

Brad Parker

08:04>> Nope. We're still bootstrapped.

Nathan Latka

08:05That's weird. Why do I have a note that you raised a pre seed round? Did you do a secondary early on at a 4,800,000 post money valuation in 2021? Nope. Weird. I wonder why I have that. Okay. So great. Still bootstrapped. And founding story here, sole founder, or what what do your co founders look like?

Brad Parker

08:22>> My co founder is Ryan Munson. So we started the financing company together seven years ago, a marketing company, and then we merged it and created formpiper about three years ago now.

Nathan Latka

08:33I 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 SaaS plus or SaaS plus GMV from the financing business. You're building a beautiful moat here. How many how many pet retailers are there in The US?

Brad Parker

08:51>> Well, that's that's the tricky thing there. I wish there was a lot more. So you really only have about 200 pet retailers that our product would fit for in the market and we have about 60% of them. And then, so what we've been doing is focusing in the furniture space. In the furniture space, you have about 40,000 retailers that fit our model. So, you know, our goal is to bring value to that space, continue to learn

09:13>> it, and really kind of scale up. And our goal is to get to a thousand furniture retailers over the next couple of years.

Nathan Latka

09:19A lot of people, when they talk about buy now, pay later, they think of like Klarna. They've probably seen online. Right? They're buying a thousand dollar whatever stereo on Amazon, and Amazon says pay with Klarna and payments. Klarna, I imagine also will do like furniture and stuff, but I think you're a unique example where a very niche player can beat a multi billion dollar valuation company because you're niche. So if I'm a furniture store, why would

09:41I choose to be powered by formpiper versus Klarna on my lending options?

Brad Parker

09:46>> The issues with things like Klarna is it's the four payments, right? So they're approving everybody, they divide it up into four payments. So if you've financed something that was $50, you might still not be able to afford the $12.50 payment, right? So in a furniture business, we're typically able to offer customers a sixty month payment plan. So now all of a sudden their payments under a $100. A $100 is very manageable over a period of time

10:07>> where $12.50 is not, you know. So the furniture store is going to spread their financing options amongst the prime option, near prime and a couple subprime options. So they have different approval and different products for the type of customer that's walking through the door. So with formpiper, they're able to diversify their financing options for their customers, where if you were just using Klarna, you'd get a lot of approvals, but you wouldn't have a lot of transactional,

Customer Count and Multi-Store Operators

Brad Parker

10:32>> you know, things happening because it's just too expensive.

Nathan Latka

10:35And and payback period wise, you just said you can have our sixty month option. Is Klarna always twelve months?

Brad Parker

10:40>> I think it's just four four payments, you know, so I don't even think it's twelve What period?

Nathan Latka

10:44Period, though?

Brad Parker

10:45>> I think it's really short. I think it's, like, sixty days or, like, ninety days. It's Oh. It's a it's a really yeah. Easy

Nathan Latka

10:53You have a massive cash flow advantage in terms of what you can offer the consumer. It's way cheaper monthly cash flow wise.

Brad Parker

10:58>> And that's just how consumers shop. Right? They're shopping based on the monthly payment that they can add to their budget, you know? So you need to be able to have products that can get that payment as low as possible.

Nathan Latka

11:07So when I ask myself how you, a much smaller player with less resources than Klarna, can build a sort of moat like this or an advantage to sort of stick it to the man and start selling their market share. I would argue this advantage of your ability to do sixty month paybacks comes from you very smartly negotiated your credit facility with whoever your banking partner is to allow them for you to have a blended sort of

11:26warehouse facility where your blended loan could be and have a payback up to sixty months. Is that accurate?

Brad Parker

11:33>> So like the unique thing about my product is we can work with any lender. So they're not my lenders, right? So I represent 10 lenders and we'll market them.

Nathan Latka

11:42Oh, it's not your capital.

Brad Parker

11:44>> Not my capital, not my money, know. I see. So I can sign up a retailer and they could already have five lenders and then they could just use my platform to aggregate it. So that's why we charge for the platform because

11:54>> I'm not always making money, right?

SaaS MRR Growth from $18K to $45K

Brad Parker

11:56>> So yeah, I don't wanna be in banking business loaning out, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. I'd rather somebody else do that and just give me a piece.

Nathan Latka

12:03I guess so actually, why is that? I mean, why not go raise a $200,000,000 for some answer we're doing at Founderpath, right? We could either be a marketplace or we could actually raise the money ourselves and do it. Why not go rate? You have the the hardest part about this is the deal flow. You have all the deal flow.

Brad Parker

12:17>> That's true, but I also have very strategic partners in the spaces that I work. So if I came in and competed with them, then they would say, well, Brad, why are we paying you to come in and compete? So I would have to choose, do I want to represent companies or do I want to be the company? And then if I put my own financing product into my SaaS product, now I'm competing with all of the

12:36>> 60 lenders that I have in the platform. So for me, it just feels like a conflict of interest. Could be wrong.

Nathan Latka

12:42That's fair. That's fair. I think

Brad Parker

12:44>> that's something to do in the future, but yeah, it's not on the

Nathan Latka

12:46Let's say when a let's say you were you want a furniture company that pays for your software $200 a month. You show them six of your friends who are lenders as options, and you drive one of your friends a financing on a thousand dollar couch. Your friend is gonna bill the customer over sixty months, whatever, $1,500. So they're gonna make a $500 spread over sixty months. You can calculate an IRR on that. It's way higher than

13:10the 1% you're making. Right? So at some point isn't the margin, like the ability for you to go capture that margin just too irresistible?

Brad Parker

13:20>> I mean, can be, but, you know,

13:23>> financing is a challenging business, right? So got a lot of people who default, everybody's not going to pay you, right? So you have to know which bucket of people to approve, what are the merchant rates you're going to charge the retailer in order to execute and get that done. Then you have to have a whole ecosystem of collections and just, I mean, it's just a whole another business, you know? Yeah. And it's, I really like working

13:45>> with retailers and helping retailers drive success. If I was in the finance business, now I'm working with consumers, I'm working with the end product. And I did that for twenty years in retail and loved it and it was great, you know, but since we last spoke, I actually sold my four retail businesses. So I'm just focusing on SaaS, working with retailers and it's just a much easier place to live.

Pet Retail Market Share and Pivot to Furniture

Nathan Latka

14:07I love that. Of the 40,000 furniture retailers in The US, what's the total purchase volume annually across all 40,000?

Brad Parker

14:15>> Oh, god. There's no telling. I have no idea, to be honest with you. It's I'm sure

Nathan Latka

14:18it's in a billion. It's in the tens of billions, I'm sure.

Brad Parker

14:21>> Yeah. I mean, it's massive. Yeah. That's wanna figure out

Nathan Latka

14:24what I wanna figure out what 1.5% of that is. That's your opportunity. Right?

Brad Parker

14:28>> What's what's the potential grab out there, you know?

Nathan Latka

14:31That's right. That's right. Okay. This is very cool. And so give me an update on the team. How many folks full time today?

Brad Parker

14:38>> Right now, we've got nine. We've got Nine. The two two founders. We've got six salespeople brought in a head of CSM. So that's the internal team. And then we're still outsourcing our dev team to the same same company we were working with last time.

Nathan Latka

14:54Yeah. Which you've done very nicely here. It's called Maker Software. Always look for good dev shops. You're happy with them still?

Brad Parker

15:00>> Oh, yeah. It's fantastic. Just 24/7 service. I can get them on the phone anytime, talk about BrainStorm. Everything they put together for me is fantastic.

Nathan Latka

15:08And how do you interface? Like, do they talk to your furniture owner companies, put together specs, actually deliver the UI, UX, and the code to you?

Brad Parker

15:17>> They wouldn't actually talk to the customers. So we do all the talk to the customers. We have all kinds of outlines. We work on twelve week sprints. So we have a laundry list of things that we're working on to improve our systems and processes. And we're just always itemizing it and continuing to evolve it. Know I the last time we talked, I told you we were about to launch our third iteration and that we were going

15:34>> to go into just chill mode. That was not correct. Like now we're going for our fourth iteration. We're developing more than we've ever developed. And the cool thing about that is, you know, we're just getting feedback from our customers. What are they looking for? How would they like it? Our relationships with our lenders are getting stronger, so we're doing more API connections. And so when we launch the next version, it's gonna be really, really sweet and

FormPiper vs Klarna: Competitive Advantage

Brad Parker

15:54>> just be a real turnkey system to help retailers just crush it.

Nathan Latka

15:58Yeah. This makes so much sense. Makes so much sense. How are you getting furniture retailers to return your phone call?

Outbound Sales Motion and SDR Strategy

Brad Parker

16:04>> Well, the good news is is they're retail businesses, so they're open, and so they have to answer their phone during hours of operation. So Yeah. We're just I mean, we're just always on the phones. You know? I've got the SDR team. They're all making a 100 calls each a day calling into retail businesses, just trying to get on the phone with them.

Nathan Latka

16:22That's the number. It's a 100 calls per day. Yep. How many SDRs again?

Brad Parker

16:26>> Three.

Nathan Latka

16:27So you're doing 300 calls per day. And how do they how do they find the 300 phone numbers, like people to call?

Brad Parker

16:32>> You know, we were using a company called Task Minions to scrape the Internet for us and find leads. And then what we've done recently is we contracted with Seamless AI so we could enrich those lists and then also build lists inside of their system in order to give my guys the best chance to get in touch with the right people.

Nathan Latka

16:50And is that system working now?

Brad Parker

16:53>> We just launched with it.

Nathan Latka

16:54So Okay. So it's task minions to get the list, then it's Seamless AI to enrich the list. And then your SDRs, three of them daily, will use that enrich list to call people and try and close deals. That's it. That's great. How many furniture brands did you add new customers last month?

Brad Parker

17:09>> Last month, I think about 12.

Nathan Latka

17:12Okay, interesting. So your folks are making 300 calls a day, right? Times call it twenty business days a month. They're making 6,000 calls and closing about 12 per month?

Brad Parker

17:22>> So my goals are so the goals are for them to book 30 demos and that's what they do on average. So 30 demos a month, we see 50% of those demos show. So 15 demos per SDR is showing and we're closing 35% of those. So on average, what we're doing is bringing on about 15 new clients a month from That cold

Nathan Latka

17:40makes a ton of sense. Yeah. So 15 new clients at $200 $225 ARPUs. I mean, that's 3,300 of new MRR, which obviously compounds over time. You can obviously that feels like the economics on that make a lot of sense.

Annual Contracts and Closing Economics

Brad Parker

17:53>> Most of our contracts are being done annually now. I'd say probably 90%. And we're closing those in the furniture space around fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars depending on how many locations they have.

Nathan Latka

18:02Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Mean, that's $40,000 of cash flow monthly. Right? If you're closing 15 at 2 grand a year a pop.

Brad Parker

18:09>> That's that's exactly what our goal is. Yep.

Nathan Latka

18:11Yeah. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. So what's I mean, what right now, is there anything keeping I mean, it seems seems to give your ducks in a row here. Is there anything keeping you up at night?

Brad Parker

18:21>> No. Nope. Sleep like a baby. You know?

Nathan Latka

18:23Who else is doing this? Is there anyone else doing this?

Brad Parker

18:26>> We we definitely have some competition in the space. You know, I feel like when they built their technology, they were finance companies, thinking about it from a finance perspective. So they do a great job working with finance companies, but I'm a retailer and so I understand what the business needs. And so my system is built to be agnostic from a lender perspective. So the retailer can choose what lenders they want to use, run them in the

18:51>> order they want to use them. But most importantly, it goes back to that data I was talking about, right? Like if you wanna move the dial in retail, you have to know which salespeople are not performing well. So if you have somebody who's getting approvals and they're not closing those approvals, you have to train that person on how to sell, right? And so my system will tell you the close ratio of every single sales associate that

19:10>> you have. So when I come in, I can look at my scorecard and say, all right, I need to work with Jim and Todd today and teach them how to close the sale because they're not converting. So from a retail perspective, I believe that our software just helps the business owner, the sales manager, the sales team just really drive success.

Nathan Latka

19:26And you're still pretty profitable. You told me last time $60,000 a month in profit on a 140,000 a month top line.

Brad Parker

19:33>> Yeah. So I pulled those numbers up. So right now, last year we ran 18% profit across the board with 34% growth. And then this year, we're at 20% profit with 37% growth. And that doesn't include adding back, you know, mine and Ryan's salaries. That's awesome.

Nathan Latka

19:50That's freaking awesome, man. This what what it's just like, I just wanna like make a newspaper and put you on the cover just to say, you know, sell to millions of people. This is the kind of stuff we should celebrate. So congrats on congrats on what you built.

Brad Parker

20:01>> Technically, you have a newspaper. It's in the form So of a you feel free to put me on that cover anytime.

Nathan Latka

20:07I know we've got we've got we've we've we've got these bad boys coming out. We would love to actually where are you based?

Brad Parker

20:13>> I'm in just North of Atlanta.

Nathan Latka

20:15Interesting. Yeah. We've got a big event September 1 down here in Austin, Texas. We're just featuring bootstrapped SaaS founders who are killing it. I don't know if I can convince you to come down, but I'll definitely put you on stage if I can get you here.

Brad Parker

20:24>> I would come, but I I I fly out to Italy that day.

Nathan Latka

20:27Ah, what about what about March 16 next year? We'll have to follow-up. That's our next big conference. I'll definitely put you on stage.

Brad Parker

20:34>> I'll make it happen. I'll make it happen.

Nathan Latka

20:36I love that. Yeah. It's in New York, March 16. Just stick a soft hold on your calendar because this is just a fantastic story, and I can't wait to see where you're gonna be in six, twelve months.

Brad Parker

20:44>> Yeah. That's great. That sounds great. Be right after

Nathan Latka

20:46It's my gonna be This is amazing. Alright. Let's wrap up here quickly with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Brad Parker

20:52>> Right now, it's the twelve week year.

Nathan Latka

20:55Twelve week year.

20:56Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Brad Parker

20:59>> I think he's the CEO of his own business. So Chris Smith, he's dropped the conversion code. I'm just all I'm focusing on right now is trying to figure out how to get people to call me as opposed to me calling a 100 people a day.

Nathan Latka

21:10And number three, what's your favorite online tool for building formpiper?

Brad Parker

21:15>> My favorite tech right now is superhuman. I don't know if you've heard of that, but that email plug in is just unbelievable. It's changed my life with email.

Nathan Latka

21:23Number number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Brad Parker

21:26>> Eight.

Nathan Latka

21:27And situation, married, single, kids?

Brad Parker

21:29>> Married, no kids.

Nathan Latka

21:30No kids. And I think you maybe had a birth date. 41 now? Or sorry. 42?

Brad Parker

21:34>> 43. 43.

Nathan Latka

21:3643. Okay. Two birthdays. Very cool. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Brad Parker

21:41>> I would tell myself just to be a little bit more patient. All comes hard work.

Nathan Latka

21:47More patience. Formpiper, hell of a story here, launched back in 2019, basically helping pet stores, retailer brands, help them give their consumers options to buy the $4,000 fish tank. They now go, oh, there's but not a lot of those locations in the world. Let's go into furniture stores to do the same thing. How can we help furniture stores look at all the different lending options they can give their consumers so they can sell more thousand dollar

Team Structure and Outsourced Development

Nathan Latka

22:07leather couches? And so that's what he's doing. They're processing over $350,000,000 of GMV annually right now across, again, pet retailers furniture brands, of which a 150,000,000 they directly attribute to their formpiper brand, which they take one to 2% of. That's a basically a $200,000 a month revenue line right there. And smartly, he's now getting into SaaS. He's building software tools to build the operating system for furniture brands, for retailers, for pet retailers. That's doing about $50,000

22:32a month, up from $14,000, $15,000 just a year ago. So really healthy growth, all bootstrapped and profitable, which we love. Brad, thanks for taking us to the top.

Profitability: 20% EBITDA Margin and 37% Growth

Brad Parker

22:39>> Alright. It's a pleasure.

Nathan Latka

22:42One 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 1PM

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23:29fundraise, 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 people are saying. Sign

23:51up 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 and 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, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people.

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