How FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller grew FreightWaves to $53.9M revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

please help me in welcoming to the stage Craig Fuller from Freight waves good afternoon everybody it's always great to be back in Austin it's one of the greatest I think one of the greatest cities in the country and it always reminds me of the college football season that is starting up again so uh excited that we're back in Fall it's my favorite time of the year uh I I think this bringing together Founders to talk about what's happening around the SAS business and how to build businesses whether it's bootstrapping using interesting marketing techniques to acquire customers that's what this form is all about and what I'm going to share with you today is the story of freight waves now a lot of people think of us as a media company we provide supply chain news data and context for the global supply chain industry and we have journalists that write original content and so if you ask someone who is familiar with the brand they would suggest that we are a media company are investors on the other hand think of us as a SAS and data company and in the four years since we've launched our SAS business we've achieved 20 million in ARR and we burn about a million dollars a quarter but we add about two million dollars of net ARR per quarter we have some of the most compelling unit economics of any Enterprise SAS company and we're still growing exceptionally quick and this is really a tribute to our model of combining media with SAS we have coined the term content supported SAS which I will walk through how we built this and how we got this today so a little bit about freightways we're based in Chattanooga Tennessee we have about 200 employees and we focus on the global supply chain so if it's a product that moves through the economy if it's physically Goods part of the economy that is our focus and that's what we are entirely centered on is understanding what's happened around the global economy I'll walk through how we provide data and intelligence but the important thing that I think is really sort of uh different about our business is we go to market thinking about what the community needs to understand what's happening in the global supply chain the community being the community that we've built and using both content and data to get there this is just a story of our growth trajectory you'll notice and I'll get into this in a few minutes is that we started out as a media company that's how we monetized and over time data and recurring Revenue have increasingly become part of our business and we'll talk about what that looks like as we move forward I often start presentations for folks that don't know who freightways is and say the way to think of us as if ESPN and Bloomberg had a baby in the back of a semi and what I mean by that is if you think of the way Bloomberg has built their business model they have a really substantial media brand they're the largest media organization news organization in terms of editorial and journalists in the world but they really make money on their data and their subscription products people pay companies Traders pay 25 000 a year for this uh recurrent for this data platform that brings in the world's economic and financial data and we are building that at freightways except we're focused on the physical Goods part of the economy but we also live in an industry and work in an industry that's very blue-collar and you've got truck drivers Warehouse operators they need to be spoken in terms of the tone and how you talk to them in their own language and I think ESPN has done a remarkable job of really becoming fit you know the folks at ESPN are often Fanatics they're former football players their former coaches that's what we do when we recruit our editorial team we recruit people who are actually on the field to write editorial content so that it's written from a point of authority and it's written from a point of credibility and not written from somebody who's never actually dispatched a truck driven a truck or loaded an airplane so a little bit behind the scenes 200 employees we have 50 uh right at 50 analysts and I'm sorry 50 journalists uh analysts and data science we get about 85 000 people a day that tune into our streaming content live uh and then we get about three million visitors across all channels across our entire world uh 65 of supply chain content is originally sourced from freightwave so if you're reading times you're reading on Washington Post perhaps you're reading in Bloomberg a lot of that data material actually gets originally sourced through our data and through our content and it's as you anyone has known four years ago people had can you really build a media business on supply chain that sounds kind of boring if you've lived through the last two years you know that's actually not true uh straightways as I discussed has a Content supported business model and what that means to us is we go to market with really two primary products one is our sonar data product which is on average about twenty five thousand dollars per year is what customers pay us for the data and our media offering which is advertising supported media so companies that want to reach the same audience the very same decision makers that we want to reach are paying to advertise to us if ever watched Bloomberg television or red Bloomberg articles you will see services and products that are being pitched to other traders that also happen to be Bloomberg customers it's the same business model it's just that we focus on the physical Goods part of the economy um our data product because this is really a SAS conference so I'll talk a little bit about what we focus on is high frequency data so we're tracking the global economy and really at what's moving around the world within 24 hours so when the virus hit uh Wuhan China in January of 2020 we were monitoring what was taking place and preparing supply chain Professionals for what was about to come into the United States when the economy was starting to Roar back in mid April of 2020 it was not apparent to anybody else but Supply chains you actually see the economy eight to 12 weeks before everybody else does in March 31st 2022 I wrote an op-dead that said the the we believe a recession is imminent and the Global Transport sold off and it's because the high frequency data that we track is showing what's happening globally way Upstream think about it if you're building a product if you're manufacturing a product if you're ordering a product or a retailer those products have to move 12 16 18 weeks before you see it consume it as a consumer so we see that data and through that data we publish it and our editorial team brings content to it so that this data all comes alive our media business I talked a little bit about I think really the focus of today is this can apply in any industry I'm a True Believer that content supported X models and what I mean by that it can work in real estate it can work in SAS it can work in anything it's basically going at it in a editorial first mentality of developing content that will drive your audience to buy and consume your products let's think about this for a second everybody in this room is here because of the content that's being produced on the platform you have come across and become aware of it not because you're buying something but because you're intellectually curious about the topic of SAS you came here today for the very same reasons that our com our customers buy our data products they become aware of what's Happening they become aware of these Trends oftentimes these trends that we see because it is supply chain and is Upstream happens weeks or months before or maybe they're just curious about why is a ship stock in the Suez Canal going to impact my life or why can't I get baby formula for my babies those things people get curious about and they're really concerned about and having that information and being the market leader in providing that context has enabled us to build not only a very successful media business but also a very successful SAS business so when we talk about our media business our investors often don't really spend a lot of time thinking about media it's a 50 margin business our data business is about an 83 margin business it operates under traditional SAS metrics the reason that they love the media business is it actually generates a lot of cash flow and that cash flow enables us to reinvest back into our r d for our data but it also creates something that we've coined negative CAC so if you think of a traditional SAS metric of customer acquisition cost we actually have a term called negative CAC so when I pitching investors and talking to SAS investors they want to see the metrics of your SAS business and we provide metrics of SAS business the way everybody else does but we have something that very few companies does that do which is as we go out and develop content and are developing customers and creating top of funnel the advertising contribution margins the profits we make in our media business actually enabled us to have perpetual and almost unlimited growth without having to acquire pay to acquire customers that's not to suggest that we don't pay Facebook and Google and Linkedin an enormous amount of money to advertise like every other company does but 70 of our deals that come into our uh into our Enterprise SAS business are closed because those companies read about the data on our own media business um I want to talk a little bit about data businesses because this is I think rarely talked about we think about SAS businesses workflow but I think data businesses are incredibly powerful and it's really what we're focused on we're not in workflow we don't match Freight we don't actually provide software that helps companies essentially operate Freight movement or track Freight we provide Market level data and intelligence that powers some of the largest...