How G2Xchange CEO Ron Jones grew G2Xchange to $1.8M revenue and 7K customers in 2022.

hey guys recording this here on what is it friday the 19th maybe you're seeing this on monday at the latest but want to let you know we are almost sold out for founder comp sorry founder 500 in austin texas here in about a week uh it's gonna be an amazing event 500 b2b sas founders i'm looking at the attendee list there's almost um there's almost 60 founders with more than six seven million bucks in arr it's an incredible group of group there's over uh there's over a hundred over 150 with more than a million uh more than a million revenue it's an incredible group you don't want to miss it uh grab your hotel grab your flight grab a ticket right now i'll put the link in the bio um in the description here on youtube and i think there's only about three tickets left okay about three tickets left i'd love to see you guys there don't be bashful grab your ticket now hey folks my guest today is ron jones he's building g2 exchange which is actual insights for government contractors ron you're ready to take us to the top yes thanks for having me nathan all right do you come from the government sector yeah man so my entire career has been in government contracting uh funny enough started my career as a software engineer moved into solution architecture technical sales and then finally went over into software and services sales and um it's been federal contracting with a mix of global public sector um but the vast majority has been north american public sector which you have your federal contracting you have defense contracting but you also have um state and local law enforcement public safety um even some work for the canadian government too very cool okay so give me an example what is what are one of these governments paying g2 exchange for what's the product yeah so it's actually we actually don't serve well we do serve government right we do have lots of government users but this is a product for sales business development and capture professionals that serve the government so whether you're a software company that sells products or sells services right um that's what we do we have actual insights which is basically just bits of relevant data from multiple disparate public data sources right to help speed up your business development efforts okay what might be something i'm selling to the government that i'd use g2 exchange to get data on yeah so anything like for example like aws is one of our customers they sell you know lots of cloud services as you know to the government deloitte another customer of ours um management consulting technology implementation like a lot of folks may not know this but the government is the largest buyer of goods and services in the world so everything from down to like plastic forks and knives in a cafeteria on a military base to rockets right all right so what what are you selling the person that makes plastic forks for military bases what are you showing them on g2 exchange yeah so we focus on a couple of major categories around things that will help you have an impact on your business development efforts so for example when contract awards are released right uh we write tidbits about that so we have articles that basically focus on the award itself give some supporting data but also the crux of it really is the additional data which is like you know the the uh information about for example their senior leadership team where else they've worked in the government so what other contracts they performed on what their capabilities are right and also you know some of their recent wins if applicable and the way that this is actionable right for a bd sales or capture person i'll explain capture in a second uh for those that are unfamiliar but the way this is actionable is that hey if you're looking for partners right to get your technology into a specific government agency and you see that they're delivering or they want an award that is a response that that you know includes implementation of that technology in the scope right that's something that uh got it you might might be able to reach out to them and say hey you know he's got it what would the fork manufacturer or aws on average what do customers pay you to use the technology yeah so we have a couple of tiers of membership but um it's we have an individual membership that's 500 dollars a year we don't do monthly subscriptions it's all annual so 500 bucks a year and we also have um business uh memberships you know corporate memberships which you know it's it's a per seat discount right so our poo is kind of sitting in like the 250 dollar range across 7000 uh users or so and you know that's you know so we got a good mix of monthly rp or annual daniel got it got it so can i take seven thousand times 250 you're doing about 2 million revenue today yeah we'll cross the 2 million mark in november that's the projection 2 million mark in november um you know and and you know we're launching a new product line new business line to focus on defense specifically so right now we've just got health uh federal health which is the big health care agencies and federal government we've got federal civilian which is just about everything else that's not defense related and then next month i'm sorry month after next we're scheduled to launch g2x defense which will focus on everything defense contracting 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 to 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 evaluation 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 ron help us understand growth right so if you're doing a one point you know eight million-ish run rate right now which is about 150 000 per month what were you doing exactly one year ago do you remember yeah so um a little bit of backstory i was brought on as an operator right i did not found the company however uh about a year ago uh well let's just tell let's talk exit you know 2020. exit 2020 was about 800 k so coming in exit 20 you finished 2020 with that yeah yeah uh recurring revenue from subscriptions um and in that year you know we had launched festive that vertical so that kind of helped accelerate it accelerated through 2021 um i was brought in as a matter of fact as an executive as part of the former parent company in june 2021 right and so through some you know it was it was an exact acquisition two brands right uh one focused on events one focused on providing this intel uh working with the ownership team and leadership team that was there kind of advice hey we could transform this product this service into a sas business right it's techno it's a tech enabled market intelligence service today but in our roadmap we're building a sas product to introduce the market probably q2 of next year okay interesting and so 800 000 in 2020 did you like double do like a million a million six in 2021 something like that yeah uh yep as close to it's close to a million seven okay very cool yeah yeah well so why why have you been flat then right so you're at like one seven right now in terms of run rate so you haven't grown over the past 12 months yeah so we've grown a little bit um one of the so a few of the things that we've realized and you know...