How Streamline Software CEO Rachel Stern grew Streamline Software to $6.1M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

guys she's building GST streamline.com which is selling software to something called Special Districts there's 55,000 of them in the United States today they already have 1,450 using their platform paying on average of $275 per month for about 400,000 bucks a month in Revenue up from1 140,000 is a year ago she joined his chief strategy officer just a couple months ago and saying how can we get our hands on additional Revenue lines here if I can increase our po across a base of 1,450 we can double triple Revenue quickly without even adding any new logos we'll see what happens they've got 37 folks on the team sold about call it uh uh 10 20 14% of the company in their preed round last year targeting selling something like around 20% in a 76 to 8 million series a round that they're out there looking at right now we will see what happens hey folks my guest today is Rachel Stern she's an investor operator and political strategist currently the chief strategy officer at streamline which provides Digital Services to special district governments before streamline she served or founded sorry instate Partners venture capital and lobbying firm investing in govtech she's an active investor in ADV visor for early stage gov tech companies Rachel you ready to take us to the top yeah I'd love it thanks for having so it's something to you of exposure to a lot of cool companies via your investing you decid to jump Allin two feet first to streamline why well it felt like I had the experience of being on the investing side of the table Less on the operating side I'd sat on a number of boards I you know advise a lot of CEOs and seite people and the reality is is that it's much harder to execute than it is to advise and and be an investor and so to be sort of the best leader I could be in this space both as a thought leader perspective or building companies or investing in companies I figured I needed the experience of actually being in the trenches building these things fundraising um coaching teams helping us figure out product Market fit and pricing and um boy I have learned so much in the last five months well I want to get into streamline here in a second but first give fill out your backstory just a little bit uh when did you close the first fund for instate partners and about how many invest M did you make yeah so inate was actually an evergreen fund as part of a private Equity Firm called Advantage capital and Advantage was a very unique type of private Equity investor in that it used a network of state and local lobbyists across the country to create programs where government incentivized Capital into to come to come into very vulnerable areas and that's you that's a Tale As Old As Time tax like like what might be a vulnerable area yeah so um they were called New Market tax credit areas and they tended to be lower median incomes than their surrounding areas on average um but you're thinking urban areas you're thinking rural areas you're thinking entrepreneurs of color and women and minorities and it's just really trying to encourage the private markets to bring Capital into areas that typically are overlooked um because they're seen as too risky and so government often steps in in these ways usually the federal government but more and more on the state level to say okay guys you know we are willing to put our money where our mouth is and say we want to invest in small businesses in our communities particular particularly our vulnerable ones we're going to help create these programs whereby we're creating pools of money to invest in those areas and private private Capital comes in and matches that money and then invests it and then pays back to state so fast forward to streamline right you said this is uh my audience might not know what Special Districts means but you cater to them what is a special district example I had never heard of them before uh approaching streamline actually as a as an investor and partner before just you know as you said jumping in two feet first so special districts are everywhere and if you own your house I'm confident you're paying into some you'll see it on your property tax bill it's water districts it's utility districts it's libraries it's cemeteries it's sanitation districts it's this really funny sort of corner of the government Market uh that is wildly underserved partially because it's so disperate no one really knows how many there are um they supersede city and county boundaries they're managing their own budgets they're providing a singular service to a specific geographic area um and so they're very hard Most states don't even know how many districts there are interesting within their borders and so part of our work is sort of creating that Unity of market and understanding The Tam um and really serving them in a way you know we provide we provide Digital Services it's a website it's social media presence it's um an ability to post agendas and meetings they are being regulated on a state level basically being told what they have to do and very few of them have the tools or the technological background to build it themselves so we're coming in providing that sort of Gap in the market which is getting them online getting them digital tools having them better served constituents and R when you bucket all that up what's the average special district paying you per month or per year to use your technology yeah so our average it's actually very very small um our average monthly uh customer is paying us about $275 a month okay interesting and on the website at the bottom I see it's $60 is that per seat or per District or what's the $60 I see on your website so there's three tiers and it's based on their budgets it's based on their operating budgets which is how much money is coming in how much money is going out what are their revenues what are their profits what are their losses and different kinds of districts operate different ways so we've tiered it in such a way to be to accommodate each District's needs whether it's size whether it's um for example water and utility districts are collecting money they've got large operating budgets because you're paying your fees every month versus a fire district or a parks and wreck District maybe they're collecting little bits of money over time for charity or for bake sales but it's not part of their intrinsic value and so the pricing tiers and also the packaging of services is to accommodate each of those customers needs so there are three tiers based on budgets 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 287 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've bu 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 valuation 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 founder paath 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 real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22% 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 the 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 founder path.com products valuations or if you go to founder path.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 I also see though you you powered by stripe offer payments folks can make payments through your sites obviously one of the big big spaces we're seeing is this idea of SAS plus a core SAS model then you had Plus on top you've got payments some big companies take 1 two 3 four% of payments and they're processing billions and that's a huge Revenue stream for them how does streamline think about revenue generated from payments going through your platform yeah it's a great question and one that we're talking a lot about right now which is stripe is a wonderful partner because they are easy to integrate right that's why everyone's doing just API to API we are in we're...