Goboon Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2018)

hello everybody my guest today is david sorry dakota younger he's the ceo of a company called boon he's ambitious and tenacious likes working connecting people and enjoys the fact that simple interactions have with one another that we have with one another can have a big impact he tries to keep that in mind as he goes through his day let's talk boone dakota are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right what's the company doing how do you make money so essentially what boon does is uh helps people be able to make money by sending referrals uh so we sync up with an employee or a user's social networks and their address book on their phone and we can proactively give them recommendations when someone they know is a good fit for a job opportunity on boon with one of our companies so it's like a little recruiter in your pocket that makes it really easy for anyone to be able to send referrals and how do you make money who are you charging we charge the company so they pay a flat subscription sas fee based on the size of the company well what would you say an average is what's the average company pay per month about well per month we break it into a just an annual upfront contract so it's about 30k 30k and what does that get them like how many how many referrals uh they have unlimited amount of referrals i'm in an unlimited job post that's like the average size there you're looking at a company that's going to be over 5000 employees okay and when did you launch the company what year uh 2000 officially we did uh 2014 but that was when it was just coming out of beta uh so we've been around i'd say like fully operational about a year okay very good what have you scaled to down today in terms of total customers uh so right now we have chat spotify um and we're kind of shifting in from a really hands-on working with a select number of customers and scaling that up now to work with a growing number of companies and being able to expedite the onboarding process dakota you cut out sorry how many uh 26 20 okay great 26. and is this just you kind of on the streets hustling closing this people or what's your sales machine look like today yeah initially it was um but uh no right now um we have some pretty cool uh scaling techniques i mean one thing we have in our is our ambassador network so we work with a lot of like hr consultants um or hr specialists people in the recruitment field that companies will use to help them build out their hiring process let's say you're a growing company you don't really have a formal hiring process so we uh partner with the people that are that do that and so they recommend boone as one of the sourcing solutions um that they need to bring on so the sales cycle there is really short we also have another really slick tool where we um automatically scrape new jobs that are posted and can create profiles for them those companies automatically and reach out to key members of staff that helps to really target select you know companies based on how we want to qualify those leads that's been really scalable so 26 of these folks you've closed at a 30 000 kind of ac that's 2500 bucks per month i mean i can multiply that right you're shooting about 60 65 grand a month right now and what's it up from about a year ago uh so a year ago we were looking at a low 200k about 195k in terms of armor yep yeah yeah so 195 by 12 that's about 16 grand a month now up to 65 grand a month that's obviously healthy growth what's the team look like today yeah it's still a pretty lean team so we have uh three full-time members we have an external dev team um so that's how we were able to keep it really lean lane there's not a lot of sleep going on right now but uh part of we just uh we're about to wrap up our raise right now and so part of that's going into bringing on some additional sales and marketing individuals and customer success people um that's great and now have you so three people today have you raised any capital today are you bootstrapped no we raised capital we raised i think uh by now uh we actually last week we just closed another 200k so uh we're at around 130 in terms i mean 1 million 300 000 okay for the entire life of the company was any of this kind of on a priced round or it's all kind of venture debt or convertible debt convertible debt yeah yeah the first i think our families and friends round was priced but uh that was it everything passed that was yeah all right so three folks and where's everyone based everyone in l.a yep uh well our biz dev comes in uh on a monthly basis he's not always here he's actually based up in canada but since it's a sas company he doesn't necessarily need to be there he's got a pretty strong network but the myself my ops manager the cfo um we're all on site and i assume since you're raising capital you're still burning capital or drive growth yeah i mean right now it's especially uh given the market i mean the unemployment has been i mean it hasn't been this low ever like the the the demand for talent is at an all-time high uh so we're trying to capitalize on that market and grow as rapidly as we can so how much are you burning per month right now like 10 20 grand or what no we're looking at around 35 okay right now that's not that's not horrible and it's most that head count or what yeah development and and head count yeah churn is obviously critical in any sas company especially in kind of hr tools and recruiting space what's your turn look like and how to make sure to keep it low yeah we've had limited turn um we've now uh lost i think two companies at this point um and so the biggest things that have have helped us or been i think a factor for us has been the fact that um relatively easy to maintain we fit inside the company's existing hiring process so like when they post a job to their current ats or whatever tool they're using it's automatically posted to boone so they don't have to do anything extra so the ask upfront in terms of both on a capital end they most of these companies spend more on toilet paper and then the fact that we're not we actually do less work we help help them do less work rather than asking anything extra i think helps with that quite a bit um so uh yeah i mean plus the fact that we're helping in industries we're really targeting right now industries that aren't really getting much attention at all like a lot of these blue collar uh markets where um if you look at a lot of sourcing solutions hiring solutions they're really catered more towards tech so there there's not a lot of other options for them to go to anyway have you looked at like your scale so instead of continuing to take like dilutive convertible notes and things like that have you looked at venture debt at all yeah i think that's what i mean i know that's where we're going to be headed for the roundup this next this is the last uh convertible that round we'll be doing you mean convertible yeah convertible note yeah um uh i think we'll be from what we're looking at the metrics that we're going to be able to put up i think that'll be uh something we're gonna be looking at for sure and and what do you like about venture debt well i mean you get a lot of the strategic benefit there well you can get a lot of the strategic benefit there um both from introductions uh and opportunities with partners or potential customers but also some of the experience there um that they're going to be able to bring to the table both from the business and right and how to run a company how to scale a company but also um things the benchmarks to be looking for if you're going to be planning to raise in the future uh and so i think that that's important as well and then potentially even helping to accelerate um you know that or help manage that that future any future raises that you're going to be doing so you would be looking for venture debt to help you manage the growth of the business and help with venture capital rounds in the future um i think no i'm saying like working with the venture companies i mean they're going to be able to help potentially open up doors with potential customers leveraging their network right i mean even when we went with we got with 500 startups that was one of the benefits we got out of them right that's an accelerator though with hundreds of companies inside or you know maybe thousands of companies at this point right but i mean we're not it's not like we got on with every single one of those companies we still get in like by working with a venture company i mean you're going to be able to our venture and fund they're going to be able to leverage whatever network they have to potentially help to accelerate your growth whether it's they said making introduction to strategic partners or potential large customers that might have longer sales venture debt folks don't typically do that though because they have no upside they don't take any that's all points they don't take any equity it's non-dilutive so i'm just usually when i say when i ask a founder why what do they like about venture debt they'll say things like it's non-dilutive there's no personal guarantees there's no covenants there's no warrants things like that your answer was very very different so i was trying to understand where you're going with that oh yeah no i um on that end um yeah i was thinking more along the the business side of things i mean that's really what my focus is right now i guess my head's just primarily and the the growth and trying to scale the company as fast as we can but yeah yeah i guess like yeah very good all right man let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um there's the uh the power persuasion uh i forget who wrote that but it's a psychology book i think that's a pretty solid one and he has a new he has a second one out too it's pretty solid number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um there's uh obviously elon musk but uh the the uh ceo of uh of uh ford motor company i think is is pretty interesting i don't know why but the logistics uh play and where that's headed right now is to me is pretty interesting number three what billing tool do you guys use uh we use fresh uh no uh intuit into it into it number four uh how many hours of sleep to get every night uh six okay and which situation married single uh married any kiddos no not yet not yet i'm uh trying to keep that keep that away for the mean time and how old are you uh 33 33 i think about that last question dakota what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh that i don't know everything guys remember you don't know everything again launched his company back a couple years ago we'll call it 2014 again helping really teams turn their teams into their most powerful agents for recruiting right recruiting new talent 26 customers today paying about 30 000 bucks on average in terms of acvs they're up to about 65 grand per month right now in revenue up from 16 000 per month just about a year ago burning about 35 grand per month that's okay they raised about 1.3 million bucks to drive growth team of three based mainly in la uh too early to talk about kind of other economics but scaling nicely looking at raising some additional capital here in the near future dakota thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks a lot appreciate it