How Goldcast CEO Palash Soni grew to $10.8M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording and this is a graph of all the VC money raised in ourspace right and this is also a graph of my blood pressure and we used them AB tested them in the title and we saw the registration rate like Skyrocket hi everyone uh welcome back from lunch I'm palash I am the CEO and co-founder of goldcast I'm very glad to be here we are a B2B video and event marketing software and I'm going to talk about how do we use a video and digital event strategy to drive an awesome go-to Market motion so here we go okay to put things in context this is a revenue trajectory and what I'm going to talk about helped us get from 2 to 8 million in the last 2 years this was especially after we moved out of founder sales right founder Le sales and over the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk about why did we commit to a video and event for strategy how do we you know what tactics we use to power a great Live digital event motion and then how do we use that to power a great content engine all three are connected and I'll talk about them and before I start couple of disclaimers I know everyone is back from lunch so if you yawn or nap I have no problem with that and then I do a lot of Shameless L plugs for goldcast and I will apologize all in advance so please forgive me and you can use goldcast for anything you like you see today as with SAS everything in SAS there are tons of competitors and Alternatives you can use them as well but I wouldn't mind that either so let's start so why did we commit to a video and digital event based strategy right that's that's a key question why do you do all the hard work and the big theme Here is that SAS is a red ocean right we all know it's so crowded right this is like mtech map from last year probably it won't even fit in this screen if we do it this year and I kind of knew this when I was going into mtech but you don't really feel the pinch till you have to sell in a market like this right and this is a graph of all the VC money raised in our space right and this is also a graph of my blood pressure as this was all happening and digital events was like a sleepy corner of SAS and it became like super hot when Co hit and all our competitors were raising a ton of money and we also have raised more money than I would have liked to but we still raised a lot less and we were figuring out how do we stand out as a verticalized competitor to all these like gantly funded horizontals right so we tried a bunch of things we tried outbound we did all the things that the influencers told us on link and we had a good SDR team and it didn't really work right this is from one and a half years back and our reply rates were pretty bad pretty poor we also tried a lot of SEO inbound blog stuff and it kind of worked but it didn't really really work because what we realized is that it's hard to stand out as a brand and build a brand with these two tactics it's good to capture demand but not to create demand and to stand out and we posted on LinkedIn as well um and that is when we realized oh video content really works really well and it kind of gels with what we are doing um so we started eating our own do food so I'm going to talk about key like tactical strategies to power a good Live digital event motion so the the two like themes that work for us is number one is an event Series so event series think about it as a podcast that is video based uh that happens on a recurring regular basis and is targeted to a Persona so for instance we have three key personas we have an event marketer Persona we have the VP of demand gen and a CMO over the last two years we have done event series that happen every like two weeks to four weeks targeted to these personas and we talk about anything that's relevant to them at the moment we don't talk about a product it's very thought leadership but it's very like engaging and and the key here is consistency so you do it over a long period of time and it initially is slightly Flatline then it grows and at the peak we have had almost like 100 people attending these on a weekly basis and it's great engagement and then it tapers off and then you move on to the next one so that's event series works very well if you target the right Persona keep it focused on them the second is using Summits digital Summits and miniseries to create lightning strikes so if you have something you want as a CEO or marketer focus on in a specific spefic period of time say a product launch or you are repurposing your brand or things like that then you use this so for instance last year we launched an AI product just like all of you right and it's a product used for video content repurposing and we said okay let's couple it let's launch it with a minseries like 1 hour session over 4 days talking about AI video content repurposing right and we were talking about things that Eric from single grain yesterday was talking about uh but there were some things that really worked for us in this and made it successful right so a couple of tactics number one is the titles that you see here right they are all derived from keywords that are PR prospects use in gong right so we looked at gong what are the things that like the words that prospects use and we used them AB tested them in the title and we saw the registration rate like skyrocketing so you see that 1171 people registering they are all marketers that registered for this event the second tactic that worked is we said okay let's ditch thought leadership in this let's talk about use cases tactical content even like competing products because we want to give people tactical advice and that helps really well especially if you're trying to drive like midf funnel so you see this we had almost 500 people attending this in in you know span of 3 days and a lot of Engagement so the stuff in the bottom that's all data that's very key engagement data that we got from um doing this and over time this has become like a big pipeline driver for us so if you look at this trend the early bars are bigger because it Tak takes time for leads to convert into pipe but it almost drives like 750k of uh pipeline for us every month and for very little cost right it doesn't cost that much money to do it and some very big brands also use it right so some of our favorite Brands like sixense drift Zora they also use similar kind of strategy especially if you want to learn about this and see this in action look at six cents and attend their webinars and events they are awesome and they very much you know embody what I'm talking about and then the last thing which is obvious but also important to know is that this thing drives a lot of live engagement if you do digital events well right if you really make an engagement that then the live engagement is really sales gold right your sales team can use it to personalize their Outreach the marketing team can use it to personalize their marketing even the product and and customer success team can learn a lot from it so this is something that you do not get if you do in a do a podcast instead right but this is very very valuable stuff that you get from Live digital events and it has worked for us the second part is how do you use this to power an actual like content engine right that's a very key part of this it will not work if we don't do you know content after it and the big thing here is something that we have kind of talked about in other sessions as well is how do you use one video asset and then repurpose it into multiple different marketing assets right so three things that work really well for us we take a video clip you know coming out video asset coming out of say an event and webinar or or anything like that and then we cut it up in multiple clips and then we post it on a regular cence on YouTube right so the YouTube elard of the M works really well if you post repeatably on consistent topics and that has caused a huge surge of traffic for us the second thing is we create blog posts automatically that are SEO optimized and they have Clips video clips interpers so if a human is actually reading them then they find it engaging and they can go and watch the video if they want to and the third thing which is very important is we can automatically create multiple LinkedIn posts right using you know using Ai and this is something that all of this goldcast product does uh but you can use chat GPD as well and other tools uh but it creates all these post and we give it to our employees and post it on our page and it creates that drum beat of you know posts on social that you need to stay relevant in top of mind to your audience the second big thing that works really well for us is leveraging the speaker reach so we have very nice speakers and when they come to our events we give them just right after the event when it's fresh in their mind things to post on social right away right we don't expect them to create it we give them a LinkedIn post and a video clip of something nice they said in the event and we give them multiple options and they can go and post it so the two things in in between I I I look weird in that but these are basically this is the CMO of KPMG and I got her on an event um she gave gave us just 15 minutes but right after I sent her five options these are awesome things you said she posted two of them and we got two in um Financial Services firms as you know leads from those posts and they are both closing into like six figure contracts and this is something that that is that has worked really well for us right how do we leverage on the speaker reach and ultimately all of this creates like the Vitality you need right from a go to market motion that works consistently over time so we regular we ask our prospects about how did they hear about us and this is a number one um way people hear about us either through our events or through speaker sharing about us so we talked about um all of these things but ultimately the key takeaway is that you need to be able to create content and do live engagement using digital events because in this day and age a brand is only as relevant as you know the last ad or the last video you posted and uh and you need to do that at the speed of social to keep top of Mind in especially when things are getting crowded and crowded over time some you know I'll wrap up with some tactical learnings that you can use and just create a checklist of sorts um use you know what the words that your audience uses to create that extra bump in registrations attendance um do a mix of thought leadership and use case to create top funnel bottom funnel impact um get great speakers one thing that I forgot to mention is use automatic C calendar invite so anyone who registers for our events we send them calendar invite and that bumps up our attendance by 30 40% and then last AI is your friend right to create content at the speed of social you need AI so use AI to repurpose content to you know power your speakers and ultimately get all of the data to drive Pipeline and brand cool I am actually done thank you [Music] hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 4 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer

Introduction goldcast.io for running your virtual event they've got 200 customers are doing 500 000 a month in Revenue that's up from 250 000 a month just a year ago they got their 28 million dollar series a done back in September 2022 at 120 million post money valuation call it they sold 28 23 of the company now 110 folks on the team as they look to scale again 200 customers today charging an average 30 000 bucks per year focusing on B2B brands hey folks my guest today is plush Sony he's a goldcast co-founder and CEO he got his first days of Entrepreneurship charging kids from the neighborhood hourly to play video games on a second-hand console he's always been fascinated by Legacy companies like Microsoft Verizon and Disney that Excel that identifying writing long-term trends while building resilience now he's building a digital events platform for B2B marketers called goldcast dot IO plus your radio takes the top I'm late I'm excited all right tell us the story of one of your customers and why they pay you yeah Nathan so one of the largest customers is GitHub and they started with us in uh in May of 2020 and they started with us doing an event Series in in Europe for one of their you know new product launches so they didn't and event series throughout the year for 2013 events and now they have around 30 teams using us mostly marketing teams doing a variety of marketing events right like product launches or or demand gen events or events with Enterprise customers and that's what typical use cases look like right like marketing teams of different types you using us to do events with their customers prospects to serve a variety of marketing and use cases that's awesome now just to be clear are you I mean is this sort of in the hop-in visible V Fair sort of world or would you say you're different uh fundamentally it looks like that yes but our focus is more in the niche of B2B marketing teams so we only go after B2B marketing teams and we are more agile in the way that we can serve the small you know 30 to 40 person webinars all the way up to you know bigger multi-day multi-track conferences we don't go after like the big you know fifty thousand hundred thousand person trade shows which is what you know vfares stop in specialized then we don't do like very complex ticketing and stuff because that's what not you know B2B marketers looking for they're typically looking for you know 30 to 5 000 that's where you know the B2B marketing use cases lie and that makes a lot of difference in how a u of X is our technology is how our you know everything is and how easy the product is to use that's awesome now you work with some of the biggest brands in SAS drift GitHub auto desk Sixth Sense HootSuite user testing Zora sentoso you've got a bunch of them on your website here helping me understand on average what are companies paying per month or per year to use the technology uh thirty thousand dollars okay and how do you upsell is it number of attendees number of seats or something else yeah since the last time we have spoken Nathan it has changed now we charge based on number of teams that companies use uh interesting yeah because last time you up sold what did you tell me you said you upsell against number of uh attendees and features but now it's just now it's just teams yes interesting and when we last spoke you told me you had about 110 customers Currently serving 200 customers where are you today 200 200 okay great and I remember you telling me on that episode this was back to remember this was back in April of of last year you said you were raising a 20 million series a come September it looks Raised like you got that closed a 28 million series a is that right yeah yeah okay that's awesome there's the first time you announced that you were doing it on the show or had you already sort of started the process so we had started the process Nathan we had just started it that time that's awesome well congrats on getting it done are you comfortable sharing the evaluation you raised at yeah Nathan absolutely we raised it at 120 Postman and did that feel fair to you at the time it did and I am glad we raised that valuation because it puts us in a very nice spot at this point where we are not overvalued as much and we can put money you know in the right places we don't have immense pressure to grow and we are growing very well we we can you know so at a decent phase and and put money in the right places 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 the 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 evaluation 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 evaluations inside of your founder 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 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 raise they sold 22 percent 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 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 Monthly recurring revenue and so what is mrr today we are ad 5 not the 500k 500 000 a month that's more than double from exactly a year ago when you're at 250 000 a month so congrats on the growth how are you winning deals over hopping and submitting with our players yeah it's uh it's honestly just our focus on the Persona right so our product is honestly the best in the market if you are a B2B marketer and it shines in in three ways one is that it is the most brand available right so if you are a sixth sense our product does look exactly like sixth sense or if you're an LG it looks like algae second is it is very adaptable to your strategy right so if you are doing webinars or if you're doing multi-day events or if you're doing even field events you can you know you can use Google cast and that creates a lot of advantage for teams because you can centralize your data you can use the same product for the entire team and it's just easy you can you know save a lot of money by doing you know using the same product and the same you know license the third is that our Integrations and analytics and all the martech functionalities that you know the sales and marketing teams need they are just the best in the market 10x better than what you know horizontal platforms like hopping Etc offer and they are very appealing to the marketing team especially marketing Ops who are the key stakeholders and all of those deals and they all of these things really resonate with them so how do you Profits manage growth now moving forward how much are you burning net burn per month would you say are not burn per month Nathan is somewhere between 600 to a million so it's still high but you sort of smile you sort of smile when you say that a little bit why do you why do you smile uh it is still high Nathan I would say interested hi it is still a coveted I would say and we are very cognizant of it trying to bring it down I mean but it sounds like I mean you probably still have what probably more than 22 23 million in the bank from your series a right yeah very correct yeah yeah I mean so you've got 24 plus months of Runway right we do we do we easily have at least two plus years of friendly and what do you think you'll grow a or R2 by the end of this year 2023 civilizing across 10 million the end of this year and um and hopefully we can double next year as well and what's the growth strategy you went from 110 customers to 200 over the past 12 months how do you go from 200 to 300. yeah Nathan so right now our focus is very much go after large Enterprises in Tech so the likes of LG Adobe Etc right who we already where we already have non-trivial traction and then we are seeing success in non-tech B2B as well right where the go to market motion is the same just that their stack is a little different right so they'll use Lexus Nexus instead of Salesforce for example right so law firms accounting firms and things like that so our goal is to very much go after them and the motion there is very outbound right and um event heavy actually which is our core you know strength so that's our strategy and in in our core Market cash costs thoughts right now which is b2bid Market Tech we already get a lot of inbox so that market I think is set and will keep on giving us the Baseline group let me ask you a question like I I get invited it is like virtual Summits all the time and it's like two days and 100 speakers and I get it the event organizers want as many speakers to get the list as big as possible but what have happens is you go on this and the first session has like a thousand people three hours in you've got like five people on right people no one's gonna sit in front of a computer for two days and just watch your streaming event so like first off is that accurate you have the data and if it is accurate what would you tell event organizers in terms of how to plan a virtual event to maximize live eyeballs yeah for sure Nathan so digital events are just like any other marketing tool right it depends on how you use it right you can similar to how you can bundle up a digital event you can bundle up ads or any other medium right so I'll I'll suggestion to event organizers is always to do what you know is right for your audience and seldom is a big two-day free day event with you know such a complex agenda in digital mode is the right thing to do unless you are you know something like an LG or adobe like where you have such a wide audience across time zone set it means something to you so typically we suggest something like a you know two to four or five hours with you know Punchy sessions and and um and there is a whole marketing strategy that needs to go behind it so there's like a full Playbook that we published we had published multiple playbooks and it also needs to tie in with your marketing strategy right so a digital event cannot be just like a thankful in-person conference right where it's a thing of its own and and people are traveling just to have drinks or something right it needs to be part of a big campaign right either there's a there is a big piece of content that you've released for a Playbook that you've released or a product that has been launched and this is part of that and that's where digital events are so powerful right because they can be very defeatable they can be very measurable they can be very tied into what else you are doing in marketing so I don't know if it answered your question but it really depends on what the marketer is doing but some of them is what you described as the right answer yeah what I just heard you say is if you're a B2B SAS company and you're looking at your own online event like amplitude or toast or drift sales Loft try and do like a four to five hour one day session do some quick sessions 15 to 20 minutes per speaker and get in 30 speakers because then they'll all promote that's the best way to do this and hold attention yeah yeah that's exactly what's the most creative thing you've seen one of your event organizers do in terms of just driving a lot of Engagement or driving sales diving sales to events yeah I think there isn't a lot of what you know people get out of event is determined by what they do before the event right and the most creative thing that people do before the event I've seen is is this company called metadata right so they what they do is they will do a bunch of like where you plan gimmicks before the event so every week they'll have a new event right they'll be like oh you know if the first thousand people who register will get a you know one ten people of them will get a trip to Hawaii so they'll generate a lot of momentum that way then they'll say okay the next thousand people who will register will probably get um you know this like really quality piece of Swag and they'll do a lot of like these gimmicks that people don't expect to do in a digital event right and they for a company of that size they generate a ton of traction and a lot of Engagement in those events so uh we also did a case study on them that's amazing where can we read the case study it's on the website I'll share the link is it under under the customer tab I yeah it should be yeah uh and was it this is Gil aloosh at metadata right yes okay I can't find a link right now but you'll send it to me I'm on your website okay okay great um very cool and then um this is interesting okay let me ask you another question a lot of people when they do a live event right in person they don't want to also do it virtually because they're scared people then won't pay for the in-person ticket and they want to fill seats at the in-person event how would you for someone with that concern I.E me with SAS open how would you recommend we we take you know tackle that challenge yeah so there's no straight answer anything but what I have seen at least in in marketing domain people do is that they would do some kind of gating for the in-person conference they would create it to what they would call as high value Target accounts right so they'll say okay if you are part of one of these like 500 accounts that we want to go after this year we will allow you to come and participate in this in person event otherwise you can participate in this like huge virtual event right so and we have seen a lot of people do that with pretty high success that keeps your in-person conference smaller more targeted and high value because it's very expensive and you can still open it up uh to a wider audience virtually well Posh what if we did like I don't want to see I don't want to limit like if if people knew as we were promoting SAS open which just finished last week if they if everyone knew there's a virtual version a lot of them were just said screw it I'll pay for the virtual ticket I want to fly away to New York right and we had hundreds flying from Europe so I don't want to lose that traffic I mean have you ever had someone like let's say the next event that we were running was January March it's March 20th today let's say it was remember it was April 15th right and we've got 110 speakers what if two weeks before the live event we did a virtual three-hour session where each speaker who is coming flying in live shared like one slide from their presentation over five minutes and we just got through like 60 speakers in the virtual event two weeks before to promote the in-person one have you seen something like that work well we have seen versions of that definitely um and they do work um like you can use teaser virtual events to promote in-person events you can also use content from in-person events for example you can do the in-person events you can use like a some recordings of that to prep to do a virtual event eventually right um You can do all of that I think also the the some of the concerns of people like not coming in person to and watching it virtually Allen found it I think if given an option people will attend an in-person event and I'm saying that as CEO of a digital Advanced company um but you know there's still a there are a wide variety of people and with you know within people who prefer in person there are situations that you know force them to attend in digital events and for example just in our company we have seen in just 10 weeks the the attendance of digital events has surpassed what we saw last year in the whole year with the you know the traction we have so I think overall that debate is not is is not that important to have I think I like this idea of doing like a pre-virtual event and then record everything live in person and then you know we had 112 speakers but there was probably like 15 that crushed it so maybe what we do is we do a post post virtual event with the recordings but after the recording plays then the real scene yeah it comes up live that would work well yeah that works well and we have quite a few of our um of our customers who have done this with such tests interesting and who's done it the best is our case study so we have had LG do this recently and uh there was a sales Loft also they did one in Atlanta and then they did like a version of their event uh virtually um and they did they had their speakers come in and answer questions like that's really interesting they play the recording from the live thing and then they have the speakers come in and do q a fascinating can you make a lot of money selling tickets to Virtual events no I don't think and uh at least in our industry with the way we go after it's never seen at least by good marketers as a way to make money it's always a way to generate demand or generate audience very interesting that's super interesting all right what else should we know about Gold Coast got cast before we wrap up yeah if you were a marketer who's looking to build audience and and you know on a great platform that's uh you know you should come to broadcast but IO we are we are the platform for you and I can have found a link to please add me how many folks are on your team today we have 110 110 and how many engineers 50 50. that's up from 45 and how many sales reps oh we have six so you cut that down what happened no we had uh we had six last time oh you told me 12 sales employees 86 but six carried a quote no six a so yeah yeah six AES and then we have 10 bdrs actually increase I see so 16 total on sale six or A's that carry a quote it's still a million dollar quota you changed that a little bit or was that different yes uh some yeah on average like one on caddy higher but it's 800k on average very cool I love your story let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book uh model Animal by Robert fright uh number two is there a CEO you're following or studying Manny Martinez Too number three what's your favorite online tool for building gold cast online tool for building goldcast it's uh it's still notion I love that you said B plugin last time so you have an update yes yeah all right number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night what's your situation married single kids married with kids one kid or more one and second one coming on the way oh that's very exciting and do you have a birthday are you 33 now I'm 33 yes 33 very cool last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. take more risk guys collage goldpast.io competing in the virtual events baseball it isn't for in-person events right you don't have printers and print off name that it's just for virtual right no we have we have some in-person projects would be a primary for digital events very cool guys there you have it again goldcast.io for running your virtual event they've got 200 customers are doing 500 000 a month in Revenue that's it from 250 000 a month just a year ago they got their 28 million dollar series a done back in September 2022 at 120 million post money valuation call it they sold 28 23 of the company now 110 folks on the team as they look to scale again 200 customers today charging an average 30 000 bucks per year focusing on B2B Brands all right thanks for taking us to the top thanks Aiden thanks a lot one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise 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 SAS 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 up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 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 we got to push them away click the 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Introduction hey folks my guest today is palace he's the ceo and co-founder of gold cast it helps b2b marketers throw events that drive pipeline their long-term goal is to become the marketo for b2b events helping enterprises deliver scale and measure events that drive revenue in an integrated platform purpose-built for b2b marketing and sales teams boss you're ready to take us to the top yeah and i'm excited this is a very competitive space right you've sort of got visibo v fares uh hop in you know all these guys what's your unique mouse trap here why are customers signing up for you yeah nathan so we are we think of ourselves more as a revenue driving platform that uses events as a channel so our positioning is really hold on this one vertical of b2b marketers and how they can use events to drive pipeline and you know grow their business and so we think of our space versus say happen in visible something like intercom and drift right intercom did the horizontal we are doing the vertical like 100x better in a big vertical and so the things that we do uh uniquely are integration analytics workflows in the back end that matter to the b2b market to help them work with sales their existing tools and and drive results from their events okay this makes sense to me tell me about uh what customers are paying today on average per month uh our acv is 25 grand okay got it that's very easy does everyone pay that same price no nathan so we have contracts that are you know all the way from 10k to 230k but mostly in that in that interesting ballpark your biggest customer pays 270k 230. oh 230k and so what what enables you to charge you know someone way more is it number of attendees what's what do you upsell against uh so it's the number of teams that use us and the number of attendees and also the features so we have three tiers in our pricing depending on the the features you use so teams would go up that here as they need more features and more choose out of the platform very cool plush when did you start building this what year so we started in the summers of 2020 may of 2020. mid-2020 the middle of covet all right so you get your first customer how many Monthly recurring revenue customers are you serving today 110 110 okay holy mackerel so i mean can i take 110 times 2 000 average rpu you're doing about 230 thousand dollars a month in mrr uh that's a little north of that oh north of 2003 okay like 240 250 yeah this is this is incredible growth so you've gone from nothing to almost three million dollar run rate in under 24 months yeah so we launched only in jan of 21 um so okay so we'll give you a little more credit to in 18 months then huh yeah okay so i mean look by the way i think this is just a great lesson you know people founders always think i've got to have a brand new super unique idea no one's ever done he said you know what events are hot let's just do it for a very specific use case and look at what you're building it's incredible thanks thanks a lot all right so you're doing two thousand two hundred fifty thousand dollars a month today in revenue do you remember what you were doing last april last april was our just end of first quarter so we were at 400k uh 400k uh annual error so yeah 30k 30km yep yep yep that's incredible okay so so um you so you've got your first 30k and mr then in the first four months of 2021 since you launched in january 21 right yeah how'd you sign up these first you know 10 20 customers so nathan the first 10 20 customers were really through through a lot of growth hacking so my like me and my co-founder would reach out to the ceos and cmos asking for advice and talking about our view on the market uh and we would ask community partners and you know people who get us exposure to cmos and and um you know the marketers to do events so our first big customer was drift uh that we signed because they spoke at underscores event like the ceo david cancer he spoke at underscores event that was hosted from the gold castle underscore was our investor that's how we signed drift and then drift because it targets the same kind of persona that gave us virality so there's a huge virality in this business and that works best for us because we speak the language of those customers and not about general events so largely driven by virality like the first after first-term customers it was mostly involved 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 percent 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 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 yeah that makes a ton of sense okay you mentioned a fundraise so how much have Bootstrapped you raised to date 11 million okay and when was the last round last one was may of last year okay and how much was that for that was 9.8 mil 9.8 okay and so was that your seed or series a or what oh we call it the seed just because the stage we were at that time um we got it's a 9.8 seed round and what valuations you raise at we are in the middle of a fundraiser so i cannot disclose that that number why does the fact that you're currently i mean the current people looking at you are going to ask for the last round valuation right so why does that mean you can't talk about the last valuation okay i okay or a range or range yeah it was 40 50. okay 40 to 50 pre money first post okay got it 40 50 posts i mean that is a massive as you know valuation multiple because you're doing 400k in ar at the time right yeah so i mean you've got effectively 100x multiple does that make you nervous about growing into that so nathan at that time didn't know because we had a super strong pipeline we still have so we knew that we'll get to like two and a half that's what we projected now in our numbers like two and a half end of year and so that way the multiple wasn't looking that crazy um but yeah i'm mindful of crazy evaluations as we go do you just i mean look you can also just say i know it's frothy i don't care i'm going for it all i don't care about delusion i'm gonna raise as much as i can to the highest valuation possible and see what happens no so i i would love to say that but i don't subscribe to that nathan i've seen enough of that picture play out so i'm more of a more of a more sensible okay in that respect so you did that you did the 9.8 um seed last year and then you raised more what in 2020 that was in summer so currently yeah but before you've met you said though you raised 11 million today when was your first yeah so the first round was actually yeah in 2020 uh june of 2020 that was a 1.5 okay uh 1.5 so you did i mean you started in 2020 not 2021. you just didn't have customers until 2021 yeah yeah yeah but but by the way that's a tr just for all you guys listening that's a great trick a lot of founders uses they'll just move their start date to more recently so the growth sounds way more impressive but nothing wrong with that nothing wrong i get it it's all a game i didn't get it all right but but you raised 1.5 free seed in 2020 and most folk i mean what was that like a 10 million cap something like that yeah okay and was that on a note or it was a priced round that was not so how okay i mean that's more impressive you raised basically no revenue right so why did people trust you when you said we're raising a 10 million evaluation how did you convince people to say yes they said we had a unique insight in the idea and you'd but i would say a very strong point of view on how this would pan out and you know where the market would evolve uh and we showed a lot of commitment at that time our team was strong had background in martech and events we dropped out of business school to go after this opportunity so that gave confidence to people that okay you know it's worth that kind of pet how many co-founders three okay and did you guys just say 33 33 33 at the beginning or what uh sorry yeah okay well i guess let me ask you a question a lot of people in my opinion founders at the beginning they're lazy they don't want to have tough conversations so they split it evenly right if you have a tough conversation usually someone ends up with a little more a little less so what kinds of here's my question what kinds of things the three of you talking on day one um made you guys give maybe somebody more or somebody less uh so nathan in our case it was actually a little straightforward because we like the two of us had started working on ideas since we got into business school in 2019 so the day we landed in boston our we started thinking ideas and um our third co-founder he joined a little late uh so by the time the idea was already fleshed out we were already in the middle of some place okay so this was like something like i'm like 40 40 20 before investors came in something like that a little better than that okay a little better for you or him no no okay so like 35 35 30 something like that or whatever yeah okay very cool all right and then obviously you're raising right so you're getting dilution obviously but you're also scaling nicely what enabled you you mentioned virality right so i mean is that really what it was to go from 10 to 110 customers yeah exactly um most of our customers like we did some maths recently like 90 of our customers we close are people who attended an event before talking to sales mostly two events on goal test yeah interesting and now you're raising capital today how much are you targeting we are targeting uh 20 mm-hmm and what on like 100 or something you don't know nathan i won't force you to say that one since you're you're negotiating right now but let me ask you why do you need 20 why is this a hard thing to build why do you need that much money so nathan i think the product the most of this investment is going to build like a real sales and go to marketing so most of like this two and a half mil was closed uh between you know me and kishore my co-founder and uh we we have a sales team which is kicking right now but still early days for us so we want to build a repeatable uh go to market motion which is also not impacted by seasonality so our last year's revenue also looks you know sinusoidal because we were largely reliant on events happening and then people discovering us um so we want to build a more sustainable and not have not sustainable but smooth um go to market motion so it's going to go to sales marketing and and how many folks are on the team today full time uh nathan we have 80 people uh 45 in india and 35 in the us um 45 in india are all engineers in some marketing which pune chennai bangalore it's actually distributed in india so we have only 10 people in what you would call tier 1 cities rest everyone is there tell me how you built that i mean i know a lot of sas companies now are have great very talented teams in india but how did you build that team in india background agents i was in um i did product management for two years at one of the largest tech companies in india so i had a good network in moby ah okay as i ordered in moby i built a good network i did my undergrad at a at a good school in india so i had an effort from there so it was just a lot of a lot of network recruiting in the first at least for the first 1050 people it's amazing okay and basically mainly engineers yes okay all right so 80 on the team um and how many folks on the sales team today sales team is 12 12. do you have anyone that carries a quota yet yeah yeah we have six aes now but i've joined in the last two to three months yeah so tell me about that right a lot of founders they have difficulty deciding what comp package to give their first code carrying sales hires how did you structure it uh so nathan asses is actually typical of what you would see in this uh kind of you know stage uh typically like their ota would be or their quota would be like four to five x of 30. so what is what do you have quota set at right now for an ae once they're fully ramped uh fully rammed uh we consider right now our time is like four months four to five months for fully damped and after that it's uh between 800 to 1 million to 1.2 million okay got it so you want them closing on average about a million bucks in new er per year yeah okay interesting no obviously no one's fully ramped up yet right because you just hire how many so you said you hired 12 people in the last three months on the sales team uh not everyone but most of the aes yes in the last three months how many are quota carrying all so out of the 12 people there are six pdrs and six eighties sixty is all carry quota i see okay and so is it a one to one ratio one bdr to one ae yes and how do you split up which leads which aes get so right now they are split by um by in alphabetical order so we know you know where it's coming we're still figuring that out early stage interesting okay okay yeah that's probably a good way to do it until you figure it out um and then i guess this is a tough question but it's an important one how do you know when you have to fire a rep like let's say they're past four months and they're starting heading quota right is that your problem as a company giving them leads or is that they're a bad salesperson when do you fire them so we haven't had to do that fortunately nathan yet but i guess uh we track we have started tracking stuff like win rates for example right and we know what they look like in normal situations so wind rates would be a big thing um and also but what do you target there what target what's the target win rate so our opportunity to close rate is 25 okay yeah which is actually pretty good for an industry that's competitive so uh we will obviously we can give some leeway there but it's mainly based on the win rates i love that okay and then you don't have a ton of history here but gross revenue churn is about what we do and nathan right now we are um we are at slightly north of 110 net retention okay for me though how much is expansion versus churn uh so of this we will let's say we started with a hundred dollars we will have churned twenty dollars and expanded thirty dollars oh well okay so churn's actually fairly high but expansion's higher i would say twenty percent turn is high yeah okay but that makes sense 20 and 30. now what's the most effective thing that your sales reps are upselling the number of seats is it features is it some utility-based metric it's based on uh it's it's it's based on the number of attendees that they get so obviously choosing the tier the right tier for your company is is one thing but the number of attendees interesting yeah because you i mean you you have a lot i mean you you price up a couple things right so like number of organizer seats included stages so like how many stages are there but the number of attendees one you say is the most powerful which is interesting though because you have a thousand under growth premiere and enterprise you don't require them to pay more right where do i see that pricing so yes we we charge on number of attendees also once you cross thousands so either companies come and say oh i'll foresee 10 000 this year and we'll give them a package or they pay a sticker oh and that price would depend anywhere would vary anywhere between you know three to ten dollars depending on the kind of event so there's some method for there at the back i see i see very cool okay i love this story what a great story um let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh favorite business book is uh only the paranoid survive and you know who are you most worried about right now most worried about right now is um you mean who or what side you answer could be a person or a what who i'm i'm worried about honestly my wife and my kid because i have been away from them for two months that's a diplomatic i was hoping for like a competitor ceo or competitor you say your wife and your kids it's funny okay all right number two what's your favorite online or sorry is there a ceo you're following or studying right now yeah yeah uh manny madina from outreach are you in any acquisition talks with outreach no i don't know if i believe you that would be a perfect fit you and manny would be a perfect fit thank you but uh still too early i guess for recognition interesting all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building gold cast favorite online tool we um we use uh b pro lb plugin a lot which is a page builder amazing user a lot of people what's it called b b plugin b plugin b double e b four ball oh got it yeah yeah yeah uh number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night seven and situate well when married with one kid yes all right and how old are you i'm 32 32 last question something you wish you when you were 20. oh uh i wish i knew carrier career trajectory is is never linear or predictable so take more risks earlier guys there you have it officially launched in 2020 with a uh 1.5 million dollar pre-seed round around a 10 million valuation then they got their first customers in 2021 again gold cast dot io helping folks do events but specifically for revenue generation purposes within marketing teams 30 000 bucks a month in revenue a year ago now over 250 000 a month as it looked to scale uh 9.8 million dollar seed round last year between a 40 and 50 million evaluation big revenue multiple but he's comfortable and excited about growing into it we'll see what happens thanks for taking us to the top thanks man one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise 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 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