How Goodunited CEO Nick Black grew Goodunited to $15M revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is nick black he's running a company called good united which helps manage facebook fundraisers in the past he was at john hopkins an army ranger 27 months in afghanistan got his unc got his mba at unc and founder of stop soldier and suicide at good united husband and father of two nick are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right talk to me about good united what's the company doing and what's your revenue model how do they support yourself we manage facebook fundraisers for large non-profits it's a usage-based sas model okay usage based and so what do you mean by that is it is it actually predictable and recurring revenue or is it go up and down it's seasonal goes up and down depending on the number of fundraisers we manage per client interesting okay so what's the average client play per month would you say seven to eight thousand dollars okay okay so this is you're very much in the enterprise world then yes okay so walk me through like a case study if you can can you share a name of someone who's used you and kind of how they used you uh what could share my own non-profit okay stop soldier suicide so stop soldier suicide at a given point last year is raising about four hundred thousand dollars through facebook peer-to-peer giving with that individuals are starting a fundraiser and asking their friends to contribute the vast majority of which are birthday fundraisers but again a lot of people are using the functionality of facebook to just create a fundraiser for a cause they care about so with that good united has a [Music] messenger sequence and software that we're able to manage each fundraiser which cannot be done today and in doing so we can improve the kpis for the nonprofit how much is given how many donors participate and most importantly give that donor experience that they deserve so they opt in to do it again the future so nick facebook obviously has their own donate product how do you interface with their donate product so there they have the functionality uh we use messenger to manage each of the fundraisers so we do not touch the financial transaction it's just the uh the management of the fundraiser themselves but you do you tie in this is it someone have to launch a facebook fundraiser and then buy you on top of it to manage the messaging and stuff or can they buy you and still do a fundraiser without the facebook donate button no they have to have the the first one the fundraiser first and then they use us on top of that i see okay give me more of the back story here when did you launch the company lunch company 2015 the idea for the company came through my co-founder jeremy berman in my work uh in the nonprofit space so i started a non-profit in 2011 after i left the military called stop soldier suicide thank you for thank you for your service oh yeah the big challenge that i saw was how do we stay engaged with the average donor uh as you said i went to johns hopkins university a couple weeks ago mike bloomberg gave 1.8 billion dollars a couple days later i got asked for 50 bucks so my experience is much different than bloomberg's it's much different than the vast majority of of uh you know the high net worth individuals so we've been really trying to build technology to give the average donor the experience they deserve and in doing that hopefully increase the lifetime value of each donor for the nonprofit interesting how many nonprofits are you working with today 20. okay and these are all paying customers yes okay so can i take 20 times eight grand a month you're doing about 160 grand a month right now uh we'll probably discount that out we have uh some big ones and some smaller ones so okay over 100k that's great congrats that's you know you're past the million dollar a year run right that's a nice nice place to be passed yeah it's a lot of hard work a lot of uh a lot of pain blood tears but uh you know we're really excited about the opportunity to serve our customers and and the donors that that uh that do better work for and what's your growth look like so a year ago today what were you doing per month do you remember nick do you remember what you were doing a year ago today just so we can look at growth rate uh we launched this in july oh you okay so what we're doing between 2015 and july this year we had two failures oh got it so you're pivoting some things right what were the what was the first and the second failure first failure was enabling a individual to give an item instead of cash so think about habitat humanity you can donate a two by four instead of giving 20 bucks toys for tots right uh you know the use case of having that transparency uh for a donor but it just failed the non-profit side we weren't solving uh big enough pains for that the second failure point was uh we flipped to email automation again trying to give that donor more personal experience so they could say the type of content they want uh we just again weren't solving a big enough pain for the nonprofit yeah yeah and have you bootstrapped the company i raise capital we raise capital okay how much have you raised to date we raised over a million dollars okay a million bucks so that's kind of what's giving you the runway and the flexibility kind of test some things fail it too and now kind of hit this win yeah but we also started our own consulting uh practice with my co-founder jeremy and i so we uh in the past 18 months been working four or five jobs to get this thing back going why do you have to work so much if you're doing 100 per month right now you can't pay yourself out of that that revenue we didn't uh we weren't making anything until july oh i see okay so got it so until you kind of hit this in july you are working four or five other things to make the things work correct interesting what's the team size today how many folks uh we're growing we've got a really expansive team um a lot of contractors and about 15 uh full-time or about five okay great five full-time 15 full uh uh contractors and where's everyone based charleston south carolina oh great everyone or the including contractors or no no contractor's all over that's great and um walk me through how you decide whether someone's gonna be a full-time employee or a contractor how do you split up the roles uh we start off as contract uh for some positions we just don't need someone in-house full-time or it's an expertise that uh you know we just can't afford or you know we don't have the capacity for them uh full time really focused on the customer uh so we're investing along the customer life cycle to ensure that we can deliver the highest value possible so our first investments have been into people that can really bring um you know just exceptional backgrounds and great people and working with the customers and i'm sure they're getting the most out of of what we do and what does churn look like annually an annual revenue churn or is it too early to tell too early have you lost any like does that have any customers that you signed up stopped paying you eight grand a month okay so every all twenty you've signed up are still today paying you twenty uh the eight grand per month somewhere around eight yeah that's great it's probably a lot lower now i think about it uh it's probably around five uh but it's probably somewhere around there well yeah sorry 20 paying five grand a month puts you at that 100 000 mark you just told me sure um so that surprises me and i'll tell you why typically charities when they run things they're campaign driven they start and they stop are people still paying you even if they're even after a campaign is over no it's per fundraiser but each month there's new fundraisers okay and so that's what's really driving the usages no matter what every month they're doing something fundraising related right and it's uh again it's all happening on facebook and our sole focus right now is managing those peer-to-peer fundraisers on facebook interesting walk me through you're landing these customers how'd you close the first uh the first deal back in july just personal relationships uh you know we've we've been in a space a while we've met some great people introductions i've also had some come in from just the content we're putting out an inbound uh tactics who was the first non-profit that signed up uh the first uh parkinson foundation parkinson's and that was a personal connection right interesting um interesting so okay what's the plan over the next 12 months you're going to keep growing this out a new product line what do you what are you doing you know our our purpose is to empower nonprofits make every donor feel appreciated uh so we've got a three year plan uh we're trying to cement that but backing out of that in year one i really kind of reinforced the beachhead that we think that we have uh we think that we're delivering great value to customers and the market's expanding so there's additional countries coming online with peer-to-peer functionality so we're gonna see if we continue to build out um you know our current service and then think about maybe in q2 q3 where we're going to go and are you burning cash today or no no you're casual positive correct that's great congratulations that's not an easy place to get to especially when you're raised thanks why do you laugh it's brutal man yeah i know it's brutal what makes it what's been the toughest part for you failure is it it's it's tough to it's tough to move on from those first two ideas you know it's just it's uh you know as if you're coming from an organization where there's a lot of people you...