How Incentify CEO Laurence Sotsky grew Incentify to $21.3M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is lawrence satsuki he's the ceo of incentify he's an accomplished high-tech ceo with the track record of successfully managing high-performing companies and teams most recently lawrence was ceo and founder of hopscotch's sas based venture-backed mobile application development platform company in the sports and entertainment space lawrence are you ready to take to the top it's nice to meet you nathan i'm excited to be here you bet thanks for thanks for making the time now look uh tax r d and credits is a hot space entrepreneurs know they're owed something but they don't want to spend the time combing through tax all to figure out what they're owed how are you playing in the space well it's a it's an interesting one so credits and incentives um is is almost like a developing space in a sense they've been out there for quite some time there's literally a trillion dollars of credits and incentives that are out there and available for various organizations and and we're trying to democratize uh the process by which people can discover manage and monetize these credits and incentives so we've developed an incredible platform a purpose-built solution specifically for this space where uh companies can come they can find the credits incentives that might be owed to them and they can work with us and their advisors uh to to work their way through and stay in compliance and actually monetize these these this important asset class and again there's a very hot space there's a lot of companies in the spaces you're on boarding very similar to the rest people are connecting their payroll their bank accounts and you're sort of coming data to find these rewards is that accurate um a little bit different for us we've been focused there are a couple of companies that are working in the in the smaller in the smaller spaces in the uh startup space in the smb space we're focused primarily in the enterprise space with big fortune 500 companies we have about 30 uh fortune 500 companies that we found on our own we also signed a pretty big deal with a big advisory firm and we're on boarding in the process of onboarding more than 100 of their customers on our platform so we're a little a little bit different not necessarily connecting into to payroll our companies usually work with big erps like sap and oracle financials uh but a similar process nonetheless i see okay so got it that makes sense yeah so the main treats of the world might be focused on smbs right you're way more enterprise level fortune 500 30 out of 500 so far that's right we are we are so far although we are seeing that our our platform is strong enough and easy enough to use that we can start moving downstream for now we're focused on the on the enterprise we certainly intend to move downstream um as as time goes on and so what's the sales pitch there right you know you're finding tax credits you're saying nathan your company has owed 535 000 because of tax credits x y and z where can you add additional value so people will pick you over other competitors who are finding the exact same credits available yeah it's a great question so the our process is a little bit different if you think about big fortune 500 companies they're building distribution centers warehouses retail stores they're building sustainable energy projects like wind farms they're doing all these big big capital expenditure projects what we often find is the tax departments don't have the time nor do they usually have dedicated resources to identifying and securing all of the credits and incentives in a particular space so that's really where we step in so our sales pitch sounds something like this you guys are probably owed quite a bit of money from the government for either projects that you worked on in the past or projects that you have planned to work on in the future you can certainly work with one of the big advisors ryan or one of the big four or somebody like that but what our product does is it actually injects technology looks at all of your site locations and then helps to figure out exactly where uh credits and incentives could be owed to you it's a it's not too unlike like a rocket mortgage so instead of going directly to a bank to trying to secure a mortgage for your house you go to rocket mortgage you put in some information rocket mortgage then goes out and finds all the primary secondary home equity loans whatever it is that that a particular uh buyer or or um borrower needs it's very similar to that and lawrence how are folks paying you is it a one-time fee you're getting 10 of any recovered funds or is there a sas product here too yeah ours is also a little different than main street and and the others that you mentioned they're mostly working on a success fee for us we are we are a uh software as a service company we're not well advisor so we do we do take a a monthly fee from the uh from the client to use our to use our product what is that on average well i know it's probably a huge range what's an average uh our average price is around ten thousand dollars uh and ten thousand dollars a month for some big big enterprise customers we've seen tremendous roi from uh from it however is there a portion of that fee that is tied to funds you recover from the government or is it tied to something else yeah so so not necessarily tied to that um as a success fee so to speak for us we just ensure and our clients don't pay us until they know that they can at least clear the amount of amount of money that they're paying us and then some yep fair enough love that and give me the back story here when did you guys launch this but actually you have to tell us the backstory here because i don't think your original founders but when did the original founders launch the business yeah so the original founder is a gentleman named brett markinson who's a who's a a very successful entrepreneur he was the the the guy behind a hot look that sold to nordstrom he was the guy behind lowermybills.com that sold to experian so just an incredible track record of of identifying spaces that were underserved and and getting into those spaces in a really big way so he the backstory is he was actually playing golf with the son of max factor from the uh from the cosmetics industry and they were talking about uh credits and incentives for their own personal uh financial planning and then that kind of got him into maybe this is something for a business maybe i should start a business and then as soon as it became more of a sas company he brought me in i just well hold on so what year was that when did the business launch so the business launched about five years ago but it was more of a marketplace for transferable tax credits he then realized that there was a better market for um to build a sas company out of this instead of building an exchange we pivoted the company i was hired in about a year and a half ago and we've been we've been on just a rocket ship ride ever since then got it so early 2020 you joined the business um and and what was the thinking there i mean there are founders listening right now that maybe are tired want to bring in another ceo but they're worried about the signal that sends to the market how did you guys make sure that transition was smooth especially being venture-backed well um well we were really more bootstrapped than venture-backed uh we haven't we have not taken a institutional round yet we're certainly you know considering that this year just with the trajectory and growth uh and sort of where we sit um well right i'm sorry crime wrong here sorry my research might be wrong did ryan llc they didn't put in 4.3 million dollars ryan did put in money as a strategic round but we we are not yet calling that a series a we haven't taken an institutional round yet from a from a vc right yeah you have raised 4.3 million just not a traditional pre-seed seed series a sort of style correct you're exactly correct yeah so so i think i think for founders that are listening um i think the idea was bring someone in that has a lot of experience running these types of software companies my whole career i started early in my career management consulting but quickly realized that my my passion was really sales i i worked as a salesperson a sales manager chief revenue officer for venture-backed companies for the last 10 years my la and then i started my last company myself as a ceo successfully sold that so i've got the good i've got a strong track record and i think the founders realized that uh better to put somebody in the seat that has sort of done this before uh has relationships in the in the vc space knows how to run a sas company hiring the right people um and it's been it's been great ever since great relationship with uh with brad and and another co-founder uh and and really we're just on a on a great trajectory now founders listen and go i want to get a ceo of the quality of lawrence how the heck do i have to incentivize a guy like that i mean can you obviously don't tell me specifics but the degree you can i mean can you tell me it's obviously comp plus equity i mean did you get more or less than 10 equity in the business can't share my cap table with you but uh they they they paid me well i've got a great equity stake um in in the company and i will tell you like i've got this book over sitting over my right shoulder here you know start with why i think for me i was more interested in finding a company that had a real strong why message a real a real passion project for me i've done a lot of things...