How Issuu CEO Joe Hyrkin grew Issuu to $30M revenue and 65K customers in 2023.

I am um very excited about this next guest because every time I have on had him on the podcast I couldnot get you guys know how I push that I just could not get the data I wanted and then all of a sudden I say let me put you on stage at SAS open and he says well we actually just had a big transaction I'll come to SAS open we'll talk about it that's all I'm going to say please tell me welcome to the stage Joe from issue Joe come on up good to see you my friend thank you for the water so I'm going to keep chatting while I ask you questions and I'm going to grab my coffee while you make yourself comfortable um first off go ahead say um you should change the name of this conference to the resilience open because all we're hearing about is like one experience of resilience after the next it's sort of the core of these businesses anyway I I also want to tell you guys uh and Joe I hope you don't I hope you don't mind me doing this but we'll get to this later because conference is not always just about business but he actually feels great he just sounds terrible we'll talk about that in a little bit uh we'll let that be an open loop I have vocal cord non ner this is called an open loop and foreshadowing it let it sit they'll pay attention we'll get to it in about four minutes the point you know this happened about a month ago what did you do with bending spoons yeah so first of all I should just say I'm no longer the CEO of issue I was a CEO of issue for 11 years 11 and a half years and we got acquired by bending spoons at the end of July mhm um um so any anyone familiar with bending spoons so um there a company everyone in this room should know more about they're uh italian-based and they are acquiring primarily product like growth s companies but also doing more as well they bought uh Evernote Meetup uh they just bought we transfer they bought us as well hop um hop in yeah um and what they're doing is they're buying companies that have uh some pretty good scale kind of Revenue in the 25 to $200 million range profitable or close to it and then they go run them they buy to own it's not a PE firm and we found them uh through some of their earlier Acquisitions and they were sort of always on my list of folks that we should be reaching out to at the time when we were ready to look getting acquired we're going to get your backstory here but I want everyone to understand what the end looks like so this is sort of what the end looks like and can we put a dollar value on the deal or maybe a range on the on the AR multiple uh sure we can I can't give you specifics because you're never allowed to give specifics like this but I've never given you anything so I'm going to give you a good range here which will be pretty good um so you know we we did um uh as a company we're doing just north of 30 million in Revenue profitable um not not very profitable but sort of barely profitable and uh we sold the company for nine figures y so fair to say like a 4 to 6X Revenue multiple something in that range yeah not six I mean uh unless you're AI right now you're not getting north of five okay I mean there's that that there's all these companies uh you know given the stage of where issue was when we sold it in July if we had sold it 2 years prior in 22 we would have gotten 2 to 3x what we got why didn't you because we weren't at the size we're at now I mean one of the things is when you're selling a company it's important to understand our Lane right so and where the market is so uh we could have held on and contined to grow and build issue for another two years and hope that the market comes back but I think it's also important to understand where we are in the business is where we are in the uh opportunity cycle and um we felt like uh you know profitable growing north of 30 million in Revenue good business um huge number of really happy customers wait a million free customers a year marketers content creators uh 65,000 of them paying a shuee and um we had gotten some inbound interest and once we got that inbound interest we started talking to folks out the market so here's what we're going to focus on over the next 14 minutes and 30 seconds you know going from zero to a nine figure exit right we're going to talk about how Joe used debt how he scaled AR across three key sort of story points and then exiting right you paid your Bankers how much to do the deal $2 million over2 million little too over2 million over $2 million uh was it all cash or Cash Plus earnout a mix whole deal was all cash no earn outs um we just let let it hang so we'll talk about that and then that's good right and then we'll talk a little bit more about the layer the lawyers and the process you did on the exit so all that in the next 14 minutes but let's talk about the product for a second this is your homepage this is what you do yeah so issue is this massive digital publishing platform primarily catering to marketers to take their marketing content collateral sales materials brochures um publication all a whole range of different documents mostly created in using figma Adobe or canva get uploaded to issue issue hosts it um transforms it into a range of assets so you create one piece of content and it can get transformed into a video and Link enhan paginated version uh an article using AI social post whole range of different assets that can then be shared anywhere embedded anywhere and then provide a whole range of data and analytics around that content we landed on this homepage about two years ago um we had our version of the purple homepage yeah also um going all the way back I just put the revenue graph up first revenue is back launch was 2006 is that about right launched 2007 uh very slow Revenue growth for the first five or six years Focus initially was massive scale so I joined the company in 2013 took over for a from a previous CEO um and up until that point the focus has been go find anybody that's got a longer form high quality PDF brochures cataloges Market materials magazines Publications all that stuff get it into issue because from there make it look great issue launched like as the iPad was launching right so it was a different time um make it look great get lots of data and then start to f figure out what aspects this are valuable to businesses and start to charge and we really honed in on being a B2B company in that 2013 2014 time frame so you guys can see again the story here just doubling down on this idea it's not always like you know zero to a billion dollars of Revenue in two days you know this is like well it is for most companies yeah it is for everybody else except you right but we we all it's I mean look at this I mean that is that's 10 years of hustle before your first 5 million of Revenue right and now we see it we're seeing the Big Exit on LinkedIn it's a great story but it takes a decade two decades almost of hustle right to get to this point so you're scaling at this point you come in a CEO in 2013 should we dive deeper there was there a contention with Founders and investors and they brought you in or what happened company was founded in Denmark in where Denmark Denmark and the lead investor is airmed one of the larger Scandinavian VCS would they have the 2007 round for 10.3 million yeah okay the bottom one yes um yeah I don't think it was whatever yes um this is wrong it's crunch basis fall not much but crunch base doesn't have everything but it's close I think it was a little less actually okay I think some of that 2007 was actually the point being the lead of that series a is yeah hardcore Capital they also put the the bulk of the rest in um in 2014 when I raised and kddi the big Japanese Telco came in as part of that uh they had there was a founding group of five people they were doing a nice job of scaling use um but the but there's sort of two M main growth opportunities one was Partnerships with content Tech Platforms in Silicon Valley primarily Facebook Pinterest uh Adobe ultimately later canva Etc um and then the other was really an emphasis on Revenue growth and so they decided to go find a Silicon Valley season person to come in and and run the business so I joined they had actually gotten rid of the CEO six months before I joined which was really great most times when there's a CEO switch the board will bring in the new CEO and then say hey lucky you you've got this previous CEO and you can have them do whatever you want and even in the best circumstances and often it's you know it's challenging um it's confusing because the people who are still in the company aren't sure whether loyalties are supposed to lie or who's really in charge or whatnot so what are the brass taxs here though so they they got rid of the CEO because he wasn't performing or she wasn't selling or what what was wasn't we didn't have any connections outside of Denmark and wasn't really growing the business couldn't grow internationally they find you were you already involved in the company or they brought youch no they brought me in from scratch from scratch you are a talented guy you can do anything you want how do they recruit you what was your compact...