How Jellyvision CEO Amanda Lannert grew Jellyvision to $60M revenue and 1.4K customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is amanda leonard she is the ceo of jellyvision one of chicago's fastest growing tech companies that serves 1400 customers with alex the most helpful employee decision support platform on the planet jelly jelly vision's been recognized as the best software company and best culture by the moxies the lighthouse winner by the ita and the top place to work in chicago by the chicago tribune and cranes amanda are you ready to take us to the top ready i'll try my best awesome all right so it sounds like alex is like your main product but help us understand what does jellyvision do and what's your revenue model how to make money we make money by licensing alex to mostly large employers to help them help their employees choose their benefits so it's an annual recurring license fee based on the number of eligible employees that we mostly licensed to the jumbo employer market meaning companies with lots and lots of people okay and how would this be different than like a gusto yeah gusto is a full benefit administration platform they help you enroll employees and and manage employees all we do is help people understand their benefit choices and help them understand the mathematical and annual out-of-pocket costs so they can make those good decisions and you say well how is that possibly a big enough business compared to gusto that's an end-to-end sort of crm for people and the reality is ford spends more money per car on health insurance than it does steel and one in four of their employees would rather clean a toilet than think about their benefits and so we just drive really really good decision making around health insurance to help reduce the cost of confusion on overall care we save employees and employers a ton of money on one of the most expensive decisions they make in a given year that's fascinating so right now how many employees are under a brand that pays you uh total we have 1400 customers that represent 18 million employees wow that's a lot okay that's very good mostly u.s based all u.s based largely because we're the only country that really has messed it up so that employers are in the game other countries have nationalized health care and no health insurance to pay for it so it really is a very uniquely american phenomenon in large part that's fascinating i want to put all this on a timeline here in a second but first you mentioned kind of enterprise many times like kind of how enterprise are you so on average what are these people going to pay you per year for this kind of thing um it depends on the number of employees but it can be a five six or seven figure deal depending on number of employees and we work with the country's largest employers okay can you tell me ignore per logo like per seat typically i mean or per employee are we talking like a dollar or 10 cents or a hundred bucks yeah sliding scale which depends on the number of employees you have and on the teeny tiny companies you can get it for you know 18 bucks for a large enterprise you can get it for a quarter an employee a month you can get much much smaller so okay so so the most if someone's listening right now they're really small the most expensive would be about 18 bucks per month per employee oh did i lose you i'm so sorry you just cut out i literally just i just missed that question if you can edit that out yeah i don't know it's fine it's 18 per month per employee that's the most expensive for someone listening is really smart a year that's that's an annualized 18 per year and it drops down to uh per uh you know a quarter or less for very very large employers okay got it so almost basically almost a little over a dollar a month that's right that's great very good all right put this on a timeline for me so when'd you launch the company so jelly vision actually started in one form as a gaming company in the 90s that was making very famous for making games on cd-roms these things used to slide into computers that had data on them so we created virtual game show hosts like you don't know jack and who wants to be a millionaire this company then began saying we're not going to create virtual game show hosts in a b2c gaming space but we'll create virtual advisors in a b2b interpret space so in 2002 we relaunched raised a small series a which was technically a seed but we call it a series a and our thesis was we're going to go to where there's for a brow where people are trying to do something complicated and boring but important and we'll talk you through it alex isn't the first time we tried to productize and scale what we do it's just the first time it worked we spent the better part of a decade from 2002 to 2010 thereabouts really just trying to find innovative ways to sell and we did projects for large companies operating more or less as a digital agency before alex happened started to get some positive market momentum into 2011 2012 started to sell directly and in 2016 it became the company and it's our sole focus but it certainly was a longer-tailed start than many many of the companies uh featured on this podcast and and how did you know so so in 2002 how did you know that you wanted to move away from b2c kind of game show host and like b2b basically tutors yeah it was because the the mob is so fickle and in b2c gaming you don't need to just have a great game you need to be really lucky uh it is very very hits driven and it is very impossible to guarantee a hit no matter what kind of the cultural phenomenon you're riding on it's just a very lucky business and we had figured we had used up all of our luck so far and as games moved from cd-roms to online nobody was making money online yet and we're a company that's been largely bootstrapped largely run by the other type of vc not venture capitalists but vested customers and so we wanted to figure out how is the way to more predictably create you know scalable revenue that didn't rely on a hits driven business that takes a lot of luck to win yeah okay so again you mentioned mainly bootstrapped how much have you guys raised today though uh in total we've raised 27 million but only 6.6 of it hit the balance sheet we did a 20 million dollar secondary round that closed last year and okay so walk me through the psychology how that affected the team who did you offer liquidity options to was it all employees or just early ones etc there was a line in the sand uh based on appetite our original you know our series b investors sigma partners chose not to participate they kept their chips uh on the table so we drew a line in the sand and it was based on tenure it had nothing to do with seniority it was how long had you been in service to the company and drew a line and then also offered it to our earliest investors okay interesting sorry the line in the sand for your early employee base that was based on a hiring date if they were before that's exactly right we just picked a hiring date it went far enough back that we could reward a lot of people but not so far that we'd be wildly oversubscribed that's interesting um that's really interesting and you're just doing a backwards math there in terms of exercise price and things like that correct that's interesting what percent of uh well okay hold on did it surprise you or was it in line in terms of how many of those early employees did take advantage of liquidating you know it's a very personalized thing i think i was probably surprised by what everybody did because they all made very personal decisions versus anyone's statement about the growth and success of the business it's how long have you been there how diversified are you as an individual what are your liquidity needs how bullish are you about the future there's no one dynamic therefore it was a very very personal thing that everybody did i thought it was really interesting but i also was very pleased by how many people didn't take chips off the table or left a large porsche portion still to ride like people see still upside potential jelly vision and that was pretty cool too yeah that's that is very cool uh what do you get today in terms of total employees uh just under 400. going to next year will be about 470. all in chicago most in chicago we're chicago headquartered about 10 of our population is permanently remote but it's more like they start in chicago and then move and take their jobs with them versus us having a strategy of hiring outside of our town yeah talk to me about churn turns critical in any sas company what is your churn today and how do you think about it it's a low digit net positive dollar churn we've been very successful in having a sticky solution it does its job it creates an roi and so we stay in with our core product and then we expand through additional line items things that help employers navigate leave of absences or financial wellness or additional add-ons is how we grow but we have a we have a really uh lucky relationship with a lot of our large employers with our core product so when you say a low single digit churn i mean so less than 10 revenue churn per year it's net positive we actually grow each year ignore expansion for a second i'm talking just gross just gross revenue churn before you add back expansion it's it's you said it's 10 or less yes okay and then let's then go to the fun story which is when you add back expansion you make up that 10 gap and you're above 100 net revenue retention yes how far above 100 it changes every year it depends on what new items we're taking to market but it's a...