How Leon CEO Bryan Smith grew Leon to $5.3M revenue and 264 customers in 2024.

hey guys recording this here on what is it friday the 19th maybe you're seeing this on monday at the latest but want to let you know we are almost sold out for founder comp sorry founder 500 in austin texas here in about a week uh it's gonna be an amazing event 500 b2b sas founders i'm looking at the attendee list there's almost um there's almost 60 founders with more than six seven million bucks in arr it's an incredible group of group there's over uh there's over a hundred over 150 with more than a million uh more than a million revenue it's an incredible group you don't want to miss it uh grab your hotel grab your flight grab a ticket right now i'll put the link in the bio um in the description here on youtube and i think there's only about three tickets left okay about three tickets left i'd love to see you guys there don't be bashful grab your ticket now hey folks my guest today is brian smith he's an ex wellness professional pro sports performance coach turned repeat founder and startup advisor now building an employee performance and mental health platform which you can find at my leon dot co brian you ready to the top let's do it man all right how do you do this feels like such a personal thing how do you do this in software you know what it's it's funny so my background as as you said so i was a director of sports science for usa track and field right um and then what we did is we used data science to predict performance to predict injury and professional athletes right um if athletes and people sales people people work in tech we're all the same right we burn out we get fatigued all those other things and really what we need to be able to do is we need to look for the signals within the data to understand what's going on so what leon does is we integrate into like sales we primarily work with sales teams by the way we integrate with salesforce and hubspot and then we use sentiment analysis using um diagnostic surveys and whatnot combine that into an algorithm that gives us a snapshot of the teams at risk of burning out teams that are at risk of mental health issues but on the opposite end of that it actually tells us the teams that actually can be challenged or pushed harder all right so it tells us the teams that are very resilient so it ends up being sort of a almost like a mental model framework for a sales manager to say these teams need support these teams could be challenged to push harder now how do i build my business model around that so let's say one of our listeners here b2b sas founder they've got five people on their sales team they use hubspot they want to use leon to reduce turnover they sign up they give you access to their hubspot api what are you reading for give us an example of a signal that you're getting from hubspot's api to signify that one of the sales reps might be you know having a mental health issue or about to be burned out it's a combination so what we'll do is we'll look at your hubspot um activity data so that could be calls emails revenue generated meetings blocked opportunities generated whatever else um mix that with diagnostic surveys all right so where we're asking about sleep we're asking about well-being we're asking about psychological safety work relationship things along those lines you're asking the employee asking the employee correct how do you invest how do you incentivize the employee to take the time actually fill those surveys out i feel like people get those surveys they ignore them so so that's the interesting part about it right so you do surveys suck right everybody agrees that right and mps specifically are are very bad like you get no signal from it from an intense standpoint to understand what to actually do with it so one it's the way that we ask questions two is the way that we score questions right so the way someone scores has or answers a question has a half-life associated with it so that will help us understand exactly when to follow up with that person again but to your point we don't just take survey data and report some garbage metrics to a manager right what we also do is provide recommendations to both the manager and the employee to how to actually fix the things that are going wrong so we see that an employee's burning out we'll push a playbook to a manager to say these are the things you should be doing reduce hours whatever it is right go to a four-day work we talk more about empathy but also we have a marketplace where we've integrated into headspace and the com and equinox and the soul cycle and inside track and all these other things we'll tell the company the exact service to buy for that employee based off the data that we're seeing but on the opposite end of that we'll do the same thing with employees we'll say employees this is what you're struggling with here's what you should do to be able to fix this here are some content that you can engage with and here are some services that you can use through our marketplace to be able to sort of fix the issue that might be going on got it that's compelling okay so give me a sense of your business model right what's the average customer going to pay you per month or per year to use this technology yeah so um right now we have a couple different tiers um sort of a free plan all the way up to sort of like a managed care program um so primarily two revenue sources we have a sas model which is on average about 350 per manager per month so we're charging on a per manager basis but the marketplace also has a revenue share um revenue model attached to it 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 2 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 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 founderprep.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 sorry real quick so how do i want to focus money on sas here but the market how would the marketplace work you recommended your membership to equinox and you have a relationship with equinox you get a cut from equinox both sides of it so it's almost like a vendor model to a certain extent so a familiar vendor so you can actually buy purchase manage the whole entire benefit which will make a percentage on that on the on the on the employer employer side all right but also on the other side we'll make a percentage from equinox or headspace or else so we're making roughly about 20 of every dollar spent within the platform 10 on both it's split equally 10 on both sides okay so if you like so i'm making this up if you sign up a 100 a month user to headspace you'll get a 20 cut just as an example of that 10 from the employee or intent from headspace most of the use cases are are company-wide right so an hr manager will buy headspace for the whole entire organization which we'll get 20 total on oh i see which of these is if you if you add up total revenue last year on a percent basis what percent was marketplace revenue or sas revenue um sas was about seventy percent of the business and that was purely just because we didn't market it...