How Limble CMMS CEO Bryan Christiansen grew Limble CMMS to $1.9M revenue and 470 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is brian christensen he's a full stack developer with a passion for entrepreneurship he's a father of three little boys ages six four and four he's married his lovely wife yvette when he's not working or uh he loves reading about various topics but has a passion for everyday sci-fi and fantasy now building limbo cmf cmms.com a b2b maintenance management software sweet brian you're ready to take it to the top yeah let's do it now all right so walkers with the company who's buying this and how are they using it yeah so our typical customer is a facility manager or maintenance manager and their main pains are they're trying to manage all this different uh like work orders pms all throughout a wide range of different types of equipment and so they're the primary user that that comes to us and purchases our software and what do they typically pay you per month on average yeah so right now it's about 335 per month although we're recently trending like the last three months it's closer to 500. okay and walk me through what enables you to charge someone cheaper or more like 500 upselling seats upselling by the number of pos per month or what yeah it's all based on seats and so there are different plans so like the starter plan is cheaper than the enterprise plan but it's all based on seats so a pretty traditional sas one price against any other utility metrics like number of po orders through the system or things like that yeah we did actually try that with a per asset model way early on and that like worked to get some early adopters but we found that it just wasn't it wasn't as good when it came to trying to to like compare against our other competitors and also raise the overall acv and so we'd get some customers that pay us like 10 a month and then load up like 30 users and they get tons of value from it but it was just you know the incentives were misaligned i see interesting and when did you launch the company brian when did you launch you broke up a little bit there yeah back in 2015. so 2015 is go live date and how much time energy has been building up the code in the mvp before your first sale oh it took us probably two and a half years so limbo's fully bootstrapped so at the early days it was literally just me coding at night trying to like get an mvp these these type of systems have been around for like decades right we weren't trying to do anything necessarily new as when it comes to features and so there was a large run or initial get uh to go to actually get it built and so it took about two and a half years to get that first paying customer they were on the per asset plan they were a whopping twelve dollars a month i was ecstatic uh my wife thought i was kind of crazy uh all these years to get it going and i mean how are you paying bills during that time yeah so well like when you know how to code you don't have to pay a developer right and so there was just a lot of sweat equity and then also i'm really blessed to have my father help um with uh you know with just a bunch of advice but also giving us office space and so um i was working full-time for him in a family company and he was like okay if you finish all of your work for the family company then you can spend all the rest of the time on your other company and so it was just basically working a lot of 12-hour days i'd spend four to six hours on the on the day job right and then i would spend the other you know you know eight to six hours on you know just coding and building limbo and what year was that so was it 2017 you got your first customer yeah roughly yeah okay interesting and um how many customers are now working with today yeah we're up to about 470 right now oh wow okay so how are you getting customers today where are you finding them so uh a content strategy so through seo and today we're still getting the majority through that way um about a year and a half ago we started an outbound arm and so since then we've uh made it so that about 30 of our our deals come from just like cold outreach um but yeah in the early days you know full stack developer was kind of shy to call people you know it wasn't the typical like biz dev and so i was like well i'm pretty good at seo so i'm going to build up you know our web presence as i'm actually building the product itself because i knew it was going to take a while and so those kind of aligned right we were starting to rank well right when um the mvp was starting to get to be something for whatever ps4 oh cmms cmms software maintenance software maintenance management software there's there's tons of terms out there where it really landed well for us was more around topics not necessarily like the money keywords for like cms software because there's so much competition there but we built stuff like uh the ridiculously simple guide to a pm checklist for example and so if you google i think it's preventative maintenance plan you'll see we're ranked number one there and so we we ranked really well for a bunch of topics around the space and then we just did the right conversion on those blogs to get them to come check out our you know look at our software and that's typically how we get a lot of our our inbound leads okay got it that makes sense do you remember in 2017 when you closed your first customer do you remember what run revenue was that year uh 2017 you know and i might actually have this right here i think we ended the year at about 2800 mrr in 2017 2800 okay got it and in mrr or arr run right uh mrr mr and can you bring those forward 2018-2019 or no yeah 2018 we finished at 14 225 uh end of 2019 we were at 61 uh basically 61 000 and then end of 2022 we'll probably get this is we're starting to swap to arr because the numbers are getting larger but uh the end of 2020 i think we'll be able to get to 2.4 million er and you're what doing about 158 grand a month right now on revenue something like that we're doing about 160 grand a month in revenue right now yeah 470 customers times 335 is about about that 160 mark so you're close i mean you're not far off from getting up to 2.1 2.2 yeah and we've seen like some really good months the last couple months like last month we added on about 210k arr and so it's it's ramping up well a lot of 2020 was just built on systems honestly i didn't think customers were going to buy as much in this year just because of covid so we were kind of like okay let's actually invest in people and systems like we redid our text we redid our sell stack and we you did a whole bunch of other stuff because we were assuming right like this is the time to build build people build systems so that in 2021 we can do really well but um we've just done really good this year for a variety of reasons um the systems what are some of those yeah what are some of those reasons i mean if you added a hundred grand a new mrr about 1.2 million an aor over the past 12 months what's driven the growth yeah so one of the big things is like a big shout out to our sales team they're doing absolutely awesome we redid our entire sales presentation um really over the last like 14 months or so really nailed it down on how do we present limbo and how do we talk with the customers to make sure that they're they feel that their their problems are going to be solved with us and so that was one big thing we redid um our cell systems our cell stack to outreach and hubspot and really made it like before we weren't really using a good crm or at least we weren't using hubspot to the power it could be and our vp of cells jake westbrook did a great job setting that all up and i didn't think it was really going to pay off until 2021 but started paying off in the middle of the year which uh that was a huge help we were starting to actually get real metrics on like how are we handling the leads and like how quickly are we closing them and where is it going wrong and that that all factored in a lot also our our success team has started to do a really good job onboarding people which is uh greatly expanded our expansion efforts and made people like basically after the first month or two immediately start up selling again i thought that was actually going to be like payoffs 6 to 12 months in the future or longer but because they're getting onboarded really well they're they're upselling even quicker and so the systems are just paying off quicker than i i anticipated how many are on the team today uh we just hired our 31st and how many quota carrying sales reps we have four well we have three now but we had four because we moved her to a a more important position and how many engineers do you have uh six six so six engineers three quarter carrying reps there's another 20 people floating around out there what are they doing yeah so we have uh eight sdrs so cold calling we're a little overstaffed on those right now because we're trying to ramp them up i don't think any of them i think the oldest one has been there only six months um uh we have seven in customer success that we have me um and then we have a couple support roles and i don't know if...