How Limble CMMS Reached 470 Customers and $160K Monthly Revenue While Bootstrapped (Interview with Bryan Christiansen)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Bryan Christiansen. 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 to his lovely wife, Yvette. When he's not working or, he loves reading about various topics but has a passion for everyday sci fi and fantasy, now building limblecmms.com, a B2B maintenance management software suite. Bryan, you're ready to take us to

00:21the top?

Bryan Christiansen

00:22Yeah. Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:23Alright. So walk us through the company. Who... Who's buying this, and how are they using it?

Who Buys Limble CMMS and How They Use It

Bryan Christiansen

00:28Yeah. So our typical customer is a facility manager or a maintenance manager, and their main pains are they're trying to manage all of this different, 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.

Pricing: ARPU and Seat-Based Plans

Nathan Latka

00:46And what do they typically pay you per month on average?

Bryan Christiansen

00:49Yeah. So right now, it's about 335 per month. Although we're recently trending, like, the last three months is closer to 500.

Nathan Latka

00:58Okay. And and walk me through what enables you to charge someone cheaper or more like 500. Are you upselling seats, upselling by the number of POs per month or what?

Bryan Christiansen

01:07Yeah. It's all based on seats. And so there there are different plans. So, like, the starter plan is cheaper than the enterprise plan, but it's all based on seats. So pretty traditional SaaS.

Nathan Latka

01:18Why don't you price against any other utility metrics, like number of PO orders through the system or things like that?

Bryan Christiansen

01:23Yeah. 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 $10 a month and then load up 30 users and they get tons of value from it, but

01:48it was just the incentives were misaligned.

Company Founding and Early Days

Nathan Latka

01:50I see. Interesting. And when did you launch the company?

01:58Bryan, when did you launch the

Bryan Christiansen

01:58Oh, broke

01:59up a little bit there. Yeah. Back in 2015.

Nathan Latka

02:03So 2015 is go live date. And how much time and energy you spent building up the code in the MVP before your first sale?

Bryan Christiansen

02:12Oh, it took us probably two and a half years. So Limble's fully bootstrapped. So at the early days, it was literally just me coding at night, trying to get an MVP. These type of systems have been around for decades. We weren't trying to do anything necessarily new when it comes to features. And so there was a large run or initial get to go to actually get it built. And so it took about two and a half

02:38years to get that first paying customer. They were on the per asset plan. They were a whopping $12 a month. I was ecstatic. My wife thought I was kinda crazy, all these years to get it going.

Nathan Latka

02:49I mean, how were you paying bills during that time?

Bryan Christiansen

02:52Yeah. So, well, like when you know how to code, you don't have to pay a developer. And so there was just a lot of sweat equity. And then also I'm really blessed to have my father help

03:02with just a bunch of advice, but also giving us office space. And so 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 twelve hour days. I'd spend four to six hours on the day job. And then

03:22I would spend the other eight to six hours on just coding and building Limble.

Nathan Latka

03:27And what year was that? So was it 2017 you got your first customer?

Bryan Christiansen

03:31Yeah. Roughly. Yeah.

Customer Count and Acquisition Channels

Nathan Latka

03:32Okay. Interesting. And how many customers are you now working with today?

Bryan Christiansen

03:36Yeah. We're up to about 470 right now.

Nathan Latka

03:39Oh, wow. Okay. So how are you getting customers today? Where are you finding them?

Bryan Christiansen

03:44Yeah.

03:48So a content strategy, so through SEO. And today, we're still getting the majority through that way. About a year and a half ago, we started an outbound arm. And so since then, we've made it so that about 30% of our our deals come from just like cold outreach. But yeah, in the early days, full stack developer was kind of shy to call people. It wasn't the typical like biz dev. And so I was like, well, I'm

04:09pretty good at SEO. So I'm gonna build up our web presence as I'm actually building the product itself because I knew it was gonna take a while. And so those kinda aligned, right? We were starting to rank well, right when the MVP was starting to get to be something that's

Nathan Latka

04:09For what

Bryan Christiansen

04:09gonna

Nathan Latka

04:09term?

Bryan Christiansen

04:09Pay us Oh, CMMS, CMMS software, maintenance software, maintenance management software. There's tons of terms out there. Where it really landed well for us

04:33was more around topics, not not necessarily like the money keywords for, like, CMMS software because there's so much competition there, but we built stuff like, 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 rank 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

04:54to get them to come check at our... You know, look at our software. And that's typically how we get a lot of our inbound leads.

Revenue History 2017 to 2020

Nathan Latka

05:00Okay, got it. That makes sense. Do you remember in 2017 when you closed your first customer, do you remember what revenue was that year?

Bryan Christiansen

05:082017, you know I might actually have this right here. Think we ended the year at about 2,800 MRR in 2017.

Nathan Latka

05:182,800. Okay. Got it. And in MRR or ARR run rate?

Bryan Christiansen

05:22MRR.

Nathan Latka

05:23MRR. And can you bring those forward twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen or no?

Bryan Christiansen

05:27Yeah. 2018, we finished at 14,225. End of twenty nineteen, we were at 61, basically 61,000. And then end of twenty twenty two, we'll probably get... This is... We're starting to swap to ARR because the numbers are getting larger. But, the end of twenty twenty, I think we'll be able to get to 2,400,000 ARR.

Nathan Latka

05:50And you're, what, doing about a $158,000 a month right now in revenue, something like that?

Bryan Christiansen

05:55We're doing about $160,000 a month in revenue right now.

Nathan Latka

05:58Yeah. Four seventy customers times 335 is about about that one sixty mark. So you're close. I mean, you're not far off from getting up to 2.1, 2.2.

Bryan Christiansen

06:07Yeah. And we've seen, like, some really good months the last couple months. Like last month we added on about two ten k ARR. And so it's it's ramping up well. We... A lot of 2020 was just built on systems. Honestly, I didn't think customers were gonna buy as much in this year just because of COVID. So we were kinda like, okay, let's actually invest in people and systems. Like we redid our text, redid our sales stack

06:29and we did a whole bunch of other stuff because we were assuming, all right, like this is the time to build, build people, build systems so that in 2021 we can do really well, But we've just done really good this year for a variety of reasons. The systems are

Nathan Latka

06:29Yeah.

Bryan Christiansen

06:43Paying off

Nathan Latka

06:43What are some of those reasons? I mean, you added $100,000 in new MRR, about 1,200,000 ARR over the past twelve months, what's driven the growth?

Bryan Christiansen

06:50Yeah. 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 really over the last like fourteen months or so, and really nailed it down on how do we present Limble and how do we talk with the customers to make sure that they feel that their problems are going to be solved with us. And so that was one big thing. We redid

07:13our sales systems, our sales 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 sales, Jake Westbrook, did a great job setting that all up. And I didn't think it was really gonna pay off until 2021, but it started paying off in the middle of the year, which, that was a huge help.

07:32We 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 all factored in a lot. Also our success team has started to do a really good job onboarding people, which has greatly expanded our expansion efforts and made people like basically after the first month or two immediately start upselling. Again, I thought that was actually gonna be

07:56like a payoff six to twelve 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.

Team, Sales Quotas and Rep Comp

Nathan Latka

08:09How many are on the team today?

Bryan Christiansen

08:11We just hired our thirty first.

Nathan Latka

08:12And how many quota carrying sales reps?

Bryan Christiansen

08:15We have four. Well, we have three now, but we had four because we moved her to a a more important position.

Nathan Latka

08:22And how many engineers do you have?

Bryan Christiansen

08:23Six. Six.

Nathan Latka

08:24So six engineers, three quota carrying reps. There's another 20 people floating around out there. What are they doing?

Bryan Christiansen

08:31Yeah. So we have, 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. We have seven in customer success, that we have me, and then we have a couple support roles. And I don't know if I did the math fully correct.

Nathan Latka

08:31You're there. You're there.

08:53It's the SDRs in customer success. Do you give a group quota target to customer success in terms of expansion?

Bryan Christiansen

09:01Not yet. We're really careful on giving quota to the customer success because we don't want them to just be like an extension of the sales arm. Like our first core value is we really care about our customers. We call our customers obsessed. I know a lot of companies say that, but we actually live it. And so if we put quotas on our customer success, they may not act the way that we want them to act. Now

09:25we do pay commissions on it because we do want to motivate it. And we always want our employees to share in our success, we but don't be like, hey, you have to hit at least this amount this month or else there's a problem.

Nathan Latka

09:37Now, Bryan, if you were hiring me as one of your sales reps that actually had quota, what would my quota be in year one?

Bryan Christiansen

09:42Yeah. So we have a ramp period just depending on when you get hired. So the first month, it's a thousand MRR. The second month, it's 2,000 MRR. The third month is 3,000 MRR. And then you're then you're ramped. And we have AEs that get all the way up into 6 or 7 k MRR a month.

Nathan Latka

09:58So so how much new, like, ARR do you wanna rep to close in the first year?

Bryan Christiansen

10:03In the first year? Let's see.

10:07It'd be about 30,000 MRR in the first year.

Nathan Latka

10:11Yeah. So $360,000 in terms of ARR. And what would I earn if I hit that quota in the first year? What would my full comp be?

Bryan Christiansen

10:17Yeah. So we we pay really good commission to our account executives. So basically the... Before quota, you get two x MRR. So if you close, you know, 3,000, let's say you're fully ramped and you close 3,000, that's a $6,000 commission check to you. If you get over quota, it's 3X MRR. So if you close like 5,000 MRR, you're starting to bring in a lot of money on just commissions. And let's see, 5,000 would be like a

10:42$10,000 commission check if I'm doing the math right. I'm not doing the math right. It'd be 13

Nathan Latka

10:42Yeah.

Bryan Christiansen

10:42Thousand

10:48so then there's of course a base pay. Now we don't pay high base, Right? We really want everyone to succeed with us. And so if we aren't doing well, then no one's getting paid well.

Nathan Latka

10:59What would you pay me if I joined and I didn't close sales? Like, what would my base fee probably?

Bryan Christiansen

11:04It varies. I mean, it's around 50 k about per the base.

Nathan Latka

11:08Okay. I mean, that's still... I mean, that's not horrible. Most sales reps, I mean, 50 k base plus another 50 k, 60 k in commissions, you can really earn, you know... So what do you expect? A salesperson who's really good that hits quota, you think they're gonna earn, what, $110,000, $120,000 annually?

Bryan Christiansen

11:21No. They... They're doing really good and they're over quota, they really should be over a 150.

Bootstrapped, With Help From His Father

Nathan Latka

11:26Okay. Got it. Got it. That makes sense. Okay. Got it. So your quota target is, you know, three, four, five x that ideally.

Bryan Christiansen

11:26Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:26Super interesting. Now talk to me about capital. Have you bootstrapped the company or raised?

Bryan Christiansen

11:38Yeah. It's completely bootstrapped. I only... Thanks. It's been an interesting journey and it's very tempting to go raise money when you're... It's like, oh, it's starting to work. I should go raise. But yeah, no, I've been incredibly blessed to have my father be able to give me a spot to work and then also be like, hey, you don't have to work all eight hours here at the family company and come work on it. So I haven't

12:03had to do what a lot of people typically do where they're like top ramen and complete devotion and whatnot.

Nathan Latka

12:09Did guys invest in the company?

12:12Did he write a check into the company?

Bryan Christiansen

12:15It's mostly been like support, like a portion of my salary or the office space or whatnot. But once it started getting some traction and we were starting getting some paying customers, then he did put some cash in and it was about 150 over probably a year and a half.

Nathan Latka

12:30Okay.

12:31So you could argue that you didn't maybe like an angel round, but it's really your dad.

Bryan Christiansen

12:34Yeah. Yeah, basically.

Nathan Latka

12:34And this is back in

Bryan Christiansen

12:34Well, I don't wanna minimize that. He's, again, blessed to have him.

Nathan Latka

12:40And that was back in 2017.

Bryan Christiansen

12:43Yeah, well, he did a little bit each month. So it wasn't like we raised one round. It was like, Hey dad, this is starting to work. There's an opportunity to spend $5 here. Can we do this? And he's like, Okay, let's do it. And then we repeatedly did that, some months higher than others. And so it wasn't like a typical angel fund. It was just like, if I found opportunities, he's like, okay, go after it.

Churn and Net Revenue Retention

Nathan Latka

13:03Churn's critical, obviously, in any SaaS company. How do you think about churn today?

Bryan Christiansen

13:07Yeah, it's really important. Some of our numbers, our dollar churn is 7.8 annual, and then our net negative, churn is a 111.28. So it's not bad, but it's also not fully world class. I've heard you say on the podcast many times, a 130% is, is world class. And so we're trying to get there. Our customer success department really is actually our youngest department. We only started it back in February. And so I think once that even

13:33starts paying off more, we're gonna be able to see those numbers go up a good amount.

CAC and Sales Efficiency

Nathan Latka

13:37Yeah. So 8% annual revenue dollar churn, 19% expansion gets you to a 111% net revenue retention is where you're at.

Bryan Christiansen

13:37Yep.

Nathan Latka

13:37And what are you spending on fully weighted CAC to get a new, what is it, $4,000 ACV account?

Bryan Christiansen

13:51Yeah. So our CAC based in months is 9.45 and our fully weighted CAC, let's see, is about 4 k where we're at right now. So we probably spend about 3,000, maybe a little bit over 3,000 to get a customer.

Nathan Latka

14:05And where do you spend most of that?

Bryan Christiansen

14:07A lot of it is in the sales team. So we do spend a a good amount on our content marketing. We probably spend close to 15 to 20 k a month now on content, but that's because we're ramping it up a bunch. For a good while... For a good long time, we didn't even have a marketer. It was literally me coordinating with a vendor to get all of our content written. And so we were only spending

14:28like 4 k a month. So a lot of the inbound leads, we just didn't really have to spend that much. Where our CAC number started getting higher, where we jumped from like four or five months up to, you know, nine or even, you know, some months we fluctuate into 10 or 11 is, the salespeople are expensive, right? And, you know, SDR is expensive, good AEs are expensive, but that that's okay. We wanna share, you know, the

14:49the success with the team. So as long as we keep the CAC under 10, I think it can be really profitable.

Capital Strategy: SBA Debt Over Equity

Nathan Latka

14:55Makes... All makes a lot of sense. Now would you consider raising, like, capital today, or do you think you just kinda sorta keep operating as you are and grow how fast you want?

Bryan Christiansen

15:03Yeah. So we're doing... We are getting some capital, but it's through debt. So like we just... And I was gonna tell you this, but we just got our approval to get about three fifty ks from a local bank through the SBA. And so that's gonna help growth. And then we have another X number of dollars lined up just on debt, so no equity. And so we're gonna see what we can do with that, I think over

15:28the next six months. But if everything's doing the way that we want it to be, and it's we're at 5,000,000 ARR by middle of next year, there's probably a chance we will actually look at getting some growth capital where we can go raise at a pretty good multiple, I hope, because we are growing really fast and be able to have someone come buy 10 to 20% of the company or whatever and be able to really use

15:50that to grow. Additionally, some of the founders

Nathan Latka

15:50How

15:53much did you raise for 10 to 20%?

Bryan Christiansen

15:56Well, as much as possible, obviously. Yeah, no, I mean, on multiples we're looking for, I mean, really depends where we're at middle of next year, right? Like if we get to 5,000,000 by middle of next year, we're growing really, really fast and that's an awesome story and it's awesome traction to tell the investors, right? But if we're only at like 3,500,000, we're still growing really good, but not... It's a totally different story. And based on the

16:21story is where we'll set expectations on multiples.

Nathan Latka

16:25On the SBA loan, would you have to personally guarantee it and what's the interest rate?

Bryan Christiansen

16:29Yeah, we did have to personally guarantee, which kind of stinks, but it's really cheap. The interest rate is like one and a half plus prime or two and a half plus prime or something like that. I'd have

Nathan Latka

16:41to five, four, 5%.

Bryan Christiansen

16:43Yeah. It's something like that. It's so small.

16:48Compared to what we can turn that money into, it's just not a factor.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

16:52Yep. All right. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, Bryan, what's your favorite business book?

Bryan Christiansen

16:56Yeah. Lean Startup.

Nathan Latka

16:57Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Bryan Christiansen

17:01Not very closely, but I do look at, Bezos. He does great stuff.

Nathan Latka

17:06Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Limble?

Bryan Christiansen

17:10Probably G Suite. We use that very heavily. So docs and all of that, spreadsheets.

Nathan Latka

17:15Number four, how many hours of sleep are you in every night?

Bryan Christiansen

17:20Six to eight, probably.

Nathan Latka

17:21That's pretty good.

17:22And situation, married, single kids?

Bryan Christiansen

17:23Married, three kids, six, four, and four.

Nathan Latka

17:27Yeah. Remember that actually. And how old are you?

Bryan Christiansen

17:30I'm 35.

Nathan Latka

17:3035. Last question.

17:31What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Bryan Christiansen

17:36Learn how to learn faster. I made a lot of mistakes on, like I spent five years trying to build a software company that I could have basically shrunk that all on down into like one year's worth of lessons and gotten four years back. That's a big one. Learning to sell earlier with anyone that's a developer out there that's doing this, please go learn how to sell. The world of possibilities that opens up are insane when you

18:01have the power to build something and to sell it. Those two things, I wish I would have learned to sell earlier, and I wish I would have learned how to learn a little bit quicker. Does that make sense?

Nathan Latka

18:09Guys, automation software for all your maintenance needs, limblecmms.com, they're doubling year over year, bootstrapped now at about $1,800,000 in ARR. They're serving four seventy customers. They have done it basically bootstrapped outside of... Except outside of an angel check, $100,000 sort of angel check back in the first, call it, year and a half. 31 people on the team today, six engineers, three quota carrying sales reps, a 111 net revenue retention, might do a traditional VC round mid

18:37next year if they can get up to 4 or $5,000,000 in ARR. We will see. Bryan, thanks for taking us to the top.

Bryan Christiansen

18:42Anytime. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

18:45One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live, the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it. And the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM central.

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