How Limelighthealth CEO Jason Andrew grew Limelighthealth to $5M revenue and 300 customers in 2018.

please welcome Jason Andrew to the stage all right uh good afternoon good to see everybody hope you got some lunch some good food there and I did want to start by just uh thanking Nathan for the invite and cool event having some really good conversations and also congrats on the 145 million dollar raise I think it's awesome um so my name is Jason Andrew I was in Silicon Valley for about 20 years I'm in Eugene Oregon now and I started Limelight Health with three co-founders in 2014. uh we were uh started out as a multi-carrier quoting system for insurance brokers in the life and health space I'd been in the insurance industry for now about 22 years and so when we started the company we were you know grew it for about six and a half years and we were acquired in August of 2020 and then I was at Phineas for the last two years on an earn out and just left two months ago and so now I'm trying to figure out what I'm gonna do when I grow up if you have any ideas I'm open to conversations um so just trying to figure that out okay so um so today I'm going to talk about how we pivoted multiple times to about a 93 million dollar exit um I'm really enjoying the bootstrap mindset here so full disclosure we raised about 44 million dollars over four rounds of funding so all the pitfalls and challenges that have been discussed all day around taking Venture we went through a lot of those but it wasn't a meaningful exit for our Founders and employees and investors and so we're really thankful for that as well um so over the next 20 minutes we're going to talk about um what we did to get our first million and and kind of some of the ways we went about that how we found uh product Market fit which actually took us about probably six years almost till we sold the company actually forgot product Market fit um and then why an exit for us made sense and where we were at in the marketplace uh what things were keeping me up at night and and why that seemed for sure um the the best path so thankfully uh you know we grew revenues from uh the first year all the way through our exit um and when we when we started the company uh we did some things that you know worked on a prototype but we were then you know acquired we were doing almost 12 million in 2021 and our way to about 19 million um and so you know we were having some growth but uh we had about 50 of that was Services Revenue the other 50 was uh recurring error and really because we were doing big Enterprise deployments at that point in time uh you know it was probably a three-year recurring revenue on the on the services side of it so um that explains some of the multiple that we got which is kind of a blend between SAS and and the services so um I know it's kind of cliche but I'm going to talk about really for me a lot of it as a CEO was about relationships and intuitively trying to figure out where the business needed to go and having really great people that helped us along the way and just learning how to go from a Founder to a CEO through the whole path and so we we did a prototype for the first um really for the first um year and it was built in one programming language and when we finished that we also my co-founder Michael had a lot of connections in the industry and we had about 20 to 30 clients that paid us about thousand dollars total in advance that's where our first year revenue and they really did it based on the fact that we had a prototype that they believed we would deliver to them and it was on the relationships and the trust and we did a lot of work to to deliver on that but if we hadn't had Michael and didn't have the relationships in the industry and what we were doing we would not have gotten those first customers signed up without a doubt um and then another relationship that Michael didn't used to was an angel investor who actually ended up investing in the company becoming an advisor to me and then ultimately we hired him later on he was instrumental in a lot of areas of the company but one of the first things that he did was make an introduction to an insurance carrier was one of the largest insurance carriers in the in the world and they said yeah we'd love your your product which was really a prototype at the time we want to work with you and so we had a huge decision to make after a year of selling to Insurance Brokers having about 20 clients on the insurance brokered side of now going Enterprise and we had 13 people in the company at the time and we really decided if we do this we're gonna have to take our baby which we just built put it out on the doorstep in the rain ignore it and go all in on this insurance carrier which is going to pay us about a million dollars in revenue for the next year of work and become a customer so we made a bet we went after the million dollars and we then worked really diligently to try and take care of the customers we had there but we largely did not have capacity to do both well and it took about two years to rebuild the product for the insurance carrier space while we kept the brokered side of the business alive and spent a lot of time with those customers who were very very very patient with us um so it we we didn't at that time turn off the other business and so we kept growing that and so now we had two businesses one selling to Insurance Brokers the other one selling to insurance carriers we had one insurance carrier and that was for about almost two and a half years that we had worked with um so in terms of culture and authenticity um this is my co-found one of my co-founders Garrett viggers uh he's a musician and so we got into it in the early days neither one of us were technical co-founders so uh we couldn't code so we were mostly remote we had some engineers in the office so when they were up late at night because in the early days we were like you know burning the count on both ends I could buy pizza and he could play songs and we were just walking around the office and like trying to encourage the guys like hey keep going man we're gonna get through this you know and um but what we started doing then on our All Hands was playing music uh just as a way you know to kind of encourage people and get like music and that was the thing when we sold the company we had 140 employees and I swear probably 80 were really really good musicians of some variety or another and all through the life cycle of the company we started doing all hands where an employee would say hey I'm gonna do a song an original or a cover or something like that we had everything from Opera to rock songs to you name it but then we started actually in uh serenading customers so we had like a huge uh executive team come from Ireland and they came to our office they visited a bunch of companies in Silicon Valley and so we like serenaded these guys and they came to our office and they were blown away they're like we've never had anybody in a sales meeting serenade us with a song and we're friends with them to this day and we've gotten then then we started doing that to uh go on site we'd outside with customers we'd like sing to like all their employees and so what it did was we knew we were looking for ways to stand out because we were still building our product and we had competitors that had a lot more money and a lot more skilled engineering teams and it it was huge in in settings apart and it was authentic because we all liked music we ended up doing concerts when covet hit and we invited customers we invited Partners we invited family we started to talk about mental health you know and so you say we probably spent as much time thinking about culture and doing quirky stuff like that as we did building the company and it may have been in some folks Minds a complete waste of time but it was authentic and it was real and to this day the acquiring company adopted that they've done eight concerts globally and we ended up becoming the the music sponsor for the largest and sure Tech um event globally uh for this third year running now and so it's it's been something that the company became known for we got a lot of business a lot of customers out of that and uh our sales team could call in and people would start talking about music and it just dropped uh the guards that people had so anyway so um you gotta figure out your own thing whatever it is in terms of your culture so um as we continue building the company uh in in the the kind of the first pivot we we had to again uh make the decision to move away from the broker Channel we went into the the carrier market so um all right let's go to section two so in terms of relationships and and the importance of relationships um after we had uh pivoted and shifted um it was 2016 we were heading into 2017 and we were we were growing um but our I started getting overly concerned about how we were going to be able to scale and how we were going to really grow the business and so I had brought on uh that said said another slide a gentleman around kind of late 2018 as an advisor who had sold a company that was in the space that we had started with and so I...