How Living Security CEO Ashley Rose grew Living Security to $9.7M revenue and 130 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ashley rose the ceo of living security she's been the driving force behind the company's rapid growth since its founding in 2017 the company's raised more than 20 million dollars for growth and product development and accelerated revenue growth over the for three consecutive years she's continuing working continually working to build a diverse and inclusive organization around the belief that the team should reflect the community at large they're playing in a very competitive cyber security and human risk management space at livingsecurity.com ashley you ready to take us to the top awesome yep ready all right so so you i was so impressed when you came on the show for the first time because of your landing expand strategy you were doing in-person escape rooms to then eventually land these much larger sort of software upsells is that still the playbook today uh yes we are still doing our land and expand strategy um have obviously converted many more organizations now over to our kind of software upsell um but with covid we actually have completely gotten rid of all of our in-person training so we can kind of talk through that transition today um and as we think about future growth and cross-sell um we're actually launching a new product here at the end of the quarter which i'm really excited to kind of share with our our listeners unify very cool so i want to dive into that as well talk about the current product though what do you what are customers currently paying you for yeah so um we have living securities human rights management platform and the platform is comprised of three separate products uh when kobet hit we actually brought our team-based training that was uh run in person through escape rooms prior um into a digital environment so that's something we call teams it's all um you know a team kind of social learning environment but again all online through a digital platform we also have our living security training platform and this is where we're giving like high quality individualized training content out to end users um really high quality the highest quality in the industry it's super personalized and we have risk scoring on the back end for our our admins and our program owners and then we have living security fish and that was a new product that we launched this year um and that's a fishing simulation tool so right now we have all the tools and kind of techniques that you need as a program owner um to build a really successful human risk program focused on data what was the difference in the first two virtual training for teams and then risk risk rank for admins yeah teams and training are the two kind of primary products in the market but um on the front end we're delivering you know training and content to the to the end users on the back end there's data and risk scoring for the administrators got it which so which one of these is like closest to like your sas product the phishing simulation tool so the sas so it's a sas platform all of them are actually but then they're just different parts of the same platform yeah i see interesting okay so we'll dive into uh unify the new the new idea here in a second but give us some of the backstory here when you launch the company company was founded in 2017 um so we're going on four years uh four years now yeah that's great and i think when you came on last you told me you were this was in 2019 that you had just passed about 55 56 customers where are you today yeah so we more than doubled our customer base last year so um we're about 130 different customers um and yeah i saw significant growth through 2020 i mean i mentioned earlier so you know beef when we first met um and we did the other recording um we were doing both in-person training through our escape rooms and then we had launched our sas platform and we're really scaling up significantly i can't remember if this was right before right after we'd raised our a-rod when i met with you the last time you had raised you raised 1.7 million at that point oh perfect great so that was yeah that was a long time ago yeah um that was just after our c round so yeah saw really significant growth through 2019 um and then we raised our 5 million dollar series a led by silverton partners um and then through 2020 with covid we had to transition our entire offering and product suite into an online sales platform so it really accelerated our digital transformation and then we more than doubled our customer base in 2020 um and then saw of course you know significant revenue growth there as well and so the 14 million raise was 2021. yes so we closed our 14 million series b in march of this year march of this year okay great so total capital race today is what about 20 21 million yes interesting you're you are on the path you are not bootstrapped ashley rose anymore you are like gotta be growth year over year raise it at a up round and go ipo one day yeah absolutely we're really excited and that's the journey we're on okay very cool so 130 customers and then if someone's listening right now you know maybe they were just or they're scared of being the next headline about a phishing scam or something or their credit card or their customer data leaking and they want to pay you to like help train their team what are folks going to pay on average per month to use the tech so it really ranges just depending on the size of the company um but really we're really competitive when it comes to kind of security of other security awareness solutions um today with our existing platform um once we move and we actually launched unify we're creating an entirely really new category and there's not an existing uh product or platform out there in market today that's doing what we're doing from a behavioral integration and human risk metric uh measurement um and this will you know then you know be a kind of a different pricing model than what we have in market in comparison to other security awareness providers i want to dive into that here in about two minutes the acv that you told me last time you said people could get started for somewhere around 25 000 bucks a year is that sort of still or are you moving up market or down market or status quo yeah so we um acv is still in the 25 to 35 000 range um but we have you know a larger portion of our customer base that's now over six figures um we also did move down into kind of uh the middle market as well um and so we brought on people that range anywhere from you know 10k to 150 000 per year is kind of the range that we're in right now well if i remember correctly you had a really nice way it sounds like now it's virtual but again you had a very nice for being so early expansion like component to the business i mean where you were like doubling and tripling contract values fairly rapidly i think it was like 400 or 300 net dollar retention what you told me something like that yeah yeah we i mean that's definitely going to continue to be a part of our growth strategy of just getting in the door giving them a really quick way to access and start kind of trying out the new way of running their training and human risk management programs so we're still running that very much heavy land and expand and then our csm team our customer success management team is really focused around growth of our client base now can i take those 130 customers times at acb i mean that would put you like that somewhere like a quarter million per month right now in revenue uh let's see we'll do that you don't have to give exactly if you want to give a range that's fine too but um we are uh so we're over that okay great so what's the big goal for this year i mean you're now planning sort of how do we make sure we can invest in the new unified product drive growth and then prepare ourselves for around maybe late next year what do you think you have to get to in order to in order to see that happen yeah so um we last year we about tripled our revenue and so we're looking for a very kind of similar growth path this year okay interesting so i mean do you think i mean is it insights you think we can get above a million bucks a month in revenue in the next 12 months you think uh in the next 12 months yes that would be exciting okay you're going to do this with this new product why is it new why is it innovative so right now the way that most companies are managing their human risk program um it's typically been driven on what we call activity metrics so how many people are right engaged with the program um are they completing training right we're trying to check that box for compliance and so what living security has done is really transitioning the way that we think about success for our program as being outcome driven and that outcome that we're trying to drive is behavior change and so in order to do that we built unifi which is actually integrating into the existing security technology stack to bring in end user kind of behavioral data and to generate insights for our security leaders so they can say you know who is the most at risk and what are they doing what are these behaviors that are really causing you know risk for the company what are some of the things that what's that what are some like tease me a little bit what are someone would be like hey that employee nathan black he's always clicking those random emails from external emails coming in and with an ip address and like i don't know some weird off you know location he's at a high risk for a phishing attack yeah so i mean that's a really good example and right now the data that most companies use are phishing simulation metrics so they'll send out those phishing emails to their employee base to figure out who's going to click right who's going to report and then that's the data that they're presenting but there's a lot of other behaviors that we need to watch out for and that could present risk for the organization so um are you what's your password hygiene like right are you reusing the same passwords across websites are you using a password manager are you connecting and accessing you know sensitive information sensitive applications leveraging your virtual private network are you browsing malicious websites right so there's all of these different types of behaviors that we really need to be capturing and measuring and that we want to fight against as an organization and ultimately you want to create you know as a positive security culture around people making you know good risk-based decisions about how they're behaving online and talk to me about pricing you mentioned new pricing model yeah so with the new model um again this is not something that is currently existing today so we're helping companies first of all we're educating you know why this is so important a lot of organizations almost all security leaders can tell you you know when it comes to data and measurement to their ceo to their board they're really still left with a lot of unanswered questions what does risk look like what should we do about it okay great we took these three steps what was the return on investment right how much did we save or where's our risk at now and so that's really valuable for an organization to have that sort of strategic uh overview dashboards and reporting um and so we've really surveyed the market um we think that these will be you know over six figures could be much larger you know as we go to market with the new product you know as it matures so this is going to help you target enterprise accounts because you have the ability to upsell based off many more parameters than your current product offering it's a more strategic solution for the organization and one that is measurable and that's really important when it comes to you know security and investment if you could only drive growth over the next year by upselling unified to your current 130 customers how many of them do you think would sign up for the new product and pay for it over the next 12 months so that's definitely a goal that we have um you know i think all of them need it right um it's really how quick can we get it to market and can we get budget out there um but yeah i mean over the next 12 months we're targeting anywhere from you know 25 to 50 percent of our customer base really selling unify into and then expand from there yeah and driving that expansion obviously gonna be critical on your team and how they make these new users fall in love with you activate them etc what is your team size today how many people we have 60 people on our team and then we have about 15 engineers and developers in ukraine so we're growing really really rapidly from a team's perspective 60 plus 15 or inclusive okay so 75 how did you spin up this ukrainian team how did you find the first person like build around over there so i'll actually have to give credit to our director of engineering he he found the team um and then they are also growing really rapidly as an organization over there so it's not one of those like very very large um works uh which is awesome because they're partnering with us they've been really flexible in our relationship and then it also allows us to kind of keep our cost model down and have a little bit of flexibility as we're growing so it's like it's sort of like a dev job it's not one person then hire a team it's like it's a shop that does this for a lot of companies and they have a dedicated group for you correct i see very cool talk to me about sales team how many are carrying a quota so we have uh five account executives that carry quotas and then we have a bdr team so really heavily kind of outbound driven right now and so kind of building up that business development function and so what is its total teams team size of the sales team including folks that don't carry the quota uh well so the bdrs have a quota from meetings but um let's say we've got five account executives we've got uh six bdrs and then our csm team also carries a quota from an in from a growth and install based upsell perspective and we've got four csms that carry photos right now so 15 total there the csm thing is unique very few people are doing this because if you get the incentive structure wrong with your csm's you're gonna they're gonna do the wrong thing or try and sell too hard how are you giving them a quota but making sure they don't sell too hard so we we are actually really big around um like two main goals for our csms one being empowerment and one being growth and so what we kind of drive home is from a partnership perspective you know if we're giving them the tools that they need to be successful and we have like the best solution on the industry like why wouldn't they want to do more with us and so we go in first as a trusted partner and then we set expectations around how do we want to grow and mature your program and then they are partnering with us to help grow our business so we can continue to innovate and provide more solutions so today it's been working really well um and i think it's you know leading with empathy and value and then being able to drive growth on the back end last couple of questions here actually dollar retention obviously a big metric you got a new product to upsell you hope people fall in love with it what are you guys at right now from the net dollar retention uh so last year's numbers were about 150 net revenue retention that's incredible and and is that i mean can you peel that onion a bit gross gross turn versus expansion yeah so um our from a software perspective uh well we lost one customer on our software last year so our our turn was extremely low and then we did a really great job last year um growing our install base with our csm so majority of it was expansion driven yeah yeah it's a very less than five percent annual revenue churn more than fifty percent expansion gets you 150 net dollar retention right very cool i love this okay so unifi's coming up you just got some fresh capital in the door where are you spending most of this capital is it really scaling that team in ukraine or is it anywhere else yeah so it's really split between three um major initiatives so obviously with unifi we're hiring tons of developers and tech talent so a lot of r d and then sales and marketing um you know with the creation of the new category um you know working with forrester and gartner and trying to get a lot of education out there we're spending a lot in marketing this year um and then growing our sales team which is both inclusive of our direct sales team as well as bringing in channel this year you mentioned last time you were on that you were comfortable spending about twelve thousand bucks to get a twenty five thousand dollars sort of ac account for a six month payback period do you anticipate that sort of spike longer payback period as you invest in gartner and the new product yeah it's it is going to be spiking um and it is uh but we know from a lifetime value perspective we've been able to prove out that we can retain these clients and we can grow and so um you know we're keeping it a really healthy kind of packed ltb metric but yes we're you know expanding our investment all right ashley let's wrap up with a famous five number one favorite book um i am reading the oh yeah i totally did not i totally forgot about these um what am i reading right now i know so i am reading the ceo the ceo typo type rope right now and i'm liking that book so okay number two is there a founder you really respect or you're following or studying um there's so so many good founders um i've actually really started following a lot of local founders um and people that have just built really good companies in austin obviously you know bumble and the like so number three what's your favorite online tool for building living security uh we so i've started we started using um uh sas optics and so that's been a really great tool for us number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night six to eight there and situation married single kiddos married with three kids still in a pumpkin goodness so busy okay three kids and can i ask how old you are i am 34. 34. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 to not care as much about what people think about you guys living security launched in 2018 they're on a tear broke a million dollar run rate in under 18 months now scaling 200 300 a year over year growth doing north of 250 grand a month in revenue and a very exciting new product coming out called unifi you want to check it out they help you understand who on your team has healthy password hygiene are they using their own vpn are they browsing malicious websites they're very excited about it currently serving 130 enterprise customers they expect a lot of those customers to use this new tool they just raised another 14 million bucks to help invest in this new tool team at 60 right now as they look to continue to scale ashley rose thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan laca.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is ashley rose as the ceo of living security ashley is passionate about helping companies build positive security cultures an adaptable problem solver she is thoughtful and transparent in our approach to running the company and working with clients for a singular goal to reduce risk by making security awareness engaging and quantifiable ashley you're ready to take it to the top yes absolutely so how should we think about this i mean are you like a training company are you true sas like know before these other kind of security firms yeah so we are a cyber security awareness training company and we are a sas company as well so we train people through sas products um essentially experiences that are backed by a technology-enabled platform interesting okay so so i mean if you look at last 12 months just to really understand what you truly are if you look at kind of training revenue versus true sas revenue what's the split what percent was sas yeah in um 2019 we were three-quarters sas revenue and then we had another portion of our revenue that was services based okay okay got it so your majority sas the service to support the sas that's correct okay take us through a customer example so we can understand what the services you deliver and what the sases they pay for yeah so um we work mostly in the fortune 1000 enterprise um and they are buying training from us that's uh again it's delivered through an experience the experience can either be online or in person but they're subscribing to a sas application to help them run and enable them to deliver both types of training so they are either hosting a cyber security escape room oh is that your dog um might have to pause no no bring bring the puppy in this is great this is this is this is how founding life works we work from home we work in basements we work in garages we work with puppies and babies and husbands and wives that's how it works all right here's zoey zoey oh my god puppy that's i'm gonna say that's not a puppy she she's is it he or she she's a girl she's she's six months old she is a puppy but she's humongous amazing okay so now with zoe in your lap tell us about uh can you tell us the story about a fortune 1000 that used you recently yeah um so i mean a lot of them look very similar i'm not gonna put any names on there you can look at our website um can we talk about like mass mutual or enterprise working with us with our cyber security escape room uh essentially it's an in-person training experience that we actually enable our clients to run continuously throughout the year with a subscription to the platform that manages it okay um and then that client they usually bring you know a good portion of their users online um they're getting them trained up throughout the year and they love the experience they love how immersive it is and the feedback and then we're um able to cross-sell them onto our online platform um to help them scale that out to more users and remote locations and you know with a global audience okay so give me a general sense then once these companies sign up ignoring the upfront payment for like the secure the escape room experience on average really paying you per year to use the technology so our average um currently is 24 000 per year and that's for a good person of their their organization that's pretty sizable okay yeah so give me flesh that out if someone's gonna pay you 24 000 in sas revenue per year how many people are in the organization typically what are they getting for that yeah so we um price per user it's between five and twenty dollars per user per year um most of our clients are training between a thousand to three thousand of their users and we do have some larger clients as we work to grow and expand within the accounts that are training their entire enterprise and then with those clients we'd be looking at training uh 10 000 plus employees as part of their organization interesting okay so um so this is interesting take me through the kind of the back line here when did you guys launch the company so we launched the company at mid year of 2017 um really we're in market in october so just over two years old at this point okay and who is we by the way you have a couple of co-founders or what's the team look like uh yeah so myself and my husband drew co-founded the company who owns more equity where aaron even 50 50 split wow that's a lot of trust ashley that's a lot of trust um and then from there we've grown a team we're actually um at 18 people right now amazing okay so 18 people and have you bootstrapped the company or have you raised we've raised money um to date we're at around 1.75 raised total okay so uh 1 million 750 000 was that equity or debt uh equity okay it was all equity okay great so 18 people and how many customers have you scaled to we are at 58 so almost 60 licensed customers um those people are licensed on our escape room platform and our online training platform okay are they all on both or some of them only on one um yeah so we have the portion that would be on one or the other and then there's a handful um that are on both and we're seeing more clients who are leveraging both products now okay how many are just on the sas platform well they could be on both but how many are on the sas at least so it's a 50 50 split between uh staff and escape room and then also the escape room platform okay so what does that mean um percent of those are only on our escape room platform the other 50 are either on just sas or sas and escape room oh i see okay so 30 are on sas and escape room together and then another like call it 28 ish our just escape room correct the ones that just the escape room why don't they upgrade to the to the software so at this point the software is a little bit newer of a product um and it's the escape room is a little bit more unique and so a lot of clients that we're coming in the door and having conversations with um they have something that they're already leveraging for the compliance or checkbox training and so they're really looking for something more immersive and outside the box so they love getting started with that in person it's just unique something they've never seen before once we're able to get in the door and form those relationships with those clients and able to show them that there is an impact and we can bring this into a digital experience that's where we're seeing the upgrade and the upsell come from okay i see okay so can i do the math 30 customers 2 000 a month or twenty four thousand dollar acv that's like what you're past six thousand dollars a month in terms of pure sas revenue yes uh well so our uh escape room platform is also managed by a sas application so the license to that is um is also sas revenue we have another portion of revenue on top of that that's service based where living security is hosting the training if that makes sense okay so if i if i asked you um i understand there's a dual model here but if i just asked you what you when you guys track internally what your true monthly recurring revenue is right now what would you say how would you respond uh we're over 115 at this point total okay so so so that's north of obviously the 60. so you're including the escape room license platform in there as well correct yeah yeah okay interesting okay so so um take us forward a little bit i mean you've raised capital um we met through a mutual connection pat matthews that runs active capital i'm an lp in the fund so i know a little bit about the company but i mean i imagine vcs must hit you all the time and say ashley twit this escape room nonsense it's low margin it's difficult to scale just focus on sas if that's true how do you respond yeah so i mean there's a couple things that um actually you know the escape room has done a lot of really amazing things for us and so the escape room service as i mentioned where living security comes in the door and hose um it has high margins it also helps us to get our foot in the door and build a relationship with the client but we're also seeing those clients not only be retained but also buying more services and products from us and so there's a positive conversion over them purchasing something that's an annual subscription license after a service um you know same thing with our escape room platform it's actually recurring revenue they're buying a year license revenue for each you know each user seat and we're seeing recurring um retention and upsells on that as well again having high margins with both of these and so it's something that's unique the market is honestly like pulled us in that direction when we first started we thought at some point maybe we would drop it but um people just can't get enough of this you know really immersive in-person experience that we're offering so talk to you you just talked about upsell on churn a little bit when you look at past 12 months what is gross churn been on a revenue basis before upsells yeah so um we've only had one percent uh net revenue churn and then uh we have over 300 net revenue retention so people that are buying something from us they're loving it and they're buying much more of it okay so hold on so break that down for me so to get to 300 net revenue retention that's made up of two numbers gross revenue churn and then you add back all the upsells right so one percent revenue churn gross revenue turn and then over another i think it was a 312 percent uh in growth expansion growth expansion yeah and that expansion is not including new customer signups that's just upgrades from historical accounts that's great okay amazing and that one percent gross churn number is that monthly revenue churn or annual uh total annual well okay amazing so you basically have no revenue churn 300 year-over-year expansion on the accounts for like you know i mean that puts you like 400 net revenue retention at this point yeah i think somewhere in the mid 300s 300 to 400 okay so that i mean that's pretty remarkable i mean uh most sas companies at this kind of stage don't see those kinds of economics what's the number one thing you're upselling against year over year where you got that 300 growth from historical accounts is it number of seats or something else so it's number of seats and it's also the cross sell from the escape room platform over to the online in the digital trading platform okay what's the you talked to us about what the average cost on the sas was about 24 000 a year what's these typical escape room license cost so um our price per user seat is actually really comparable five to twenty um we're starting with a smaller amount of users uh with the escape room so generally like we're going in and doing you know a thousand to two thousand users on that one um but then we're charging more so we're averaging out at the 24k uh the larger expanded accounts on our online platform are over six figures okay and this has allowed you again to get about 115 000 month recurring revenue today where were you exactly a year ago do you remember yeah a year ago um we were just over 10k in mrr so we've seen over 10x uh growth from january 2018 to 2020. that's pretty i mean that's a pretty impressive story are you raising capital now or are you good to go for a while so we are raising capital um we're pretty far progress in our series a round of funding we have some theses that are really excited to partner with this with us on this so we're excited to um you know be able to take the growth that we've uh accomplished the next year and then expand it out even further how much are you hoping to raise in the series a uh we're looking between five and eight and why are those the right numbers how did you guys come up with that yeah so um you know we looked at the customer acquisition costs and our unit economics that we had in 2019 and then what our projection and goals were to get to the next phase of growth for us going into 2020 and 2021 um we think between 5 and 8 million we can take that in the door and we can actually get to cash flow positive okay how much are you burning right now like a lot or a little no not very much like less than 10k a month it's right around there give or take okay that's not horrible and that's net not gross right obviously yeah um okay so five to eight million are doing call 1.5 million in run rate right now i mean you have a great story here 10x year over year growth you seem pretty convincing what valuation are going to try and get pre-money on this well i'm not sure that i'm ready to talk about that can you talk about can you talk about a range on that right so like 5 to 10x multiple are you in that range um we're looking at higher than a 10x multiple okay higher than 10x multiple okay so let me ask you another question here right um you have a great story right 10 grand a month to 115 000 a month you can probably go out and get a really great valuation above 10x right now so it'd be above a 10 million valuation raising you know five to eight the tricky thing is let's say you are so convincing you raise at a really high valuation there's been real pressure to grow that valuation otherwise you risk a down round ratchet causes liquidation preferences does that make you nervous at all so um i mean wait when you talk about it like that but i mean we feel really confident in our growth from what we've seen last year our pipeline building through 2019 2020 is looking to be an awesome year even you know not even halfway into january we've um you know we're already going to be exceeding our goals for this quarter so we're really excited we believe the market's growing at an insanely fast rate there's a huge opportunity for us and there's a lot of people not only in north america but worldwide that need the the products and the solutions that we're offering so yeah less less so nervous but more excited yeah fair enough now to get a new twenty four thousand dollar your account uh what do you what's your all in cack on that is it the same price so yeah year-long payback or is it something different yeah so we're about a 50 uh your paybacks around a six-month payback period so just around that 10-ish thousand and where are you so to get a new customer paying 24 000 a year you'll spend kind of 10 to 12 000 where are you spending that money where are your marketing costs going yeah so we have a mixed approach between events marketing and then inbound marketing through like digital seo and content marketing um we also run a direct sales model right now and so there's costs that go into that um events for us are have been a really fantastic uh lead generation can you name one we're able to essentially trade services so we come in and bring our escape room on site so we found that to be a terrible way to get our to generate awareness about what we're doing um but we're actually seeing about 50 percent of our new customers come through our website okay interesting tell me real quick um an event that that worked really well for you in 2019 yeah um so we do a lot of regional cyber security uh themed uh conferences um so rmisc which is rocket rocky mountain information security conference has been great wait say that a little slower rmis rmisc so the rocky mountain information security conference okay got it that does work yeah a lot of regional events where people are coming to learn um you know it's the right kind of buyer persona the right market for us which is director level and above um and we're you know interfacing with these potential buyers for 30 minutes at a time as they're coming through and experiencing essentially a demo of what we can provide for their company tell me real quick about the direct sales model how many quota carrying sales rep do you guys have right now of the team of 18 you said so we have one outside of the founding team so you know we've been selling up till this point but we have another one that's clearing a quota and he's taking butt uh we actually just brought on a vp of sales this month and we're gonna be looking at him to help grow our team and help scale out our our direction well he also carry i mean people struggle with this when they hire their first vp of sales is he responsible for a quota or is he only managing the one sales rep he's responsible for full team quota so anything any difference between the sales rep and then what we're looking to hit for um for the team he would be responsible for making up and then he'll also be responsible for growing the team interesting um a lot of people are not quite sure how to set up their pro formas for their first salesperson hire what i mean by that is what to set the quota target at relative to like their their full earnings how did you guys think about how to compensate your first sales rep yeah i mean it was definitely a lot of back and forth with pat he was involved with that as well as some of the vcs that we're working with and then i really worked hand-in-hand with our vp of sales higher um he comes from you know sas uh companies in the past where he's worked and so um he had a lot of insight and we just looked at historicals and what our company goals were for the next year and then kind of fit all the numbers together can you give me a general range so is that quota set at north or north or south of like 500 grand a new arr for that one rep oh for the the one rep just the one just north yeah okay just know okay so fair enough so somewhere between 500 a million bucks is what that that rep is expected to land in 2020 that's correct interesting okay um and you said he's doing well so i assume you feel really good about him being on track to do that yes okay that's interesting uh will you increase quota um not at this point i think we're we're feeling really confident about where we are so your vp of sales feels like you can go hire more sales rep at those same kind of economics that's correct yeah which should make sense if you want to go then raise money to do some of that yes very cool okay uh so that makes sense um we talked a lot about growth we talked about um evaluation we talked about how you're thinking about raising we talked about cac um are you i mean so are you able to go in and using this on person escape room concept win over people that are using other cyber security solutions right now like malwarebytes no before i mean there's a bunch of them out there yeah absolutely so um yeah one of the things we've done really well is just developing really the relationship with the enterprise building trust with them and being able to show value and the initial product that we've delivered and so we are seeing now um opportunities to rip and replace some of these competitors and it's exciting for us and we're seeing positive results from people on the online training and getting user feedback that they you'll love this so much more than any other training they've done in the past yeah last question i have for before we wrap up you said 50 of your new signups are coming directly from your website that it works together with your two other channels direct sales with your quota carrying rep and your event management stuff or your event kind of sponsor stuff all the stuff coming through their website you have a pop-up that basically says hey get a free cyber security card game does that work it does that's actually our biggest uh forum submission on our website people love getting things through directly give me conversion rate give me a conversion rate if 100 people hit that pop-up how many of them will put an email in if they hit the pop-up um i don't have the exact number i probably say it's like 20-25 getting an email that's amazing okay because you're also then okay so then you're also getting an address after that correct uh yes until then after that they get an automated email and then they have to submit their address and we send out the card game what does the card game cost you to produce uh i think it's about five to seven dollars at this point when we bought like larger packs and then yeah and obviously just shipping on top of that that's a pretty cheap cac for someone that could be worth 24 grand a year yeah we love the card game and we're kind of thinking right now like what's the next card game but it's still working so we haven't changed it up i love that all right ashley let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh something i'm finishing up right now the hard thing about hard things by ben horowitz number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh jason lumpkin number yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company i love hubspot um but envato i also love getting their their digital files number four how many hours of sleep breaking every night oh i'm an eight hour girl i have to get eight hours of sleep that's great now you mentioned your husband so i assume you're married any kiddos we have three kids three oh my gosh three you guys are busy yes very busy they're uh five seven and twelve though so they're all in school and wow makes things a little bit easier okay and then do you want me asking how old you are i'm 32 32. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew yeah i had to think about this one i don't think i would have listened to anything that i said to myself at 20 but probably the one thing would just be what i thought mattered then doesn't really matter at all so um but yeah nothing nothing too extreme guys living security playing in a cyber security space doing 10 grand a month a year ago now up to 115 000 a month so 10x year over year growth they're currently raising their series a pretty far down that path targeting five to eight million dollar raise at north of a 10x revenue multiple their economics makes so much sense even though one-fourth of the revenue is professional services in the form of escape rooms they bring on site to companies to do security training and then upsell the sas product they have a team of 18 people right now two quota carrying reps including their first vp of sales and obviously the founder included in there as well what's remarkable here is the upsell revenue from the escape room to the software is really high and that has led to between 300 400 net revenue retention annually and a payback period of under six months ashley thank you for taking us to the top thanks nathan these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now