Lucid Meetings Revenue & Valuation (2024)

hello everyone my guest today is elise keith she's the founder and ceo of lucid meetings and the author of where the action is the meetings that make or break your organization she's also a regular contributor for inc and other publications lucid meetings helps thousands of organizations worldwide implement a system of successful meetings elise you ready to take us to the top you know it all right meetings are is a hot space you got zoom you got all these companies how are you how do you kind of fit into the space so we focus on the collaboration and productivity aspect of meetings not the communication part not the tech layer not the not the video not the how do you talk to people but what do you talk to them about and how do you make sure that time is worthwhile for everybody so are you selling a framework right like a like you know john doerr kind of okr kind of thing or are you selling a real piece of software more like a project management base camp monday kind of tool it's a little bit more like a project management base camp kind of thing but we do have a framework that helps people understand how to put that to use interesting we just don't we just don't lock it into the software as saying like this is the only way you can meet sure sure okay interesting all right um what i mean help me understand pricing are you pure play sas we are pure place last on the software side um from a overall company position we're a solutions company so we're a mix of services and software yeah so if you look over kind of the past 12 months what would the split be what percent would you say is services versus sas our services sas mix is 60 40 so 60 on the services side 40 on the south side and is that because you're kind of uh by the way this is what a lot of successful entrepreneurs is because you're early on and you're still trying to just do professional services bring in cash figure what the real problem is and then build that onto the software that's definitely part of it for sure and part of it is that the nature of the problem we're solving is one where people actually need the services to be able to make that jump into meeting productivity you know it's just not something most companies are any good at yet mm-hmm interesting okay so let's quickly just uh look at your 40 that's kind of sas focus so for the sas tool on average what's someone going to pay you per month to use the tech so we have two versions we have an on-demand version and we have an enterprise version um the on-demand version has a has a free edition which is a great place to learn but a lousy for revenue and that's where where the most of those people are but um for paying customers on the on-demand version they're going to average about 39 a month okay and is that per user per seat or per company or what per organization yeah per company so you don't sell based off number of seeds it's on the on-demand version it's number of hosts so very similar to like a zoom license or a skype license where you've got so many hosts and they can invite other people got it um on the enterprise model however we do do a number of seats based pricing because that's just much more comfortable in the enterprise space and those contracts are going to be between you know 50 and 100k annually interesting okay across a team of usually about how many would you say you know that's going to depend but they started around 2000 and they can go up to like 20. okay and are these pilots you're currently running have you closed a couple of these deals already we have a handful of closed um in multi-year renewals so that's exciting um and then we have a couple in pilot right now as well very cool so i mean would you say your model i mean where are you spending most your time optimizing the ui to get 39 a month no touch sales credit card inputs on your website or building an inside sales motion to go close hundred thousand dollar acv kind of accounts on the ladder for sure that's what i would say very good yeah very different models um and i think the you know one of the things we've learned because we've been at this for longer than you know you would like to be before you ramp but uh yeah one of the things we've learned is that the nature of the problem that we solve is most acute in a larger organization you know they have them they have a clear recognized need they have the funding to actually put money behind it um and and we can do greater good there when you launch the company what year company was founded in 2010 we went full time in 2014 with our first enterprise client okay how much did you spend in like in that four year period building the mvp and like all in before your first dollar revenue yeah so we were four founders and we all put in 5 000 each okay that's pretty i mean i would say that's pretty lean actually it was super lean and we were um we were super sweaty and you know stayed up late and did all of the you know hopefully when you say sweaty you mean sweat equity or or your exactly all right and and i mean what took you four years to really get on this were you guys all like you didn't want to quit your cushy corporate job or what um you know some of it was some misalignment of expectations about how to solve the problem um some of it was that a couple of us went through divorces and had babies and life happened all over the place yeah so there's an awful lot of life and then we needed um we're an entirely revenue funded company so that's great we needed uh needed that revenue to come in to actually support us and the business to make that that leap successful and are you profitable now today are you operating basically right at breakeven you're reinvesting everything we're pretty close to break even but our revenues are hitting you know we're hitting a million almost not quite so we're we're at the place where we're breaking even but with some room to actually do something with it yeah when you say hitting the million do you mean when you add your services plus sas each month you're doing about 83 grand a month we're doing about um more closer to like 800 a month 800 a year so it's closer to like 80 70 80 a month yeah exactly that's great and then again i we can assume call it about 30 000 of that as pure sas the rest is kind of service based contracts absolutely that's entirely correct you are such a great math and your head guy oh i'm just you know i smile i get the numbers i do the math i just you know what i love is when i get a really good story and but it's backed up not by hyperbole but by real data points and so next you know three years from now when you're ipo and i can come back to this interview and go look here were her numbers back back when she was in 2014 you know after her co-founder said babies and life happens and she hustled through it it'll make a nice headline what's your what's your team size today how many folks we're five on the books um and then we contract regularly with an extensive xops kind of i was gonna say at least tell me about what's off the books i've never heard anyone describe their team as on the books and off the books before yeah no so basically five five full-time employees and then um lots and lots of contract and service and all that what's the breakdown on the five between engineers and maybe sales people we have um two people who are are deeply technical um we have one person who's full-time customer service sales and then we've got two others who kind of swing hit quota carrying no okay now so how are they just they're just a flat rate essentially what incentivize them to close deals if there's no no commission um the ability to keep their jobs [Laughter] and to get to the place where we have a proven model so that we can in fact be quote quota carrying yep how many customers are you now serving today on the sas side of the business the south side of the business there are over 5000 organizations in there who use the software on a regular basis but from a paying customer perspective we're looking at around 300. 300 and when you say use it on a regular basis how do you measure that across the 5000 is that a login one you know one meeting recorded per month what is it it's meetings and it's and it's meetings um it's you know a number of meetings with over the course of the year some of our use cases serving things like boards and committees in regional areas so they aren't necessarily monthly users they're gonna be what is that number for you on an annual basis is it they're active if they do at least three calls in a year or what is the number it's like six okay you know we wanna we wanna see them have significant meetings and get some real things done okay that's great okay so 300 um at that 39 rpoo puts your mrr there at about 11 11 700. so it sounds like your your average revenue per customer cost at 300 is actually higher right it's more like 100 a month 120 a month to get to 30 000 a month in sas revenue it's not it's not coming from the on-demand fee people mostly it comes from the enterprise folks oh i see the 50 to 100 000 acv kind of accounts yes exactly i see how many of those do you have like four three four we've got four of those right now oh and a couple and a couple in pilot yeah i see okay so you're able to there's a huge difference oh makes a massive difference yeah yeah i mean but you've kind of got this nice pipeline where you can essentially pick off potentially new enterprise leads out of ones paying 300 out of the 300 that you have and trying to upsell to the 50 to 100k yeah once they get big enough and their usage grows that way um it it's actually more common for a large enterprise to discover us through either an analyst conversation or some other mechanism and then go oh my gosh i had no idea you existed let's talk and then we have six months of let's talk and then they become pilot yep no that's great so okay so is that the typical sales cycle about six months uh at least yeah mm-hmm okay what's the longest one taken to close the longest one took i want to say 18 months like they were you know they went through a leadership transition and they forgot where procurement lived and you know all the things right all the things yep that's that's the name of the game very good okay um any plans to raise capital potentially um when we have this enterprise sales model a little bit more locked to the place where we could put a quota on it for example um then it would be appropriate to then scale into that it's really hard the um the enterprise sales gauntlet going through you know i.t security procurement and having some capital to back that would be uh useful what do you think sure what if you did raise an ex call it six to twelve months what do you think the right amount would be not a lot i mean for us actually the the the bigger question would be what kind of funding partner could we find right that would be truly a partner and aligned in terms of growing the business because we're very much conscious capitalism you know be corp sort of aligned um so that makes it a little bit of a narrower band of folks to look into dream investor they're gonna write you a 500 000 check pick from anyone on earth i don't know any of the my dream investors come on elise you got you gotta know you have to go you have to target out of a dream i uh yeah i would okay yeah where would you i mean wait so when you say when you want to i'm a little confused of what you mean right so like if eric won from zoom said he'd like to invest do you consider that strategic or you're talking about like someone that runs a b corp for a charity or something that's you know tied into that world yeah not for a charity um it's it's about sustainable growth right it's about um trying to find ways to invest and then grow business together in ways that create returns both for all of the investors but also for the larger community around you mm-hmm so it's good yeah no it's all right what do you so to get one of these new 39 a month on on-demand kinds of folks what are you spending on your fully weighted cac to get them do you know i have no idea we are entirely inbound we have no advertising we have no anything no spending okay so you're not sure how that model works yet and then has anyone started paying and then stopped what's your churn they have we so we gain on the on-demand side we gain you know five to ten a month which is not a huge growth rate at all um and we lose one or two okay got it across 300 right so i mean that's that's not a i mean that's not a horrible call maybe one percent a month or 12 to annually churn yeah the the churn once they convert to paying is not is not bad at all and usually those are people who've gone out of business or they've had a major leadership transition elise sounds good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um you know i think uh influence and persuasion by sieldini are pretty darn handy and you can learn a lot from great game of business by jack steck number two is there a ceo you're following are studying right now ari wines wig at zingerman's zingerman's ceo very good number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company i have a an intense love-hate relationship with hubspot number four how many hours of sleep to get every night seven to eight that's good and can i ask your uh can i ask your age i'm 45. 45 and situation married single kids married lots of kids how many between us we have five holy mackerel okay five kiddos um now are you like having to manage them in the company are they all out of the house at this point oh no no my my youngest is seven oh you you have a full plate you are busy yeah that's 2010 to 2014. this is amazing all right last question what's something you wish your 20 year old self knew you actually have to do the work yep guys do the work lucid meetings helping teams run smoother meetings working with about 300 customers right now for enterprise customers paying 50 to 100 000 acvs they're doing about 800 000 per year right now in revenue growing nicely team of five people they're bootstrapped which i love prof almost profitable two engineers they look to scale 12 annual churn uh again no revenue or no uh funding in the company today again as they use services cash flow to drive the growth of the sas business elise thanks for taking us to the top thank you