How Maropost Reached $63M Revenue and 5,000 Customers with 52% EBITDA Margins (Interview with CEO Ross Paquette)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey folks, my guest today is Ross Paquette. He's building a company called maropost.com launched or at least earliest date I've got revenue data on call all the way back to 2016, 2017. Now scaling up. Now he took some capital from an outside partner and said, You know what? I like the Bootstrap life much better. He said, You know, I'm gonna buy them back. And he did it. Now he's continuing to scale. They're doing M and A.

00:20One of the great Bootstrap success stories. Ross, welcome to the show.

Ross Paquette

00:24>> Thanks so much for having me, Nathan. Okay. Did I get that right? When was founding year? It was actually 2000 Jesus, what year are we now? It was 2011. Sorry.

Nathan Latka

00:35Ah, okay. Okay. So '20 And then for folks that have not heard of you before, quickly, what do you guys do? What are you selling?

What Maropost Sells and Its Target Market

Ross Paquette

00:41>> Yeah, absolutely. So we have a single solution that encompasses, commerce cloud, marketing cloud and service cloud. So effectively e commerce and retail marketing automation, email, SMS, and then help desk, a live chat, chatbots, ticketing, and so on. And our target market is mid market e commerce and retail businesses or organizations.

Revenue History from 2013 to 2019

Nathan Latka

01:03Hot, very hot space. So when did you, do you remember the year you guys passed a million bucks in revenue?

Ross Paquette

01:09>> Yeah, that would have been 2013, I guess.

Nathan Latka

01:12And what was that like? What were you selling back then? Is it the same thing today or

Ross Paquette

01:15>> is it changing Yeah, no, mostly email marketing and marketing automation. So we very quickly went from 300,000 in revenue in '20, I guess that would have been 2013 actually. And then 2014, 3,300,000. 2016, if I'm not mistaken was $13,300,000 and then $26,000,000 in 2017, if I'm not mistaken.

Nathan Latka

01:36Interesting. And then you told me on the last show you broke 40,000,000 in 2019.

Ross Paquette

01:40>> Yeah, correct. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

01:42Very cool. Okay. So how many of these companies or customers are you serving today?

Ross Paquette

01:46>> Just shy of 5,000 actually. We're about to, we should hit 5,000 in a couple months.

Nathan Latka

01:51Holy cow. Okay. And average company is paying about what in terms of ARPU?

Ross Paquette

01:56>> Probably about $1,800 per month.

Nathan Latka

01:591,800 a month. Okay. So, I mean, can we can multiply those bad boys to get MRR?

Ross Paquette

02:03>> If you want. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

02:04And that's 9,000,000 in MRR?

Current Customer Count and ARPU

Ross Paquette

02:07>> Give or take. Yeah. Maybe I'm a bit less, maybe a little bit over. Yeah. Yeah. Will you break let me let

Nathan Latka

02:13me ask you this. Will you break a $100,000,000 in ARR this year run rate?

Ross Paquette

02:16>> Just shy of it actually. Sorry. Yeah, just shy of it, most likely.

Nathan Latka

02:22So you think by December 2022, so this year you'll do about 8,300,000 in MRR that month?

Ross Paquette

02:26>> Correct.

Nathan Latka

02:27Yeah. I love that. Okay. So now let's reverse engineer from a 100,000,000 run rate, right? So you're getting there a bunch of ways. First off, you're preserving equity with some buybacks. You're doing some acquisitions with M and A. Let's talk about the funding strategy first. So thought you wanted to raise and you did. What year was that and how much did you raise?

The 2016 Secondary Round and Investor Buyback

Ross Paquette

02:43>> That was 2016 and we did an all secondary round for 37,000,000 US, 50,000,000 Canadian if it was relevant.

Nathan Latka

02:50Okay. 37,000,000 US and that was a 100% secondary to you or also early employees investors?

Ross Paquette

02:56>> Yeah, it was a combination. Like everybody got a bonus and all that kind of stuff.

Nathan Latka

03:00Okay. Okay. And what valuation was that at?

Ross Paquette

03:03>> 163,000,000.

Nathan Latka

03:05Did that feel fair at the time?

Ross Paquette

03:07>> Yeah, it did.

Nathan Latka

03:08Yeah. Okay.

Ross Paquette

03:09>> At the time. Yeah. Yeah. And that

Nathan Latka

03:10was post or pre?

Ross Paquette

03:12>> Yeah. That was, there was technically no post or pre because it was all secondary. So Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it.

Nathan Latka

03:18Yeah. So we could take 37 divided by 163. They bought about 20%, 21% of the business.

Ross Paquette

03:23>> Yeah, exactly.

Nathan Latka

03:25Okay. And then you sort of casually said it felt good at the time. What happened?

Ross Paquette

03:29>> Yeah, mean, was, it's easy to look back. I mean, was all very positive. They're really great people, great groups, but, you know, coming from a fully bootstrapped approach where the business is based on profitability and growth at the same time and not grow by all costs, where effectively the founder being myself is gambling with the growth of the business, which is as I see it. You know, we were just really weren't aligned from a philosophical perspective,

03:55>> but I don't think that would have been any different with any other parties, frankly. Think it was just, you know, it was just how the times were then with from an investment standpoint, and at least from, kind of the VC to to, you know, kind of startup VP firms as well. And so for us, it just really didn't make sense to continue down that path.

Nathan Latka

04:16Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:39your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:04get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here, Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is

05:25not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

05:51going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

06:13you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. All right. Let's jump back into

First Board Meetings and Philosophical Misalignment

Nathan Latka

06:39the interview. And so, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of you might right now be listening, thinking about raising capital or doing a secondary like you just described, but they're really not sure like what their first board meeting is gonna be like. You obviously didn't like what you saw or heard in your first couple of board meetings. Otherwise you wouldn't have bought them back out. So what act, what were you expecting and what happened?

Ross Paquette

06:58>> To be honest with you, it was, that's actually a great question because I had absolutely no idea. So like no preparation whatsoever, very little from a content perspective. We were doing like, again, I think about 16,000,000 at the time with maybe 20 employees in the business. And yeah, I just had zero experience from that perspective. So it really wasn't anything on that front. Think it was a combination of things that happened over, you know, over the

07:24>> three year period that, you know, it was just like, we better separate here or this is going to go sideways. The business had gone from triple digit growth to single digit growth, You know, so really nobody was happy across the board and I don't take a salary or compensation. I do well if the company does well. So I'm very focused on, again, continuing to build the business, not just, you know, Ross has got, you know, compensation

07:47>> coming from salary and options and all this kind of stuff as well. So what did you do about it? Sorry.

Nathan Latka

07:54So you didn't, you didn't obviously like that sort of pressure. It didn't make a lot of sense. Right. So what did you do about it? You raised this capital. Are they still on the cap table today?

Ross Paquette

08:02>> No, no, no. So I bought them out or, you know, there's a few more nuances to it, but yeah, we effectively decided on a figure. I went our separate ways and

Nathan Latka

08:12Ross, you think I'm just

Ross Paquette

08:14>> gonna let you off the hook by saying we decided on a figure?

Nathan Latka

08:16How the hell do you come with a figure? They just paid 163,000,000 valuation. Can you convince them to sell them back at like 1x? Or they're gonna say, Ross, you gotta give us a premium. Our capital is tied up for you.

Ross Paquette

08:23>> No, it was nothing like that. It was just kind of what you said. Okay. So they're like,

Nathan Latka

08:28if we had put the same $37,000,000 in the stock market, we would have earned 10%. So give us 10% more than 37,000,000. You can have your 20% back. Something like that.

Ross Paquette

08:37>> Something like that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:39All right. Fair enough. Okay. And then what? So you get that deal done. Where did you get that money from, by the way? Was it the cap? I mean, was that all the money on the balance sheet?

Ross Paquette

08:47>> All the secondary funds. So effectively at the time I had just taken the capital, didn't spend any of it, invested it and, you know, the money was just sitting there. And so I think we're very fortunate in that regard to have done an all secondary round whereby, you know, we didn't put all the money into the business, spend the money, and now we're like, we're totally screwed here Yeah, on both

Nathan Latka

09:08that a ton of sense. So, okay, got it. So you do that in 2016. Let's, before we talk about like more recent capital news, let's talk about product between 2017 and today, right? So how has that evolved? Have you done any acquisitions?

Ross Paquette

09:20>> Yeah. Yeah, so we did the two acquisitions that you mentioned that we've spoken about before. So we acquired a company out of Australia called Neto back at the end of twenty twenty. So right in the thick of COVID and then acquired another coincidentally Australian business as well at the end of twenty twenty one. Clearly we have an affinity for Christmas deals and that was in the point of sale space called Retail Express. And so back to

09:46>> your question, which was, you know, how has the product evolved? We've had the same vision for the last six years, which was this unified, again, commerce marketing automation and support solution. And so really we acquired those businesses to just help bolster a lot of the knowledge, lot of the understanding, a lot of the nuances that come from retail and e commerce that, you know, we just didn't have the experience with. And so those have been very

10:11>> successful for us, especially as we're continuing forward in our product strategy.

Nathan Latka

10:16How do you measure success of an acquisition?

Ross Paquette

10:20>> Good question. I mean, the percentage of failures is so high. You know, think you're able to look back and say that the asset still has retained the value or amplified the value of the overall business, that's successful, right? Things aren't always going to work out with the, you know, with the founders or with the previous leadership team. Things aren't also going to work out, always going to work out from a customer technology perspective. But I think

10:44>> if you can look back and say, would still do this, you know, twenty four months later, twelve months later, even for that matter, you know, that's really the key, you know, to the success side of things. And I don't think that's very common in, you know, in all the examples that you and I have both seen over the years.

Nathan Latka

10:59No, I would agree. So Neto, how much ARR were they doing when you bought them?

Ross Paquette

11:03>> Do you remember? They were around just over 10,000,000 USD.

Nathan Latka

11:08Okay, got it. And bootstrapped?

Ross Paquette

11:12>> No, they had, they were owned by, this is all public information. So they were majority, their majority shareholder, sorry, Telstra. It's an Australian telco, so similar to AT and T or Verizon, but in Australia.

Nathan Latka

11:24And so was that an advantage or a disadvantage that they were owned by a big conglomerate?

Ross Paquette

11:28>> I think it was actually in a way it was an advantage because Telstra is a huge company. They were making changes effectively with the strategy that they were implementing that caused them to acquire or invest in a business like that. And so, you know, when a company that's doing billions and billions of dollars in revenue, you know, is making a turn, you know, a $10,000,000 revenue company is really not that important to them. They're just thinking

11:53>> the strategy is different now. Let's exit the, you know, investments that we've made across the board and move into the new direction we're moving in.

Nathan Latka

12:00So I

Ross Paquette

12:01>> think everybody was very motivated to, you know, to complete the transaction in a mutually beneficial way.

Nathan Latka

12:07Yep. And I guess when you look at how Ross likes to structure deals, Of that total price that you paid for Neto, what percent was like all cash upfront versus them taking a ride with you now and sitting on your cap table?

Ross Paquette

12:18>> No, no, it was all cash. So we paid all cash. Yeah. Our cap table is still myself and the employees. That's it.

Nathan Latka

12:24Wow. That's incredible. Okay. So so 60,000,000 all cash upfront for Neto. Six x multiple.

Ross Paquette

12:31>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:31Interesting. And can you share those same metrics?

Ross Paquette

12:33>> I'm sorry. That was in USD. So it's a little less than that. It was closer to 4x multiple.

Nathan Latka

12:37I see. I see USD. Okay, cool. And what about by the way, you like 60,000,000. Retail Express, think was a $55,000,000 deal. Same sort of size, 10,000,000 revenue? So a little bit smaller,

Ross Paquette

12:48>> but completely boot strapped and founder owned and operated. The founder there is now our Managing Director of Australia and New Zealand, coincidentally.

Nathan Latka

12:57That's super cool. And did you pay about the same multiple, four to six X, something like that?

Ross Paquette

13:01>> Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Okay. And, but in his example, there was a little bit more, you know, a big part of it was the partnership continuing forward, you know, having an aligned vision on the business. So I'm really excited to have him here and he's obviously a big advocate for us in Australia.

Nathan Latka

13:16So I'm keynoting SaaStock here in a couple of days. And I said, I wanna put some of this at the front of my keynote. And what I wanna put there is founder, a lot of founders don't know, this is gonna sound very conceited, but don't know a better way to ask it. Founders know how to get personally rich or wealthy without exiting, which they don't wanna do because it's like selling your baby. You're gonna go do

Building Personal Wealth Through Dividends

Nathan Latka

13:33the same thing again. So what if there was a way to not sell your baby, but still generate personal wealth? The way you obviously can do that is sort of via secondaries, dividends, things like that. You know, obviously without sharing personal net worth and things you don't wanna share, but how have you built the business so you can extract personally wealth and build a great life? So

Ross Paquette

13:50>> it goes back to my comment before. So I don't have a salary. I don't have a bonus. I don't have anything. I have my ownership in the business and if the business does well, I do well. So typically through dividends as you just described and we've been fortunate enough to build a strong performing business when it comes to cash flow and EBITDA and profitability. So that has really driven that side of the coin. Granted that's not

14:13>> very common, certainly not in the tech spaces we've seen. Most companies are burning through capital. So I think it just it takes that unique focus on ensuring that a profitable business is a part of the strategy as well. So as in, it's great to grow 50% year over year in my opinion, but it's also great to have a 40% or 50% EBITDA margin around the cash flow side of things.

52% EBITDA Margins and Profitability Philosophy

Nathan Latka

14:35You mean you guys are doing 50% EBITDA margins right now, last year?

Ross Paquette

14:40>> Yeah, about 52. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:41This is insane. Guys, this isn't, I'm laughing. I'm laughing because I mean, this isn't small scale we're talking about. I mean, this is like, I think you guys had like a $63,000,000 in revenue USD last year or something like that. Right?

Ross Paquette

14:52>> He's like, yes, yes.

Nathan Latka

14:53Right. So 53%. I mean, you guys do the math, 53%.

14:57Now, Ross, obviously that whole dividend, that's not all coming out of business. It's not all personally your money,

Ross Paquette

15:01>> but We use it for the acquisitions.

Nathan Latka

15:03Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But then you also obviously, you, even when you pay the dividend, do you structure it in a way where it's weighted? So for example, if employees own 10% of the business, you own 90%, you're gonna pay out 10,000,000 in profits. It's split evenly like that?

Ross Paquette

15:16>> No, we don't, we don't have any shareholders except for myself. So we have option holders like everybody else. And we're very generous with that side because we want people to enjoy in the journey that we're going down, but they are nonetheless still option holders.

Nathan Latka

15:29So I guess my question would be, do you let them, so if you, Ross, as Founder, pay your spot a dividend, which I love, you should, it's a great way to build wealth, this is why you've started a company in the first place, it's for freedom. Do you enable the employees to sell back options to the company at like a certain price? They can, okay, got it. So they can't get, so how will they get liquidity

15:47long term?

Ross Paquette

15:49>> They would get it when we hit an exit event. So in our case, when we go public or via public listing or direct listing or an IPO, is our path. I mean, alternatively, you know, most other companies are trying to sell themselves, so that would be their liquidity event. But for us, that is the specific path we're heading down.

Nathan Latka

16:06Ross, I think you would be a terrible public company CEO because it's your personality at all. Yeah.

Ross Paquette

16:13>> I'm not interested in that either. And that's not my goal. That's different. My goal is more to retain 80% of the business and be able to operate from a product perspective or a vision perspective and really be supportive to somebody like that. I don't aspire to be the CEO of a public company.

Nathan Latka

16:27I say that in a joking way, but that's a compliment. Yeah, I mean, you don't fit the mold, right? Like you're doing things a very different way, which I think is frankly healthy. But my question still stands though. So if you don't wanna IPO, don't want to exit. You want to keep 80% and grow it yourself.

Ross Paquette

16:41>> We do want to IPO or we do want to go public.

Nathan Latka

16:43That's the goal. You do want to IPO?

Ross Paquette

16:46>> Correct. But I don't aspire to be the CEO of that public company. You know, after a few years I will, you know, of course, either, you know, bring somebody in from outside or have somebody, you know, elevate within the organization and we're positioning ourselves even now for those stages. I see.

The Ongoing Secondary Round

Nathan Latka

17:02Okay. Very cool. Now, the reason we're recording this is twofold. One is that I wanted your story ahead of SaaStock cause you're actually doing some deals in Sweden and The Nordics. But second is, I think you did recently a secondary. So update us. What did you recently do?

Ross Paquette

17:14>> Yeah. So just as of Sorry, it's still ongoing right now. So I'm not even sure if I should share this, but we're doing a secondary round at a $1,700,000,000 valuation.

Nathan Latka

17:25I love this. Okay. So just for people that don't know what a secondary is, can you explain it in maybe two, three senses?

Ross Paquette

17:29>> Yeah, absolutely. So secondary is providing liquidity to the shareholders as opposed to directing funds right into the business in terms of primary.

Nathan Latka

17:40Yep. So if we take, let's say you're at like a, well, I mean, what are you doing right now at MRR?

Ross Paquette

17:46>> 6? I have to look.

Nathan Latka

17:486,000,000? Just shy of that. Something around 6. Yeah. So I mean, so that would put you right now at like a run rate, whatever. What is that? $72,000,000 run rate, right?

Ross Paquette

17:56>> It's just under 60.

Nathan Latka

17:58Under 60. Okay, cool. So I'm trying to back into your multiple, right? So did you Was it a competitive process and that's unable to drive up the multiple?

IPO Plans and Employee Liquidity

Ross Paquette

18:06>> Not really. We've gone with a much wider net. So there's not just one or two or even five parties involved. There's more than 50. We've taken a bit of a different approach to this because we have a lot of people who have been involved in the business for years, been in, you know, customers of the business, partners in the business, employees, family members, friends. This was their opportunity to really to enter into the, you know, it

18:30>> wouldn't be the cap table again, but effectively enter into an investment that they can, you know, join the journey over the next few years as we head to our public listing as well.

Nathan Latka

18:38And so what do you think the size of the secondary will be? You know, 50,000,000, 10,000,000, a 100,000,000?

Ross Paquette

18:43>> Yeah, probably close to 50,000,000.

Nathan Latka

18:4550,000,000. Okay, interesting. So this is sort of a way for, you know, partners, friends, supporters, marketing agency owners who love you to death and sell out of Maropost to buy in pre IPO.

Ross Paquette

18:57>> Yeah, exactly. Interesting.

Revenue per Employee and Rule of 40

Nathan Latka

18:59Super interesting. How do all your other sort of IPO metrics, rule of 40, you good?

Ross Paquette

19:04>> Yeah, we're good on that one. Yeah, absolutely.

Nathan Latka

19:07Net dollar retention.

Ross Paquette

19:07>> Can't remember the actual, yeah, this year will be well above 150.

Nathan Latka

19:13Okay. That's world class. I'm trying to think of revenue per employee?

Ross Paquette

19:18>> Revenue per employee is just over 200 right now, but it'll be significantly higher. We've been staffing up, you know, much like other companies are aggressively.

Nathan Latka

19:27That, well, so sorry, that number will go down because you're adding headcount?

Ross Paquette

19:31>> No, no, no. So we've added the headcount. We're already in that process right now, but we've staffed up for a much higher revenue multiple at

Nathan Latka

19:37Which the end of the is great because you're already above average. Most public trades companies, it's about 129 average revenue per employee. You're already at 200. Rule of forties, rule of whatever higher, and net dollar retention is already world class at 150.

Ross Paquette

19:48>> Yeah. We're targeting about over 300, 300, three fifty on the employee side of things.

Net Dollar Retention and Cross-Sell Strategy

Nathan Latka

19:53I just love that you track it. I never talked to a pre IPO founder that's even tracking revenue per employee. Really? It's not even a thought, unfortunately. So I think it's great. How have you driven, you know, something, I guess we'll wrap up on this. That net dollar retention surprised me because you're selling to mid market. These aren't enterprise deals necessarily. How are you gonna be able to get- how are we going to keep gross churn low and

20:14then also cross sell enough to get up to 150 net?

Ross Paquette

20:16>> Yeah. So the key element of the platform is people are usually coming in for one, you know, through one of the areas of the platform. One of the three or one of the four arguably is, you know, e commerce retail marketing or service clouds. And so they're coming in through one of those and then we're cross selling them over the rest of the platform. So if anything, 150 is probably generous because somebody could easily come into

20:41>> Service Cloud and maybe they're using Shopify or they're using Klaviyo for marketing and that's fine. And then we cross sell them into those solutions and all of a sudden what was a, you know, 1,000 a month customer is now a $4,000 a month customer. And those other areas of the solution are of significantly higher, maybe not cost base, but value for the business overall.

Team Size, Engineers, and Sales Reps

Nathan Latka

21:01That makes a ton of sense. And what's the full team size today? How many people?

Ross Paquette

21:06>> Three zero five.

Nathan Latka

21:07Three zero five. And how many of those are engineers?

Ross Paquette

21:11>> About 125.

Nathan Latka

21:13Okay. So heavy there as expected. How many sales reps that carry a quota?

Ross Paquette

21:17>> Only 15.

Nathan Latka

21:18Interesting. Why do you say only?

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Ross Paquette

21:20>> Because usually companies would have, you know, usually the numbers would be the other way around to what I just described. So, you know, you'd have a 100 people in sales at a minimum and then marketing would be another 50 or 60 even, and then the rest trickles down through support and client success and development and so on.

Nathan Latka

21:38Well, Ross, this is a hell of a story man. We're rooting for you. Let's wrap up here with Famous Five. Number one, favorite business book?

Ross Paquette

21:44>> Favorite business book? Elon Musk's autobiography.

Nathan Latka

21:47Number two, by the way, is he about to take over all of He has 9.2% of Twitter. He's gonna take over the whole thing or what?

Ross Paquette

21:53>> I don't think so. No. I don't

Nathan Latka

21:56think Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Ross Paquette

22:00>> Probably him to be honest with you. It's not like I'm a fan or anything, or I should say I'm not a fan, but I'm not a fan in particular. I just really appreciate the hard work and I can obviously sympathize with the fact that it, you know, takes so much of that to get to where he's been. You know, Maropost is of course not comparable to Tesla in any way, shape or form, but, know, we certainly

22:19>> hard worked our way to a lot of our successes.

Nathan Latka

22:21Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Maropost besides your own?

Ross Paquette

22:26>> Good question.

22:29>> Honestly, probably Microsoft Office. They've just done a great job.

22:33>> Tried and true.

Nathan Latka

22:34Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Ross Paquette

22:37>> Six hours.

Nathan Latka

22:38Six? That's impressive. Because you have a new one, so that's impressive. Six hours is pretty good actually.

Ross Paquette

22:42>> I've been lucky to maintain that, to be honest with you. I've been talking a lot about it. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:46I forget. First kid or is it second or third?

Ross Paquette

22:49>> First kid, yeah. And a week old.

Nathan Latka

22:50Wow. Well, hey, congratulations, man. That's so I was my email was right on when I said, I think the baby's due. Was literally Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Ross Paquette

22:56>> It was last Friday or sorry, the Friday before last.

Nathan Latka

23:00So I was only two days late about. That's great.

Ross Paquette

23:01>> Two days late.

Nathan Latka

23:02Exactly.

23:03It's amazing. Alright. And how old are you, Ross?

Ross Paquette

23:05>> I'm 38.

Nathan Latka

23:0638. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Ross Paquette

23:10>> Something I wish I knew when I was 20. Jesus.

23:17>> Good question.

23:19>> I wish I knew how hard it would be to get to this point.

23:24>> I think at the time it seemed very easy and it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.

Nathan Latka

23:27Not an easy journey guys. Maropost launched back in 2011. They did 300 ks in revenue in 2013, 3,300,000 in 2014. Fast forward to 2016, did 13,300,000 and sold $37,000,000 worth of capital, call it capital on 163,000,000 valuation. So sold 20% of the business and said, you know what? I don't like these board meetings with other investors. Wanna buy them back. Did. Now the company basically him and employees own a 100% of the business. They've

23:52scaled up to $60,000,000 in ARR serving over 5,000 customers, 52% profit, EBITDA profit margin last year, and now are raising call between 50 and $60, $70,000,000 bucks in a secondary at a $1,700,000,000 valuation, about a 28 X multiple. This is how you build a great SaaS company, keep control and build a great life as he welcomes his first little one in the world. Ross, thanks for taking us to the top.

Ross Paquette

24:15>> Yeah. Thanks so much, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

24:18One 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 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 1PM

24:44Central. 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

25:06fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or 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 SaaS 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

25:28for that @nathanlatka.comslashslack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and 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, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got to

25:47push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.