How Matter Made CEO Eli Rubel grew Matter Made to $5.9M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Eli Ruble he's been a marketing advisor to some of the most iconic technology companies of Our Generation including Dropbox Loom calm product board and many others his agency mattermaid.co helps early stage companies reduce CAC and drive sustainable demand Eli Ray takes to the top let's go all right let's talk about Loom first I had the folks on I think with shahad I forget which one it was one of the co-founders on bright like a week before they were launching the paywall they said Nathan we've been patient we've got a bio coefficient built in when you send a loom and get two to sign up it works we've got 1.2 million on the waitlist we want to convert I think I'm going on memory I think he said they wanted to convert 6 000 to a ten dollar a month plan and they want to hit a million dollar run rate within like the first 24 hours you worked with them early on at what were you working within pre-revenue to build that wait list or was it post Revenue once they you know had a million two million in ARR yeah this would be this would be post Revenue so this was essentially when I think they had raised a series a at this point um and they were trying to figure out how to um cast a wider net like their goal was to increase work user signups efficiently and so we launched this hybrid campaign for them helping them lean into high intent channels capture demand and drive down their cost to acquire but I mean at a high level they brought us in when they basically didn't have a demand team it's like maybe a demand team of one or two we were brought in by an advisor of theirs uh partner directly with CEO Joe and his team is this is this typical folks use you right they have one or two internal folks but they really need more strength before they hire 10 people on their internal demand gen team yeah I mean I'd say that's probably the most common use case is like series a series B real small demand team and essentially they they need to get to key growth Milestones to get to that next raise um and prove some things out but it's kind of risky to go and hire like a very senior growth leader because they might not have the budget for the growth leader and the growth teams like the arms and legs to execute plus strategy and so we're able to come in and be that senior strategy layer that's you know helped grow 10 plus unicorns a year um and also be their arms and legs really help them figure out that initial foundational growth plan and the program what that looks like help them establish Baseline metrics such that they can go back to their board and say we've built a demand engine it works here's about how much it costs to scale and then they can go and build out their team so we're frequently what do you reverse engineer from if you had to pick one metric that you say it's this and then everything else Falls from this what what is it is it CAC payback is it CAC in general what is it yeah I mean the two metrics we focus on are reducing cost to acquire and scaling Revenue so it's like revenue or pipeline depending on who we're talking to and depending on how long their sales cycle is right so we might come in for a six-month engagement and if it's an Enterprise sales product we're not going to be focused on Revenue because their sales Cycles might be six to nine months we'll be focused on like quality pipe gen where the sales reps are saying yes these are really great conversations we're having whereas if it's you know a product-led Growth Company like Loom or hoppin or Com or any of these other companies we've worked with and helped grow um feedback cycle is much more immediate and so we're able to focus on it might be pqls that they're really focused on and that's the board metric that they care about usually the metric is driven by the board wants to see certain proof points and we reverse engineer from there oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to 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 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 not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations 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 the interview yeah okay let me give you I prefer to talk about one of your customers but I'm sure you can't because of ndas so let me make up an account that I think is maybe similar to who you help and then let's let's let's go through that so okay I'm gonna see I'm I don't want to use series X with a lot of bootstrap Hunters on who are actually bigger and revenue-wise in terms of their series a competitors but let's say there's someone listening right now they've got five million Revenue right whether they're series a or bootstrap whatever they have five million Revenue they're currently paying I'm gonna make this up 100. let's say they're paying 400 bucks to get a 40 a month customer so 10 month payback they hire you you come in what's a good CAC what Target are you setting for a 40 a month plan I mean it's gonna depend there's so many factors it's so hard to go like get me in your head talk out think out loud all right give me the metrics again yeah so four four hundred dollars to require a 40 a month customer 10 month payback okay and so your question I want to hire you how much can you improve yeah I honestly don't even know how to answer that like so let me let me give you an answer like the our process is we we look at what I call demand efficiency so most most people when they're talking about this space they will they'll talk about demand capture they'll talk about demand creation and where we find the juice and what's different is we zoom out further and say let's talk about demand efficiency which is all of the different growth surfaces and by surface that could be something as common as you know like the actual channels and how effective we are on those channels but it could be the soft tissue between touch points like when and when a trial comes in how is that handed off between sales and marketing or is there an upsell motion that is triggered by in-product uh behavior that then there's a certain handoff so like they're all of the life cycle nurtures like all of these different spaces um where things can go wrong and a lot of these companies especially on the earlier side ignore these surfaces Eli that was really valuable you just gave two soft tissue between touch Point how is trial handed off is there an upsell motion triggered in on product Behavior give me a couple more of those questions that was good yeah I mean so okay so like all of these surfaces cross between how they approach Tam customer focus Revenue orchestration top of funnel mid funnel messaging alignment experimentation and retention those are like the high level buckets that go into demand efficiency and then within each of these there is there are a number of kind of qualifying questions that will tell you how well you're doing in demand efficiency you actually set up a a survey that scores companies and they can like fill this out on their own and then get benchmarked against the industry leaders and see like okay if you know uh if calm and Loom our score of 93 in demand efficiency like you could see I'm a plg company like how do I score in demand efficiency and then they would essentially give you like a recipe book for what to focus on as far as low hanging fruit so you ask for more specifics I gave you categories let me give you more specific so like in Tam it could be are you trying like a lot of a lot of early stage companies think of their Tam they're like yes this is what I've been pitching my investors or if I'm bootstrapped like this is our total addressable Market I'm excited I'm gonna go after everyone I can get in front of everyone I can but the reality is if your budget is strapped you need to focus on a specific segment of your Tam you can't just try to boil the ocean or you can but it's going to be way less effective because you might only be able to get your impression in front of folks like once or twice whereas if you're focused on 10 of your Tam you might be able to get in front of them like 15 times in a certain time period right so that's like one little piece of it um you know simple things automated lead routing automated lead booking sop between sales and marketing uh a lot of time early stage companies will have a complex buyer Journey that they've done a really good job like the marketers have done a great job teeing up this person to talk to sales and then sales will have no idea of all that historical con context and they'll just treat them like they're a cold in cold inbound right and so then then there's this disconnect in all the hard work marketing has done this person thinks they're going to go into this really like high quality conversation then you have an scr saying like oh have you ever heard about heard of us before kind of a thing um so there are a lot of different examples like this but in aggregate it could be the difference between you know cutting your cost to where in half it's huge yeah it's huge okay I imagine people are hearing you say this going oh I wonder what eat what tools Eli is recommending for all this stuff automated lead routing all this kind of stuff right now what is like your your Tech stack right now that you're just really bullish on um to be honest I think people over invest in Tech Stacks generally I think that uh people generally think that Tech is going to solve fundamental problems for them that it won't and so usually Step One is before I even answer that question I would say step one is like get clarity on your buyer Journeys they're gonna there should be multiple buyer Journeys they should be segmented um appropriately and then once you have just like from very first touch Point all the way through to revenue and you can very clearly Define that from marketing's influence to sales influence to products influence to retention all of these pieces then you can say okay where are our gaps that technology could fill um rather than this being manual right and so there is no one-size-fits all I really I'm not like a huge Fanboy of anything in particular it's just like what is the right tool for the job and what's minimally invasive yep yeah that makes good sense okay let's talk more about you what got you into this when did you launch the agency uh launched the agency in 2019 I founded a SAS company before that that was Venture backed sold that in 2014 uh acquired which company was that glider.com we did quite lifecycle Management Hot Space did you bootstrap that or raised I uh I raced yeah did how much did you raise I raised like 1.4 1.7 something like that required really early so be on it look I put my freaking tax returns in the book right so I rate bootstrap 2 million bucks raised 2 million BC flash sold I made no money the the investors barely got the liquidation preference but I learned a crap ton so same question to you I mean was this a life-changing for you is it basically like a shutdown acquire sort of deal yeah so uh I was waiting tables before this I dropped out of art school and I was basically like man I need to get my foot in the door in Tech I'm gonna pick the most boring unsexy company I could possibly pick contract management sound sounded like the ticket uh this by Silicon Valley standards was a total failure um sold the company for three million dollars okay um but for me you know I I walked away with a seven figure outcome you learned a ton and I learned a ton and and like the relationships that I built and the trust that I'm built from that became the platform for everything else that I've done yeah how did you make a million though off that if you raised 1.2 I assume you had co-founders too right I had a co-founder okay um who was no longer with the company by the time we acquired so I see okay so you can basically take acquisition price of three million minus whatever pref investors got and then there's some there's some juice there to squeeze for you which is great exactly okay so you then pour all you pour all that into matter made no no I I acquired an e-commerce company I was really burnt out after that I was like all right man I gotta take a break um from Tech acquire an e-commerce company to just like learn something new and give my brain a break from from the SAS stuff uh it was a dumpster fire like I literally bought this thing the guy was about to shut the company down he was a brick and mortar guy in one of his uh how much more spend on it I paid 70 grand foreign name and like some assets it's not bad I mean if your whole net worth is what you made off the glider sale that was only what 10 of your net worth yeah exactly yeah okay so what happened you just you killed it or what so I bought the company this was an interesting one this so I bought it um they were doing like 20K a month I got it up to I think it's like 250k 300K a month in rev um and then realized that Amazon was just absolutely going to destroy us and there's like a roll-up happening we were selling motorcycle parts and accessories online um so I saw the writing on the wall it's like okay I need to get out of this I sold it to a PE firm in 2019 and that's when I started matter made interesting okay was that a flash sale in 2019 or was it that was like a no that was like a I'm holding almost a million dollars in inventory that's all aging it's like motorcycle parts right so every year it becomes more and more obsolete the parts that you're carrying in a warehouse that's so funny we had 22 000 skus under management it was nice oh my God so you stole this like a thracio sort of business or someone else uh we sold this to a PE firm that was rolling up they owned like bikebandit.com and a couple of other e-commerce motorcycle entities interesting Well the hat trick here was uh buying this business allowed me to extend my qsbs exemption from glider so I ended up like the money that I made on the second position was really just in the tax savings yeah from Rolling the proceeds that's great that makes tons of that makes tons of sense if you guys want to learn more about that just Google qsbs and you'll understand um okay so then you get into matter made uh when did you so you launched that in 2019 um can you sort of share first year Revenue in 2019 at matter made yeah that's a good question first year revenue and matter made was probably it was like nine 900k something like that okay that's not terrible for first year agency but you already had some chops of value you sort of been through the linger already yeah yeah and what were you so like if I was Loom approaching and not actually Loom but if I was like a loom approaching you what are you doing you're saying here's a six month deal it's 10 grand a month retainer or what yeah exactly we were we had a monthly retainer six month deals uh exactly that what and so what are you doing today same model today it's a very similar model so we have a paid media side of the business we realized that most paid media agencies were like agency people starting agencies and I felt like coming from SAS I knew how broken that model was so we do a Performance Based model where we literally set our pricing based on which growth milestones we help them accomplish and if we miss those Milestones our rate gets cut down and vice versa like we make more when they win uh and then there's the traditional side which we've already talked about which is like marketing org in a box so they come in your loom and you say hey I've only got one to two marketers I need like VP level strategy plus execution in across demand gen Performance Marketing uh messaging like all of the different surfaces lifecycle marketing nurture just come in and own the whole program for six months and help us get to a better place and then that's still like 10 10 20 grand a month you've increased prices no no we were 45k a month all of last year across all of our clients and I would say times are a little bit different now so we we've changed our pricing it's a little bit lower okay it's okay but still okay guys this isn't like for I mean I would say if you're going to spend 30 grand a month on a six month deal right it's 180 Grand I mean you don't obviously want to be spending this unless you're doing at least four or five million bucks in Revenue right you need some industry cohorts for you to analyze precisely yeah yeah yeah okay very cool um and how many clients you're working with right now like literally in this moment oh man you're gonna make me do math live call like 10 10. okay and how many how many employees do you have at the agency serving these 10 customers we have uh 12 boys 12. okay okay this is great so 12 employees so 10 times 30 grand I mean so that's like 300 000 bucks a month in Revenue something like that something like that this is a very profitable agency yeah yeah I mean we did uh we did 6.1 Top Line last year uh and we're being a little lower this year or about the same will be lower this year yeah I mean we were 37 employees earlier in the year we we had to downsize when are you spinning out when are you spinning out your SAS company I know you're working on it dude oh I can feel it too I I so funny enough I I just spun off um we have this amazing design team like they're doing design for Dropbox and Yelp and like really high profile clients of ours and I realized that so many companies especially like you said your audience is like bootstrapped or early stage Founders like these so many of these companies wish they could have that level of creative for their campaigns and their brand and all their assets and right now up until at this point they've had to work with matter made and pay that giant monthly retainer to get access to our design team but I was like you know what let me spin off our design team and have it be like start at 2500 a month get design exactly when you need it not be held up waiting for the product designer to ship your you know marketing assets that sort of thing or brand assets so I just spun that off that's my new baby in addition to matter made that's called noboringdesign.com no doubt about it yeah eventually interesting okay cool all right on that note here let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite Business book oh Never Eat Alone number two is our CEO you're following or studying no number three what's your favorite online tool for building matter made I live and die by HubSpot all right Fair number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night nine and a half I love that uh what's your situation married single kids married uh one-year-old daughter Ah that's exciting how old are you I am 34. 34 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh uh enjoy it guys he had his first ass coming a couple years ago raised 1.2 million and then sold for 3 million still managed to make a bunch on that because he was really the major shareholder there then said you know what I'm gonna use this money by an e-commerce brand failed miserably flash sold that then got into matter made where now he works with some of the fastest growing Brands you've heard of loom G2 these kinds of fast growing SAS companies helping them decrease CAC or increase revenue and drive more pipeline charges on average call it 30 or 40 Grand a month in Revenue currently working with the 10 customers and they'll do about 3.6 this year up from or sorry down from 6.1 last year but last year was VC dollars flown everywhere was the heydays uh now getting now spinning off his design agency to do that continue running this I think I'll have a SAS business one day we'll wait and see but in the meantime Eli thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m 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 nathanlacka.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 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 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