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...