How Mediafly CEO Carson Conant grew Mediafly to $15.2M revenue and 260 customers in 2025.

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 carson conant he is building a company called mediafly he's the ceo and founder of the company based in chicago really focused on sales enablement under carson's leadership the company's been recognized as an inc 5000 fastest growing company for five consecutive years the best place to work by inc in 2018 and the best place to work by crain's chicago business the software is currently leveraged by top fortune 500 companies including pepsico miller coors disney and goldman sachs carson ready to take us to the top yeah man all right enterprise play here it sounds like what's the company doing are you pure place ass pure play sass yep okay yep and enterprise um although we you know we also you know handle small business now that we've got this acquisition we just made um so we can handle small teams and small business which is something new since last time what was the acquisition so we acquired a company called i present um uk-based company uk and here but it's a it gives us a self-serve kind of a premium model that um is pretty unique in this space um why do the acquisition i mean why deal with self-serve at all so um one of the biggest challenges with sales enablement is a lot of companies don't know the value so they know they have to do this at some point but it feels a lot like crm they're worried about the deployment word about the return we're about you know usage so this just removes all that so if you're five you know you can start with five users even if you've got ten thousand long term um so it allows us to beat the competition companies like show pad and seismic we can now come in and say look don't spend 18 months looking at this thing roll it out to five people it's gonna be great and start adding more users do you compete with show pad we do yep interesting and sorry what was the second one seismic seismic interesting um and so wait so sorry i understand how do you feel like this gives you an advantage over show pad so we can we can go into companies and rather than going through a big enterprise purchase cycle where there's a lot of risk and a lot of you know there's people worried about it right it's kind of like you know you go buy you know um you know any you know gmail for your for your business you know the ability to start at a no cost model or a very you know very inexpensive model removes a lot of the risk because you know you start using it and you realize this thing really works um so um so we have a big campaign that's launching in the next you know the next 30 days specifically around essentially allowing companies to get easy access to sales enablement whereas before it wasn't this easy so is your acv moved down last time we spoke uh what you were doing i think about a hundred thousand dollar ac was it was with the average yeah i think it'll probably be about half that is my guess um mainly we're just adding customers so fast with this model it's still land and expand so we still take those i mean some of our biggest accounts started at five users and are now you know thousand users right so the model hasn't changed the big thing is we're just adding customers faster so um you know they'll grow over the next you know 18 24 months but um but we can you know we can close new customers in less than 30 days now whereas historically it took you know several months so how many customers are you at right now i think it's 260 customers right now that's pretty good i mean you came on the show six months ago or three months ago and you're at 150 so i mean you've had about 110 now obviously some of those are maybe smbs yep yep yeah smbs also just small teams within big companies right so um you know we've got accounts now that where there might be you know 15 20 different divisions that are each contracting separately using this new model so they don't have to run through a big procurement process um you know they can each buy it individually and because the model's self-service we can support it has most that growth come from that acquisition most of the customer growth yeah probably about half the let's see probably about a third of that growth since the last time you and i talked was organic the other two thirds came from this acquisition okay so so break down the acquisition for me right when how did the how the conversation start they reach out to you you reach out to them yeah we talked to them about two years ago um at the time you know we hadn't done an acquisition we now we now have so we you know we didn't have that muscle um and um you know we hadn't figured out some of our own stuff so you know we kept in touch um they were in a place where i just you know i talked to them and convinced them to to merge themselves into mediafly so um um and um you know they're similar culture very similar technical you know competencies um it gives us a great headquarters in the uk now too um so you know international is a big piece of our business and um so the combination of all those things just made it a natural national fit for both of us you're very good at using debt i want to dive into that how much cash you actually put up for the i present deal or did you get away with nothing yeah no we did end up putting some cash up um i don't think i'm allowed to say what it was but um this what it did include cash um as well as debt on our side um but it was um um this was different than our previous acquisition and that there were some outside shareholders that we needed to buy out versus a you know true aqua higher where everything just rolls in and you know we're looking at a couple more similar to this model yeah now you i mean just just to be clear so if for someone else that's trying to buy companies they've been your shoes they have cash in the balance sheet they want to buy companies they also want to use debt how leveraged can you get up so let me roll play here for a second let's say there's a company doing 5 million bucks in ar that you want to go buy right and let's say the price is 10 million dollars right there obviously you can do stock earn out cash upfront blah blah blah let's say the cash it's all cash up front 10 million using cibc or any other banking partner how much you can lever up how much equity you actually have to put in your thing so the combination of of you know cibc and then other folks i think we can get to about one times ar if we wanted to um i don't know if we get the full credit from the acquisition until a couple quarters so there's probably a discount there and i think the model we've been looking at is kind of a one-third one-third one-third where it's maybe a one-third in cash up front 130 in stock um and uh and then 130 in in um in kind of earn out notes um okay well so if you do one-third in cash though right let's say the deal size is a 10 million one-third is cash that's three million but you're able to raise personally in debt 1x your current mediafly company arr again you could get away by using only debt doing this deal correct yes yes definitely yeah interesting um okay so that makes a lot of sense um what's the team size today how many people so we're now we just we added 22 kept everybody um so i think we're 120 now i want to say yeah you were 85 four months ago i mean that's a lot of growth have you raised additional capital to this or still 28 million in equity we raised um i think we raised a well kind of the beginning of our series c here so we raised some additional convertible stuff that'll convert in um so um i want to say it's probably about that's a good question what it is um i think i'm tripping about it i'm allowed to mention it but but we did start raising essentially convertible notes lead into our series c that'll come out um you know originally we were gonna do that right about now but this acquisition we decided to you know give ourselves kind of two quarters after this acquisition to let it bake and kind of impact our evaluation and so we'll we think we'll close this our series c somewhere end of this calendar year um first couple months of the next day and what is that looking like at 10 million 20 million 30 million around what do you think the size will be yeah so we it's anywhere between call it 30 and 50 million depending on how much um how much um kind of refinancing we do and that kind of stuff um so it's and also depending on how much inorganic we want to do so you know there's kind of two two groups of companies that are interested in us some that are saying look you know let's let's run to profitability we think we can get...