Mightysignal revenue, CEO Ryan Buckley, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hey guys my guest today is Ryan Buckley he's the CEO of Mighty signal which he sold to air now in 2021 before that he was the co-founder and CEO of script at a Marketplace for Content marketers he's also author of The Parallel entrepreneur and an associate professor at Diablo Valley College where he teaches business and marketing Ryan you're ready to take us to the top absolutely all right I remember those scripted days man marketplaces are tough huh yeah kind of a brutal business uh content marketing seems to be like a race to the Bottom now and it's a tough Market to be in but we we gave it our best now you sold this to Xenon run by Jonathan Siegel a very famous guy sort of doing micro private Equity like deals um and then I just saw him running ads like crazy on this thing I assume it grew but were you still running it at that point no no after I sold it I actually took some time off that's when I wrote the book and I was working on twofer uh morphed that into find emails track job changes some of these other microsass uh products and then Jonathan hired me back to run Mighty signal which he had just acquired in uh late 2018 and I ran that for almost three years before selling it to air now and wait Ryan how does that work how does a probiotic reform incentivize a Creator like you who do anything he wants build anything from scratch and keep 100 for yourself how does someone like Siegel convince you to come run Mighty signals yeah um you know I just kind of thought of it like going back to school um I respected Jonathan uh during the scripted acquisition process was just really impressed by what what he built and the companies that he was able to acquire I know you've had a lot of a lot of those guys that have come through the Xenon program on the podcast um and I just thought it had a lot to learn from this guy and I was kind of feeling like some of my muscles some of my entrepreneurial muscles were atrophying and this was going to be a way for me to get a kick in the pants um just learn from some of the best get challenged and um so yeah I just decided to take the plunge I also Mighty signal is a big mobile data company we process uh data off of offer phones break apart apps look at what software's installed I knew nothing about mobile data I knew nothing about sdks frankly I really knew nothing about private Equity other than I kind of liked what it sounded like these guys did so when uh when he offered me that job you know I was kind of flattered that was part of it and uh and yeah I just decided you know here's an adventure I'll just uh I'll just kind of go for it now Jonathan acquired Mighty signal around about January of 2019. you joined it I believe there's only three or four folks on the staff at that point right no they're actually none so oh no but he bought the business the whole team was Aqua hired by instacart and uh so he handed me a business that was doing a million ARR with no team and the first thing I had to do of course was hire an engineer this is a highly highly technical product tons of resources in AWS like far beyond my ability to comprehend what the heck was going on with uh with all the software and all the databases so I had to find someone hired that guy hired sales guy slowly built out a team and started to grow it interesting okay how did you find that developer was it like a freelancing site or a top towel or a friend or what you know it was it was an upwork I really had amazing luck with upwork and you know I'm I'm friends with Founders what's the job description when you post it on upwork what do you say hiring a lead technical engineer and you give it to 10 people and then you hire the best one basically yeah you uh I mean with this one it wasn't it wasn't a hard sell because we were you know kind of a sexy startup Silicon Valley startup um owned by private Equity profitable you know I threw all these keywords in there and then I said you know I'm willing to wait wait no no what were some of the other keywords profitable what else yeah um you know profitable San Francisco um probably also Silicon Valley mobile data um SAS Enterprise and um and then I pitched myself a little bit and um and then Xenon like you know this is like hot private Equity Group uh man is like the lead engineer first engineer hopefully lead to something full time and I think for a lot of the really good talent on upwork that's very very attractive and uh and then when I posted that job you know I said I picked the highest paid like the expert category whatever like the most expensive category because I really wanted someone great 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 evaluation 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 founder 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 by the way Ryan like I try and tell people to do this all the time that is a mistake most people make is they give the project out and they go and try and find someone in the middle or the bottom price point just hire the most expensively it's still way cheaper than a 300 000 San Francisco engineer hundred percent hundred percent and I found this killer guy awesome guy still with the business lived in Colombia and um you know paid him well um he's still with the company I'm not gonna like say what his salary is but I think well for Colombia but below San Francisco prices um and we've been we've been ratcheting him up but just a A plus a plus engineer um like we're lucky to to have him I really feel lucky that if he's still on the team so now now did Jonathan approach you before he bought money signal in other words did he find the CEO before the acquisition or did he come find you after no he did he found me before um actually they were in in the process of closing and I think in his mind because this was a bit of a fire sale they were about to shut it down and uh the board had already approved it the Assumption was they were going to let it go investors were going to take a loss and Jonathan was like okay I'll start looking at this if I can find a GM then we'll do the deal so um you know he's a persuasive guy it's Jonathan Siegel and uh we we met in San Francisco over two two meetings and yeah and then I was like all right let's well so how's he incent you does he say here's a 100K salary and 30 of the business or I mean you don't have to tell me exactly but generally yeah no I could I can give you roughly um low double digits kind of Shadow Equity uh and um it was higher than 100K okay like so you're making a good base for a startup founder you're making a good base right out of the gate lower risk yeah yeah yeah I mean you know what my opportunity cost was the other thing was...