Mostly metrics revenue, CEO CJ Gustafson, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

as he cut his teeth in an operating uh company as a in the private Equity Firm also at PWC before that now runs on newsletter focused on CFOs of which he gets a 46 open rate which is about 16 000 opens and a five to seven percent click through rate which is 800 clicks per post called mostlymetrics.com hosted on sub stack 7 000 of those readers are actual CFOs in fact it's so valuable you've got companies like brex willing to pay him one two three four K sort of per post uh from a sponsor perspective he's looking to scale that Now launch to podcast as well with turpentine still while cutting his teeth as an operator as a true CFO at a company called Parts Tech with Giza which he's working on hey folks my guest today is CJ Gustafson he's a startup CFO who sat on both sides of the table the one who's doing the funding and the one who's receiving the funding he's a fan of business breaking of breaking down how businesses make money and writes about his learnings twice a week in his newsletter mostly metrics.com all right CJ radio takes to the top let's blast off buddy all right so my audience really respects obviously folks that cut their teeth in the operating world so what company were you sort of operating in learning that side of the equation yeah man so I've been an operator for about 10 years now I was originally on the you know private equity and management consulting side where I learned a lot about business models but I felt like a total Financial tourist I didn't really have skin in the game and then when I moved over to get you know my quote real world MBA I was at a backup and recovery software vendor and I was leading uh you know sales Ops and FP a and that's kind of where I learned how to make the trains run on time yep so you have a very interesting background so it's a big four PWC then Providence Equity partners for a year and a half Providence equities usually majority buyout it is yeah and technology and media space yeah so did they buy a chunk of veeam and that's why you jumped into veeam no I I had it's funny the connections you make when you're younger end up playing out uh to help you in your career so I had interned and I was completely useless by the way I basically got coffees and sandwiches for people at a company that was bought by VMware and uh this the CEO uh ended up going over to this company and and I called him one day for advice and I was like hey I don't know if I should go get another degree here and he said well why don't you just come work for me and since I went over and started to hang out with sales people and learn about how you both sell and build a product I've never left the operating side got it so theme software through 2019 then a group called snake I think is how you say that through 2012. so snake kind of cyber security on that pre-ipo path and I I followed the same management team there and I helped build out the first FPA group and then we went through the whole craziness of covid and fundraising and hyperscale then you leave that in September 2022 and jump into sort of this this media Empire You're Building why did you make that decision and what is the media Empire who are you focused on audience wise yeah of course so I stumbled upon this so I have a newsletter it's mostly metrics mostlymetrics.com and then I have a podcast it's called run the numbers it's produced by the turpentine Network and do they pay you for this on or do you pay them to be part of the network uh they paying me so we have advertisers so there are a couple different monetization streams I can break down for each but basically what I discovered was there wasn't an operator voice creating content out there specifically for you know the people who are in the trenches uh in kind of the office of the CFO and for a while I was trying to just document what I was learning and Nathan that's because people in the startup world will pay you for the Playbook that you have you've taken a company from X to Y to Z how do you do that now for my company too and I was kind of scared shitless that I don't know if I can swear on this I was scared if I I was scared that I was gonna forget what I was learning so I started to document it and eventually I found what I call audience Market fit it was a bunch of people who were like me interested in the same stuff and it it took on a life of its own it went from you know my mother and my dog and and my wife reading it to 35 000 people in about a year and a half so first year and a half I wrote nobody listened to me when did you launch it when do you start writing I launched it in covid in I think December of 2020. okay just and how did you get your first thousand subscribers oh man that was a grind I was a nut so I would write stuff and then I would find five key words within it so maybe I wrote about top metrics for vertical software and I would go on Twitter and I would maniacally just keep searching for like vertical software and then I would write something insightful and then link back to my article you'd write something insightful in a response to tweets that were already posted and linked back yeah that's exactly what I would do and then I got kicked out of just about every Reddit group trying to post stuff uh like like many content creators do and then honestly what helped was building inroads with B2B companies who were looking to promote their software in some way but wanted a real person to speak to The Narrative of using something so like there are a lot of fpna tools out there they all have content arms or like there are a lot of payment companies like a brex or a ramp and they all you know have content arms but they want to partner with people who are actually practitioners in the trenches and you know I was I was at first willing to you know do it for free for them and say Hey you know I'm trying to get my my name out there I enjoy writing and I have experience to speak about stuff that'll resonate with people it's not like you just hired somebody on upwork to write it for you and it doesn't really make sense so partnering with business has helped a lot 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 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 evaluation 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 who was your first business partner my first business partner was actually it was ramp which was a really good one to have and then I did data rails on the fpna side and then the first uh paid one that I worked with was brex and since then it's been kind of Off to the Races what year did Rex pay you they were in 2022 and before that like I I actually never even thought about advertising or sponsored content I was totally of the subscription mindset and that's...