How MoxiWorks CEO Aliene Chase grew MoxiWorks to $56.2M revenue and 3.5K customers in 2024.

guys Moxie work start off a spin off with one big customer paying single digit Millions per year back in 2012 they brought in New York to scale the business they now serve 3 500 brokerages think of them almost like Salesforce but for brokerages and a lot of other details and and individual products sort of uh silos built on top of that base platform those customers are paying a bunch of money now multi-year deals they're close to 50 million bucks in a run rate uh growing rapidly uh they've got healthy expansion Revenue through arpu expansion and also what they called Cola those multi-year deals they accelerate um looking to be acquisitive obviously they're backed by private Equity Firm called Vector looking to do more deals hopefully in the near future as the markets compress and deal prices get a little bit more into York's liking we'll see what happens hey folks my guest today is York Bauer he's a startup and turn on Executive with a unique blend of General management sales and marketing skills he specialized in venture-backed and family-owned technology companies helping them get their product right then go to market using direct sales marketing BD to make Revenue growth scale and profitability happen he's now building moxieworks.com which is a leading residential real estate platform New York you're ready to take us to the top uh yes sir thanks for having me Nathan great to be with you all right what does that mean leading residential real estate platform are you selling to Brokers consumers buyers or someone else uh we sell the brokerages and in particular the Enterprise brokerage one of the Lessons Learned I think is the consumer and small business part of the market is very hard as a SAS company you always have to be concerned about churn and boy you can't avoid it at the low end of the market so we chose a decade ago when we started this journey to concentrate on the Enterprise how does adjustments and sofa affect your business a lot of these Brokers can't get cheap money anymore it was four percent five percent cheaper about eight months ago does that mean they turn from from oxy no because again with the Enterprise Focus the the customers we have we're not only on the large brokerage and we're also on the quality Brokers the full service Brokerage in which means that these companies tend to be better run they are profitable and they don't rely on the kind of funding that you've seen some of the new model uh real estate experiments I'll call them in the last five to ten years you know that have been heavily dependent on funding that's now dried up that's not the case for the traditional uh well-run full-service brokerage very cool okay so what are they paying for what do they get so think of us as salesforce.com for residential real estate and it's more than just CRM it's a whole Suite of products uh websites presentation software the CRM of course um management tools recruiting tools Etc everything you need essentially for a brokerage to give an agent to be successful and they're buying it though very much like they would buy like any company would buy salesforce.com they're they're buying it on a monthly uh you know RP SAS basis uh and we license we don't do what are in our industry at least are known as hunting license deals and we're licensing the entire Enterprise up front on a multi-year deal as opposed to hey we have X customer here's a lot we have X customer what it means is you can just you're allowed to sell into them onesie Tuesday uh that's a that's a beating so we again have focused on the Enterprise and that would be the one word of of I guess advice I would give if if you can generate something for the Enterprise that's going to be a higher it it's harder to sell into at the beginning yes but it's so much more durable and stable over time yep so you say you're selling multi-year deals give us a sense of range here right what's the average brokerage paying you per year to access this technology we're talking 10 grand 100 Grand a million sure it it varies all over the map our small deals are typically 50 000 in ARR um although we don't concentrate heavily on that end of the market we tend to focus on more we would call at least the Middle Market which is I'd say you know 100 to 500 Grand AR but we have customers a number of them that are uh single digit Millions per year for us so it's really uh yeah that's the best clue you can look in a SAS company to go do they have the ability to drive net dollar attention above 150 is how many customers are paying more than a million bucks a year it sounds like you've already got a couple of them yeah actually we have about a half dozen so it's we've oh wow okay yeah and it's you know it's funny one of the jokes I make is Max is the overnight success that took 10 years I mean that's the uh that's the other message for entrepreneurs out there you know this this business takes grit and I think the successful businesses when you look at them they all have a long history of grinding and we are no exception so you launched in 2010 yeah I came to the company actually in 2012. the company started as a spin out in 2011 um the leadership um there was a change made in the leadership which brought me in in 2012. 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 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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 did that also come with a round of funding were you backed for by VCS uh interesting we're kind of on the SAT test we're the ones that don't belong in terms of funding we started as I mentioned as a spin out we're originally funded by the parent that spun us out which was a real estate brokerage here in the I'm in Seattle here in the Northwest called Windemere real estate and we had some funding from them and a couple other uh key customers that helped us get going and then we brought actually private Equity Firm in Vector capital in 2019 that's been our Capital Partner since then interesting was that a minority buyout or majority buyout uh it was a majority uh but our three existing customer investors the previous investors remain both customers and investors of significance uh so it's been a really good partnership actually to have both both customers and an experienced PE in the boardroom we're I guess you weren't in charge of leading the spin out in 2012 right or were you no I came immediately after that yeah I see I see okay I mean I was going to ask you are you know those those customers that were part of the funding back in 2012 are they one of those six handful today paying more than a million bucks per year that would be great alignment the the yes they are and uh it's interesting because when I came to the company the reason I consider it more of a startup than than perhaps other spin outs is when we spun out the only customer was the customer we spun out of so I mean it really it was a luxury in the sense we actually had a customer but you know beyond that it was a total startup and we had to probably ask yield all the tech anyway can...