How Muck Rack CEO Gregory Galant grew Muck Rack to $143.1M revenue with a 315 person team in 2024.

and then it was a real slug to get to a million you're growing 50% 70% year over a year and you're profitable like you idiot why don't you raise money so my co-founder and I are still the majority owners still in control of the [Music] company hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 C copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's let's jump into the interview well thanks for having me it's great to be here I'm going to tell you about how we scaled our way up uh to over 50 million in ARR which was about our size when we did our $180 million round in 2022 but first I'm going to tell you about how we got started and the bootstrapping journey which I I know many of you are doing here in the room all right so here is the overnight success story uh started in 2005 launched mukra in 09 and then we did that round in 20202 uh I'll come back to that slide in a moment I actually got my start podcasting uh similar to to Andrew and Nathan where I was interviewing Founders but I actually started all the way back in 2005 so a lot of people don't know this podcasting is called podcasting because originally you could only listen on your iPod uh this Photoshop here is uh kind of wrong because the pods weren't in color back then but got got this early start in podcasting I interviewed Reed Hoffman back when LinkedIn had 50 employees the founder of Yelp Vanguard group Brooklyn Brewery if I only had money back then I could have Angel invested in those companies I would have would have made really a lot on that but I I didn't but I I met all these great people one of the people I interviewed back in 2005 was EVN Williams who had this really hot uh startup called Odio which itself was a podcasting company if you've never heard of it it's because it didn't work but E's a smart guy he pivoted can anyone guess what he pivoted to Twitter that's right so this is the original Twitter logo back before they could afford the vowels and ironically they've lost all the vowels again now that elon's renamed it X but but I this was uh 2006 2007 when Twitter is just getting going it led me to sign up really early I got my first name on there because no one else grabbed it so I got got at Gregory on Twitter and later on Instagram too this is the first name Club logo which I made with Dolly last night uh so I was getting to see all this social media really early on and and one of the pain points that my co-founder Lee seml and I noticed in those early days was that there was no way to know hey if you're interested in news or sports or politics like who should you follow on social media which was back in 2008 so we thought we'd launch an award website uh called the shorty Awards because tweets are short and let people vote with a tweet so we we built the first ever system now that's commonplace you know you want to vote share it on social media no one had done that before so when we launched it within 24 hours it became the top trending term on Twitter and then we had to drop everything organized the first short short Awards it's still a thriving business we got over the years DJ khed Carly Claus lizo lots of other amazing celebrities and social media influencers there as well as Brands and agencies uh but what we noticed at the shorty Awards is that there uh that we got a tremendous amount of press and I'm sure you all know when you launch something it's really hard to get attention for it I'd launched things before in my podcasting days really hard to get press with the shorty Awards we instantly got written up in the New York Times Wall Street Journal BBC so we realized like hey journalists are on social media trying to figure out what to write about but there's no one place to figure out where you can find all those journalists so we we thought okay let's build a site to do that just to show all the journalists one place we weren't thinking about sass or anything like that at the time uh and to come with a name we have have to go back now all the way to 1906 this is Teddy Roosevelt where he dubbed these Progressive investigative journalists Muk rakers because they're digging through the muck the mud to find stories over it was a bit tongue and cheek almost a little derogatory at first but over the years journalists really uh adopted that and and viewed it as a positive they they viewed you know if you're a Muk raker you're really investigating and going beyond the press release so we knew journalists like that idea of mck rakers we we figured all the journalists are going to be in one place so it's going to be like a newspaper rack or a magazine rack and we embraced our bootstrapping constraint we had an $8 branding budget which is what it cost to buy noain name on GoDaddy at the time and it turned out mra.hk work it took off virally with journalist so we had over 10,000 journalist requests to get added in that first year at the time I got to admit we were kind of unfocused we were doing the shorty Awards again we launched like five other business ideas that uh didn't end up working but but mukra we just let it run and it kept getting more and more journalists and being in New York at the time I kept running into PR people when I told them what I did they say oh I use mukra to figure out which journalist to pitch I'm like oh that's interesting we have this whole audience of of people using our website to do their job we have the data we even have a little brand amongst these people and like idiots we're not charging for it also from running the shorty Awards as I'm sure Nathan or anyone who runs an event could attest it was always profitable but we always had to start from zero and I'd seen friends of mine launch uh SAS businesses like hoot suite and MailChimp before us and I saw how powerful that was to have predict our Revenue so we relaunched mukra uh a year this is what it looks like uh now but we relaunched mukra a year later and in 2011 and added in the SAS part the rest is history as I'll talk about in a moment so let me tell you about the bootstrapping journey now uh here's that timeline I showed again so again it was uh 2009 here that we launched mukra 2011 that we pivoted to sad and then it was a real slug to get to a million it was uh uh you know pretty much 3 4 years of just hacking away at it and we'd raised you know pretty much next to no money it was under 200k of Angel was the only primary Capital we ever took and we used some of the profits from the Shorties which was still part of the same company at the time that we reinvested in mukra uh and so every day it was just talking to customers figuring out what would happen to get to a million and it was really clarifying cuz we had to like find customer pain points that we could solve quickly uh and and with the tech resources that we had and because you know one hand we couldn't invest money like we could had we raised a bunch uh but on the other hand we we weren't answering to investors we weren't thinking about how to position for the next round it was how do we get the next customer I was personally doing the customer support for longer than I care to admit and it it was really just um kind of do or die to get to that million and uh once we did that though we kind of knew we had something and we kept scaling and here's our our ramp where it CHS our our Revenue our AR or pretty much our ARR uh compared to our annualized expenses and in this graphs launched the secret in that since 2022 before 2022 everyone was like you're growing you know you're growing 50% 70% year over a year you and you're profitable like you idiot why don't you raise money and grow 300% year-over year since 2022 no one ever says that anymore everyone's like well what's the secret to being profitable how do you profitably grow and this is the answer it's the secret spend less than you make that's what we always did we always tried to re reinvest as much as could cuz we knew we were growing we believed in the future we we knew that there was always more to invest in the company but we just constrained ourselves by the ARR and also leaving a comfortable cash cushion in the bank I always aimed for for two or three months worth of whatever our total expenses were to have in the bank didn't always follow that but but that was always the the goal early on and it worked so yeah I think it's uh you know I'm not religious about I know some people do very well going out there raising a bunch of money to grow and I think a lot of people the misconception I know a lot of people here might be at like the five $10 million ARR Mark and...