Muck Rack Revenue, Valuation & Funding (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 maybe you're thinking like oh you know if I want to really go big like I have to either decide I want to be this tiny little lifestyle business forever or I got to go raise money if I want to want to go big I don't think it's that dichotomy maybe it is the right move to raise money but I think there is a path where you can keep reinvesting and what I really learned was like at these different stages like getting to a million uh I guess you have to index it for inflation too maybe now it's 2 million but but it feels really good uh but but it's still till like 5 million 7 million 8 million for us I found it was always this really kind of uh painful tradeoff where every time we'd get a couple hundred K more in revenue and we could invest you know reinvest it it was always this impossible convers ation it's like do we hire the salesperson do we hire the programmer do we increase the servers do we do we finally get a better coffee maker for the office back when we had one so it was really tough you know that that kind of 5 to 10 but then I find I found once we approached 10 it flipped where all of a sudden we had plenty of money and the hard part the harder part became finding the right people to hire figuring out what position position to bring in next really educating ourselves all cuz it's just facing all these decisions like hey we got to hire a CFO what does the CFO do you know if you've never hired one before and educating yourself about that or uh figuring out okay we need to add a layer of management in the sales team how do we go about that do we bring people in outside bring in new people so so that the challenges changed but I think you can just get to that 10 million is a rough mark that's when it starts to flip and you and you start feeling the pinch for uh cash at least in in a lot of SAS businesses I also want to show this is just a Google Trends results for mukra uh you could look it up yourself and uh from our our founding at09 till today and I think it really shows the power of building a brand one one thing we always thought about was that you have to do lots of things to get known in your industry one's PR that's a little self-serving because that's what our our software does but PR events going out there meeting customers creating content all these things you have to do to get known in your industry we we did a lot of long-term bets we even launched this Free Academy to teach people how to uh how to do PR very early in their careers it's a free certification anyone can can take it academy. m.com and we know like we're not going to see Roi that for three or four years cuz it's someone Super Junior with no buying power taking it but our bet is hey in four or five years after they take it maybe they're director somewhere and they'll recommend it to their boss in 10 years they'll be the VP and they'll be making that buying decision so we we just always invested into the brand and I I think this is hard because a lot of us when we're bootstrapping we we feel like we have to be so analytical and you hear these stories where someone says hey we know with our our Google ads our social ad spend we invest a dollar we get a120 out with a lot of these long-term brand bets you're not going to be able to see it immediately in a spreadsheet unfortunately but as I've seen our continual lift and especially for profitable growth it really matters and I think we all know it's just so much more Capital efficient when you have inbound people coming to want to buy from you even if you have a sales team like we do uh having the person coming and wanting to buy is just so much easier than going out there and having to hunt for every single deal and then finally in 2022 uh we we'd always been approached by a lot of investors I'm sure all your inboxes are if you're at a couple million in ARR even are getting filled by investors and I always told them to go away but finally we had uh one one that I'd gotten to know for a while uh Susana growth Equity approach us a few others did too so we finally said okay let's talk to people we wanted to get to a scale where we could do a round that'd be really meaningful and still stay in control uh so my co-founder and I are still the majority owners still in control of the company very very little has changed culturally but by partnering with a growth investor we were able to really kind of just give ourselves a lot more Firepower should we ever want to do an acquisition I just have kind of more optionality and it was also kind of our signal to the market we're here to go go long to go big and what one secret I learned is that I was like well what do we call this round and I looked it up you know series a just means it's your first series so I'm like well it's our first institutional Capital so it's a series a and we'll see if we ever do a series B but that's how we uh branded it in the Press so never never too late to do your series a and so finally I want to talk about how we're thinking about scaling for the future and and hope uh some of this ends up being useful to all of you too first I I want to tell you about Talent we we always place a really big focus on this just in the past year or so we added a new cro a new CMO uh new AI lead I'm proud to say too we have a lot of our oldtimers at the company still with us uh working with these new uh Executives you know both learning from them with with the function and the new Executives learning with our uh our long time team members about our market and the particulars of our customers uh but but this is one thing that that I think if you're bootstrapping it's important to think about I found before we raised the growth round when I was recruiting more serious Executives to join us it was um it was a lot it was a little more work because there there's this there is this I I think unfortunate perception of bootstrappers that hey we're just lifestyle business businesses we're spending most of our time surfing or playing golf and and then Executives Wonder Hey if I join this company like are they serious will this look good on my resume will there be Equity compensation that will ever be worth something we always did all that just as rigorously as any other uh any other company especially any uh any Venture back or PEB company but I had to do a lot more work in the recruitment process to really convince these Executives that we were serious that we were operating professionally that their Equity comp would one day be worth something I found once we did do the growth round I just didn't get any of those questions anymore people just assumed okay it's a good company to join it'll be good for my career the equity uh comp will be worth something so I think that that is a benefit to raising money the talent you can access but I'm also here to tell you that you can still get great talent without raising money you just have to work a bit harder to uh to do it and and really go out of your way to show that you're operating as professionally as someone who's raised outside money also want to talk about how we evolved our workplace when we started we had an office in New York and and by the time uh pre pandemic in 2022 we had a beautiful office in SoHo uh rooftop access this was like the the young Greg dream of like what successes like for a startup still the only half the team was in New York we were very remote friendly we never forced the people in New York to actually come to the office most days like less than half the team even in New York would come to the office unless we had free food in which case just about everybody came so when the pandemic hit it was very easy for us just to tell everyone hey we already have zoom we already have slack just don't come in tomorrow we grew a lot during the pandemic so by the time our lease was up a year later uh only a third of the company was in New York since the new people we brought in were disproportionately out of New York and we surveyed the New Yorkers that they'd want to come back uh after the you know once it was safe to and everybody was like maybe I'd come in once or twice a week to see my friends but uh I don't know if I actually would so we ditched the office went fully remote uh and since then we've you know pretty much quadrupled in size so it's really really worked for us and again you know now when we do a talent search uh it seems kind of insane to me to limit the search to one or two geographies even if it's a great geography like here in Austin or San Francisco or or New York because there's so much great talent out there uh you can get anywhere our C's in the Bay Area our CMOS in Boston our CFOs in New Hampshire we just got a great team but they're not in one place and instead we do quarterly exec offs sites we pick a new city every time and then we do an annual all company offsite which we just did last December where we brought over 250 people to Cancun Mexico and had a great time and I no one came up to me and said hey I would have rather go to an office 5 days a week than than come here for this offsite so it's been a great mode to switch to and of course here's our obligatory AI slide but it's something where I found on the SAS Journey being on it now since 200 at since 2011 uh there's just always something new and you always got to quick adapt to it so just a couple weeks after uh chat GPT came out we launched press pal AI press release uh a generative AI agent that also suggests journalists to pitch to and then over time there's a lot of concerns have grown around AI we've really gotten that ahead of presenting AI standards for the whole public relations industry out there so that that's pretty much our uh our our journey here uh just going from boots trapping in the early days to scaling up to uh 50 million plus an ARR and still scaling past that to raising funding I'm happy to uh to take any questions as I mentioned I'm just at Gregory on Instagram and Twitter or Instagram and next now uh you can look me up on LinkedIn find me around today I've got 10 more seconds I kind of want to wait for the offer music to come out so I can thank everybody uh including my agent uh and get dragged off stage but I I know they're running a little behind so I'll get oh there it is all right great well I'd like to thank everybody for listening have a great day have a good one