How Mywalletcard CEO Michael Prince grew Mywalletcard to $5M revenue and 120 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is michael prince he is the founder of a company called wallet card which is an occupational health and safety uh records are easily and automatically updated to reduce administrative burden on the train on training oh sorry of training management so safety records certification solution michael's going to do a better job at describing it than i am michael are you ready to take it to the top yeah you got it so yeah well wild card is uh we're a compliance platform for managing safety records that's the short of it the long of it is we help companies training providers um manage their health and safety make it easy on them basically from you know the shop floor to the top floor uh cover your assets kind of thing so michael yeah so a lot of people is gonna be without getting unless we get really specific this is all going to go over their head so give me like tell me a customer story of someone paying you sure yeah so uh we work with a lot of like blue collar companies we got guys in construction warehousing manufacturing they got maybe 100 300 guys that they have to manage those guys got you know they can have up to 10 20 different types of certifications have to get renewed it's a big job definitely like sorry like what uh fault protection uh let's do forklift training first aid training um so mainly construction like physical labor kind of companies you got it yeah blue collar employers we call it blue collar technology yeah again i'm trying to make it real so everyone can follow along so these are like kind of construction companies leaf cutting or sorry you know tree branch cutting companies you know these these kinds of things yeah you got it anywhere where skilled labor is involved okay that's great so and then what's your business model is it a pure place sas company yeah we're a sas platform a couple different types of revenue uh basically subscription model or consumption model okay so subscription model and help me understand kind of on average what will these companies pay for you on an annual or monthly basis yes so obviously depending on employees depending on features um our average kind of annual customer right now our sweet spot is kind of a medium-sized business uh we're looking at about five to ten grand for for a company depending on you know what they turn on and how many guys they got okay so is it really just number of seats or are there other kind of other kind of value-based upsells that would push them to higher price yeah they can choose to have like ipads with um the form builders different things like that the higher level features um more than just the database management and and the matrix the training matrices and whatnot and when did you launch the company what year uh so company launched four years ago uh so in about 2014 we built the product for the first two years uh then threw it away and then rebuilt it uh over the next year and and kind of launched about a year and a half ago okay great so 2014 kind of in and out building scaling and then what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you uh we just broke i think about 120 customers the other day so getting there that's that's in startup mode but getting out of it yeah no no there's nothing wrong with that i mean so can can we take that 120 times the the 5 thousand dollar kind of ac you're doing like 50 60 grand a month right now something like that uh we wish not quite okay so why is that not right uh well ideal customer would be that sort of check size we do have a lot of small employers some of them have uh you know early beta free accounts um so what do you got now are you a closer like 10 or 20 grand a month yeah that's more yeah okay got it so call it 10 grand a month 120 customers mainly because a lot of them maybe are on free plans or cheaper plans in that 5 000 price point you got it yeah okay great and and so when was the first sale of the current platform done was it just like a year ago or um 2016 we started to roll beta customers into uh paying very slowly um for the ones that we could convert over okay so what is growth like if you're at 10 grand a month today where were you about a year ago uh about a year ago we were probably at uh like 1500 a month okay so quite a lot in the last little while that's great and i want to jump into kind of how you driven that growth in a second but first have you done this bootstrapped or did you decide to raise capital yeah we bootstrapped a lot in the beginning and we've raised about a half million so far okay or was it like angels or venture capital or what yeah we got some local angels here and then um and where is here where are you based uh in vancouver canada everyone's there the whole team uh some of the teams in austin texas right now okay that's great so austin vancouver and how many folks are you now uh seven seven of us seven of you okay great so 500 grand raised up there in vancouver based between austin and vancouver seven of you guys um and are you the sole founder uh there's three of us oh wow three okay it's a lot of decisions a lot a lot of agreeing has to happen sorry can you say that again i said a lot of agreeing has to happen with three founders yes yeah equal equal uh voting rates too so you just went 25 25 25 25. uh well yeah kind of kind of with employee stock auction pools and stuff like that you bet we we wanted we wanted uh a good way of just of deciding how decisions we're gonna get made yeah not in a bubble it's hard to pay seven people on 10 grand a month in revenue so i assume you're still burning some of that 500 000 bucks you raised you're burning cash today how do you get to break even uh we get to break even by pumping up one side of our platform that is more revenue based on the other side so just getting getting us uh one of our user types up there and basically we just got a little bit of a vc investment um so we're really heavily bootstrapped a couple months to go to some of that so here's this more runway to to build some more features and um like our some of our current customers are just crying for a few features so once we feel that we're able to do that we're able to convert more how many months of runway did you raise for in other words if you're burning you know 10 50 grand a month today and you just raised 500 that'd be 10 months essentially a runway yeah we look we look at about a year right now that we have runway before um either break even or or okay all right so so if i take 500 000 divided into 12 months that would mean you rate you know that's like what you're burning 30 40 grand a month right now something like that uh hopefully not okay well that's what that would equal if you optimize for a year-long run rate yeah we don't have the 500 all 500 left of course so when did you raise that uh well we raised some of it we raised the last 300 just recently um okay so that was to basically last you guys over the next year yeah so the two the first 200 was raised as angel and friends and family round got it okay so 300 000 bucks spread over a year that means maybe you're burning closer to 10 15 grand a month something like that yeah you got it but developers are expensive yeah i was gonna say mostly head count yeah yeah yeah makes it makes sense um talk to me about stickiness once once these guys sign up do they stay oh man we are that's what that's what we love about our platform it's so viral it's so sticky once they get their information into our platform um that everybody stays like that's that's one thing that we've really nailed down so you've turned no customers well we we turned one or two so far but um considering what we've turned the amount that we brought in are we're in the like 90th percentile right now um for churn rate it looks like so it's well what do you mean sorry how do you know that what do you mean compared to what well i mean 100 100 customers and we've we've turned out a couple of them so retention rates being in the 90 okay and that's annual retention looks like annual retention like i said we're a little early to be you know clocking numbers um exactly but yeah that that looks like where we're at right now yeah it's pretty pretty sweet yeah i mean look obviously you're operating on a small cohort some of these people are really passionate because they're your first early customers with big discounts right so that makes sense too you mentioned once they get activated they you know they're really sticky what do you know you have to get a new customer to do in the first month to make them really sticky uh we gotta get we gotta get what's called historical onboarding we gotta get all their previous stuff into the platform the faster we onboard that client the stickier it is for them to stay especially in the free trial point we give one month to three month free trials and we found if if we you know go above and beyond in the customer service side to grab all their records put them all into the digital platform set them all up get everything in there they're bound to stay with us for years to come yep it makes a lot of sense man uh let's uh let's wrap up here...