How platformOS CEO Adam Broadway grew platformOS to $6.1M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is adam broadway he's a lifelong tech entrepreneur adrenaline adventurer whose deep technical knowledge and strategic business acumen helped him uh helped in the acquisition of his previous sas business to adobe in 2009. he's an expert in building high performance teams technology and marketplaces he loves his adam and his team love to solve hard problems alongside enterprise and smb clients alike his current product called near me is going through a reband we're going to talk about it today adam are you ready to take us to the top absolutely well thanks nathan for having me on the show of course what are you rebranding to platform os okay form hyphen os.com is the website and what's it do well the the way we came to be where we are now is after the my last company business catalyst was sold to adobe in 2009 uh there was a shift going on in what we saw from traditional e-commerce one-to-many type businesses to more of the marketplace you know that they talk about the changing place of of work uh marketplaces for accessing talent on an ad hoc basis uh airbnb ebay was a good example of a new way of connecting people to products uh obviously lyft and uber marketplaces and so we decided to to shift from what we'd previously seen as one-to-many type of e-commerce to a many-to-many model which is the traditional marketplace and near me marketplaces was what we originally branded as but over the last two years in particular our product breadth has gone from just not just marketplaces to learning management systems and crm and accounting and you name it people are building that on us so we decided platform os was the new brand and what is the so can you give an example of a customer that's using you that you can talk about and really describe yeah sure i mean i can even do a screen share if that screen share won't screen sure won't work but tell me about one you bet well intel is a client and here's an example of an enterprise who like many enterprise companies are going cap in hand to the big social media companies like facebook and twitter and linkedin and saying can we please get some um information on our community because people are going off and building a facebook group and in there there might be one related to intel so intel say hey why can't we build our own version of facebook and that's what they've done with devmesh devmesh is a intel branded facebook for developers all over the world to connect with other developers in the intel ecosystem and they're listing up their projects they're joining groups public private secret groups so intel has their own version of facebook if you like on our platform hallmark is another example and so where are you playing in that you're like an sdk that they use to code this faster you you could say that it is like an sdk but it's fully hosted so you don't have to worry about back-end technology our platform is a big wrapper around aws around azure around google hosting around ali alibaba as well so you can deploy on any other infrastructure as a service i see i see and this is a power play sas company so we're a platform as a service and we have sas businesses building on top of us but i guess in our direct relationships with bigger brands we are the sas provider but underlying that is our platform product on which sas companies are building as i said learning management systems and and the like so so on average and i want to avoid going down every customer cohort here because i'm sure you have many use cases but on average what's the customer paying for this in terms of acv would you say okay so at the at the low end say the we have a startup that came to us three ladies who quit their day jobs as lawyers and they wanted to start a high-end ladies fashion dress rental business they set up the site for less than ten thousand dollars and are paying five hundred dollars a month so that's at the low end for a marketplace we go down to a hundred dollars a month for uh smaller just non-marketplace sites but that's so that's thinking of the smaller medium-sized businesses on the high end uh uipath i don't know if you've heard about them recently in the news robotic process automation company uipath they had a one billion dollar valuation at march this year and now have a three billion dollar and they are now running their marketplace on our platform as well as a whole bunch of other things they're at the enterprise tier and in that scenario they have their own dedicated stack devops and a whole bunch of things that they effectively rent from us so that pricing point is you know you're starting at the 80 000 set up and going up from there and monthly rentals start at 2 000 a month okay so so basically f ignoring the setup fees you basically have 500 to 2000 bucks per month something like that and would you fair to say what i mean which one do you skew towards would you say it's more 2000 or more 500 actually this is a nice split at 50 50 right now there's a lot of entrepreneurs jumping in and creating marketplaces in very specific niches a lot of communities of practice if you like prices say that an average might fall right in the middle there about a thousand a month yep okay interesting and you do you that setup fee is that always kind of a portion of the first year acv like how do you price that setup fee yeah so the setup fee is more around the heavy lifting on getting it the site or the instance set up now we've automated a lot of that but it's usual for somebody to want some customization for their front-end design to be applied and so that's where that comes in interesting okay so so let me ask you a question then over the past 12 months when you look at your total 100 revenue pi what percent has come from kind of the one-time setup fees versus true sas okay uh i would say 30 percent okay 30 to 40 is on so true the model is true sas it's recurring arr is where we're focused and now that we have channel partners because developers come on board and build on top of us we have there's no setup fee involved they're they're basically selling and building anything on top and it's all subscription oh cool okay got it that makes sense and and put this on a timeline for us when did you launch what year so we launched uh just on four and a half years ago and so was that 2004 we started with 2004 2014. sorry 2014. yeah dropped and dropped 10 years out of there good catch um and so i'm wishing my life away that's okay we we kicked off with a marketplace called desks near me we wanted to make sure we could build a marketplace and understood not just the technology nuances but what's the customer experience like outside of the technology you need to be able to answer the phones you've got to understand how both sides the guests and the hosts work so after building that we we then had been doing that on our white labeled marketplace engine that's when we went into uh near me about 18 months after launching destiny we opened opened up the platform for others and then since then we've seen a lot of different types of businesses come and go and now we're really consolidated our growth is is starting to get into the what do you what do you call it uh crossing the chasm we're on that chasm we're we're on the other side of the chasm on that jeffrey jeffrey more language there um so quick questions here about how you've done this bootstrap to raise capital bootstrapped we have we've been um putting our own money in as far as working hard getting real customers solving real problems and how many how many how many customers have you scaled to today uh so we have over 300 sites not all of them are live and some of them have dropped off along the way um just like active live today would you say active live i would say 150 about half why they drop off so in the case of entrepreneurs and and you might say that some of them are entrepreneurs they want to be an entrepreneur the entrepreneurs go in and they don't have the stick ability they don't realize that it actually takes about three years to get a business to full gestation and ready to rock and roll so when they're not a billion dollar unicorn in the first 12 months some of them just go uh too hard others just haven't researched their niche well enough and go off and go okay i'm gonna come back and build something on this a little differently so that's uh the main reason why interesting now so if i take 150 active today right and you said the average is called maybe a grand per month it looks like just the sash string you're doing about 150 grand per month right now is it accurate that's very accurate and take me back a year what were you doing in terms of just sas in november 2017 oh uh yeah it would be probably [Music] less than a quarter of that oh wow okay so so call me 50 50 40 50 grand yep okay that's impressive growth so where's most that growth come from it's it's coming through in that split so half of it's coming from the smb mid-tier market and half of it's coming from our enterprise clients we've got a lot of solid enterprise clients and their their monthlies are anything up to 15k a month are you so when you look at your revenue churn per year what is that today gross don't add back expansion uh so on the gross a range is cool a range is cool too by the way sorry excuse me that's okay uh well i i'd have to have to have to sit down and do the sums on that i'm not good on my feet...