How Growth Era CEO Bryce Kaspar grew Growth Era to $1.6M revenue and 45 customers in 2023.

hey guys recording this here on what is it friday the 19th maybe you're seeing this on monday at the latest but want to let you know we are almost sold out for founder comp sorry founder 500 in austin texas here in about a week uh it's gonna be an amazing event 500 b2b sas founders i'm looking at the attendee list there's almost um there's almost 60 founders with more than six seven million bucks in arr it's an incredible group of group there's over uh there's over a hundred over 150 with more than a million uh more than a million revenue it's an incredible group you don't want to miss it uh grab your hotel grab your flight grab a ticket right now i'll put the link in the bio um in the description here on youtube and i think there's only about three tickets left okay about three tickets left i'd love to see you guys there don't be bashful grab your ticket now hey folks my guest today is andrew jacoby he's an entrepreneur focused on tech enabled prioritized services designed to help companies grow sales he co-founded his current company next sales in 2018 and after hiring a ceo currently serves as the chief innovation officer andrew you ready to take us to the top i'm ready nathan let's do it all right first give me in your head what what um what does a founder have to go through or think to go you know what i don't want me to see you anymore let me replace myself when you suck really um actually what it was was that um i'm i'm 49 years old and as you get older you gain a little bit of humility and you start to realize you can't do everything when i was younger i thought i could do everything and i could and as i got older i realized i'm good at some things i'm more of a creative zero to one kind of person and once i got the thing to a certain level that it went from ideas to hey man spreadsheets hr finance i had to tap out and bring somebody else in who can operate at that level better than i could that's interesting and and what level was that like what was it a revenue figure you passed yeah right it was it was a good question it's a good question we're we're not a we're a we're a tech enabled service so we obviously use a lot of tech as does everybody but we're a human-based business i mean we rent out human labor essentially i mean obviously there's ip parts of it as well and i t as well but ultimately it's people so when you're scaling with people it's not as easy as saying hey nathan you want to buy a thousand seats here's a thousand logins go get them yeah so what margin do you like to make by the way i obviously don't like the people mod i like sass but if you can do the people you can do the people model efficiently it's a whole different story so like what margin do you like to make per hour of human time that's on your team right that's it we don't do it we don't think of it that way but to answer your first question our year one so we did in 20 uh our first year was 2019 we did about 129 000. year two we did about 450 and it started to get a little bit raggedy around the edges around that half a million mark year three we we did about a 1.2 million and that was when i tapped out at the sort of around that level so around a little bit over a little bit north of a million bucks um and luckily we had an executive coach at that time and he was a successful entrepreneur in his own right and had built and sold multiple companies but was doing coaching and consulting on the side he was getting an itchy trigger finger to get back in the game because consulting you're not actually in the cockpit and he was looking for an opportunity and luckily enough we uh he joined and finished that story so 1.2 million 2021 what do you think you'll do this year that's a good question i don't know uh this year the first thing that he did was hey guys we got to like put on the brakes because we were basically like i'm a sales and marketing guy by background and so all i i'm a hammer and everything is a nail more top of funnel more leads more meetings let's print meetings close business print meetings close business and that's great it works to grow the company but you know it operationally can get messy that way so he just said look guys this year 2022 we've got to slow things down we've got to clean up the churn problem 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 it 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 valuation 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 valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the 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 valuations 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 wanna check this tool out if you wanna 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 what's the problem well no right now we have we don't we've he's been in place for six months and we have no more churn problem we don't we think of it a different way nathan we think about his net revenue retention so that's how we look at the portfolio uh the health of the portfolio but tell me how bad it was i mean i liked that message it was that was right it was bad i mean it wasn't it let's put it this way it's bad in the first six months of our kind of business because you're stroking a check to me for for a while before you're getting an roi and people freak out nobody likes to stroke checks and nobody likes to do that they want to like get roi immediately everybody wants to put we live in a push button world and what we're doing is the chat well for us it's 3800 a month per thousand contacts works that we consider a seat of sdr service so essentially what was happening was that you know we were people were coming in in the first six months there's a high churn rate because they'll freak out and it's hard to keep them calm once they hit the six month mark once you hit the nine month mark once you start seeing a return those meetings turning into pipeline that pipeline turning into business then all of a sudden you're you're you're fine the churn goes away essentially i mean it goes almost goes to nothing and you start going to expansion right now we have net positive so we're you know we're probably 105 percent we'd like to improve that but you know our business expands now and that's all due to the operational um so i would say just to give you a sense of revenue-wise because i know you're going to ask me because i know your show um just you listen yeah right i'm a big fan awesome dude yeah this month we'll probably do between 135 to 140 k mrr that's great and last year i know you're going to ask me what we did last year probably around 100. so that's good so it's it's still growing but as you saw in the first three years we were growing hundreds of percent and i love it when i have someone i love when i have someone who comes on you can always probably do this interview yourself uh because you reuse your face you got my favorite book i got everything man i'm good that's awesome people always go you're a good person to ask this people always go...