Ninety.io Revenue & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Well, I I don't wanna bury the lead, but I I rarely see someone take advantage of a movement and build into a $30,000,000 revenue software company as quick as you did. So, guys, buckle up. Mark, take it away. [00:10] >> Awesome. Thank you. Alright. So good afternoon. I'm curious. How many of you are founders and or CEOs? Alright. I'm curious, during your journey as a founder and or a CEO, [00:29] >> how many of you have actually kind of hated the journey for at least a little bit? If you raise your hands. [00:40] >> Alright. You're my audience. Thank you. Alright. So over the next twenty minutes or so, I'm gonna talk about, our growth because, you know, Nathan always likes to hear people talk about their numbers. And then I'm gonna talk about our business and how we help people do something, which I'll talk about in a second. And then how we've also gone about getting our customers, which he also talked about a little bit, so our growth. But then I'm [01:08] >> gonna go a little bit different, than most of the other speakers. I'm gonna talk about where the world is and where it's going. Because if you're a CEO or a founder, you need to be aware of all this, and you need to play in to it. Right? We want to ride the wave, not fight the wave. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about where the world of work is going. And then finally, I'm gonna talk [01:30] >> about how we're leveraging AI to help our clients ride the wave. Alright. So that's the next twenty minutes. So a little bit background on me. I started my career back in the eighties. Alright. So I'm an old dude, and I started with a big bank, and they sent me down to Oklahoma City to work out bad oil and gas loans. So really early in my career, I found out what happens when a company goes under and [01:57] >> how it hurts lots of people, not just the investors, but the employees, the community, and and and even their their vendors and their customers. So it's not a good thing. So I did really well at that, and I got to go anywhere I wanted to go in the bank, and I helped start a leveraged buyout finance business. Started sitting on a bunch of boards, and I became fascinated with the art and science of building companies. Helped [02:22] >> build a company and a platform that was pretty successful. Helped take company public to this day, the company is over 50,000,000,000, pretty well known in space. And part of my journey was I loved data and collecting data and understanding why things are the way they are. This takes us to the next thing because I like understanding things and why the way they are. I ended up being on a bunch of boards. And I actually got frustrated [02:48] >> as a board member because I thought building a company is not this hard. [02:55] >> Not that complicated, I should say. It's hard, but it's not complicated. So I got frustrated, I thought I should be able to help people with this thing. That's really the big idea behind Ninety, which is that we're going to give people everything they need to build a company that ultimately you'll love forever. Because for a lot of us, there are a lot of times when we don't love our companies. So what's Ninety? We're an innovative cloud [03:20] >> based platform that simplifies the hard work of building extraordinary productive, humane, and resilient organization where people are focused, aligned, thriving. Now you'll see up there we've got Great Place to Work certification. We came in at 98% this year. I was afraid of our certification because we do it every single year. And honestly, I was afraid of it because we just did one of those transitions that you will do as you as you navigate the stages of [03:48] >> development of a company. We went from having about 10 different departments reporting to me, to me hiring a c suite over all those department leaders. And that's not an easy thing for people to experience. Right? And so I thought for sure, my numbers are gonna go down. Our numbers are gonna go down this year, and they actually went up. And we made it on a number of fortunes, best places to work list this year. And so [04:13] >> we've been able to sort of walk the talk, if you will. So I'm proud of the team, proud of our organization. Alright. So what do we do? We basically just help people master the fundamentals as I mentioned earlier. And we do this by helping them master what we call the nine core competencies. I won't get into all this, but right, you need to have the vision stuff. You need to have the customers. Obviously, you need to [04:36] >> have the goals. There's about nine things that you need to be great at. And when you're really, really strong at these things, scaling, starting, building, scaling, and running your organization just becomes so much easier. [04:48] >> Alright. How do we do this? We have a bunch of tools. These are the tools that everybody in the company should be using. Everybody should be in meetings. Everybody should be having quarterly conversations. Everybody should have KPIs. Every team should have scorecards. Right? Everybody should be hopefully helping the company move ninety days forward. Right? All hitting about 90% of what they wanna do. So those are the goals. And we help people communicate, ideas, and come together. [05:15] >> We give assessments. And so really, everything that the everyone in the company is using, we want them to all be using the same tools so they're all on the same page. So that's what our platform does. What we do is we help people think about whether or not they really wanna become masters of being being great company builders. So first thing is in our process is just assess whether you wanna build a great company. You know, [05:39] >> I'm not a magician. If you don't want it, I can't help you get it. But if you really do wanna try to build a great company, we can help you figure that thing out. Once you decide you really wanna build a great company, next thing you need to do is get everybody in your senior leadership team to agree and then to commit to the journey. And then the first thing is to focus. Make sure you guys [05:57] >> are all on the same page in terms of what you're trying to build. Then the next thing is to make sure everybody else in the company is aligned around where you're going to take the company. And then ultimately, what you're gonna get it to is where everybody in the company genuinely loves being there. One of the speakers talked about it earlier. You wanna be surrounded by people who genuinely care about one another and wanna work together [06:18] >> and wanna make the company better and better and stronger because they understand that together, you can build something extraordinary. So that's what we help people do. Alright. So from a revenue perspective, we've started the company. Rev first revenues were 2,017. We grew, you know, like a lot of smaller businesses, a 100%, a 100%, a 100% plus. Last year, we're 85%. This year, we're not gonna quite hit 85%, but we're gonna still perform pretty darn well. And [06:47] >> I know Nathan's probably gonna ask me question about that later on. So let's jump into work now. So the ages of work. So we're gonna talk about the ages of work. I'm gonna talk about the future of work and learning, and I'm gonna talk about what I like to call useful intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence. So I've got a book coming out called work9.o, and it talks about the seven ages of work we've been through, [07:12] >> the eighth age that we're going through right now, and my optimistic perspective on the ninth age of work. So the seventh age of work was the age of information. You're all aware of that, right? Part of the age of information was we became overwhelmed. We didn't know what information to believe in, what not to believe in. We were talking a bit earlier or someone was talking about a bit earlier about the gen z wanting to understand [07:40] >> things. Well, we all wanna understand things a lot better than than we have been. Right? We wanna understand what's real, what's not real. This is why I talk about useful information. So I deeply believe that COVID started this transition and that ChatGPT has accelerated it. And by the way, big transitions like this do not happen without a lot of turmoil. Transitions like this threaten the status quo. There's status quo all over the place, all over the [08:07] >> world. And if you think about some of the anxiety and some of the stuff that's going on, that's what we're going through right now. There's a major transformation taking place in the world right now. And we need to as leaders, we need to be able to confidently walk our way through and take our organizations through this major transformation. So I think it's really important to understand what's going on, and that's why I've spent the last four [08:29] >> years writing this book that hopefully will be out the very beginning of next year. [08:35] >> So trends, future of learning, lifelong learning. Alright. Skill based credentials, decentralization of knowledge, letting people move at their pace. These are the future of learning. The future of work is proliferation of data. It's teaming. Right? And it's developing soft skills, especially for leaders. We need to be able to meet people where they are. [08:59] >> The status quo is not enough. One of the things someone else was talking about is, you know, I've written a ton of stuff. Probably if you go to our website, there's a we have a section called 90 u. I probably have thousands of pages that I've written on how to start an organization, how to scale your organization, understanding where you are developmentally, how to give hard how to have hard conversations, all this different stuff. Right? And [09:24] >> we give it away for free because I believe information wants to be free. We try to protect it sometimes, but the reality is it deaf it desperately wants to be free. And so every team member should have information that they that we can give them and make it digestible, and all this results in a workplace where people feel like they matter and they're being appreciated and they're trusting and we're trusting them with their information. Alright. I [09:50] >> mentioned earlier, I believe what it's all about is that is useful information, not artificial intelligence, useful intelligence. [10:00] >> Alright. So how are we helping companies navigate this new era that we're going into with AI as an example? Well, let's just say you've come to 90 and you are in a certain industry, a certain stage of development, and at a and have a certain number of people. Well, within plus or minus a year from now, you can give us that information, and we will immediately give you what a likely organizational chart will look like for [10:29] >> you. Not only that, we'll give you the KPIs, not just for your company, but for every single seat. Right? So this is an example of us leveraging artificial intelligence to help you navigate your stages of development. First stage is just figuring out survival. Second stage is getting things up and running and moving. Right? You've proven product market fit. Third stage is starting to scale the organization. Fourth stage is you're succeeding. This is predictable. It's consistent. And [10:58] >> then the fifth stage is you've gotten to the business to a place where you actually don't need to be there anymore. That's scary for some people, but the reality is we need to get our companies to stewardship stage. This is a place where we could gladly hand it to the next generation of leaders, or we could sell it to someone who we would genuinely be happy selling it to. Ultimately, we want to have that something that [11:19] >> we we deeply feel good about because wouldn't it be great to love your companies forever even after you've sold them? [11:27] >> Alright. So now talking about the humans in the company. Right? How are we gonna use AI there? We're building out a MentorBot. I've been working on him for a year and a half now. His its name's Maz. I struggle sometimes with the gender thing, but its name's Maz, and ultimately it's gonna meet every one of our employees where they are. It's gonna help them understand themselves. It's gonna help them understand others. It's gonna help them interact [11:52] >> with their teammates. It's gonna help them collaborate and make decisions taking into consideration the unique characteristics of the individuals. So as an example, if I'm a high fact finder and someone's a low fact finder, it'll help us meet in the middle in terms of sharing information. Helping introverts understand extroverts. Extroverts like to think and process out loud. Introverts want to have time and wait and be able to think about something. Introverts want to have a be [12:18] >> able to go home at night and think about it and then come back. So really helping people to better understand one another so that ultimately we can reduce the level of friction associated with doing work and just loving working together. Alright. So that's the big idea around some of the ways we're helping we're incorporating AI into our platform is to help people understand where they are, what's important, what to focus on, using assessments to help everybody [12:44] >> in the organization understand what's not working and what's not working, so so they can prioritize properly, and so they can also decide on what they're not going to worry about. Maybe it's for another quarter, maybe it's for another year, etc. But there's a I'm super excited about the things that I see us being able to do for our clients, and and [13:06] >> I'm extraordinarily optimistic about how AI AI is gonna help all of us build companies that will ultimately love forever. And that's all of my prepared remarks. Any questions? [13:22] Here. Hit my mic. Yeah. Mark, I'll fire a question, not you. It about revenue. Won't How did you identify? Because you built this around traction. A lot of people have problems identifying movements to build around it. We saw with Chili Piper. They tried to build a movement around meeting automation. It didn't work. You successfully built a movement, real revenue growth around a movement. How did you align that? Is Gino in on this? Does he have equity [13:42] in the business? [13:43] >> Yeah. No no equity in the business. So it goes back all the way to 2000 and so I the idea for '90 actually started before I ever heard about traction. So it goes back to 2005, and I was gonna write my own book called Connecting the Dots and then create the software. And then I actually invested in the company that started to run on '90. I personally invested in it. And so I read the Traction book. [14:07] >> I was like, that's better book than I was gonna write, cause he's really good at simplifying things. And the second thing is I wasn't planning on starting a coaching community, and Gino was building this coaching community. Today, as you may or may not know, there are over 800 e o s actually, 828 as of last week, eos coaches around the world. That wasn't the thing I was thinking about doing. So when I heard about traction, I [14:31] >> read the book, then I met Gino, and I said, hey. Right? I was gonna do something similar. I wasn't gonna do the coaching community thing. I really wanted to do the software thing, And could I possibly join the community and and and build the software? And his answer was we tried it. It's not in our DNA, and the rest is history. [14:50] It's not in our DNA. So I guess I'm a part of thing I try and do pull out from all these speakers like nuggets you can take. So like one of the patterns we see from 3,000 interviews and having diligent hundreds of data rooms at Founder Path do these debt deals is starting as an agency is a hack. It's it's totally a hack. The most successful software companies we see that are most unwritable bankable, they usually [15:08] launch an agency. Another way is they get on on a movement. So if you can go find a coaching program with hundreds of coaches but no engineering DNA, that is a prime target for you to go build software for that community. It already exists. Then go build an economic relationship with the leader of that consulting firm or coaching company, and then boom, you have a software command that's growing very quickly. So you've done this very well. [15:28] >> Yeah. And then the other thing is we now have a strategic partnership with Vistage. There's a group called Exit Planning Institute that has over 5,000 coaches that we have [15:36] a What kickback do you pay them? Beg your pardon? What kickback do you pay [15:40] >> them? We're just sponsors for Vistage, so we don't kick them anything. No revenue share? No revenue share. K. And with regard to EPI, we do have a revenue share. [15:50] Okay. Can you share that or no? You're smiling [15:52] >> I'm smiling. It's it's it's between 1020%. I'm not exactly [15:57] Okay. [15:57] >> I don't have What's the average [15:58] >> customer pay for 90 per year? [15:59] The average customer pay for [16:01] >> 90 per year? About $2,500. [16:05] Okay. 2,500. So let's just make the math easy. If someone if they bring if if EIR brings you a company that pays you 2,000 per year, you'll kick them back something on the order of 200 to $400 per year as long as the customer stays active. [16:16] >> Yeah. And I should have mentioned earlier, you know, we have 13,300 companies now running running on '90 and, you know, several 100,000 people in those companies. [16:27] Well, we're excited about the movement you're building. Thanks for showing the revenue graph, your future of AI. Congratulations on getting the book done, and good luck on the launch. Guys, give it up for Mark Abbott from Ninety. Thank you. Mark, thank you. That was great. Thank you.

[00:00] Founders, what's going on? You guys know I love in person events and they are back. The recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together, share intimate details, templates, KPIs, OKRs about their business, and it was something special, something special. We'd love to meet you in person. If you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule. The link will be down [00:23] below in the description. If you're listening on iTunes, check this out on YouTube, you'll see the links in the description. Or you can just Google Founderpath or Latka next event. We'd love to see you in person. In the meantime though, enjoy this recording. It's a good [00:43] >> system. The question is what kind of operating system do you have? There are about five operating system types that are out there if you think about it. First of all when you start a company you've got this thing called an accidental operating system, right? So you've got papers and Excel and PowerPoints and you're just trying to get your act together. And you're working like dogs just trying to make things happen, right? And so a bunch of [01:04] >> people are doing a bunch of different things and you're probably not even using the same tools to figure it all out. And then all of a sudden you're like wait a second, we can't have people's names in one document here and another document, another document here. Let's bring it all together. And that's called an intentional operating system. And then you're like you know what, people have built businesses before. Someone's probably figured this out. Why are we [01:25] >> sitting here creating all these tools when I'm sure someone's already done this, there's books on how to do this, there's tools out there. Has someone figured this out? And if you go out and you look, there are a bunch of books out there. There's E-Myth, right? There's Traction. There's The Great Game of Business. There's The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. Trying to think of some other names that are out there. Rockefeller Habits. Rockefeller Habits, Scaling Up. [01:47] >> There are a bunch of books that are out there, right? And they kind of lay out how people have been doing this for decades and decades. So that's called a designed operating system, alright? And then after that you come to a holistic operating system, because some of the systems don't have everything in it. So as an example, EOS, which I'm very close to, really doesn't have anything about figuring out how to build value, right. Because the [02:08] >> reality is in industry, right, we're not focused, at least lots of us aren't, focused on EBITDA. We're focused on growing revenues, right. And so the value of the business is based upon the revenues, not the EBITDA. So get your arms around how you create value. And then the last type of operating system is actually what we're doing. We're creating an integrated operating system which takes all this information, all these tools, all these disciplines and puts it [02:32] >> all together. So it's almost easy to build a great company. [02:35] Mark, before you go forward, go back when I'm going to sell you for a second. Go back two slides, just to the revenue growth graph so people, they're more likely to pay attention, at least I am, the revenue success of the business, right? So you get going in 2017, small revenue. Where are you at today? [02:50] >> So ARR as of today is about 10,400,000 [02:55] So this graph is actually a little bit old, 10.4. And how much did you grow to before you raised, so fully bootstrapped? [03:02] >> So we raised money last summer, and at that point in time, our ARR was around $4,000,000 [03:12] And then how much did you decide to raise? [03:13] >> So we raised $20,000,000 Okay, that's the lead. [03:17] Now let's keep going. We'll come back to that in a bit. [03:19] >> Alright. So what I'm going to do here is share with you, these three playbooks, right? So number one we're going to talk about community, how we leverage community to get going. How we activate people when they get into our system and then the top metrics that Insight Partners looked at and fell in love with. And I'm going to share with you that they didn't actually understand our business as well as they loved our numbers, which is [03:42] >> kind of a funny story. So how we use community. So we don't sell, we serve. This is an important thing. I wanna talk about this a bunch of different times because there's so much I'd love to share with you all, right? But one of them is I believe we're moving into a new age of work, alright? And I believe that every single one of you to succeed in this new age of work you have to have [04:02] >> high trust relationships with all of your stakeholders. Alright? So think about that. You have to have high trust relationships with all of your stakeholders and obviously your employees and your customers and your vendors are all stakeholders and ultimately society is a stakeholder because we're moving into this age where everybody pretty much knows what's going on. You can't hide anymore. Alright. And so, so we don't sell, we serve. There are a bunch of books in the market [04:26] >> about operating systems and so people are aware of operating systems. The market is aware of what it is we're selling big picture wise. And there are coaches. There are thousands of coaches and they're all sales people for us. Right? And in particular we've been close to the EOS community, The book Traction which I'll show in a second. And there are millions of copies of Traction out there which is super cool. And there are, like I said, [04:50] >> there are thousands of coaches and there literally were up until recently about a thousand coaches just selling EOS. And so we're very close to those folks. [04:59] And Mark, when you say selling EOS, what does that mean? Is EOS a website? Is it a template? Is it a playbook? [05:04] >> Yeah, so EOS is a book and it describes the six key components of a business and it teaches you how to master those six key components. So getting everybody on the same page in terms of vision, getting right people, right seats, getting really good with data, getting really good at problem solving, getting really good at building out your processes. Remember the one of the slides just a bit earlier, right? Getting everybody on the same page with [05:25] >> regard to who does what. I call it agreement based leadership and then ultimately getting title of the book in the EOS Traction. We call it getting smart shit done, right? But just getting traction. So it explains how to get strong at all six of those key components. Cool? So here is the slide that shows you the number of coaches and as you can see just in the EOS community, it went flat, grew, went flat, but then [05:48] >> you can see the number of coach companies and these are companies that all the coaches have coached. There's over 12,500 companies out there. And if you saw the slide earlier, we've got 5,200 running on our software right now. Now the reality is is for every coach company that's out there's about nine times as many companies that can't afford a coach because coaches cost like 25 to $30,000 a year. And our software makes it almost easy to [06:14] >> master the tools without hiring a coach. And we're only $14 a seat per month. Alright, so talked about the book. Here you Go [06:23] back to the book for a second. So go back to that slide. So do you guys, do you own this? [06:27] >> We do not own it. [06:29] Does that work? [06:30] >> Yeah, so we just pay a license fee to EOS to use the terms. So we pay 10% of our revenues to EOS to be able to use their trademark terms in our software. We got about seven trademark terms. So we're paying almost $100,000 a month for seven trademark terms right now. [06:44] >> Cool? [06:46] Should we talk more about those? [06:49] >> Well, so people, I mean, it sounds like I'm gauging reaction. People say, well, that feels high. Does it feel high or is it worth it? It's worth it. It's one of the best investments we've ever made. [06:59] Oh, you're a customer? [07:00] >> Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess that answers that question. [07:03] >> Alright. So as you can see, what's interesting is at first all the clients were coming to us through coaches, but now we've got a bunch of companies out there running on us, they're aware of us, they're telling people about us, right. I'll give you a couple punch lines here ahead of time. Net promoter scores goes up and down because sometimes in software everything's not working perfectly, but we're typically between fifty and seventy on Net Promoter Score, [07:29] >> which in the SMB space is pretty damn good, right? I'm gonna give you the really big punch line. If you use our system and you cascade it all the way down so everybody in your company is using our tools including the feedback tool, [07:42] >> our churn rate annualized is less than 1%. That's in SMB guys, less than 1%. You know how many companies go out of business as a percentage in the SMB space every single year? Right, so what does that mean? It means it's sticky but it also means we're helping a lot. Right, I've got emails from entrepreneurs saying please don't super jack up your price of your software because we're so dependent upon you right now. Does this make [08:10] >> some sense? Because we're in everything, right? Their meetings, their goals, their processes, their feedback. We're involved in everything the company does to do work on the business. We're not work in the business tools like we're not a marketing tool, we're work on the business tools. So all of our tools touch every single person in the company. So the good news is we're getting a lot more growth from the non coach side of the world. Alright, so [08:36] >> how do we activate? So this is really cool. So I'm gonna talk about we three users. If we can get three users in during a trial period, we're almost at like 90% conversion rate. We have world class chat. Remember I said we're moving in the new age of work. I call it the age of understanding, high trust relationships. We're there within five minutes always with real people answering your questions, doing everything we can and we're going [09:00] >> 24/7 as soon as we possibly can. Because if you're an entrepreneur and you're working on building your business and it's one a.m. in the morning, my son's in my head right now. One a.m. in the morning, dad is redundant. Alright, but if it's 01:00 in the morning, right, we got to be there for you. So world class chat and then ultimately we get them to expand the use of the tools. So that's how [09:22] >> we do it. So I mentioned earlier the conversion rates. By the end of the trial if we can get three plus people, if there are 10 plus people in the company at least, almost 98%. [09:34] >> Five, remember I've talked about chat? So Intercom, right? We're there for you. We understand what's going on. We've got real people and we make sure that we get your issue solved as fast as possible. And one of the things that's really super important in my company is you care. We care about that's our number one value proposition is we care. It's not innovation, it's making damn sure we're taking care of you and you know we're taking [09:57] >> care of you. So if you go to Trustpilot as an example, we're like 4.7 and our people just like man this is one of the best customer service experiences I've ever experienced in SaaS, right? And then support staff knows product well, it's really key. So I mentioned the 1% less churn, right? So getting people to use the tool. We do webinars. We do anything we can to help people master the tools. [10:22] Wait. Go back real quick. This is the first time you showed a screenshot of your actual product interface. This gives you guys an idea of sort of what he's, you know what Ninety is selling, there on the right. Right, Mark do want to talk anything a little bit about that maybe? [10:33] >> You know, it's funny, I'm gonna be really just you know this is what we do here right, we talk real honestly. So, we got a new tool we're working on right now and I reached out to MetaLab and they came back and said you know can we help you with your user interface. I'm like you know we just went through a whole process to update it. And they're like yeah but you know we think it [10:53] >> could even be better. And I'm like, fuck. So we tried to make it super easy, super intuitive, super navigatable. We hear this from 95% of our clients. Every now and then there's someone out there who's like really critical and we love that. We want to get better and better and better. But yeah, the UI is really super simple. People can get up and running on it and we start doing demos like, oh, I get it. It's [11:18] >> just all right there. Boom, you click on it and it's obvious. It's a meeting tool, it's an accountability chart, all obvious stuff. [11:25] Is that cool? [11:26] >> Yeah, so you're up now to like 4,000,000 in revenue, and the next slide you're gonna talk about when Insight reached out, like what did they think about? [11:31] So take us through that journey. [11:32] >> Yep, cool. [11:33] >> Alright, so going up, went the wrong direction. So there are somewhere just in The United States alone, and it depends on whose data you look at, so if the ZoomInfo guys were here right, but it's at least our target market is companies with 10 to 250 employees and somewhere between one and three million small mid sized businesses fall in that category in The United States. It depends on whose number you're looking at. And my [12:02] >> research suggested on average it's 40 people, right? And I think that The U.S. represents approximately a third of the sort of the world that's gonna be interested in our product. And so you take that number times three. So let's just go in the middle and let's say 2,000,000 times 40 is 80,000,000 times three, 240 million people times 14. You guys can get the size of the market from that math probably, right? So it's a [12:27] >> big market. We've been growing at five to 8% month over month revenue. To be direct with you on the data you saw earlier, we put our first price increase in last month, February. So we never increased prices. So we're $12 up until last month. So that's part the reason our numbers are growing. We have grown as much as they have in the last couple of weeks. But we've been doing five to 8% month over month revenue [12:55] >> growth for several years now. CAC payback period, we got coaches. We don't even pay them a referral fee. You can get the sense for that payback period. And then we have our marketing. But on average, our payback period is about three months. The way [13:10] to tap that coaching team, it sounds like there was a licensing fee you pay, right? Does that come with the licensing fee? [13:14] >> I don't have that included in the CAC. [13:17] Interesting. Good point. What makes the coaches sell you? [13:20] >> Because we make their clients' lives so much easier. [13:22] So got it. So they can make more on their services if they get their clients on Ninety software? [13:27] >> Yeah. And I don't know this. It's a really good one, I'm just looking one of my colleagues. But it used to be that you'd have your clients, 80% of your clients would graduate. It takes about two years to teach someone how to master EOS. So about eighty percent would graduate. I'm pretty confident, if you think about our math, that we turn that graduation rate up to ninety percent, ninety five percent. But more importantly it's just the [13:51] >> whole experience is that much easier, right? You walk out of a session, everything's there, you just go back and you just have your weekly meetings. It's really easy to master EOS in our opinion using our software. And I remember old clients before we got the software out there go, God, I can't believe we used to do it this way, right? Because you'd have all these sheets up, tear sheets and stuff up, you have to go back. [14:12] >> I don't even remember what I wrote there, I can't read my writing, it was kind of a pain in the ass. So lesson, and then user churn is less than 7% and our net revenue, net dollar retention's 135%. So in SaaS, SMB, right, I can tell you that I'm going to show go here actually I'll go later. But I'll give you a piece of insight, no pun intended on those ratios in a second. So we've already [14:41] >> done that one. This was it's funny, Insight Partners. So they just reached out to us. We were not raising money. We had no interest in raising money. I'll get to this in a second. But they just reached out to us and said we'd like to get to know more about you guys. K1 reached out to us, Battery reached out to us, bunch of people started reaching out to us last year. And I said look, we have [15:03] >> no intentions of raising anything until we're at least a 10,000,000 ARR. Because that's when I think in my old world, that's when you started to be able to have conversations with almost anybody you wanted to. So that's where we were. Just back to the coaches, there's 100,000 plus coaches out there, so it's a huge market. Already talked about the numbers here, net revenue retention, MRR growth, all that good stuff. CAC payback, we already talked about that. [15:28] >> User churn, talked about that less than 7% annualized and that includes we have a lot of small companies. You can get into our software for $14 right? So there's a lot of small companies in there. There's a lot of one or two offs. But generally speaking that's obviously less than close to it's been averaging less than half a percent per month for years. [15:52] >> So why did we raise the money? I self funded it for the first three, four years. I didn't want I could do that. I didn't want to give up any equity. [16:03] Did you own 100% before that basically? [16:05] >> I had sold some to my colleagues and some customers and things like that. But yeah, so I was at 80% up until Insight came in. Only had one full time employee up until I want to say '19. And then all the rest of us including me, I was an EOS coach for years, right. So I got in there. I had the idea back in 2005 sitting on a bunch of boards and I'm gonna use an expression [16:34] >> that someone shares and it's crude so apologize. But I would go to these board meetings and I'd invested in a 100 companies. I built a business that made our shareholders over 1,000,000,000. I'm like guys this isn't that complicated. And I thought it was me, right? But every time we'd go to a meeting I'd say you gotta do these things, these things, and these things. These are the right disciplines. They'd say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They'd smile [16:56] >> fuck me is the expression, right? And I got tired of it. I'm like there's got to be a better way. I'm gonna write a book. I'm gonna create software. It's gonna be easy and obvious. And that was 2005, right? So it's a long road, right? But I was the, so I was this coach because EOS had this book. It was pretty popular. There were 35 coaches. They were growing. I'm like I'll join the community if they're [17:16] >> not gonna do the software. They said software's too tough. We're not gonna do it. And that's the story. So I had a still to this day have a fractional head of marketing. Coach support, we're full time now. Pretty full time actually. We're not totally full time. Data is fractional, engineering's fractional, finance is fractional, talent, all fractional people. Now what I got was really, really good people, right, that I could afford. So it was half cash, sometimes [17:42] >> all equity. I've got people that honestly cost 200, 300, 400, $500,000 and more a year to support the journey up until now. And so now we're doing hiring full time people. We're actually at 50 and we're going to 100 this year. And we're getting everybody full time. [18:02] And so wait why is that? So to me what I heard was super resourceful, found the talent you needed to get, contract model, very similar to John Darbyshire and how he's doing smart suite. But now you want to move and basically increase your FTEs from 50 to 100. Why not say it's like super rational, conservative, milk before you can and use contractors? Well, [18:24] >> because we think that we can grow first of all, contractors aren't cheap. And so what happens is we know that we're going from needing two days to three days to four days, right. And so right now I've got two senior guys in marketing and together they're costing me over $500,000. Does that make sense? So and data we've got there's part of what we want to do is make data superpower for all of our clients and so [18:50] >> we need a full time head of data like ASAP. There's so much opportunity for us on the data world and so and then talent right with growing and then so you just start to all of a sudden and then as the team gets more and more full time, they want their colleagues who are supporting them to become more and more full time because we're all running as fast as we can run. Does that make some sense? [19:17] >> Pursued by a long list of VCs, I mentioned that earlier, didn't raise, we talked about that. Insight gave us forward credit given the consistency of our growth in paying companies, paying users, MRR and churn. I've already mentioned these things. [19:33] >> This is we're proud of this. Can't lie. Jeff Horing, who's the managing partner of Insight, said we had the best KPIs he's ever seen in SMB. [19:45] >> That's a cool thing. That's a cool thing. Thanks. [19:54] >> What they didn't see was they fell in love with our numbers, but they never really wanted to understand our vision and where we wanted to go until after they got in there. And now they see it, and now they believe in it, and now they're really, you know, they're stepping up and they're giving us a lot of support. But it was kind of funny because it's like good news bad news right? It was like oh man [20:14] >> we love your numbers these are amazing let's just do it and it's like wait a second where are you guys going? Where do you want to be in ten years? It's like okay alright let's do it. [20:25] >> And that's that's all I got for you. [20:29] So just be clear before before we wrap and before we clap and all that, Jess. So you you you raised are you comfortable sharing? Was it all equity or is there a part secondary? [20:38] >> It was all equity. [20:39] Okay, all on the balance sheet. [20:41] >> It's all on the balance sheet. [20:42] Got it. And how was the first board meeting? [20:45] >> Great question. [20:46] I got to give it to How was the last board meeting is probably the better question, but how [20:50] >> was the first We've only had one. So we rate all of our meetings, it's what we teach, So we rate our meetings on a scale of one to 10 and so Chris and I and then we've got another VC friend of ours who's also a coach plus a friend of mine who runs the best Myers Briggs teaching company in the world's on our board and then we brought Insight, one person from Insight. And everybody gave the [21:15] >> meeting a nine or 9.5 except for Insight and they gave it an eight. And they gave it an eight because we didn't give them all the numbers, the detailed numbers that they wanted to see. And I'll tell you why, it's because I thought the board meeting was the appropriate venue for them to hear our long term vision because they never asked for it. And I wanna make damn sure going forward they understand why we're doing all [21:38] >> the things that we're doing. And so they gave us an eight. [21:41] Guys, Mark Abbott with Ninety. Give him a round of applause. Thank you. That was great.

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is none other than mark abbott he's an entrepreneur ceo and coach with decades of experience across startups early stage small and mid-sized companies his track record includes generating over a billion dollars in gains for his investors his dual passion is not just teaching leadership teams how to build extraordinary productive humane and resilient companies but building every one of the cloud-based tools needed to make the associated journey journey extremely extremely easy mark you ready to take us to the top i am ready all right now you are building these tools for founders that you work with via 90.io that's n-i-n-e-t-y-dot io what's the company doing are you guys pure place ass we are pure play sas and we build an expanding collection of tools that helps people just build amazing companies so a bunch of different tools meeting tools planning tools goal setting tools feedback tools process management tools just an integrated and expanding collection of core tools people need to build extraordinarily productive humane and resilient companies when did you launch the company what year um we had our first beta users in team 21 2017 2017 okay and how many customers Currently serving 1920 customers are now paying for the platform today 1920 a very specific number that's great you're looking at the right dashboards walk be walk me before you get to 1920. you've got to get your first 100 where did you get your first 100 customers from uh so we i belong to a coaching network of uh of uh coaches that teach this thing called eos the entrepreneurial operating system and so approximately half of them probably came from other coaches and and how have you sort of codified the entrepreneur operating system and why you sort of why didn't anyone else do this yeah so actually um there's a long story but we're not the only ones who have done it so there's another company company out there that has a collection of tools that also complement eos but um i actually started thinking about the big idea almost 15 years ago and then um became familiar with the community about 10 years ago and uh and then started really working on the software about seven years ago and how much do these customers pay you on average per month yeah so the average company is paying close to 140 per month okay 140 per month and has it always been that way or are you moving upstream or downstream yeah so the basic way it works is we charge on a per seat basis so it starts at 12 and then as the companies put more and more seats on the system the price declines all the way down to three bucks if they have you know hundreds of of people using subscribing to the system and mark with 1 920 customers paying for Monthly recurring revenue 90. io today at 140 per month what does that mean in terms of what you're doing in monthly recurring revenue yeah we're virtually at 250 250 that's obviously it's a great place to be it's even more impressive if Bootstrapped you've done this bootstrap have you raised have not oh we love we love that i love that answer so what's enabled you to get i mean 1900 customers you started off with the eos community how are you getting customers today yeah we're probably um it's i want to say it's close to 50 50 um in terms of people that are coming out of the community working with another coach and then you know people who are hearing about it through organizations like um eo right the entrepreneur's organization vistage ypo i'm hearing about it from friends we're global you know so um there's there are a lot of communities out there that support entrepreneurs and uh and we seem to be um catching on so what else is there anything else you upsell them besides the the sort of the operating platform tools because once you start getting the thousands of customers up selling even one or two additional tools to increase arpu by five to ten bucks per month it means a big difference to obviously revenue yeah let's just say i have a five-year product build-out road map and we know we know we need to do that we have additional tools that are coming out okay fair enough now are you burning cash today are you profitable um well we could be profitable but we're burning okay how aggressively are you burning obviously you're reinvesting in growth you're talking like 100 net burn per month or less um somewhere between 50 and 100 okay fair enough and where is most that capital getting invested it is invested for we started putting almost all of our money in engineering really didn't do a lot in terms of marketing and we're just getting going in marketing we're also now investing in uh in data so we've actually hired a head of data and so we're starting to you know build out um things we're also working on um so those are the big things right so client success cost whatever it costs engineering then we're building out you know with a pretty decent long-term road map and then we're starting to put money in marketing and into data and mark how many engineers are on the on the team um probably around 12 12 and what's a total team size oh it's um gotta be over 20 less than 25 20. okay got it and do you i mean this price point is a little bit tricky right because 140 a month is not big enough where you can afford to do high-touch sales because they're not big enough contracts but it's also sort of on the expensive side in terms of just being a credit card swipe no touch on a website do you have quota carrying sales reps we have zero sales people okay do you have anyone in sort of customer support or or are people really just swiping without any demo no calls or anything just swiping a credit card on your website no we absolutely have a client success team and we're available to do demos as well as we make it really easy for people to look at videos the software is super intuitive so percentage of demos um to total trials has probably declined by 50 70 percent over the last couple of years okay and now do you do you in terms of growing the platform do you have plans to raise capital are you just funding this from your own your own cash currently well i've i've predominantly funded it myself and then we're to the point now as you know we can start to raise some capital in terms of debt so we're gonna do debt and then um you know it's possible someday that we'll do equity uh i love having control so that's part of the story here right yeah mark you strike me as a control freak which is a big compliment i love control freaks they they then have the total freedom to just build their vision and usually that's where you end up with the best results so i love that when you say you're going to do debt what does that mean how much debt capital would you raise we're um talking to several groups right now about a couple million okay so okay guys so like well i guess let me ask be specific will you raise more than 1x your ar in debt no okay so it'll be below 2.5 you know 2.8 million in terms of total debt you raise correct and how cheaply do you think you can get the debt uh as i said we're in conversations right now um you know honestly honestly i have not been as involved as my uh my head of finance has been so i you know i've got a gut for it but i don't really know yeah yeah interesting and why use debt over equity is it really just a control thing dilution control um got a very clear sort of vision as to where we want to take this thing and um you know so so it's it's it's all about just uh staying focused and and frankly you know i there's a lot of time needs to go into if you want to go raise equity and right now we're you know we're running 90 120 miles per hour just doing what we need to do and so as far as uh you know just allocating my scarce time that's not something i really want to put a lot of effort into right now and back to being control we're going to do it we're going to do it well mark i'm going to make a big statement in a second but i want to know churn first in this sort of price point chern can sometimes ask you what's your gross revenue term like it looks like annually um it's a great question it's come down and come down right now let trailing 13 weeks i almost don't want to say this nathan um but trailing 13 weeks were less than four percent annualized okay uh less than four percent annualized so you're taking 13 weeks times four or five-ish and annualized it's about four percent yeah and do you have expand meaningful sort of upsell and expansion revenue yet uh so you have net revenue retention above 100 140 what are you up selling it's not it's just more and more seats right so they start off with a limited number of seats and then we you know we built it so that over time it becomes really apparent that it's really smart to start cascading down the tools to other people in the company so across your 1920 customers when you look at how they will probably perform the next 12 months relative to the past 12 months performance you expect about four percent of them to churn in terms of revenue churn but 45 of them will expand new seats etc leading to net revenue retention of 140 just on your historical cohorts is that accurate not net revenue retention that's expansion so you you take the 140 less the plus the four percent but you're close right well no i'm not close if if expansion is 140 percent and churns four percent your net revenue retention then would be like 136 sorry 236 percent not 140 136 percent so let's let's just say so you start off with 100 right and then you go to 140 and then of the original hundred dollars we lose four yes so i was got it so i was right yeah yeah so you're 36 yeah yeah so you're i was right your net revenue retention is between 136 and 140 percent great yeah okay got it now let's talk about new user acquisition for a second what's it cost you in terms of fully weighted cac to get a new 140 a month Customer acquisition cost customer it's interesting right and i don't believe the numbers right now they're way too low um and it's a part it's a combination of the you know the fact that we have this great community um so we don't own the community we're not on the community no no we're just members up but if you pull if you pull that number out it looks like our payback period right now because we have not put that much effort into marketing our payback period is literally less than three months got it so you're spending like 300 400 bucks to get into non-community based it's lower than that but i don't even like going there right yep yep well so let me ask you a question then uh you know i built founder path so that founders could click a couple buttons and raise debt without having to go and raise it do a big process sign a bunch of you know term notes you know understand revenue based financing true interest rates we have 50 million deploying to founders we'll have 10 million out here by the end of the month uh i'd love to do that deal with you okay let's talk is the number you're looking for again you said less than 2.5 million is really what you want uh the tricky thing with debt is the second you take it you're paying some sort of interest on it unless you get a big interest-free interest-only period so how much cash do you think if you had today you could deploy it in the next 30 days how much cash could we deploy in the next 30 days um well in the next 30 days the i mean we're just you know our expenses are our expenses so i'm not quite sure i'm tracking with you i wouldn't i wouldn't deploy a million dollars in the next 30 days that's for sure i would deploy over over a period of time but well this is something that a lot of founders don't think about when they think about raising debt when you raise debt uh depending on the facility you raise on you're paying interest on it even if it's sitting in your bank so you want to as closely correlate when you're actually investing the debt dollars to when you're actually drawing the debt so that you're not paying interest on unused capital right agree with that not all not all the deals we are looking at we have to draw down got it so you're looking at some sort of line you know credit line products right where you've got you know you can take down whatever yeah i see i see very interesting well we'll talk offline more about if we can do a deal together on founderpath.com you're the exact sort of company that we do these sorts of deals with so we'll chat more about that later in the meantime though congrats on the growth let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um i have there's so many right but i'll go with traction just because that's for everything we do so attraction by gino whitman number two is there a ceo you're following or studying there really isn't number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides your own besides our own um that's a good i don't really have a good good answer um i i honestly don't i mean we you know we we use hubspot and intercom love them both number four how many hours of sleep to get every night probably real sleep is is is six but i'm in bed seven plus and what's your situation mark married single kids married with a 21 year old boy okay and how old are you i am 60. 60. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. um i love right where i am i wouldn't change a damn thing so no no one writes no it's not a regret thing it's more like when you're sitting down with your boy what's something you're telling him in terms of life and business yeah no there's a lot of stuff um that we talk about in terms of life and business uh you know i think the key one of the keys to success is having a very long-term oriented perspective on everything you're doing very good and hey speaking of long-term i didn't ask you this but you're out of call doing 250 000 a month right now where were you about a year ago so we can understand growth rate yeah um last uh july we were at 65 000 okay so joey you know we're obviously recording this in october so last october you were doing what like 70 80 000 a month probably somewhere in there okay very good eight let's just call it yeah health obviously healthy growth so call it a million dollar run right up to a 3.2 million dollar run rate today again guys 90. io they built the bat they built on the back of a community called eos entrepreneur operating system they they now built these tools to help teams actually measure these goals make the vision get to work and then obviously keep people accountable for what they committed to in those goals scaling nicely with 1920 customers mark thanks for taking us to the top you're welcome one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly 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