Norby Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

hey folks my guest today is nick gerard he's a lifelong creator and builder as well as a former microsoft software engineer and pm heals degrees in music computer science and electrical engineering from the university of michigan where he also launched his first startup while still a student before founding his current company norbi he consulted for numerous early stage companies and helped launch a viral online community at the start of the covet 19 pandemic again now building norbi.live a marketing platform for creators nick you're ready to take us to the top yeah thanks for having me you bet okay so you sound like a triple threat you have empathy for music you can code from computer science you you're in the weeds because you you ran an agency launched side projects so norby's gonna be big huh uh that's the idea um the first startup i ever started actually was a it was a music startup back that was the one i did in college um and we built it for djs and it was about collaborating like building collaborative playlists and playing music together in real time and um the goal for me has always been to figure out a way to marry those two things to figure out a way to build products and services for people in creative worlds and that's really carried me through most of my 20s very cool okay so norbi.live uh is the tool today to help me understand who's paying you and what they're paying on average per month if you have customers yeah so we have two tiers called the creator tier in the brand here the creator tier is a five dollar a month tier and the brand here uh is 20 bucks a month and you can basically think of norby as like if you took link tree mailchimp flowdesk leadpages and community and smooshed them all together all those things that people set up super complicated zapier flows to wire together to build their online presence put all those in one place you brand everything one time it looks right in all the different places everything is built to work together so you don't need to hook a bunch of different services together usually we can simplify people's stack you know take a lot of the daily tax out of their operations and also usually save the money i use a lot of those tools and i'm just thinking off the top of my head my last bill from each of them all together is probably some around a thousand bucks a month i would never believe that you could do everything they do for five bucks a month to the point where i would never even sign up for your tool at five bucks a month because i just i wouldn't think it's possible that you actually can do that yeah well i mean i'm not gonna sit here and pretend that you know our our newsletter and email features does everything that mailchimp does we are a company that is 11 months old um but what we actually found is most people don't use all the features that a tool like mailchimp offers mailchimp is you know an email provider to end all email providers it's trying to be everything to everyone at the same time um and so if you look at the average spend you know most people are spending 65 70 a month on mailchimp um people you know who kind of fall into this category and they're not getting most of that value from a tool like that that's actually why tools like flow desk have started to crop up and take some of that market share away um we learned all of this because we built a community ourselves like the genesis of norbi was myself and my two co-founders at the very beginning of the pandemic uh built an online community that went like semi-viral overnight we had tens of thousands of people uh engaging with this thing and all of a sudden we had to build a lot of stuff and coordinate a lot of things we were hosting events on different platforms and we had email lists and we had sms lists and we were spinning up landing pages and signups and all this stuff all the time and we experienced first-hand what it is like to try to build and manage this kind of operation day-to-day um and so we started out just building tools for ourselves just solving for our own use cases like we need a link in bio we want to be able to do text messages oh we're doing an event collab with you know this other community over here let's like build you know the ability to host events um and so it just started very organically with our own needs building for the use cases that we encountered and then because we were working with other creators other community builders other brands um they started being like hey can we use those tools that you're building because we're doing exactly the same thing and so it kind of just grew from there and so everything that we have built has come from the mouths of our paying customers from day one how many are you having today how many paying customers uh i'm not i'm not gonna get into like all the the details on i'll say that we have hundreds of paying customers uh we'll keep it we have a we have uh thousands of people on our wait list we're keeping a wait list uh we're basically still in beta right now uh and starting to open it up to the world in q1 next year so i mean 200 customers at five bucks a pop i mean you're doing something like a thousand bucks a month right now in revenue um more than that because we also have the 20 a month tier uh i see i see but i imagine there's probably a handful though on that right uh it's pretty evenly split actually i would say we have we have um probably three distinct cohorts we have individual creators and influencers who uh i would actually define separately i think influencers probably make most of their money from brand partnerships and sponsor posts and sponsor content creators are people who are directly monetizing their audience selling subscriptions selling content uh you know tips and that kind of thing so we have those individual creators they're very well suited to our five dollar a month tier uh then we have whatever call like community builders uh you know they may be people with a business objective maybe they have a shop or something maybe they have a paid membership community they might be an activist maybe they have a mighty networks maybe they have a facebook groups uh you know set up maybe they have a slack or something like that and then we have brands we have ecom operations that are you know d2c instagram brands that are uh you know building text message lists and doing promos and they have an email newsletter and they need a link in bio and then they're doing collabs with other brands and they do it a club spaces and that kind of thing so so 200 maybe multiply times like 10 or 15 a month on average instead of five you're doing a couple thousand bucks a month in revenue right is sort of where you're at today and where were you a year ago did you have any revenue year ago or no we did not so we started this we went full time on this at the very tail end of 2020 um myself and my two co-founders and until this summer uh it was just the three of us and we were just you know building these tools slowly you know starting to pick up our uh because we had built our own community we had a great network of kind of early people to test concepts with and get feedback from and get prototypes too um so we spent a lot of the spring doing that and kind of took the wraps off in the summer and uh unveiled our website and started doing events and activations uh with our own customers uh co-hosting things um and then we uh we we raised a round of funding in july and we've been you know building out the team since then uh the three co-founders do i just split everything evenly 33 33 33 at the start uh not exactly um but ballpark yeah and and why not exactly i mean i asked us because it's the toughest conversation you'll have as you're launching a company so tell share with us share what you can why didn't you do it evenly sure um i mean we had a very candid conversation with each other about um what all of our strengths were and what we brought to the table and i think the three of us have all known each other for several years um there's a lot of mutual respect and trust and we bri one of the things that i love about our partnership is how complementary it is we come from very different backgrounds i'm a tech and product person you know i was a software engineer i was a pm i did all the things that go into it you know i've built software i've marketed software i've done product design all of those kinds of things so so you own the most than of the three i i am the ceo yes as as the ceo on the most of the three and yeah well those things aren't always correlated there's just because someone has the title ceo doesn't mean the most so i'm just curious so you own the most because of the skill set you brought to the table the others maybe own a little bit less yeah fair okay cool talking about the round you raised how much did you raise this year uh so we raised just under four million dollars uh in july um and we basically set a cap for ourselves about how much of the company we wanted to give away uh and said this and no further um and what was that cap i mean most people in the seed or pre-seed are selling 20 or so yeah basically that um and we um you know we kicked off we took the wraps off of our product in may uh we started doing as i said a whole bunch of events and activations with our own customers um that we've found is like an incredible way to fill the top of our funnel every time we do an event every time we do programming or anything of that kind we get hundreds of signups we have never lacked for signups we from before we even launched or had a product we've had a waitlist um so we started doing that it went super well uh we were kind of feeling out how we wanted to structure the company from here and decided that we wanted to raise around and uh so we started fundraising in um at the very end of april uh or at the beginning of may uh it took us about um took us about four to five weeks to get uh uh offers that we were interested in on the table and then a couple weeks after that to get things closed what did you do that's not easy what did you do in the first four to five weeks to generate that kind of demand yeah um the first two weeks i talked mostly to people that uh i didn't really care if i won or lost because i had never done this before and i just did like eight meetings a day for two weeks and just um you know practiced and fell on my face a lot and got a lot of very quick no's um and learned how to tell the story of what we were doing and why it was important and what the opportunity was um i i we are obviously all true believers and you know think that there's a huge huge market here and a massive opportunity over the next couple of years um but um we're all first-time founders none of us have done this before and so just learning structurally how to tell a story about where you are and where you're going um how you've gotten where you are and and why that makes sense and how that leads into a natural trajectory toward the next one three and five years um practice practice practice practice and for me at least um nothing beats learning on the job just going out and doing it and it's it can be crushing because fail very quickly um but we we designed it so that like we i i did a bunch of cold outreach hit up everyone who i could who you know could make an introduction or whatever um teed up as many interviews as i could um and save the best for last and um tried to generate um you know we at the same time are taking off wraps off of our products we were able to generate a lot of buzz around all the things that we were doing and obviously that caught people's eye at the same time uh and that helped um and so by the time we got to you know the third and fourth week we had a couple solid candidates uh we had you know term sheets going into uh the end of end of may beginning of june and then you know a couple weeks later we had the round lockdown had a couple other people falling on board and we wound up closing it um just after july 4th talk to me about notation i think they i mean they were your first capital one right in 2020 yep yeah so they allowed us to go full time uh we raised on a safe we raised like half a million dollars and that was basically just so that sam steve and i could go full time um and that was um really i i mean they i have nothing but amazing things to say about that notation help you build your pipeline for the seed did they introduce you to a bunch of investors to drive that demand they made some of those interests as well yes but it really came from like did you close it was it was the gradient introduction from notation no it was not that was actually from uh i actually don't know who made that introduction i could look it up and get back to you on that um but you know it's learning especially as an engineer coming from um i my natural kind of tendency is toward being very literal minded i'll explain to you exactly what something does and how it does it um and learning to kind of break out of that into the kind of necessary shamelessness of being a ceo a fundraiser a sales person and just being willing to ask people for favors being willing to you know just reach out cold to people who are scary to you what was the subject i just didn't email investors called what was the subject line um i could go back and i could go back and find some of them some of them what i would do is um because we had we had built our own community i would drop links to things that we had done uh or i would i would post a link to an event that we had done uh or i would post a link to you know a write-up that we had gotten somewhere um or you know every single one of them was individualized that's one thing that like i didn't just like copy and paste and do the same thing to a thousand different email addresses i would do you know five minutes of research about the person that i was emailing try to figure out something about them write a subject line that tied in what we were doing and something that i thought might interest them and then give them an interesting link to check out in the email just one don't you know bombard people with a million different things to look at and keep it super super super short and casual uh and that would pretty much building the media brand i mean you have creators who share i mean this could be part of why you sort of got a premium evaluation is because you have this sort of media brand going yeah uh well that was a very conscious decision i think when we started out you know um i think there is a very strong appetite right now especially in our space we kind of straddle you know we're b2b sas but we're also consumer in a way we're selling to people who are used to consumer experiences you know they're not enterprise com customers not even really mid-market customers to be they're long tail creators uh uh small businesses um that are used to using you know products and services that that look more consumer than anything else and i think the companies that are crushing it in that area tend to be ones that do a really good job of marrying tech and culture uh uh you know like strong software services tools with really well developed brands you look at things i mean you literally sell hats on your website in addition to this exactly and and you know what the inspiration for that was uh square if you look at what they've done with their you know apparel line and their merch and just their development of their consumer brand despite the fact that they're primarily building tools for smbs um it's incredible and and i think those are the companies that are going to really win in this category over the next couple of years and as i said like we have never had a problem filling the top of our funnel that's how many people are on your weight loss right now [Music] um over four thousand that we're slowly working our way through yep how do you decide who to let in or not uh we're getting better and better at qualifying people it's a bunch of different things um i will say that actually one of the questions i guess sometimes is like you know how much does audience size play into it once people you know reach a certain audience size so they kind of uh age out of your tools and actually it's not one of the big indicators for us we have people on our platform who have millions of followers and we have people on our platform who have 2500 followers but it's like a super tightly knit engaged community um that's not really the the kind of primary metric that we look at there are a bunch of other things that we look at there are some defining characteristics of our customers usually they've you know been building this thing for a little while they've got a setup they're stitching together like nine different point solutions to build their you know online presence they felt the pain they're spending a lot of money they don't understand why it's so hard um that's you know that's our person it's typically someone who's spread out across their own three four five six different platforms they're building this brand presence this creator presence is community across a bunch of different channels they're using all these different tools and we have a bunch of things that we look at in their usage and in their background and platforms that they're on uh to qualify them very cool so nice growth again nothing to call it two three thousand bucks a month in revenue you raised four point five million to date um hopefully most of that stuff i'm not verifying that number by the way that two three thousand dollars a month in in revenue i'll say ballpark you know we got uh hundreds of customers thousands of people on the waitlist price point is five bucks a month and 20 bucks a month average uh uh i'll say average um revenue per customer per month is like 18 19 okay got it so you have way more at the 20 then you get the five that's why i would pull the average up we also meter usage so as you use more sms and email through us we do charge you more so we have power users that we make 80 900 a month off of oh i see got it got it so there's a bass plus meter cool yeah i mean i'm glad you said something because i'm looking at this going god i would not want to be in a position like clearly i'm like this guy must be a great storyteller to raise four on 20 with this small amount of revenue so it's great it sounds like you have more traction here than what my math is multiplying and yielding which is obviously good news uh but several hundred customers i mean do you think you break a thousand we have what's 50 days left in in 2021 can you break a thousand paying customers by the end of the year or no i think we definitely could if we wanted to it's a question we have spent oh come on nick that's such a silly come on that's such a silly answer if you wanted to of course you want i'm saying that i'm saying that we we have a wait list that we are waiting to execute on um because we have a lot of pieces that we're getting into place and like for instance in the last two months we've tripled our conversion during our trial we have an entirely paid product we have no free tier and we have tripled the number of people that we are converting in every in every cohort so things like that what does that mean though you don't let them in unless they're a fit right they're stuck on your wait list until you click a button and say yes let them in [Music] right so i mean if you're clicking yes let's work on converting 30 of them that to me would be a warning sign though because it means you're qualifying like there's 60 people you're saying yes they're fit but then they don't convert sure but we're the the conversion is increasing more than we are qualifying people is what i'll say we are converting a lot of the people who i don't know what that means that means that when you do when you do the math out we are we are refining we are converting more than we are refining like the conversion has gone up more than we have gated like the people where we are we are letting it we obviously prioritize people who have large audiences have existing followings who want to do things like brand partnerships or whatever but that's not the only criteria that we use got it i'm so not sure i follow but i under understand you have a waitlist you're letting people and conversions are going up which is great um what do you there's probably one or two things you know people have to do during the trial period so that you increase likelihood they do start paying what are those one or two things so one of the key things that we track is when people come on they they request an invite to norvie they tell us up front what they're most interested in there's usually a particular wedge that they come to us for we marry a bunch of different functionality right so we have landing pages we have sms we have emails uh we have event hosting uh we have link in bio we ask people in our onboarding flow you know what what are you primarily interested in using or before and maybe they are they do a bunch of online events they do a bunch of events as their marketing they're looking for a better event management suite or they've wanted to get into sms but you know community starts at 150 bucks a month or whatever and it's expensive and that's really the only consumer option or whatever they want a more customizable link and buy open link tree whatever it is one of the key things that we measure is when did they reach for a second tool they told us that they came in for events and now they're sending text messages they told us that they came in for link in bio but then they realized they can do their newsletter through us um that time how long does it take them to discover they can do you know a second part of their operation through us um and you know how how engaged are they with that second feature um as soon as they reach for that and assumes that as soon as they reach for that tool as soon as they reach a certain threshold of engagement we know that we're going to convert that person so decreasing that time increasing the discoverability of features product education uh tightening up that kind of onboarding experience during your trial has been really the focus for us for this the last couple months makes sense hey we're over time quick rapid fire things here what's the team size today how many people full time we're at eight full-time now eight how many engineers uh we are at uh four engineers with another one starting next month very cool plus you right yes nice you still get the right code you're still early enough all right very cool let's wrap up with the famous five nick number one favorite book favorite book of all time um a transformative book for me um in college or something called shantaram um about a guy who uh basically ditches his life and goes and fights from the idea in afghanistan in the 80s um and it's a fascinating book about philosophy and values and what makes life worth how do you say it again shantaram s-h-a-n-t-a-r-a-m okay very cool number two is there a ceo you're following or studying is there a ceo that i'm following or study studying i mean this might be a semi-cliche answer but i think patrick cole's in a stripe um and just the long-term vision that they have for that company um is is really incredible i mentioned square before i think a lot of the things that they're doing are incredible although i probably wouldn't put jack dorsey necessarily at the top of my list number three what's your favorite online tool for building norbi what's my favorite online tool for building norbi um [Music] across any particular dimension just any tool whatever you use the most any tool uh we use hubspot as our crm hubspot is amazing it's a you know uh just putting a lot of our different operations in one place like that was a game changer for us number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um i try to get at least six sometimes i fail all right and what's your situation married single kids uh i'm single i live with my i i'm technically single i live with my long-term girlfriend underdog very cool so no kids how old are you i'm turning 30 next year very cool 29 so last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um i've gotten this question a couple times lately and i think the the biggest thing that i would tell myself at 20 is learn how to hang in a lot of different kinds of spaces learn how to talk to lots of different kinds of people from different kinds of backgrounds who are good at different things learn how to put people at ease and hear people's stories i think it's a really really undervalued skill to be able to walk into a place and absorb instead of project and so yeah learn to hang in lots of different kinds of spaces guys there you have it norby easy way to put your link in your bio with sms newsletters events on one place super easy marketing they have hundreds of paying customers that caught an average of 18 bucks per month they just launched call it back in 2020 with a 500 000 seed pre-seed round that allowed nick and his co-founders go full-time then just raised a four million dollar seed sold caught around 20 as a business as they look to scale now with their team of eight nick thanks for taking us to the top yeah thank you so much nathan 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 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