How OnBoard Meetings CEO Paroon Chadha grew OnBoard Meetings to $44.2M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

please help in welcoming perum Shada from onboard to the stage hello everybody uh yeah I'm gonna actually walk you through uh you know what I would say probably the most unusual story here we are all about uh bootstrapping and I saw how many hands went up I'm going to walk you through going from bootstrapping to really getting to you know exits along the way multiple bites of the Apple if you will and still accurately sort of maintaining uh you know the chance to make the dent that you're after so Peru Chara Peru rhymes with maroon you'll remember my name now we are in the board meeting business so board meeting management business over the next 20 minutes I'm going to actually walk you through uh you know how we got started you know first product really good success with that and then you know went on to really kind of just monetize that through uh you know first actually really took on debt to continue to bootstrap till we got to 15 million dollars in ARR uh along the way I had to clean up the cap table there were some non-performing uh you know uh co-founders if you will uh that had to be you know managed and that took a while but at that point I was able to you know take on some private Equity money to accelerate the growth and that proved the growth model and then last year we took a bigger check from uh a second private Equity uh transaction since then we've actually gone on to do inorganic transactions and Acquisitions is a big Focus as well um so I'm going to walk you through this and trust me you know uh I am a bootstrapper at heart I do want to accurately can I just salute each one of you guys who's doing this it's extremely hard to show the discipline but one of the things that I realized that you could be a bootstrap of a fair amount of time and then still get to be Venture back so you can actually see the acceleration that your product or your space truly deserves so this is a brief uh background of the company the trajectory I'll walk you through this first off I should say you know we started back in 2003 I've run you know the same company throughout if you run into a problem that you can solve for the rest of your career my advice would be to actually play The Long ball and stay in it investors and Founders will come and go you could still accurately run this you could still act really take some chips off along the way that's one way to think about it so our first product was an employee collaboration product Ensemble off to a fast start it was bootstrapped got onto the Inc 500 list and we were making money we were actually you know be able to you know take some distributions at the end of the year this was you know me and my co-founder um but there was one problem with it in 2009 when the financial crisis happened eight nine time frame every single one of my customers was either a bank or a credit union which meant we came to a screeching heart when it uh you know uh came down to the sales Cycles so we had to think about what are we going to do at that point we went from an employee collaboration product to a board meeting management solution which is now the only product I offer uh meanwhile we continued down the path of taking the original product Ensemble and making into a cash cow which funded the business two three million dollars every year that money was plowed back into growing the onboard business along the way my Founders lost interest stuff happens and we had to find a way to really kind of just you know come to terms with how will I actually bring that cap table to be unlocked so I use that and I used some of the you know crude Capital to come up with a schedule to pay him off pay the second uh investor off uh and then actually went on to you know really kind of grow the product through the two rounds that I've done since so I'm going to walk you through that here uh so first you know um first part of the presentation is about bootstrapping uh the number one thing you have to think about is actually the product itself everything else won't matter Financial engineering comes later optimization comes later you can think about everything else later and you can hire all of those pieces out until you actually nail the product you won't really get too far with it so if you're an early stage you know that's sort of you know what you focus on the slide here is showing that we took a while to get to the revenue numbers at this time you know we are growing you know 50 and we are actually fast growing I would attribute most of that to the early stages when we were truly focused on the product um I think not just the product itself and making sure the product is adding value you also have to make sure that you're getting customers of the same kind because if you get seven customers all each one of them is using it differently you don't really have a business yet right so to stay close to your ideal customer profiler to continuously evolve and fire the customers that don't belong there this is the discipline that you have to be sure about in early stages definitely feel like you know um the only thing that I did very well was to stay every single one of those customers was a financial institution I just told you when when the crisis hit us right well we should have Diversified but frankly it helped us build a product that was really good in a compliance heavy industry and eventually came handy to diversify elsewhere uh I'll also talk about you know you know I I often talk about being able to explore and exploit at the same time as a Founder CEO you have to be ambidextrous but once you find your Niche you gotta exploit it and don't get distracted at that time to explore new things right you still have to do some exploration because you have to think about what's next but that's a pretty key part to bootstrapping well um and also talk a little bit about you know when we went into Financial Services industry there were other verticals other sectors that came open Healthcare non-profits these are compliance driven Industries so we eventually went there and certainly used some of the equity that we built in the financial services industry uh you know public publicly listed companies all of these are customers at this point but that going back to how we started in the financial services I have 600 Banks as customers today and that actually really kind of just you know gives you a lot of credibility I'll talk a little bit about that finally you know the product uh the best growth hack will always be an amazing product a product that actually Wows every single user and that's still the goal uh for a big part of the organization this is uh you know sort of our board product if you run a board and you want to be excellent uh you know in your boardroom delivery it's an inexpect an inexpensive product it'll force you to think about you know your board meetings and what you get out of your board uh intentionally most organizations today actually really are dealing with what you see here on this slide you know a bunch of different uh digital duct tape helping you get your board decks out and uh if you want to get intentional get really good in the Board Room which by the way has huge returns right your investors gain in confidence you are deal ready all the time then you'll accurately look at a product like this that was the goal there are two things that drive us at onboard and this is sort of you know you have to be that clear with your team the first one is we want to make sure that we build everything within the platform everything that a board needs to do not just the board book delivery the board assessment the dno questionnaire you know CEO review um you know all approvals everything should be right there minutes routing should be within within the platform so that's the first big heuristic that we are clear about the second heuristic is you want to make sure that the first we could call this F talks first time user experience is an absolute uh amazing one which means when a new director gets your product they should be valve we can Implement our product within the same day so if you had a board meeting uh this evening and you called us in the morning we'll be able to implement that and your director should be able to run with it and your first meeting itself uh will go off seamlessly that focus is extremely important when you're building uh you know the product in the early stages once you do that and that comes only that comes about only if you built amazing relationship with customers other speakers have talked about this in my case my first customer uh was also somebody who gave us infrastructure we used their office they also advise a lot on operation side how do you get compliance certifications and such and eventually they became my debt partner when I talked about buying back my co-founder my first customer since this was a financial institution they helped me figure out a loan which allowed me to buy back my partner so you can get a lot out of your early customers they are emotionally invested just like early employees the question really comes down to what are you going to solve for with them uh they're your early board if you will in our case lots of things came out came out of this so for example all our early customers became advocates for us to go sign up these Partnerships so what you're seeing here is Partnerships we signed up in different sectors there's one in credit union industry there's one in the banking industry there's...