How Onboard.io CEO Jeff Epstein grew Onboard.io to $404.8K revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jeff epstein he's an investor mentor advisor and generally a huge fan of tech sports and business now along with all this he is now founder of onboardio that's onboard.io a b2b sas to stream on onboarding for every customer he previously founded built and sold ambassador a referral marketing program platform jeff you're ready to take it to the top yes absolutely all right listen we haven't chatted i don't think since the ambassador days but my gosh i'll tell you what there's so many satisfiers i interview and they say our number one channel it's affiliates but it's always difficult to manage the affiliate model so you played in that space and ambassador close that story out for us what happened yeah so uh it was a great ride um in in 2017 late 2017 we decided we were going to think about like selling uh the business and so ran through a process and you know we could talk for hours and hours about how that went but ultimately it was it was a pretty successful outcome um it was you know bittersweet of course uh but the great news was everyone uh you know did fairly well obviously all the shareholders were um you know they they received sort of a really nice sort of uh sort of surprise from for many folks uh from from stock obviously um and many of the many of the team ended up moving up and joining the acquire which was west corporation in you know various capacities but ultimately uh could move throughout the organization and of course move up inside of ambassador as well so it was it was a win-win um but you know it was bittersweet and it was for me it was time to focus on something else after about a decade what made it bittersweep i mean i i'm going off memory here but i think like when you came on i i mean you were like yeah like i don't know like three or four million in 2017 i want to say and then you more than doubled i think in 2018 like eight or nine million and you were pretty you were pretty capital efficient i think it only raised like five million or six million bucks is that all right yeah so we we actually only we raised under three million and wow we were capital efficient i think you know looking back i think it was a little bit of burnout to be honest uh for me and just the team i mean we pushed really hard and you know i think we outworked a lot of competitors uh you know we sort of a motto to do more with less and i think it catches up with you and i think it as a team i think we were really close-knit and super proud of everyone and they did a great job but i know personally for me i was uh i i think i was kind of burnt out myself just pushing so hard for so long and um so it was i think it made sense at the time instead of sort of raising more money and like even doubling down again was to sort of you know move on and we thought we found a good home uh and we thought was a really great partner and um so that was sort of the way we we went was my revenue number right there was about an eight or nine million in 2018. i think when we sold we were around eight eight okay okay and last minute on this right so you remind me a lot of andrew gazdecki uh who hits the same story with why he sold business apps which was just crushing it i mean you really capital efficient 15 million ar he basically sold he shared with me about for about 1x right but he said nathan i don't optimize evaluation i just want to move on and now he's building my growth fire can you help me understand sort of i mean you sold i think to i mean you sold a private equity firm right it was it was a it was a company that was run by a private equity firm so west corporation run by in toronto um i'm sorry and tr west corporation and the private equity company was apollo group so like super huge backing but it was from my understanding and they they don't share a ton with me right like we were a small piece of a big pie um but they were pretty autonomous in terms of choosing choosing the deal and i think apollo just sort of signed off on the high level logistics would be an understanding okay great and i mean can you share like multiple in terms of revenue in terms of what you sold for 1x 3x more i i mean i can't we we can't share like specifics but it was it was definitely multiple revenue you know instead of like an ebitda multiple so it was you know it was it was it was a solid range it wasn't like 10x and it wasn't you know some ebitda multiples definitely a revenue multiple yeah well look i mean congratulations right i mean from everything you're telling me what i'm really asking is like does the capital waterfall on the exit hit the early employees you gave point two percent equity to and it sounds like that was a definite yes it did absolutely yeah yeah so you created this is good for a lot of people so okay let's move forward now to onboard when did you launch the business so we launched onboard in 2020 actually and um it was based on and sorry this is when we started we didn't actually launch until until just about a month or two ago but the concept for onboard was from our problems and challenges that ambassador of launching big enterprise companies on our technology and a lot of people had to do a lot of things and sort of managing that process what were you doing between because you exited ambassador and you think you said in 2018 right 2017 2018 yep what'd you do for two years so for for one year basically all of 2019 my plan was to just sort of get healthy sort of sort of like decompress and i know that's like a super fortunate position to be in but uh that was essentially what i planned on doing i did a little bit of consulting i took you know still talk to folks that were in the business and this help and mentorship and and invest in some angel investing but for the most part i i focus on myself um and then in 2020 as we sort of got into covid we started kicking around ideas with some of the some of the old you know sort of getting the band back together again and so for most of early 2020 until we eventually um ended up sort of starting actually working on on onboard in about april uh we were sort of thinking about ideas and what are some of the things that we really had pain points with at ambassador and like how could we address those in a way that no one's doing today just touch on this quick because mental health and just health in general is a big thing and a lot of us will ignore this i mean did get ambassador that household it sounds like it actually made you some to some degree sick you said get healthy for two years i i mean i think i mean the the work itself didn't make me sick i mean to me it was definitely i made myself look i i have i i think i have a i have a pretty strong willpower and willing to push through a lot of sort of like pain i think like it's not me right it's like all entrepreneurs like they're willing to push themselves to lengths that the maybe most people wouldn't and that's not necessarily a good thing but i think it's probably fairly accurate and so i mean for me like i over the course of 10 years i mean i gained probably 40 pounds you know i you know i i wasn't eating healthy right like i was traveling a lot i wasn't sleep i probably was sleeping like three or four hours a night a while period of many years in a row and i can do it like i sustained fairly well um but it's i think you know i'm getting older it takes a toll and so for me i think all those things just added up it wasn't like i mean i you know i think like i was stressed out and things like that so i think just focusing on you know being a little bit more mindful of my health and well-being it was certainly sort of on trend and i think that was good that it became a little bit more mainstream and okay to think about and talk about uh but for me it was it was something that i i was like you know i'm fortunate enough i can invest in these things instead of having to invest in a business like i can invest in in myself so that i can be you know better for longer essentially yep you're pioneering this new concept on board uh called maps which we're gonna talk about here in a second uh but first you said get the old band back together now a lot of second time entrepreneurs will say the most bluetooth event was my co-founder my next thing i'm gonna have enough money i'm just gonna pay someone a lot of money and i'm gonna keep a hundred percent what did you do so it's funny i actually thought about it in the opposite way uh for me it was actually quite lonely so i was from for all intents and purposes the first few years of ambassador was all me and i at at points i owned almost 100 percent you know over time more there were investors and then the team received you know a bigger chunk of of the equity which which i think was great and for me the second time around what i much more cared about was working with people that i like to spend time with and sharing some of the sort of burden of carrying 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