How Pingboard CEO Russell Pollari grew Pingboard to $8M revenue and 2.5K customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is bill babel uh if he looks or sounds familiar because we had him on back in 2018 and 2019 actually he's building a very cool org chart tool called pingboard much bigger vision though they've got an exciting change in update to announce today when we had them on last they broke about 4 million bucks in revenue so guys help me welcome to the show bill babel bill welcome thanks nathan for having us you bet now we have laith too we're going to get to lathe in a second but but bill give us give us a little bit of context so a product that pinkboard is today and then introduce lathe and sort of how he's now infused with the business and gotcha yeah so we've spent a lot of time since we last talked expanding the product into other areas and uh a lot of it revolves around the whole shift that happened with remote work and all that lathes show that in a minute but the big news and why lathe is on this call is i've hired lath as our new ceo i was founder and ceo and i'm taking a step back now and you know we're entering this new phase of the business and and there's a lot of exciting things ahead that that lathe is going to lead us through now bill this is the this sort of transition very few people have enough courage to come on and like sort of talk about it which is why i jumped when you when you offered uh because a lot of founders frankly a lot of founders maybe should replace themselves but it's a really hard thing to do from an ego perspective uh i guess talk a little bit in terms of so where um when did you because and you also had a board right so i guess give the funding history so how much raised to date we've raised seven and a half million we did it as three separate seed rounds though so we've never truly done a series a okay so so i think 4 million 2018 2.5 in late 2013 a little earlier than that about another million so 7.2 total uh we raised 7.5 total 10.5 total okay great and so i guess when did you first you know a company was you know i think you told me historically in 2014 you break 240 000 bucks in arr right in 2018 you break three point you don't probably remember the 3.1 million in 2018 4 million in 2019 the business is growing so when did you start going you know what maybe i'm not the guy to lead this thing uh it was probably two years ago i started having the thoughts but didn't really decide to do this until last year but you know we crossed 5 million in revenue in 20 uh 2020 began right before covet hit and uh we're at 40 people and i was already starting to realize that i was uh getting a little a little bit uh struggling as ceo because like i i'm really good with a small team going from zero to one but as a team scales there's just a lot of things you have to do to to operate a business and lead and um you know a lot of things just didn't come as intuitive to me at that scale we scaled back a little bit after covet hit and um got down to 25 people and felt a lot more comfortable there but as we've really got our growth uh clicking over the past year we're you know we're hiring like crazy right now and i've realized you know pretty soon i'm gonna be uh not the ceo i would hire to run the business through this next phase so that's that's why i decided to step back and hire somebody better than me to to help scale the business from here so step one is you stop ignoring that like little seat in the back of your head and you're like i gotta do something about this i've been thinking about now for 16 months what's the step after that do you write something do you do something with the board what's step two uh the first thing i did was talk to the board even before i had decided this i started talking with them and they're good about asking tough questions to me and they were like do you really want to be ceo for the next for this like next phase and um i thought for a second and try 30 seconds of silence and then i said no and then there was uh yeah that day we decided all right well let's go hire somebody amazing and it took 11 months to find our new ceo so we hired a recruiter they really helped us scour our own networks and networks outside of people we already knew and it took a while probably half the time was figuring out the exact profile of what we're looking for but we definitely found the right person oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so we want to get over to lake here in about two minutes but first build extra context there because i'm trying to develop a playbook here for anyone else listening to do this so who who did you use can you name the recruiter you used uh yeah caldwell was the the name of the firm and they and you were happy yeah yeah very happy they did did a great job yeah and and can i ask so most recruiters are charging like 30 to first year salary as like a fee is that sort of the model they used with you yeah that was that was it paid over over time during the course of the search and what were some of the inputs you gave them they said bill board what kind of person do you want and you said prefers loom videos over zoom extrovert like what do you make a list how does that work uh sort of they had their own scorecard format that they used um it was easier for me to just like tell them and let them draft it as a scorecard though but the things that were important to me is someone that really understands product and product led growth so you know we didn't want someone who had a more traditional enterprise sales background turned ceo that would come in and kind of layer on a lot of just sales around an existing product we believe a lot of our future is continuing to expand the product and have additional value we can upsell into our base and we don't have a sales team today and it's all product led where customers sign up online and it's just i think it takes a special type of person to understand the mechanics of that and then and build it not saying that we shouldn't have a sales team we're probably leaving a lot on the table by not having a sales team but we've engineered um a kind of a well-oiled machine with uh kind self-serve type growth and we want to continue to scale that as well as layer on other ways of going to market so someone that really understood that and that was the hardest thing to find and before we go over to late the last question my audience i i think they're probably wondering i'd be wondering why not promote from within yeah that's a good question i think the main thing is we wanted experience um someone who had...