How Pingboard Reached $6.3M ARR and 2,500 Customers While Staying Profitable (Interview with CEO Laith Dahiyat and Founder Bill Boebel)

Introduction: Bill Boebel and Pingboard's Big Announcement

Nathan Latka

00:00Folks. My guest today is Bill Boebel. If he if he looks or sounds familiar, it's 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 and update to announce today. When we had him on last, they broke about $4,000,000 in revenue. So guys, help me welcome to the show, Bill Boebel. Bill, welcome.

Bill Boebel

00:19>> Thanks, Nathan, for having us.

Nathan Latka

00:21You bet. Now we have Laith too. We're gonna get to Laith in a second. But but, Bill, give us give us a little bit of context. So a product that Pingboard is today, and then introduce Laith and sort of how he's now infused with the business.

Bill Explains the CEO Transition to Laith

Bill Boebel

00:32>> Gotcha. Yeah. So we've spent a lot of time since we last talked expanding the product into other areas, and a lot of it revolves around the whole shift that happened with remote work, and I'll I'll let show that in a minute. The big news and why Laith is on this call is I've hired Laith 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

00:54>> phase of the business, and there's a lot of exciting things ahead that Laith is gonna lead us through.

Nathan Latka

00:59Now, Bill, this sort of transition, very few people have enough courage to come on and sort of talk about it, which is why I jumped when you offered, Because a lot of founders frankly, lot of founders maybe should replace themselves, but it's a really hard thing to do from an ego perspective. I guess talk a little bit in terms of so where when did you because it and you also had a board, right? So I guess

01:22give the funding history. So how much raised to date?

Funding History: Three Seed Rounds Totaling $7.5M

Bill Boebel

01:24>> We've raised 7,500,000. We did it as three separate seed rounds, though. So we've never truly done a series a.

Nathan Latka

01:30Okay. So so I think 4,000,000 2018, 2.5 in late twenty thirteen, a little earlier than that, about another million. So four 7.2 total.

Bill Boebel

01:40>> Raised 7.5 total.

Nathan Latka

01:427.5 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 in ARR. Right? In 2018, you break three point you know, probably don't even remember the 3,100,000 in in 2018, 4,000,000 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.

Revenue Milestones and Why Bill Decided to Step Back

Bill Boebel

02:04>> It was probably two years ago I started having the thoughts, but didn't really decide to do this until last year. But, yeah, we crossed 5,000,000 in revenue in 2020 right before COVID hit, and we're at 40 people. And I was already starting to realize that I was it got a little a little bit struggling as CEO because, like, I I'm really good with a small team going from zero to one. But as the team scales, there's

02:32>> just a lot of things you have to do to to operate a business and lead, and, you know, a lot of things just didn't come as intuitive to me at that scale. We scaled back a little bit after COVID hit and got down to 25 people and felt a lot more comfortable there. But as we've really got our growth clicking over the past year, we're hiring like crazy right now, and I've realized pretty soon I'm gonna

02:57>> be 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 and hire somebody better than me to to help scale the business from here.

Nathan Latka

03:10So step one is you ignoring that, like, little seed in the back of your head, and you're like, I gotta do something about this. I've been thinking about it now for sixteen months. What's the step after that? Do you write something? Do you do something with the board? What's step two?

Bill Boebel

03:21>> 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 this next phase? And I thought for a second and tried thirty seconds of silence, and then I said, No. Then there was yeah, that day we decided, alright, well, let's go hire somebody amazing. And it took

The Eleven-Month CEO Search Process

Bill Boebel

03:46>> eleven 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. It took a while. Probably half the time was figuring out the exact profile of what we were looking for, but we definitely found the right person.

Nathan Latka

04:08Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

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05:17not 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, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

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06:31interview. So we wanna get over to Laith here in about two minutes. But first, Bill, 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?

Bill Boebel

06:42>> Yeah. Caldwell was the the name of the firm.

Nathan Latka

06:45And they And you were happy?

Bill Boebel

06:47>> Yeah. Yeah. Very happy. They did did a great job.

Nathan Latka

06:51Yeah. 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?

Bill Boebel

06:58>> Yeah. That was that was it. Paid over over time during the the course of the search.

What Bill Wanted in a New CEO: Product-Led Growth Focus

Nathan Latka

07:04And 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?

Bill Boebel

07:15>> Sort of. They had their own scorecard format that they used. 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 turn turn CEO that would come in and kinda layer on a lot of just sales around

07:42>> 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. It's all product led where customers sign up online, and it 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

08:03>> on the table by not having a sales team, but we've engineered a of a well oiled machine with kind of self serve type growth, we wanna continue to scale that as well as layer on other ways of going to market. So something that really understood that, and that that was the hardest thing to find.

Nathan Latka

08:19And before we go over to Laith, the last question to my audience, I think they're probably wondering, I'd be wondering, why not promote from within?

Bill Boebel

08:26>> Yeah. That's a good question. I think the main thing is we wanna experience someone who had led other companies through similar stages of growth. No one on our team has has done that.

Nathan Latka

08:39Mhmm. Okay. So now introduce Laith. When was the first meeting and what was it like? What were your initial impressions on both I wanna get both sides. So, Bill, your initial impressions and Laith, your initial impressions.

Bill Boebel

08:49>> So we met in January, I believe. And it's strange. We have a lot of mutual connections, but we had never met before in the recruiter This year. Year. Yep.

Nathan Latka

08:58Okay. Good.

Bill Boebel

09:00>> Yeah. And, yeah. We met like I said, we we had mutual connections through the networks here in in Austin and San Antonio and just somehow had never connected. And as soon as I saw Laith's profile, I was like, yeah. This, on paper, sounds like what I'm looking for. And then we started talking. And, yeah, in the first meeting or two, it was pretty clear that Laith was different than a lot of the other candidates that I've

09:21>> been talking to. And and he got really interested quickly as well, which it helps a lot. Like, we quickly started talking about strategy and what we wanted to do, you know, as opposed to it being a traditional interview.

Nathan Latka

09:33And so, Laith, what was the first question like Bill and the Board asked you in terms of, hey, Laith, what do think we should do from a strategy perspective here? Like, what was that first question that really got your mind hooked to the challenge?

09:43I think it was kind of we were asking each other like, what is Pingboard? And what does it what does it want to be in the future? How does it need to evolve? That's immediately where my head was at. And I think I think the answer is we don't know. So I think that's where the dialogue really started. And I started, you know, my wheels started spinning around, you know, category design and strategic narrative. And like,

Laith's Vision: Accelerating Growth and Repositioning Pingboard

Nathan Latka

10:05how can we, how can we really focus the story of Pingboard so that we can accelerate growth? I'm here to accelerate growth. The company's growing 26, 27% year over year, it's at 6,300,000 run rate.

10:19You're at 6.3 today.

10:20You're at 6.3 today. It's a nice little nice little curve there. But there's a lot more we could do. You know, my goal is to take it to 40% plus growth in the next, you know, in the next twelve months. So I think we can do that we're in, we provide retention and employee engagement for the remote workforce. That's really where we're sharpening our sword, so to speak. And that's what Pingboard is. Now, there's this big

10:45world changing event that occurred in March 2020, that forever changed the nature of the workforce and workforces now are remote and remote first as far as you know, office jobs, right? So that I I really started keen in on that, even even sort of during the interview process. I think that's where we really started getting the wheels spinning in our head. And it was great.

11:08It's great conversation. Was your well, I mean, look, what was your opportunity cost? So what was Bill gonna have to convince you to leave to do Pingboard?

Laith's Background and Opportunity Cost of Joining

Nathan Latka

11:16Quite a bit. I mean, there's everything had to kind of fall in place. I was a general manager at Weed Maps, which is the largest software and data company in the legal cannabis sector. So I was hired to stand up their entire B2B SaaS division. This is a company doing north of $240,000,000 in revenue is a huge step up for me. But really like my roots are in like B2B SaaS taking companies from this 4 or

11:395, 6 million dollar run rate to ten, fifteen, twenty million had some success at Scaleworks with a couple of companies. So everything had to line up, great board of directors. That was that was the first thing. Super experienced.

11:54I know. I'm sitting here going, how the heck did Laith get Kipp and crew to agree to a a a 40% year over year growth target with VC funding? You gotta be at, like, eighty, ninety, a 100% to tell a damn good story. So how did you convince them to agree to 40% in year one?

12:10Well, they haven't agreed yet. But, know, look, I'm just throwing numbers out there right now. But look, you know, just based on based on where we've been, I think

12:21we can, you know, we can aggressively grow.

12:23We haven't raised a traditional huge round. I mean, you know, we we are looking to raise around in the next year, like a traditional series a, but, you know, we're not looking to play the game of, you know, let's raise a $50.100000000 round and just go, burn, burn, burn, right? We want to be methodical about it. Bill's built an amazing business, it's profitable, it's growing. And we have this whole switch to the remote workforce that we're

12:47really going to lean into. I'm under promising and hopefully over delivering as far as the growth, but I think there's a great story there. We can start

12:55talking about Well, Bill, and we didn't touch much on your backstory, but you've already had sort of financial success in the software world with an exit to Rackspace and other angel investing at Capital Factory and just very active here in Austin in personal endeavors. So true or false, you kept the cap table pretty darn clean because you were the sole founder. It's not like there were six parties that each owned 15% that you'd get to agree

13:14here. Right?

Bill Boebel

13:15>> There are two founders, me and my CTO, Rob Rob Eanes, and and he's staying on board. He's excited about this next phase. But we we raised from we have a lot of angels, about 40, but they're all, like, entrepreneurs, built and sold companies before, have different areas of expertise that I tap into. And I think we talked in our last call about, like, we've run the business in a way where, with every round of funding, we

13:40>> try to be able to get profitability, and that's what we've done. You know? And we never thought we actually would pull the trigger on going profitable, but we did when COVID hit because we had to. We wanted to obviously survive. And it was nice to be in a position to be able to do that and not raise any more money in the meantime, but it's time to really step on the gas. So I think we've been

13:59>> conservative. And when we think 40% growth, that's like, man, that's a big step up from 25. But I'm sure we could do more, especially as we put a plan together to raise.

Nathan Latka

14:08And what was the name? You actually had a really good name for that chart you put together. I think it was like day it's day zero cash number or what was the you put a model.

The Touch-Zero Operating Model and Path to Profitability

Bill Boebel

14:17>> Touch zero operating plan is how There you go. The idea is

Nathan Latka

14:20I wasn't close, but I was in the right realm. Touch zero operating model.

Bill Boebel

14:24>> It's a really simple idea of you if you have a certain amount of cash, there's no point in sitting on the cash because it's it it doesn't do anything just sitting in the bank. You wanna invest it in your business. But if you invest more than you have, you go negative and you have to raise money. Most companies designed for that. And if you're growing and hitting all your numbers, it's pretty easy to raise more money.

14:46>> But if you miss you you have a bad year or bad couple quarters, it can be pretty damn hard to raise money and and your VCs, they know what they're doing. They'll take advantage of that and buy a little bit more of your company than otherwise they would've would've. So the idea is like, invest it all, touch zero in the bank account the moment you hit profitability. You'd at least design for that, operate towards it. And

15:06>> if things are growing well, you raise money six or twelve months ahead of running out because you never actually wanna run out. It's more of a optimization you make month over month to run the business. And, you know, as we think about raising, we may change that strategy, but that's how we run the business today.

Product Vision: Remote Workforce Retention and Engagement

Nathan Latka

15:21I love the model. So I guess going back, Laith, over to your side. So product vision moving forward, you want to play sort of in the remote space. How do how do companies retain remote employees, keep them engaged, keep them happy? Is that that's accurate, right? 100%.

15:35Yeah, that's really what Pingboard does. We just don't tell the story properly yet, right? And, you know, there's a lot of things in the product that are coming soon that really make this a powerful suite for retention engagement. Think about not only employees networking with one another and learning who's who and what's their picture and what is the org chart? What are their interests, their likes, but also recognition and giving applause and integrating with Slack

16:01to be able to communicate more easily. But then we're really looking to target the people ops teams. Right now the pain and suffering so to speak is in the people ops teams. People are leaving the great resignation is real. How do we help them? Continuous feedback as far as surveys, surveying the employee base, one on one meetings and being able to look at who's holding effective one on one meetings, what managers have engaged teams, things like

16:25that. So really upping the game from what people think of, oh, you guys are an org chart company. It's like, well, org charts were the first piece, but really, we're a retention engagement company. We think about all these interactions between managers and teams and people ops teams and managers. So how do we empower people ops teams?

16:42I was just saying, can't, I mean, I can't help but identify. I mean, this space is incredibly hot and there are billions of dollars of capital flowing through the private markets for this kind of technology. Some examples, you know, obviously, you had Jobvite, JazzHR, NXT, you know, combining under K1, massive private equity for more billions, playing sort of in the recruitment space, but obviously adjacent category is retainment and employee happiness, which they're acquiring aggressively under Hub

17:06and Spok, one of their PE firm. You also have Colin Day and iCIMS, backed by Vista, right? Another massive. And we've got Art Papas with Bullhorn, right? I mean, are all massive companies that are, would love to actually buy a company like Pingboard, right? So when you go out and you're pretty capital efficient, right? Your ARR almost equals the capital you've raised. So when you go out, let's say you do put a story together, you grow

17:2940% over the next twelve months. You get to the point where you're thinking about a series A. How do you balance, I mean, you're gonna hopefully maybe look at the M and A market as well. How do you balance like what a term sheet or VC might look like for a series A versus you know, a buyout offer from Vista Equity K-one or one of these guys?

17:46I mean, you know, being new in the chair, I haven't thought about that much yet. Think, you know, I think the bottom line is we have a lot of runway, there's a lot of opportunity. We're not looking to flip this company. I think, looking at these bigger guys out there, our target is going be the upper SMB lower middle market, I think that's our sweet spot. So just kind of talk thinking about the first the first

18:09part of your statement there. Like, want companies that have grown large enough to need a tool. Right? If you're too small, you don't have people ops problems. You're not feeling a lot of pain. You're too small. You don't need a tool.

18:18Quantify that. How big should the team be to really use Pingboard well?

18:22Yeah, I think, I tend to think of it as like 50 to 500 employees is probably our sweet spot. If you get much bigger than that, getting towards 1,000 plus employees, you're probably aging out of a tool like Pingboard and starting to go to like an enterprise tool, some of those tools you mentioned. Or you just well, we use ADP enterprise, and it has some of that stuff in there. So I think our fertile zone, that

18:45middle zone for, let's say, 50 to 1,000 employees is our sweet spot. I think that's a great niche for us to play in. We don't want to compete with Workday. We don't want like, that's not us. Those are big complicated tools with long enterprise sales cycles, implementation cycles, services, like aspects of like, I come from the enterprise world. I've worked at a Vista portfolio company for four years, I know that world really well, we want to

19:10be in that 50 to 1,000 employee sweet spot as far as you know, weighing an acquisition from a big PE roll up versus a VC, like, let's see what happens. Let's get to forty, fifty, 60% growth and then have that conversation.

19:26I love it. Now, Bill, last time we chatted, you talked about breaking, gosh, 1,200, this was back in 2018, 1,200 customers and had about a $220 ARPU. I assume, obviously, your customer base what your customer base is, like, doubled or tripled almost?

Customer Profile: 2,500 Customers and ARPU Discussion

Bill Boebel

19:39>> Yeah. We're about 2,500 customers today.

Nathan Latka

19:42And is ARPU still about the same currently, like, before late changes or new strategies coming in?

Bill Boebel

19:47>> It's been up slightly, but I think it's pretty close to that still.

Nathan Latka

19:51Yeah. So I guess the reason I asked that is, do you think you, I mean, if you add no new customers this year, but you invest heavily in engineering and R and D, develop more products for upselling the current 2,500 base. I mean, can't you take a $300 ARPU up, you know, double it and get your 40% growth that way? Do you think that'll be the strategy or will it be PLG, keep onboarding, no touch, high

20:11volume, low ARPU customers?

20:13No, I think in the short term, like when I use that twelve month benchmark, I think the way we drive growth quickly is in the base, right? Creating a new, like our funnel right now is really well optimized to org charts, right? But like we're changing the story and it's like turning a huge ship around. It takes time to change that funnel of net new customers coming in. But we have 2,500 engaged active customers right now

Upsell Strategy: Assisted Sales vs. Self-Serve ARPA

Nathan Latka

20:35in our base. We're already seeing some success using what we call almost like a support revenue model where we have customer success managers that build personal relationships with the teams, consult, demo, and then drive adoption of the new features that way. If you look at our ARPA in the existing base, the self-service base and the ARPA in our assisted base, it's dramatically higher. I mean, we're closing, you know, close the $1,200 a month deal on April

21:03Fool's Day, had to make sure it wasn't an April Fool's versus our, you know, our base ARPA or our new customer ARPA is more in the, you know, 150 range. So it's dramatically different. So we think we're gonna have great success.

21:16So before we wrap up here, I got the chance to get it on San Antonio over the weekend, the timing actually just happened to work. This was just by chance, but I got the chance to like talk and interview some of the folks that worked with you at Chargify. And they go actually, Marcus probably wouldn't mind if I mentioned his name. Marcus Nicholson. He goes, man, late. That guy's intense. This is gonna be perfect at Pingboard.

21:32Right? He's they he just said super intense and a dashboards guy. What does that mean?

21:36Super intense and a mark I love Marcus.

21:40I think I think you're a dashboards guy as far as using metrics to drive accountability and drive growth in the business. I think he was also alluding to the fact that we launched a business intelligence tool together, Chargify, which really was the catalyst for Battery Ventures to for us to exit to Battery Ventures. I think I'm intense, I'm high energy, like maybe I drink too many energy drinks in the morning, but like I get excited. Like I

22:01love wins, I love collaborate, I'm very collaborative, right? I'm getting in the room and whiteboard kind of kind of person. But you know, love hearing that feedback from Marcus. But yeah, I'm intense. Let's let's let's win. Let's do this. Life is short in these, you know, five years is an eternity in tech, we don't have much time. So like, let's let's get cracking.

Famous Five with Laith

Nathan Latka

22:20On that note, let's wrap up here, Laith. We'll have you do the famous five this time instead of Bill. So number one, favorite business book?

Bill Boebel

22:26>> Oh, good to great.

Nathan Latka

22:27Number two, is there

22:29is there a CEO you're following or studying?

22:33No. There probably should be now that I'm a CEO. I need to get on that.

22:37Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Pingboard besides your own? For building? Pingboard. Something you use just something you use frequently, an online tool that helps you build the business.

22:48Oh, honestly, like, it sounds lame. You know, Google Sheets? I mean, honestly.

22:55Yep. No. I I have seen Bill's Google Sheets, and they are nothing to mess with. I will tell you that. Number four Excel files. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night, Laith?

23:05With an eight month old and a three month old, two hour blocks, maybe Wow. Six hours.

23:10That's great. Okay. So two so married with two kids? Yes. Yes. And how how old are you?

23:15I am, oh god, 47.

Bill Boebel

23:18>> 47. Last question.

Nathan Latka

23:19Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

23:22How important mentors are in the relationships you build as a young, you know, young professional and and having mentors is is absolutely critical. How I got to the CEO role.

23:33Pingboard launched in 2013. They really crushed it as a tool focused on org charts for the first five or six years. They grew from $240,000 run rate in 2014, up to a $5,000,000 run rate in 2020. Now up to a $6,300,000 run rate with about 7,500,000 raised. Very capital efficient business. Also revenue per employee, very high. But they've said, you know what? We've gotta grow faster. We've raised capital. It's a big space. They said, today, we

23:56wanna start building a tool that helps teams recruit, manage, and keep their remote employees happy. Bill is passing the baton to Laith, the new CEO, to do that. We'll see what happens as Laith targets 40% year over year growth and maybe a series a later this year. Guys, thanks for taking us to the top. Thanks, Nathan.

24:14One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

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