How Pipelyne CEO Adrian Casey grew Pipelyne to $716.5K revenue and 25 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is adrian casey he's a qualified civil engineer from university college of college cork following his degree he worked as an i.t consultant for accenture and pwc in dublin and toronto in 28 he co-founded ireland's first online hvac and solar pv installation business and in less than three years grew that business to be one of the largest installers in ireland thanks to its focus on the digital customer journey having seen how popular this is was he launched a sas product called pipeline with away.com the company helps home service companies double their inbound leads with no additional marketing spend it's the first in a range of products he hopes to develop this year to bring home service companies online adrian you're ready to take us to the top absolutely all right i always love someone building something to scratch their own itch it sounds like you've done that huh that's exactly it yep um so yeah are you are you still running the physical business the actual hvac and solar panel installer so we still have that business and what we actually have is we have a holding company and we have swift energy which is our hvac and solar pv business which my co-founder is heading up and i'm heading up uh pipeline which is our sas business interesting okay so swift energy when did that officially launch what year yeah so that was back in january 2018 my co-founder and i saw a gap in the market in that the installation of energy services in ireland was very much offline um so we set about digitizing the or said about setting up a hvac and solar pv business um an online sorry hvac and solar pv business and since then we've grown that business to be to be the largest one of the largest in ireland it's nearly 100 people now between full-time staff and actual contractors but when we started initially we looked at existing software in the market all the way from lead generation forms through to actual e-commerce platforms like shopify magento et cetera and what we realized is that they were very much focused on product-based businesses and didn't meet the intricate needs of service-based businesses so we were building our own technology that makes a lot of sense and what's that website is it swift energy.com dot ie and swift with away as well swift energy dot ie okay very cool and give me a sense i mean 100 full-time people launch in 2018 how much revenue do that business do in 2021 just that business yeah so we started in 2018 as i said we did about two million our first year up to five in the second year and then we were on track to do 10 and then covet hit so we should be back up at around the 10 million mark um this year that business okay well uh very cool so i guess the reason i asked that question it must be hard to walk away from a business doing 10 million revenue to take a bet on a new idea that's the sas business how did you have that conviction yeah it was mainly because we've seen the value of what the technology has delivered for us and we do genuinely see a big gap in the market and that you know service businesses around the world are very much offline the swift energy business is very much set up to scale and we have a great management team in there as well to be able to grow that business you know we brought in an operations director as well as heading it up on the ground so you know that has given us the the freedom to be able to go and pursue the sas piece as well okay so when what year did you write the first line of code for the sas business um so we started that around the middle of last year and so probably around july august last year um and it was very much taking what we have built already and turning it from you know a standalone solution into a multi-tenant sas product so how did you officially spin that out does swift is swift on the cap table of pipeline uh yes so as i said we have a holding company and all the investors are at the holding company level we transfer the ip from swift energy into pipeline uh last year as well so the it is in is in pipeline and then we're licensing the technology back to swift energy i see i see ice is a swift energy is your biggest customer exactly yep okay very cool what does the cap table at the sas company look like like do you own majority like a traditional founder would uh no so there's two of us in the business as co-founders um in swift energy initially so he said we're all at the holding level and everyone is at the same percentage so um any investor that came in after that as well as at the is at the holding level 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 percent of 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 gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you wanna check this tool out if you wanna 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 valuation 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 you and your co-founder split swift energy 50 50 and swift energy now owns also 50 100 of of pipeline uh so swift holding swift holdings owns 100 of swift energy and 100 of uh pipeline and myself my co-founder split swift holdings 50 50. i see i see okay and you mentioned investors a couple of times have you raised capital if so how much yeah so we raised capital and so we raised capital for swift energy we raised about 3 million for swift energy over the few years in 2018 to 2020 and before christmas we raised 1.5 million for pipeline okay so you raised 1.5 million at the end of last year that was i guess your seed round most companies are selling 10 to 20 percent and sort of your pre-seed round were you guys sort of in that range exactly yeah pretty much okay okay very cool so if you're you know selling 15 of the business that's sort of like a 18 19 million pre-money evaluation 20 million posts something like that yeah yeah i feel fair to you uh yeah i think so um with everything that's going on with cover and everything at the time so pretty happy with it and how do you balance sucking team members out of the main swift energy business into the sas business don't you sort of you know eat your own eat your own kids a little bit yeah so um we have we had an iet team in swift energy and they've come over now into the pipeline business so there's about eight of us in pipeline um pretty much all kind of product um but we are now starting to grow the sales and marketing side as well um so there are two separate businesses uh like that i see okay so eight on the team right now and um obviously swift energy is your biggest customer talk to me about what pipeline is delivering so is it literally marketing automation for services businesses and if so how do you charge so pipeline is in the first product we're launching at the moment and so it replaces a contact form on a home service businesses website with an engaging form that asks the customer for their information in a conversational way and then we utilize that data to provide the customer with an instrument or instant estimated cost for the service that they're looking for so to give you an example if you're a hvac business that installs gas...