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 furnaces instead of driving all your google traffic to your you know static contact form instead you direct it to pipeline where you can ask the customer a series of questions like the property type the fuel type the square footage and you can then provide an instant estimated cost for the service and because the customer is being rewarded for submitting their information i.e they get to see an estimate we're seeing an average of 220 increase in in leads for people using our form interesting and obviously you'll be able to pass on more data as well because you're asking smart questions which get tagged that contact 100 so you can root accordingly on the back of them what do what are companies what are gas companies or gas boiler installer companies paying on average per month to use pipeline yes we have number of different price points 99 199 and 299 depending on features uh on average we're at probably about 150 dollars at the moment across all the users that we have and what's so are you only upselling so if someone pays 99 bucks a month versus 299 a month at 2.99 a month are they getting more products or do you upsell based off number of seats or number of leads or any other upsells besides just product upsells pretty much product upsells and the number of submissions as well at the moment um in terms of upselling down the line our goal this year is to launch our e-commerce store the one that we have in swift energy and we're looking to move that over into the sas product as well and that is our goal here is to you know start with the with the the um estimator piece and then upsell the actual ecommerce store and that's our big vision interesting and obviously your own company was the first customer how many paying customers do you have today yeah so we have about uh 50 users all together and our 50 but about half of them are paid okay got it and when you say users are those companies 25 companies uh companies sorry yep okay do you have a per seat model do the company pay for five seats for example uh no not at the moment okay okay got it so 25 companies paying 150 bucks a month on average you guys are doing about 4 000 bucks a month right now in revenue right yep this is great so um and and i guess what percent of that is coming from swift energy i just want chris energy just one customer so okay 200 bucks a month yeah no we are we are charging it extra for the e-commerce store um so that that's costing a lot more but uh for the actual piece that we have no it's 150 and so explain to me how that explain me how that works again i'm a gas boiler sort of installer or an hvac installer i use pipeline you're sending me leads let's say you sent me 100 leads for you know northern ireland last month um help me understand how the e-commerce store would work so the actual um the leads piece you actually put it on your own website and your white level is your own so it's not like a marketplace that makes sense it's on your own website and then the e-commerce piece the typical journey is uh for a home service business you need to send an engineer on site that actually uh use your property and gives you a quote for your boiler or your furnace and today that is sent you know in a pdf quote which is pretty static um on the e-commerce what we do is we convert that static pdf code into an actual e-commerce store where the customer can add on additional products such as a smart thermostat they can pay for warranty packages they can apply for finance they can schedule their installation online so you can really think of it as converting any quarter invoice into an e-commerce store i see yeah that makes sense makes it a live cart experience where you can upsell down sell et cetera talk to me you casually mention their financing have you guys raised a big debt facility to finance against quotes or do any sort of lending offer any lending services uh not at the moment so like on the swift energy side we're working with a third party uh but that is a big part of the market opportunity that we see is one you know percentage of gmv when we launched the ecommerce store and two the actual financing piece as well now you just got this going last year um uh your name you're just now adding customers you're at 25 today how do you go from 25 customers to you know 200 customers what's the main growth channel yeah so we're actually still like pretty large technically if you go to pipeline.com we haven't fully launched it so it's kind of been organic and one of the ways that we're building it is looking for i suppose networks of uh businesses that have high a large network of home service companies for example if you're a marketing agency or a web design agency or development agency who might have a hundred home service companies working for you um you know we have at the moment we're working on an affiliate program but we're looking to also potentially roll out a white label model there as well where agencies can use it for their clients interesting and and how do you plan how do you plan to go find those agencies who will then use it for their clients like could you find them on linkedin facebook groups somewhere else both really yeah so linkedin um so we have we've actually engaged with a with a sales outsourcing team uh based here in cork so they they actually work with startups to help um scale the businesses so they're they've given us an agent who is doing linkedin outreach at the moment who is that by the way i'm always looking for resources like that because it's a number one request that i get who are you using uh they're called autonomy o-t-o-n-o-m-e-e i think um so the guys there they've ex worked with in stripe and airbnb et cetera so that you know they're really experienced guys um we brought them in to kind of consult and also give us resources are they actually are they i mean are they actually um hiring reps inside of otome to run your sales calls and things or are they hiring someone that you can bring on as a full-time employee inside a pipeline and also it's it's the first one you mentioned there so they're actually running into their business and then we're consulting them interesting are you let's say you fall in love with one of the reps they put on your account do they let you hire the rep full-time or is that a big no-no i haven't had that conversation with you know i've worked in consulting before and it's it's it's a big no-no in it consulting so i imagine it's the same in sales consulting yeah it's slowly changing i mean there's a bunch of outsourced sdr shops that i recommend to founders and some of those shops are now letting founders hire trained sdrs after six to 12 months of working together there's a big fee for it obviously because it's you know that's tough but it's a new model that's interesting i haven't had the conversation yet but we'll see oh to me very cool all right and and um god and so are is the is the pricing model that you pay those guys more sort of like a retainer just a monthly retainer exactly yeah okay interesting very cool okay so using those guys help you scale um you're at 25 customers today you raise the 1.5 million where are you investing most the money um so products in terms of um product additional features the existing product and as i said moving the the e-commerce store into the sas platform and then it really is marketing and sales and you know we just bring on a with marketing personnel on board as well um and it's about ramping up that and start getting some inbound leads rather than just pure outbound how many folks are on the engineering team right now and so we four altogether okay got it so for on the engineering team four others one of which is a marketing employee uh yep okay and and talk to me obviously every founder the number one thing is don't run out of cash so how are you managing burn you raised 1.5 million how much are you comfortable burning per month um yeah probably you know the 30 grand mark probably 30 40 grand is probably uh where it's at but i mean we do plan on on raising a lot more i suppose this year as well um but really i don't want to do that until we actually get some proper traction because we want that valuation going up yeah what um what revenue metric do you want to hit before you start thinking about raising your seed round and you know i've ambitious that i'd love to get to the to the 85 000 a month uh mark but um you know we also have probably an option to be honest in terms of debt as well uh in the holding company so that might be something that we could do a mixture of uh of of equity and debt because we do have the swift energy business as well there which is generating uh profits would you ever use debt against your mrr so like those are these firms that would take 5k of mrr and give you you know 50 grand up front today sort of thing yeah i haven't looked into it in detail but it's something definitely on the list already to to look at um because i've heard about it and i've heard on your podcast as well you mentioned it a few things yeah yeah we we do it that's my other business that's why i ask i'll follow up afterwards and see if we can i mean we we love stories like this i especially love your story because um one of the pattern like things that i see from doing over 3 500 of these interviews now the most successful sas founders come out of building software for their own other business and like you perfectly fit that prototype uh so makes a lot of sense to me what you're doing um cool okay so think about maybe raising later this year debt or equity we'll see what happens there again eight on the team um no churn right once people sign up no churn yet i think it's too early to to even mention that we haven't but it's too early to say i think yeah guys adrian's not kidding if you go to pipeline.com you'll see it's literally a landing page with an email often says landing launching march 10th and we're recording this year on march 3rd so it's literally not launched yet adrian right adrian right march 10th is the launch date march 10 sorry yeah i think i lost you there yeah very very cool all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um probably my favorite book is uh shantaram who shantaram it's not a business book but it's a it's a it's a novel what what sorry what is it shantaram shantaram how do you spell that s-h-a-n-t-h-a-r-a-m what's it about uh so it's a guy in uh i think grew up in new zealand uh ended up getting i think arrested over there escaped from prison moved to india and just lived a crazy life in india on the streets um so it's kind of based on a true story but uh it's just a crazy it's crazy life story more than oh yeah yeah yeah it's a novel uh greg david roberts is the author he's talking about pentridge prison and all that right yep yeah yeah yeah very cool i've had i've heard some other founders mention that book so it makes sense number two is their ceo you're following or studying uh not really probably more following businesses i listen to a lot of your podcast nathan so people always go nathan why did why do founders agree to come on they know they're gonna have to give up all these numbers so i can just ask you why you know the show you know the format why'd you say yes um i think i think i actually like the way you interview in terms of straight to the point then you get uh you know especially you get to listen to businesses at all different stages and i think that information is valid um yeah yeah well we're excited to get you up on the website and feature you guys i predict huge things for you there's the pattern again i love the ability to like see patterns is what i crave the most and i see a very obvious one here so i'm pumped for you guys number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business and so probably uh utrecht is what we use you track number four adrian how many hours of sleep are you getting every night and it depends anywhere between four and days okay and what's your situation married single kids and i'm single no kids no kids and something you wish you knew back when you were 20. and definitely start younger and uh start a re-occurring revenue business as well i love that and how old are you now uh 32 32. guys there you have it adrian launched swift energy back in 2018 grew it to a million in revenue then two million up to five million they were going to do about 10 million and covet their back up now to about 10 million is what they'll do here in 2022 as he was building that business said you know what our marketing engine is robust this needs to be a sas platform for all services businesses so that's what they've launched they've spun out a sas tool called pipeline with the y they've got 25 customers for 50 000 bucks in ar today so about 4 grand a month in mr raised 1.5 million at around a 20 million post money valuation back before christmas last year to keep skying this we'll look and consider it raise later this year if they're able to get revenue up to around the million dollar mark we'll see what happens adrian thanks for taking us to the top great thanks nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we gotta push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya