How Pitchly CEO Ryan Gerhardy grew Pitchly to $3M revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is ryan gerhardt he runs a business database solution platform mainly because they're broken he co-founded his company pitchly to solve this problem as the ceo he draws from tens of years of investment banking and venture capital experience to scale the business data platform of the future he saw firsthand the lack of trusted technologies to make the information within a corporation accessible and useful to employees and founded pitchly to be the ultimate single source of truth for business ryan you ready to take us to the top yes i am all right so break this down a little bit for me your xvc when you say business data what exactly do you mean yeah so information that employees want to use in their job that they currently don't have access to like what give me an example so for instance they might want to know the administration team might want to know what services they provided a client or they might want better access to statement of work information that they don't have because they don't have a salesforce subscription or they don't have access to the file server that it's stored in so it's really kind of giving access to those employees that don't have information like that that's our purpose so are you essentially storing all like all these documents and email threads and google drive files and salesforce leads and making them all searchable for the entire employee base yeah so we aggregate digital data sources so like you mentioned excel you can upload excel and create a base in our product and then have that and then you can connect an sql database or salesforce integration or postgres database or etc and then create this web of tabular data that then if certain employees with permissions can access okay um walk me through uh walk me through pricing i assume you're a pure place sas what do people pay on average per month yeah so we had some so we launched the product in a beta or an earlier early access program in 2017 and then really launched in june 2018 so historically customers pay about a thousand dollars a month for our service um in from that discounted period uh going forward kind of since june 2018 we're looking at about twenty thousand a year so about fifteen hundred sixteen hundred a month okay 2018 was launch date officially yeah june 2018 we rely on the public product so we were testing a very close set of customers and limited configuration but then june 2018 we launched kind of a scalable product okay and how many customers have you scaled to today yeah so we have um about well less than 30 i should probably say to be accurate um yeah so can i i mean can i take the 30 times a thousand you're doing north of 30 grand a month right now it's approximately right um once you exclude the discounts yeah yep okay what do you mean once i exclude the discounts yeah so when we signed contracts to the early access to get some of the big logos we got um we provided so a three-year contract and provided discounts year one maybe year two but then year three they started to roll off that so we're starting to see the benefit of that now i see so that'll increase over you it's almost like how when someone pays rent and they're assigned a three year lease there's a natural accelerator built in right except you do it in the form of a discount so so what are you actually doing per month right now like 20 grand something like that yeah about that okay 20 grand and what does growth look like so if i go back a year ago were you doing none per month at that point a year ago we were doing not none um but less more than none but less than 20. okay but like i mean i'm talking like a grand a month 10 grand a month yeah so in our customers from 2017 grew at about four and a half times okay so about five grand yeah interesting is so when you say your customers grew do you basically have the same customer card you had a year ago and you just up sold them a bunch or have you added new logos we've added new logos as well um but like kind of our expansion revenue if you will um grew about 300 with that interesting okay i want to talk more about how you draw that expansion revenue but first you know everyone getting their first client is the hardest walk me through how you put together this initial test group and then how you convince them to go from hey you're my friend you're using it because you like me okay now pay me a grand a month yeah it was actually it wasn't with friends so i was doing it part-time while in venture capital which you mentioned earlier and so it was very much kind of building a product that people wanted people want something to automate document creation from data that they have and it took us about 18 months to figure out the problem was much bigger we started with an early product for investment banks that's what i knew very well i see um we started with the creation of investment banking tombstones if you've ever seen them where you put them in a powerpoint document and you show a prospect nathan i know how to sell your business because i've sold 10 like it and here's an example of those tombstones interesting okay all right so so that makes sense but so the vc firm that you are inside of that was one of your first kind of trial accounts along with some banking customers they worked with uh no so none of the vc not the vc and not their customers so there were customers that found our landing pages and found our material um that became our test customers so they weren't relationships of mine um it was really only in the last six months that i've started you know i went full time in june 2018 with pitchley and so it was really since that time um we started using relationships and a bigger approach with our public product okay interesting all right and then and then how did you go from initial test group you can write a bunch of them how are you adding customers today what's the growth channel look like yeah so i founded the company kind of in early 2014 after leaving corporate finance at grant thornton and banks and accounting firms as you mentioned um and i know that our user base spent a lot of time on linkedin and so linkedin was our primary method of kind of attracting a customer um it's relatively expensive compared to other channels but it spoke to the exact titles the industries the people that had the problem that i solved while i was at grant thornton deloitte and commonwealth bank so it was a nice uh easy way to generate some early traction ryan go deeper there for me so what would you search on linkedin to find these people literally literally would you type in the search bar yeah so we would actually create kind of sponsored posts so we'd create a post saying use pixley to aggregate data to produce powerpoint documents and so we would create a sponsored post with a nice gif showing how easy we can make it and then we would search targets based in the us uk australia with titles of business development analyst associate vice president in the investment banking law firm's accounting firm so very kind of focused uh which was about half a million individuals in those three markets and so we would really target those and um actually got a lot of good traction with that so what would you spend then i love this approach so just be clear you posted just a regular post on linkedin with a nice gif you know he creates your pitch checks easy you then sponsor that with targeting being us uk with titles of bd vp and in the sectors of law firms investment making accounting there's about 500 000 that fit this kind of account based marketing approach when you sponsored that post what did you what i mean what did you spend would you say to get a new customer via that post yeah so we spent about for each dollar we spent we got about thirty dollars in pipeline um and that's really because it was about ninety dollars to get to a demo if you will yeah and then about one in three demos would lead to a real opportunity created at that point and so this was really in early 2018 we were doing a lot of this okay um and then so we raised money um in june or in july 2018 to kind of scale this approach so how much total have you raised uh so a little over a million we've raised total okay and why'd you so let me ask you because you know the investing kind of space well you were a vc did you do that from a traditional vc or angels or venture debt yeah i i've had this question a few times and i know um nathan you like to hear bootstrap so i'm interested to debate with you do you listen you listen to the show yeah absolutely good wait hold on let me i gotta i wanna hear real quick why do you listen to the show i just like that you get to the real numbers and you challenge the entrepreneurs and they're great stories okay so let's so let's go in why the hell do you raise a million bucks well i think someone actually asked me on the street in des moines knowing that i was from venture capitals he's been bootstrapping for three years why are you raising and i said i think i'm i think i'll be good at it and i think i know how to leverage um the vcs i have in my roller decks now you know i know how how they want to work for their companies but a lot of startups are kind of scared to leverage them um so i put my vcs to the test and they do my dashboard and they help me review slides and contracts and employees and all sorts...