How Planleave CEO Andrew Geisel grew Planleave to $2K revenue and 3 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is Andrew Geisel he's the current CEO and co-founder of plan leave his background include leadership positions that PeopleSoft Accenture and other technology companies through six years at PeopleSoft he drove strategic New Market initiatives and again eventually now leading him to understand the importance of leave management for a good culture that's what he's building at plan leave Andrew you ready to take us to the top I'm ready all right so what does that mean leave management for positive cultures yeah so Lee well two different things lead management itself has been around for a while it's essentially excuse me I have this thing popped up here it's essentially um the ability to track your employees time off so um why we say for positive cultures is you you kind of started off with saying I worked for a lot of big companies and with that comes working with a lot of different technology and so forth and I spent 20 years in HR technology itself and one thing that can be frustrating is cumbersome technology and so my attraction the plan leaves it's so simple there's no learning involved not trying to sound like a sales just being candid um it's just it just really isn't you can integrate easily it's basically cut and paste technology can you make this real for us can you can you use a real example so customer X uses you to do y when they're on the platform yeah tell me a story about how a customer uses you yeah so they basically they log in and you're a real customer like if you can share one is there a logo on your website you can say this customer uses to do X yeah so Cameo over in Spain uses the application and um they basically have 40 employees so they set up all their employees we have a mass invite link um to send out to all your employees they log into the system they have their own scaled down dashboard specific to their kind of needs so we don't over complicate it for them that's different than the admin dashboard but basically they can submit an employment request they can look at their teams to make sure there's not conflicts and they can route that to their manager they can do that through slack they can do that through email go through email regardless but they can do it through slack as well and then it'll automatically once it goes through the approval process so it'll it'll auto update the Google or Outlook calendar so really from a user standpoint that's it the admin itself has a much kind of bigger view of it they have the full organization view they can check for conflicts they can do compliance they can set up lead type designations if there's lead types that do not fit within our standard lead types a good example that would be FMLA which is a federal kind of requirement that employee has to take a certain amount of time off for family family reasons on paid time off and then there's different state laws that Barry and so forth as well so that's helpful so help me understand I mean it sounds like you give an example of 40 employee team which I would maybe put like big SMB to maybe small mid-market but generally speaking what's the average customer paying you per month or per year to use plan plan leave yeah so we charge my employee 1.99 basically um we started a month per year uh per per month sorry yeah um we started 30 employees to be very Canon we we kind of fit two niches we fit very well with companies that want to move all spreadsheets and we have pretty pretty solid rois built in which I could walk you through if you wanted to but basically a company of 30 employees would get like a 5x return on investment a company of 50 employees probably get like a 7x return on investment but just to understand costs of 30 employees at two two dollars per employee per month the average customer is paying you at 67 bucks a month 720 a year yeah 720 a year okay interesting okay and then I guess put this all on a big on a big timeline for us when did the company launch what year three weeks ago three what three weeks ago oh three weeks ago oh super new we're super new yeah and we just had a press release today announcing a lot so we just got started 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the 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something else um well actually I put all that motion before I left my company but I bought in the plan leave I retained um who's Mao a CTO Jose Manuel and he wrote it about over a year and a half ago and he just never really had the time to do the marketing or anything else like that that's how we came together okay got it so did was it bootstrap before you came in very much so yeah okay how did you find the deal found it uh through which was a micro acquire I believe okay and what did you what did you pay or whatever you're comfortable sharing there help us understand how can be sort of in you are yeah I don't really want to share the exact amount what I paid for the company or anything like that but um it was it was a decent amount to invest in and we were putting a lot into the company right now can you share a range was it more than six figures no it wasn't more than six feet okay so you got it for under six figures did you buy a hundred percent or just a portion of it to get control ended up being 80 okay and then you left the 20 with this the engine sounds like head engineer lead engineer that's correct okay and why was it faster for you to do this versus to build something new from scratch I'm not a technical person so I originally kind of was doing this in the background for a while looking at HR technology that's kind of my comfort zone so that's the sweet this was the first thing that I found that made a lot of sense um and came together and that's how it happened well what made I mean were they pre-revenue when you purchased it pre-revenue except for the company in Spain so very little Revenue to be very candid um yeah it made sense it wasn't really the money it made more sense honestly it was the user experience again I'm kind of being redundant I'm not trying to sell them being very honest it's just so simple and easy that was my first attraction then when I jumped into the business but if it was so simple and easy why didn't have more Revenue he wasn't selling it Jose is a technical guy I'm not a technical guy so he really wasn't selling at our marketing he put it out there and uh I think he tried a few things he tried some SEO and it just never really took off and you know I can't speak for him he's not here right now but I can't speak to the whole backstory but he just didn't have what's your money it's not his money that bought the company right it's your money it's my money that bought the company correctly well yeah that's what I'm asking right so I mean how did if he's not having any sales like how did he know what to build if he's The Tech Guy I mean you make it sound like he's sort of a tech guy who didn't talk to any customers because there were none he just sort of sat in a hole and built the thing how do you know what to build yeah that's good he really didn't have an HR background so I can't speak to that part alone but um and I never really asked him that question but he did do a fantastic job that's all I can tell you I mean I tested it out myself for a couple months before you know we were talking through it um everything was in place all the Integrations worked just fine um so that's just the back story um okay then like like whereas go on the business side as well I focus on another vendor um specifically and when I jumped into the model the revenue per employee is fantastic and that was attractive as well uh the revenue per employee at plan leave yeah at another company I kind of compared it to when I was kind of focused on the due diligence on the business side I focused on another vendor and um when I jumped into the business model that was an attractive piece as well sorry I'm not following you there you you wanted to buy something in this space and you were curious if generally the space had high Revenue per employee so you looked at one other vendor and had a high Revenue per employee sorry now there was two pieces so the first piece was the user experience that's what I fell in love with first I'm just like this is so simple and easy and I understand that second part was when I started focusing on the business end of things um there was another vendor that I kind of focused on there's there's a few vendors in this space but there's one specifically that they've done a pretty good job and when I focus on the business model and their revenue per employee and kind of perform the calculations that part was attractive so at a high level I mean that's kind of why what would you consider a good Revenue per employee in your space it's pretty significant it's over 800 000 at least um significant is relative what do you mean by that what are you comparing it against I think 800 000 per employee is a pretty pretty nice return um I'm comparing against this kind of Common Sense based on the investment our expenses are not that I don't want to kind of give away everything if someone's going to be listening to this but Andrew no offense but there's not a ton of giveaway at how many Revenue you bought on microquire where it's public anyway people can see the whole listing if they wanted to looking at The Archives so you're not giving away anything I'm trying to learn right so obviously 800 000 Revenue per employee um I'm just trying to understand how that drove you to buy a pre-revenue company where there is no Revenue per employee because I with 20 years of my experience I mean I I felt that I definitely um there's another backstory to this too but 20 years experience I know HR technology I feel pretty well working for big companies and startups so I felt comfortable with technology itself I feel comfortable with my network and kind of where we're progressing in that area um Beyond kind of the direct customers I think there's potential partner opportunities and self-service portals to be honest um within the HR Tech space and um I guess at a high level those for some of some of the areas that kind of stuck yeah well that's helpful look and look we had Colin day on many times right before and I saw you know at one point yeah yeah so we had it on many times right and this was even pre- when before you guys broke 100 million bucks in Revenue I think now you guys that companies up to 300 330 in ARR and Collins now not there I think it's Steve Lucas is running the show but anyways point being is you know what you're doing you've been in the space so so what's your playbook right how do you take this thing that has a great user flow within a great space you got it for maybe a steal for under 100 Grand what do you do what are the first moves SEO to be very candid that's where most of the money is focused right now and as for mostly attention's focused it's so people can find us which you know which SS SEO is but that's the biggest thing and then the second thing is I think we have all the basic functionality in place there's a few more things I'd like to do but they're not major it's really prioritizing and picking countries markets to go to so so let's fast forward let's say you come back on the show in 12 months and you say Nathan the key word that we worked really hard to rank for that has driven us the most traffic is X what is that keyword leap Management in the U.S but it varies on different countries in different countries so some people will you not compete in the US on purpose because it's too competitive you'll do it specifically in Colombia or somewhere else starting in the US actually from an SEO standpoint it's the highest place so we're definitely going to do that first um what is the highest what do you mean the highest place if you like you go through um like the SEO of data and you you think you find out who's doing the most searches most of it's here in in the US well but that also it's all that's also the most competitive right everyone else can see that in right ranks for that term so how to use a two-person startup break through the noise and rank number one for that term with a low backlink profile you know I mean the first part is yes I agree it's competitive because the HR messes I don't think it's as competitive for Standalone lead management company if that's a direction if somebody wants to go and if you start going below lead management go into vacation trackers time off trackers it's not that competitive at all be very candid so that part's pretty open for us but the hrms is our biggest competition because they're coming lower and lower into the space there's like I don't know 40 or so SMB vendors that are pretty competitive so yeah I think that you think the long tail keywords like vacation tracking is where you can excel those are areas that we are focused on yes that's from from the SEO I'm working with company um that's the data we're finding that are the areas kind of focus on but Andrew I mean when I type vacation tracking into search you know the number one way to tell something's competitive is is there an add-on against it and then it's really competitive there's multiple ads bamboo HR pay core hello tilt vacationtracker.io are all running paid ads against the term vacation tracking how do you and then there's a bunch of very highly ranked places here so when you say SEO is going to be your go to market how are you going to outrank softwareadvice.com vacationtracker.io and some of these other paid placements well I don't I'm first of all I have my personal opinion about the paid ads but bamboo I don't view as a direct competitor we're standing alone so if you're looking for an hrms we're not your bet and we're going to be much more economical um no no Andrew I'm just talking about SEO I'm just I'm asking questions based off your answers you said that you want to go to market your first move is going to be SEO and I'm trying to understand how you plan to attack SEO how will you win in a market that's so competitive you must have some unique mouse trap you're going to go after I thought it was a specific keyword but vacation tracking tracking is very competitive those are the keywords we're going with those three yeah but so how do you that's what I'm trying to figure out how do you outrank these it's how are we going to outrank Bamboo HR it has a domain rating of over 80. when I search in the US honestly when you get past those paid ads and normally three of them are hrms's outside of vacation tractor which is the only one that you mentioned that's not I see it very easy from a lead management standpoint to be great on top from a standalone lead man company so I mean when I put in my work that's what I came with I'm not doing it right now but that's what I came up with I don't think it's that difficult to be honest the way you get discovered here is the key word that a user is searching in Google so if you use vacation tracking or track or I'm just reading to you what already ranks there you've got to outrank that to get that same traffic it doesn't matter if you are a competitor to Bamboo HR or not they're ranking for a keyword you said you want to Target how do you outrank them I performed all the same everything you just did right now I did myself and I saw the same ads too and I saw the bamboos and I saw everyone else to be very honest when I walked away to perform the same exercise that you're talking about I I don't see it's that hard to climb over the vendors that I'm worried about to be honest I don't really even see them on the first page I see the HR messes on the first page okay understood but but again if the HR messes are taking up the first page for that keyword for seven dollars an hour so you're gonna have a comp or six or seven dollars an employee at least if not more so it's just as much it's a different animal foreign it's like if we're all competing if we're all competing for the swing set on a playground right and there's three other people on the swings and you're like they're not a competitor that's fine there's still only four swings so even if you don't compete with them they're still on the same swings that you want to be on how do you kick them off that's what I'm asking it's not do they compete with you or not are they cheaper than you or not it's they take up real estate that you want how do you get that real estate again when I perform the exercise I didn't really see much of an issue getting there outside the paid ads I wasn't focused on the paid ads on the paid ads itself ignore the paid ignore the paid skip over the page I mean vacationtracker.io softwareadvice.com clockify vacation how do you beat vacation tracker tennis vendor vacation tracker is the only one is a competitor software advice is a company that refers people to other software so yeah totally it's like G2 they're all built on inbound organic SEO what I'm trying to understand is like what is your stress so they each maybe have I'm making this up 100 backlinks to their Pages unless you have some strategy to write a long-born piece of content on plan leave with backlinks to it you won't outrank them on page one that's what I'm trying to understand is how do you plan to actually tactically do that uh yeah as far as I mean you're talking some language I don't know and that's where I'm getting the help of my SEO firm but I mean as far as oh you hired it I thought SEO was part of what you you personally you hired a firm to run this for you yeah oh well now I'm more worried Andrew why is that well because SEO is not a thing that I mean it's really hard to just any SEO firm agency that wants your money is going to tell you they can rank number one and then they're going to say guess what it's going to take four years you know um but look look I hope it works I mean I hope obviously I hope it works I'm rooting for you but so SEO those are is there are there any other moves besides SEO you plan to make to grow Revenue it's your first customer I'm doing some of the software channels like Gardner and so okay organic or paid paid okay tell me more about that so what might you test on Gartner next month in terms of AD spend so actually capture a specific um I paid for top five placement and and what do you anticipate like do you get 100 clicks from there and convert 10 20 to paid customer how are you thinking about that I don't know if that ratio is accurate or not I mean the one challenge we have with that is lead Management's not a very highly sought area um so I don't know I mean I'm still kind of in the figuring it out phase with that one but you know I put the money up right now and we'll see what comes from it was there when you purchased plan leave was there a waitlist that came with it is there a group you can try and move to a paid plan or no you got to build a wait list a group we can move to pay plan I apologize I don't understand do you have a wait list are there any free users that you can Market to to try and get them to pay we have a free trial yes but there was no wait list I'm sorry my CTO Jose did not do any marketing didn't do anything with the company at all got it so when do you uh your pre-revenue today right or do you have a customer yet after you've purchased it a couple customers yes oh you do you do okay great so how did you can get those customers where'd you get them from Jose got those in Spain and we got one just in Ohio recently no no Andrew like uh tactically did that come from a captera ad SEO they were on the free trial how did you find it honestly I mean SEO takes three months we just started it three weeks ago so I'm not expecting any results from that Captain started last week to be honest so I I think it's foolish for me to be thinking too much about that right now everything I've been doing has been just kind of my mind customers you already have or they call I'm just asking where they came from that's all I'm sorry the ones in Spain Jose that was preemie and then the one in Ohio as a friend of myself okay guys so you're selling into your historically like sort of your old Network a friend that you have I have to until things take effect yes okay are you all in on this are you doing this full-time I am yeah okay so how do you how do you rate yourself right how do you grade yourself a year from now how will you know if it's working or not I do have a plan um it's been a while since I looked at it but essentially what I want to accomplish ideally is once we get the machine going is get it to at a minimum um 14 clients per week 15 30 45 60 what 50 56 clients uh per month and so on and that's where my numbers kind of came from okay but you've got three customers today paying you know for whatever 10 20 30 50 seats so it's like with 50 60 bucks a month so you're at your first 200 bucks a month in Revenue right you got to start somewhere right um anything can keep growing that now do you plan to bootstrap this or raise Capital over time plan to boost traffic for now bootstrap it very cool um any other Acquisitions you're going to tuck in under this one or those will be the only one no if there's any long-term plan I think it would be again since the attractions to the user experience I think would be way down the road to do a time and attendance system very similar and just kind of vote them together but uh it's a little premature to be thinking about that interesting and did you um I'm trying to look at your LinkedIn profile you've got a bunch of stuff that it still says you're present at today right are you still daily play pay director of Channel sales no I love daily okay and then all the other stuff is advisor okay got it so but that was the thing you were doing full-time before plan leave that's correct I see okay so did you leave uh daily pay and then find planley where you waited to leave daily pay until you found plan leave the letter uh okay so you found the Target first and then quit the full quit the safety net now you're all in yeah all right well we're rooting for you man let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book uh I always like Bradley sonella's books so God we're going way back but um I guess it's less than zero sorry so what's the title of the book lesson zero less than zero okay number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um not studying I don't really think I'm following anyone else I have a lot of respect for Colin day which you mentioned previously yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building plan leave uh from a business standpoint or or something you use every day a virtual you know to a tool that you use gosh I'm bouncing around so many right now um I'm using a back-end kind of campaign manager on LinkedIn and see how that's working but um what's it called well Lexi one Lexi uh while Lexi I think it's w-2a's Lexi uh interesting number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night fairies um dog woke me up at 4am last night so that was probably like five hours but on average I don't know seven or eight and situation married single kids single any kiddos get a four no no kids no kids and how old are you uh I'm 53. 53 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. boy there's a ton um I wish I got married back then it's a lot more complicated right now guys there you have it plan leave.com he comes from the HR Tech space he fell in love with this project and engineered Bill and said you know what I'm going to leave my full-time game I'm going to buy this thing he paid under we'll call it under six figures for it let the CTO Jose keep 20 he owns 80 and now he's using his Network his go how and an SEO agency to get his first dollars of Revenue already about three customers paying caught 50 bucks a month so 100 200 bucks a month in Revenue hoping to grow that to 10 20 30 50 100K a month in Revenue we'll stay up to date planleave.com check it out Andrew thanks for taking us to the top all right thank you very much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we 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