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 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 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 raise 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 valuation 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 want to check this tool out if you want to 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 God okay when was the first line of code written uh my so my partner um is still with the company so that's kind of a backdrop story I I left my company I decided wanted to buy 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...