How Postn CEO Ross Gassman grew Postn to $1.4K revenue and 3 customers in 2024.

launch their SAS company or their agency their agency has nine people did three million in Revenue last year launching 100 campaigns for celebrities Etc helping them raise Capital posting helps them schedule all the messaging the social messaging around their fundraising it spun out at its own separate app the three co-founders to put in three thousand dollars so far they've got 70 users 30 bucks a month uh in terms of three customers paying so doing about 100 bucks a month right now on Revenue they're off to the raises I predict these guys will be doing way more Revenue called a year from now because they intimately understand their customer problems via what they're learning at the agency hey folks my guest today is Ross gassman he's building a tool called post and it's a collaboration platform that makes it easy for you your team and outside organizations to easily manage content publishing without the distractions of multiple collaboration apps Ross you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right like so many companies you got this idea from your agency business tell us about the agency business when did you launch it and what's it called yeah so well actually this com this company was birthed out of uh a fundraising platform called fandium which we started in November 2020 so we do charitable fundraising campaigns with artists athletes um festivals venues uh and creators and what we do is partner with them we create a once in a lifetime experience so for example Metallica will do a fly away uh it's a lot of palooza VIP backstage experience signed item like crazy experiences right so we work very closely with these management companies these artists and people in charge of their content right to promote these campaigns um and what we were doing and seeing you know we were sharing our contest graphics and messaging and copying all that through Google Docs Google Drive email and it was just getting out of hand and impossible to kind of track and you know remind them to post certain things on the announcement date or last chance so or like there's got to be an easier way right so Roswell before you go for it so quantify the agency what year did you launch the agency so it's it's not technically an agency it's uh we launched in November 2020 fandio okay um perfect and then how many people did you have at fandia before you started writing code for posting so we have nine uh ten and we basically built this product internally um as like uh our site our developer kind of was building this as well and we saw this as a tool for us to use and then we saw a lot of traction from management and them using it for other things right as for song releases for tour announcements and stuff like that so or like there's got to be a bigger play here um and that's kind of when we launched posts and as its own vertical and when you say own vertical does that mean you spun the company out of fandium it has its own cap table or no it's still inside a fandium no so it's totally separate right so um there's two other Founders on posting that are running posts in as its own thing and Phantom still to date its own large uh business that are you the founder of fandium I'm a co-founder of both nice nice okay and I guess give me a sense so you have nine ten people at fandium before you launch post and what does that mean you guys are doing like five 800 Grand a year in revenue on the agency side so we do we did about 100 campaigns last year with around 65 artists um we did three million last year um yeah so uh this year with nine people yeah um so it was a big year um this year we're obviously looking to do some more and that's very high Revenue per employee I mean why even why even deal with the software thing I mean you're building a very very good agency with nine people generating three million in Revenue yeah I mean we that's a good point I mean thought about that and uh it was it was it's been a tool it has been completely word of mouth and that other people have been using and we've been seeing them have success on it and uh we thought that there should be other people that could get some use out of it and so we decided obviously to bring on co-founders that aren't involving fandium to help kind of run it uh holiday engineers so no this was built no code so we hired a part-time Dev to build it um this other our other co-founders more of an operations guy CEO and he's kind of leading the charge on just managing the sales marketing and all that for the platform because the product's all built and it works you know the MVP works it's a good great product it's gotten good response but um now we just need a little push to get it out there essentially 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 so there's three co-founders over there including yourself did you guys just split Equity evenly at the start or something different yeah we split it Equity I mean we we have a little vesting period for our newest co-founder um uh as we you know the previous two kind of put a few few bucks in and then spend time building it so time and time and money and and uh yeah we had a little investing six month period but it's about to hit and we'll be honors there's the fan does fandium the agency earn any have any Equity at Poston uh no not currently but uh you know in the future it depends on what developments happen um whether like how much customization is needed for bandiums specifically or um you know other ideas to really keep it separate so we don't muddy the waters too much but uh that's kind of like where it lies now and as post and pre-revenue do you guys have customers on it already so we offer a free kit we consider every like landing page a kit right so if you want a music release rollout for a single you create one kit right if you're a record label and you have multiple artists you want to create multiple releases then you're gonna have to get more you're gonna have to get you know as many kits as you have artists so right now we give everyone a free kit to try so we have around 70 users um and only right now only three of them are paying subscription um which is fine you know we totally want to get customer feedback and as many people on post and first but you know we're really looking to launch and really get some more subscribers uh this month that's great um so 70 folks with a free kit three converted paid what are those three paying per month on average so right now they did the Pro Plan which was 79 before we just changed it 79 a month sorry but before we just change it to 30 uh as our beta launch so now they're paying a reduced rate to 30 but um previously we had four tiers and let's say we said screw it let's simplify it make it two tiers uh for the beta launch so three customers paying about 30 bucks a month they're doing about 100 bucks a month right now in Revenue right yeah got to start somewhere right the only way to build a 100 million dollar business is to start with 100 bucks a month you know there we go all right very cool how are you converting them right you got 70 users for free what are you looking for in their usage behaviors to understand when to sell them a paid plan um like I said like I mentioned I mean if they're a smaller freelancer and they're managing one client like hey take the fruit kit you know use that as much as you'd like um it's really kind of where we go to more of the they have two to ten clients where we try to sell them on right like I mentioned the record label example if they have four artists and they all have releases coming out within the same time frame they're gonna need to create four different kids so that's kind of when we like push them hey if you enjoy this free kit for this rollout like let's expand it and basically each artist will have their own folder you know they would have their own kits and you can kind of like organize it like um like that stack that's great now just speaking from again three people full time right now just the co-founders on the on the app correct yeah yeah very cool any plans to raise Capital are you gonna just bootstrap with agency revenues running bootstrap um we're gonna try to be we'll try to hustle I mean we enjoy all three of us enjoy that um if we need to bring on some regular people like or that's obviously ideal rather than coming out of pocket but um yeah we're trying to boost shop to see kind of where it takes us and kind of figure it out as we go Ross how much money have you guys put in personally just to get it started only a thousand each okay crazy yeah yeah it's enough they have skin in the game but not not crazy so that's good I've heard people put you know 250 000 bucks into MVP and they don't have any paying customers yet so you guys have done this no code three grand and you already have 100 bucks a month in Revenue we'll see what happens uh happens next yeah I mean luckily uh through building fandium which I'm also the head of product I've been able to like kind of see when we spend too much money and when we could have spent way less just to have an MVP and probably when it worked and we still wanted to spend money so it's kind of like a second go at let's let's go to the basic route as long as possible until we actually have the money to to build it up that's awesome man hey we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five number one your favorite book favorite book can I give you favorite pod uh 20 BC with Barry studies that's good number two is our CEO you're following or studying um CEO on following is studying it actually happens to be my cousin who uh just recently bought uh is the largest Auntie Anne's franchisee owner and he's my idol in the business world so he's his name's Kevin Bush at Fresh finding Concepts it's awesome number three what's your favorite online tool for building posting no code tool is the whole thing built on Bubble yep yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night I get around seven okay in situation married single kids single girlfriend live together in New York how many kids or sorry no kids I assume no kids all right how and how old are you Ross uh 27 27 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um something I wish I knew was 20. you're you get like the whole new perspective on life after college it's a it's like a rebirth guys there you have it watch out for this guy they launched their SAS company or their agency their agency has nine people did three million Revenue last year launching 100 campaigns for celebrities Etc helping them raise Capital posting helps them schedule all the messaging the social messaging around their fundraising it's spun out as its own separate app the three co-founders to put in 3 000 so far they've got 70 users 30 bucks a month uh in terms of three customers paying so doing about 100 bucks a month right now on Revenue they're off for the raises I predict these will be doing way more Revenue called a year from now because they intimately understand their customer problems via what they're learning at the agency watch out for Ross Ross thanks for taking us to the top 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 call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder 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