Postn Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Launched their SaaS company at their agency. Their agency has nine people that had 3,000,000 revenue last year, launching a 100 campaigns for celebrities, etcetera, helping them raise capital. Postn helps them schedule all the messaging, the social messaging around their fundraising. It spun out as its own separate app. The three cofounders have put in $3,000 so far. They've got 70 users, $30 a month in terms of three customers paying. So doing about a $100 a month right [00:21] now in revenue. They're off to the races. I predict these guys will be doing way more revenue, call it, 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 postn. 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, [00:42] you ready to take us to the top? [00:44] >> Let's do it. [00:45] Alright. Like so many companies, you got this idea from your agency business. Tell us about the agency business. When did you launch it, what's it called? [00:52] >> Yeah. So well, actually, this comp this company was birthed out of fundraising platform called Fandium, which we started in November 2020. So we do charitable fundraising campaigns with artists, athletes, festivals, venues, 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 flyaway to Lollapalooza, VIP, backstage experience, signed item, like crazy experiences. Right? So we work very closely with these management companies, these [01:27] >> artists, and people in charge of their content, right, to promote these campaigns. And what we were doing and seeing, you know, we were sharing our contest graphics and messaging and copy and 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 we're like, there's gotta be an easier way. [01:54] >> Right? So [01:55] Ross, hold on. Before you go forward, so quantify the agency more, what year did you launch the agency? [01:59] >> So it's it's not technically an agency. It's we launched in November 2020, Fandium. [02:04] Okay. Perfect. Then And how many people did you have at Fandium before you started writing code for postn? [02:10] >> So we have nine, ten, and we basically built this product internally as, like, our our 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 we're like, there's gotta be a bigger play here. And that's kind [02:37] >> of when we launched postn as its own vertical. [02:40] 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 of Fandium? [02:47] >> No. So it's it's totally separate. Right? So there's two other founders on postn that are running postn as its own thing, and fandium still today its own large business that [02:59] Are you the founder of fandium? [03:01] >> I'm a cofounder of both. [03:03] Nice. Nice. Okay. Yep. And I guess, give me a sense. So you have nine, ten people at Fandium before you launch postn. What does that mean? You guys are doing, like, 5, 6, $800 k a year in revenue on the agency side? [03:13] >> So we do we did about a 100 campaigns last year with around 65 artists. We did 3,000,000 last year. [03:24] Oh, okay. Yeah. [03:26] >> So this year [03:28] With nine people? [03:30] >> Yeah. [03:32] >> So it it was a big year. This year, we're obviously looking to do some more and [03:37] It's very high revenue per employee. I mean, why even why even deal with a software thing? I mean, you're building a very, very good agency with nine people generating 3,000,000 in revenue. [03:46] >> Yeah. I mean, we that's a good point. I mean, we thought about that, and 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 we thought that there should be other people that could get some use out of it. And so we decided, obviously, to bring on cofounders that aren't involved in FanDium to help kind of run [04:10] >> it. [04:11] Are they engineers? [04:13] >> So, no, this was built no code, so we hired a a part time dev to build it. This other our our other cofounder is more of an operations guy, COO, and he's kind of leading the charge on just managing the sales, marketing, and all of that for the platform. Because the product's all built and it works. You know, the MVP works. It's a good, great product. We've gotten good response, but now we just need a little [04:33] >> push to get it out there essentially. [04:37] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect [05:00] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [05:24] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [05:46] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [06:12] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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 [06:34] 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/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into [07:00] the interview. So there's three cofounders over there, including yourself. Did you guys just split equity evenly at the start or something different? [07:07] >> Yeah. We split the equity. I mean, we we have a a little vesting period for our newest co founder because we, you know, previous two kind of put a few few bucks in and then spent time building it. So time and time and money, and and, yeah, we had a little vesting six month period, but it's about to hit, and we'll be equal on theirs. [07:27] Does the does fandium, the agency, earn any have any equity at postn? [07:33] >> No. Not currently. But Okay. You know, in the future, it depends on what developments happen, whether, like, how much customization is needed for Fandium specifically or, you know the idea is, like, we really keep it separate so don't muddy the waters too much, but that's kind of, like, where it lies now. [07:50] And as post and pre revenue, do you guys have customers on it already? [07:53] >> 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 and you wanna create multiple releases, then you're gonna have to get more you're gonna have to get as many kits as you have artists. So right now, we give everyone a free kit to try. So we have [08:19] >> around 70 users, [08:22] >> and only right now, only three of them are paying subscription, which is fine. Know, we totally wanna get customer feedback and as many people on post in first. I know. But, you know, we're really looking to launch and and really get some more subscribers this month. [08:41] That's great. So 70 folks with a free kit, three converted paid. What are those three paying per month on average? [08:47] >> So right now, they did the pro plan, which was 79 before we just changed it 79 a month. Sorry. Before we just change it to 30 as our beta launch. So now they're paying a reduced rate to 30, but previously, we had four tiers, and let's say we said, screw it. Let's simplify it. Make it two tiers for the beta launch. [09:08] So three customers paying about $30 a month. You're doing about a $100 a month right now in revenue. Right? [09:12] >> Yep. [09:13] Gotta start somewhere. Right? The only the only way to build a $100,000,000 business is to start with a $100 a month. You know? [09:17] >> There we go. [09:19] Alright. 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? [09:28] >> Like I like I mentioned, I mean, if they're a smaller freelancer and they're managing one client, like, hey. Do take the free kit, you know, use that as much as you'd like. It's really kinda where we go to more of the they have two to 10 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 [09:50] >> frame, they're gonna need to create four different kits. So that's kind of when we, like, push them, hey. If you enjoyed 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 like that stack. [10:09] That's great. Now just to confirm again, three people full time right now, just the cofounders on the on the app? [10:14] >> Correct. Yep. [10:15] Yep. Yep. Very cool. Any plans to raise capital? Are you gonna just bootstrap with agency revenues? [10:20] >> We're gonna bootstrap. We're gonna try to be we try to hustle. I mean, we enjoy all all three of us enjoy that. If we need to bring on some reps here, people, like, we're that's obviously ideal rather than coming out of pocket. But, yeah, we're trying to boot shop to see kind of where it takes us and kinda figure it out as we go. [10:38] Ross, how much money have you guys put in personally just to get it started? [10:43] >> Probably 1,000 each. [10:44] Okay. Crazy. [10:46] Oh, 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 into MVP, and they don't have any paying customers yet. So you guys have done this no code, $3,000, and you already have a $100 a month in revenue. We'll see what happens happen next. [10:58] >> Yeah. I mean, luckily, 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 the basic route as long as possible until we actually have the money to to [11:20] >> build it up. [11:21] That's awesome, man. Hey. We're out of time. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book. [11:27] >> Favorite book? Can I give you a favorite pod? Sure. 20 VC with Harry Stebbings. [11:34] >> That's good. [11:35] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [11:39] >> CEO, I'm following or studying. It actually happens to be my cousin who just recently bought is the largest Auntie Anne's franchisee owner, and he's my idol in the business world. So he's you know, his name's Kevin Bush at Fresh Dining Concepts. [11:55] That's awesome. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building postn? [12:01] >> Online tool for building postn Bubble. [12:03] >> Yep. [12:04] So is Bubble it's I was gonna say no code tool. [12:05] Is the whole thing built on Bubble? [12:07] >> Yep. Yeah. [12:08] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [12:11] >> I get around seven. [12:12] Okay. And situation, married, single, kids? [12:14] >> Single, girlfriend, live together in New York. [12:18] How many kids? Or or sorry. No kids, I assume? [12:21] >> No kids. [12:22] Alright. How and how old are you, Ross? [12:24] >> 27. [12:25] >> 27. Last question. [12:26] Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [12:29] >> Something [12:31] >> I wish I knew was 20. You're you get, like, the whole new perspective on life after college. [12:39] It's a [12:39] >> it's like a rebirth. [12:42] Guys, there you have it. Watch out for this guy. They launched their SaaS company at their agency. Their agency has nine people that had 3,000,000 revenue last year, launching a 100 campaigns for celebrities, etcetera, helping them raise capital. Postn 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 have put in $3,000 so far. They've got 70 users, $30 a month in terms [13:03] of three customers paying. So doing about a $100 a month right now in revenue. They're off to the races. I predict these guys will be doing way more revenue, call it, 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 [13:21] Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM [13:47] 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 SaaS 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, [14:09] if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. 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