How Pricimetrics.com CEO Mike Kimel grew Pricimetrics.com to $10M revenue with a 4 person team in 2024.

price and metrics he's been a consultant in the pricing space for a long time he's now Building Technology to help Brands skews the corner grocery shop with over 250 skus optimized pricing real time to quickly understand pricing profitability margins with a click of a button take anybody knows from Consulting in his head and putting it out in software space he's got 10 folks in the team today one of which is their coder who's actually being paid the founders have put in 100K to build the MVP and three folks on that 10 person sales team working for Equity are looking to land there for sale here in the next couple of months hey folks my guess today is Mike Kimmel he spent almost 30 years in analytics and pricing since obtaining a PhD in economics from UCLA he's made a lot of money for a number of companies and decided it was time for him to make a world-class pricing accessible to companies of all sizes that's why I launched price and metrics with an i in the middle.com Mike you ready to take us to the top yes yes I am thank you all right so what give me a story you said you've made a lot of money for a lot of other companies who are you making rich well I've worked for a lot of Fortune 500 companies and multinational corporations both as a consultant and as an employee um so uh over time I I started out as kind of a lowly minion in analytics and uh grew to run the pricing department for uh several large companies interesting so tell me how price metrics Max Works uh yeah you did share pre-show your pre-revenue today uh how are you what's guiding how you build the software is it your own use case do you have some free users how are you building MVP um well we actually have built our MVP um to a large extent uh this is the product that I always felt I needed when I was running pricing departments um basically what we do what our software does is it finds the profit maximizing price for all of a company's skus uh it also does a number of other things that are useful for instance it can tell you which products which of your skus and which locations are responding well to being an ad which of them respond while being in circular for companies that produce circulars that kind of thing so it basically identifies information about different products how much you should charge for them um and uh it tells you uh what it provides you with that information and it provides you with other information that allows you to run simulations uh determine whether you're going to accept the guidance provided by the software or not you can always override the companies the the software guidance and if you accept it you know in general we will raise your profitability and Mike what year did you launch or write the first line of code for the platform well originally the the company was going to be basically just a um vehicle for me to do more Consulting so that was 2019. uh but uh it really it kind of grew about a year and a half ago or so people started doing people from my past life started joining the company because they like the idea it's like joining full-time as employees uh joining part-time everybody but me currently is part-time and how many are part-time today we have 10 people in the company right now and how do you pay them if you're pre-revenue that is an excellent question uh we have one person getting paid right now and uh that's uh our head coder um we we basically are bootstrapping right now although we are looking to raise money um the rest of the team is working on Equity as I said uh everybody kind of uh joined this started out as a one-person operation and uh people liked what they heard they liked the the idea of what we're planning to do what we are doing and how and so little by little people started joining next thing I knew I had a company sort of an accidental thing Mike one of the things I look for obviously in any early stage founder you've got to be able to convince world-class talent to join you right you've got to be very convincing and so why do they believe you why why do they believe the equity they're working for right now is going to be worth anything um well everybody in the company just about with with two exceptions are people who've known me for a long time so um in each of the cases these are people some of them I've worked with um most of these people uh if if I wanted to rip them off at some point uh presumably I would have done it a long time ago they know me I know uh there's a trust Factor 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 I mean they can trust you though but still not know what the vision is going to be there's a lot of people that trust the founders they work with but they don't know if the equity is going to be worth anything uh that that's a good point uh basically what we do have um well I'm not the only person with a background in analytics in the team um additionally um uh so so the others um they have they've had the opportunity to see what I can do with uh analytics uh they've seen they've had the opportunity just to see what other people on the team can also do with their analytics skills um so it kind of between the the skill set knowing that the skill set is there knowing that uh uh the others on the team have the ability to do X Y and Z and knowing what the software is intended to do um it just sounded compelling to a number of people you could have the best code on Earth with the smartest phds but if you can't sell there's no business and the equity is worth nothing um how do you tell a story that makes them understand that hey you can sell Mike can sell a million dollars worth of this product well actually that's a funny little story I began by trying to sell the product myself turns out Mike can't sell uh Mike can sell division to uh people who he knows um and uh who he gets introduced to I'm guessing speaking in third person now um but uh basically um among the people who have joined the the the company are three individuals we have a three-person sales team uh so um one of the guys uh who joined the company uh was a VP of sales at a company that I worked for in the past uh he recently retired from his uh day job and yeah he's descended to join us uh we also have an experienced that sale another gentleman who most of his background is in finance so Mike what are the sales people doing today because you're you're pre-revenue right so how close are they to Landing the first customer um that's a great question and uh until we go through this process I really will not know however we had our first uh customer meeting last week um that resulted in the customer basically seeing a demo of the product liking what they saw and sending us some data so that we could begin a pilot project...