How Printingforless CEO Andrew Field grew Printingforless to $46.3M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is andrew field he is the founder of pfl andrew are you ready to take us to the top let's go all right what is pfl and what how do you guys make money pfl started as the world's first ecommerce commercial printer way back in 96 since then we've expanded to become uh the leader of a new category that we call tactile marketing automation and in short we help people with marketing both in a more traditional sense of print and direct mail as well as we today have integrations with marketo oracle eloqua salesforce marketing cloud and salesforce sales cloud that enable people to leverage the rich behavioral data that resides in those systems of record to inform their most expensive touch and to have orchestrated true multi-channel marketing this is send a handwritten letter to this client once they hit this activation metric based off the marketo api it's tied into pfl uh it's not so much handwritten but we do dimensional mail we do boxes we do personalized notes we do pretty much anything that is legal to send uh through the mail or fedex very good now is it a sas platform or is it pay-as-you-go it's a sas platform for the software subscription and it's pay-as-you-go for what we call the consumption which is the box with the mug and the starbucks via is in it and the printed piece etc so when we just look at the sas side of the business over the past 12 months what percent of your revenue is actually just the sas versus the markup on the starbucks monk you said it's about a quarter for the sass and the rest of it is the consumption interesting okay um and are you what's the trend are you is it more sass or less sass over time well for our company as a whole if i divided it differently and if i said here's e-commerce print where you go to printing for last.com and configure your order upload your file that area is just right now being surpassed by our sas platform the tactile marketing automation interesting okay full let's just focus on your sas platform so on that platform what's the average customer paying per month i'm sure you have a bunch of cohorts but on average uh it's in the ten thousand dollars eight to ten thousand dollars a month and the reason for that is people don't start at that level of spend they end up there because we insist that they very carefully measure roi because we can rapidly become a six figure a year line item and when some cfo comes along and says what in the world do you spend 300 grand and who's pfl we want that marketer to be able to say well let me show you that that 300 grand we spent the last 12 months helped us close five million dollars of new business and launched the company in 97 is that right in 96 1996 very good and then fast forward to today how many customers do you have just on the sas platform on the sas platform we have about 300 customers okay and can i mean can i take 300 times 8 grand you know the average you said they each pay to kind of get your monthly recurring revenue which would be 2.4 million uh you did that was perfect except you didn't go times 12 for 12 months well that's because i was talking about mrr not arr oh yes that would be right in the ballpark of our mrr okay very good and again just on the south side yeah that's good what does growth rate look like on that so if you're doing 2.4 million today what were you doing about a year ago so we started in 14 uh we we started on the path of the famous triple triple double double doubles so we tripled in 15 uh tripled in 16. doubled in 17 and we're on track to double this year that's great okay so you were doing about 1.2 million a month about a year ago sure that's health that's really healthy growth very impressive um but by the way i also this space is very interesting to me because everything gets more digital like we started sending out let me see we started sending out this physical mailer which is essentially a magazine for me to be sas ceos and the amount of feedback we got on this like way larger than anything we've ever done digital so we're going all in on physical right just go the opposite of what the market's doing right yeah well you're actually right on trend because what people are finding is obviously if you can get a customer to take the next action in their journey with an email do it because email is you know a fraction of a cent a piece and you can do it at scale but it's for the people who are ignoring that the people who are heavily utilizing uh gmail spam filters or sanebox or something like that that that means they're just not interacting anymore or if they're just they have what we call digital clutter fatigue the different sources say people do between see between three and ten thousand marketing messages a day i mean your gas pump talks to you for crying out loud and so we try to help people cut through that digital clutter and get notice and drive business results and bootstrap review raised capital uh we bootstrapped for the better part of 20 years and then earlier this year we raised a 25 million round from goldman sachs okay so 25 million bucks into the company um and can i ask at a high level generally speaking valuation wise were you pushing four or five six sex are what were able to negotiate you can ask but we're not going there okay okay what would you generally find a healthy environment or not a healthy environment for sas valuations um i think it's a insane valuation for sas companies i think when you see these bay area vcs uh throwing you know 30 million dollars at a you know million dollar or a quarter million dollar mrr uh uh company you know most of them don't pan out yep yep no i agree i would agree with you okay good so 25 million bucks raised here recently i am curious though were you there had been discussions with goldman whether to value like a sas platform which typically have much higher multiples but it's only a quarter of your revenue i mean how did you have that debate about should you be like a e-commerce multiple or a sas multiple uh we kind of took a sum of the parts approach ah okay okay so 25 percent sas 75 percent blend it and take it from there you give it a shot very yeah no thank you all right so very good 96 launch talk to me about churn turns obviously critical what's your turn today our churn is modest um the reason is is as long as people are measuring their roi which we really work hard to get them to do they can see that it's working so essentially we think of it like this we sell you a box and maybe that box is 20 depending on you know trim levels 20 to 60 thousand dollars a year for the box but every time you put a dollar in the box the only question is are you going to get a 10 a 20 a 50 or 100 coming out so why would anybody not renew the 20 000 a year box when every time you put you know a dollar in 20 times that pops out i'll give you an illustration we had a customer well hold on hey sorry andrew before you do that what is the number though so what is your revenue churn per year today it's right about 100 net revenue retention okay good so everything you lose you're making up by expansion right okay and now give me the example so the example is we have a customer who's been with us quite some time called invoka it's a call intelligence software as a service based in santa barbara and they had an offer which i'm sure you've seen some of and the author said if you take a 30 minute demo we'll give you a 50 amazon gift card and they delivered that offer via email retargeting ads and random bdr voicemails what we added to it was two things a tactile or physical component and orchestration working through their marketo so today they oh and they had about a one percent response rate of booking demos against their mql list today they added to that they still warm them up with emails and retargeting ads and then instead of a random bdr voicemail a box shows up and it has the invoca label on it and you open it up and there's a 50 amazon gift card that we printed so it's fake and it's on a little tray with a pen and a calculator and a roi uh uh attribution card and you peel up the 50 amazon gift card and you think you just got 50 bucks and on the back it says if you want the real thing you have to do a 30 minute demo next 14 days and the psychologist tells people are 10 times as likely to take action due to fear of loss than desire for gain and in that moment they just lost 50 bucks then she's uh julia's a brilliant marketer she reinforces that with lost language instead of saying grow your revenue with invoca it says find out how much revenue you're missing out on with poor call intelligence and then within 15 minutes that box being delivered the phone rings and it's a bdr saying did you get the box can we talk about it yeah that's a great example one percent response rate to a 22 demo booking rate and their close rate stayed the same that's great i love i love that story that's helpful talk to me about the makeup of your team today what are you guys at total team size we have about 330 people our primary locations are livingston montana where i'm sitting 50 miles north of yellowstone national park we have an office in bozeman and we have a second headquarters in indianapolis indiana that's got okay nice so montana and...