How Proleads CEO Anders Fredriksson grew Proleads to $360K revenue and 200 customers in 2020.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is anders fredrickson he's got 15 years of startup experience as founder ceo or cto he's most recently founded and is the ceo of pro leads which is acquired by outbound works in a seven figures cash deal plus stock just recently and that's we're going to talk about today anders is ready to take us to the top sure all right so you have a history of acquisitions you were cto at our at arrival guys which which sold the lonely planet founder and ceo of table finder which was required by visit you've done the acquisition thing a couple times so when did the acquisition of pro leads happen without bound works um so that was in 2018 2018 and um give us a sense of uh like on a timeline perspective when did you launch the company so how many years up to the sale yeah so the first initial launch of what eventually became pro leads that was in 2010 so eight years of struggling yeah downs and yeah all that all that well and i enjoyed it i mean you came back on check this out you're one of my early ones january 3rd 2017 you were on the show at that time you had communicated about five or about 100 customers paying 150 per month on average for about 180 000 a year in revenue that was 2017. so beginning 2017. so so let's first start off with products so for people that missed that interview help us understand what the product the pro leads product did this i'm a bit rusty now on my on my product pitch but essentially it was automated sales development so the the product allowed you to um personalize emails at scale for for the purpose of b2b sales if you're going out you know every every b2b company they want to do some sales then they're going to hire some sales development reps um essentially and those reps need tools to be able to do their jobs and we were one of those tools yep so let's finish that story up to right before the acquisition so starting off it will finish in 2017 about 200 thousand dollars in arr where did you finish 2017 at i don't remember to be honest like the exact it was it wasn't uh a ranges so it wasn't it wasn't the incredible growth in terms of revenue because we had um a major problem which was part of the decision to sell actually so um the way i like to describe it is that we developed this sort of imagine that we built this uh perfect race car um that was like you know race tuned ferrari that was perfect for driving on the track but the problem is that we were selling it to people that just got their driver's license and couldn't really didn't really know how to drive that product so that was like one of the main reasons why we wanted to um see what we can do and and maybe i'm not sure do you want to go into that right now with dude well i wanna i wanna understand what you mean that when you say not good growth i mean it might not be good to you but if that's all relative to to you and obviously have a massive audience so when you say not good growth i mean did you finish 2017 maybe flat year over year or i i think it was it was flat or maybe just a little bit up and it was like the biggest problem that we had was churn yeah how big was it so what was like gross revenue churn annually um it was bad it was like over i think over over the whole year maybe like 50 percent of the customers we sold two churns so like like terrible yeah so yeah so it was a there was a lot of problems with the product itself um it wasn't it was the problem with what with what it saw because it solved a real problem and it solved that problem really well the problem was sort of in between there where how do you get your customers and your users to use the product in the way that it solves their problem and we were not really great at doing that we so right right before the acquisition we actually sort of revamped the whole company uh rebranded it as hexa we brought on a new co-founder and we also actually made a a small acquisition in that in that process i'm happy to dive into that more yeah so let's so let's dive into that so this would have this was mid-2018 no no so this was uh this was actually when was our interview again in in january 2017. yeah so this was in 2017. so sort of in the in the summer that year we um did a little bit of restructuring we got a new co-founder on board as well as named brendan short those were really good good choice for us um and we made an acquisition of a company called brisk or an asset purchase i should say so that was a what asset were you purchasing so we purchased the um all the assets from a company called brisk what was the revenue that they were doing at the time uh they had essentially shut down the company and we bought the technology uh okay so i don't have those numbers what did you buy the technology for uh it was in a six-figure deal okay so call 100 grand of maybe 300 grand somewhere in that range yeah and why did you pay that much for technology um because it was something that we wanted to build ourselves but this could this really short shortcut our path to um to having to instead of having to build that platform ourselves we got the technology so it was a yeah the technology that required it was a very advanced browser extension it also came with a bunch of customers so we could um continue to sell to um how many i think it was around 20 or so okay and are you talking about is b-r-i-s-k yes okay got it and what did the extension do um so it was a actually explained this uh so it was a connected connected to salesforce and helped the sales reps directly interact better with their sales force as well as do a bunch of automation on on other websites that they were on um which is why we wanted to have it so previously we had been this you know one platform that just did one thing like we just we're just talking about the um you know personalization of emails and so on but now we sorry are you still there yeah yeah it froze up a little bit um so yeah so we we were talking a lot about how um one second you just need to move this yeah under sorry sorry just so we because we have a short amount of time here so 2017 200 can arr summer you bring in the new co-founder you spent 100 grand at 300 grand to acquire a chrome extension that connected to salesforce how much did that impact your cash balance in in the bank at the time i mean was that a significant portion of what you had left um so we actually did an additional fundraise at that point so we might join so we joined the alchemist accelerator and we got in an extra i think it was 150 200 something like that i can't remember exactly the exact numbers um so but we got into the oculus accelerator which is a prominent b2b accelerator and that's what we uh focused a lot of the development and we had a lot of good growth so saunders just sorry just to be clear when you did the acquisition and you spent 100 grand or 300 grand about what percent of your total cash on hand was spent on that acquisition 50 percent 100 percent um it was not no we didn't spend a lot of cash on that there was a lot of a lot of the investment was made with with the stock as well okay got it so of the low six-figure deal is how you described it how much of it was actually cash um i think it was i don't know if that number is actually official though but i would say maybe maybe in the 25 to 50 range okay because what i'm trying to backtrack here is prior to in 2017 early 2017 you told me you'd raised 500 grand you entered the accelerator you raised an additional 150 right so you have 650 000 that you'd raise at that point but so i told you 500 then yeah so we had raised we raised a total of 880 or 900 or so for for total for pro leads okay fair enough so so you raise the capital you do the acquisition summer 2017 you bring on a co-founder uh let's keep going forward here up to the acquisition so the the brisk.io acquisition does not work what happened no no so that worked well and we and we were building and growing quite well during the accelerator at the same time as we were sort of uh going towards a demo day for the accelerator we were approached by outbound works so during dreamforce i had a beer with upon works founder or one of one of their founders ben and we were talking about our different strategies and goals for our companies and we realized that we were essentially trying to achieve the same thing which is automating sales development they had taken a a slightly different approach from this where they were attacking it from a a services perspective and we attacked it from a technology perspective so there and then...