Founder Interview
How Promys Bootstrapped to $345K in Monthly Revenue with 150-200 Customers (Interview with Founder John Breakey)
- Interview Date
- January 12, 2022
- Interviewee
- John BreakeyFounder & Majority Owner
Company Metrics at Interview Time
Monthly Revenue (Jan 2022)
$345,000
Customers (2022)
150-200
Team Size (2022)
15
Avg Contract Value (2022)
$2,300-$2,400 per month
Year Founded
2011
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by John Breakey during his interview with Nathan Latka in January 2022 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. Promys is a Canadian company and no currency is stated anywhere in the interview, so the dollar amounts are reproduced exactly as they were spoken. See Promys’s current numbers.
Key Takeaways
- 01Promys reported $345,000 in monthly revenue in January 2022. Asked where the business stood a year earlier, John Breakey said only that revenue was "about 25% less" and gave no dollar figure.
- 02The company serves roughly 150 to 200 customers, all bootstrapped with no outside investor capital.
- 03Average seat price is $59 per month, with an average customer using about 40 to 45 seats, yielding roughly $2,300 to $2,400 per month per customer.
- 04The largest customer has about 150 users and represents approximately $100,000 per year in contract value.
- 05Total team is 15 full-time employees plus approximately 5 subcontractors, with only 3 dedicated sales reps.
- 06Promys was founded in 2011 when John Breakey went full time after a parallel transition from his prior company.
- 07The company markets to a named prospect list of IT integrators, MSPs, and physical security firms that the founder put at 3,000 to 4,000 — he corrected himself mid-answer.
- 08Most customers have been with Promys for five or more years, with some larger accounts staying for nearly ten years.
- 09Sales cycles run from about one month to about four months, conducted entirely remotely.
- 10Customers are lost mainly when they get acquired or go out of business, usually the smaller ones.
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly Revenue (Jan 2022) | $345,000 | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Customers (2022) | 150-200 | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Avg Contract Value (2022) | $2,300-$2,400 per month | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Pricing Per Seat (2022) | $59 per month | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Avg Seats Per Customer (2022) | 40 to 45 | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Biggest Customer ACV (2022) | $100,000 per year | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Biggest Customer Seat Count (2022) | 150 users | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Sales Reps (2022) | 3 | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Team Size (full-time) (2022) | 15 | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Subcontractors (2022) | 5 | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Sales Cycle (2022) | 1 to 4 months | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
| Year Founded | 2011 | Founder interview, Jan 2022 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
Promys reported $345,000 in monthly revenue in January 2022. That figure is host arithmetic — Nathan Latka multiplied 150 customers by $2,300 a month and John Breakey answered "Yeah, that's about right." Both inputs are the bottom of ranges the founder gave (150 to 200 customers, $2,300 to $2,400 per month), so $345,000 is a conservative floor rather than a midpoint. Revenue is driven by a per-seat model priced at $59 per month across 40 to 45 seats per customer. Asked where revenue stood a year earlier, the founder said only that it was "about 25% less" — he named no dollar amount.
Customers
The company serves roughly 150 to 200 customers at the time of the interview, spanning IT integrators, managed service providers, and physical security firms. Most customers have been with Promys for five or more years, and the largest account represents roughly $100,000 per year.
Team
Promys operates with 15 full-time employees and approximately 5 subcontractors, covering customer support, implementation and training, and software development. Only 3 of those full-time employees are dedicated to sales, with all sales conducted entirely remotely.
Bootstrapped Funding
John Breakey and a silent partner funded Promys entirely from proceeds of prior businesses they sold, with no outside investor capital raised. The company has maintained strong cash flow throughout its history, enabling it to self-fund ongoing development and growth.
Growth Strategy
Cold Outreach to a Known Prospect List
Promys markets to a named list of prospects in its target verticals that John Breakey put at 3,000 to 4,000 — he first cited about 4,000, then corrected himself to 3,000 moments later. The sales team calls and markets to these contacts repeatedly over time, knowing that a prospect who is not interested today may be unhappy with their current solution a year later.
Customer Referral Program
Existing customers are incentivized to refer new prospects through a formal referral program. Because the target market is relatively small and well-defined, word of mouth from satisfied long-term customers carries significant weight.
Remote-Only Sales Motion
All sales are conducted remotely, which keeps the cost of customer acquisition low and allows the three-person sales team to cover a national market without travel overhead. John Breakey noted the team never has to visit customer sites, "which is kind of interesting in a COVID world."
Vertical Focus and Deep Domain Expertise
Promys targets a narrow set of verticals, including IT integrators, MSPs, and physical security companies, all of which share the same workflow of quoting, delivering, and supporting equipment and labor. This focus allows the team to build deep best-practice knowledge and reduces the need for broad marketing spend.
Frequent Product Releases
The development team ships a new product release every two to three months, continuously adapting to marketplace needs. John Breakey cited user adoption as a critical differentiator, drawing on behavioral research to ensure customers actually use the software they buy.
Best Quotes
“So what happened, maybe just to understand the background that I used to be one of our customers effectively. And so I really understand the business that our customers are experiencing and the issues, the problems, the challenges and so forth. And so the product was really built with best practices in mind.”
“Well, if you look at it, it's based on a seat license and there are two seat licenses. There's a field license or technical license and a full license for the salespeople and the admin people. And so you're looking at on average about, if you blend those two rates together, about $59 a month per seat.”
“The average customer is about forty, forty five.”
“Most of our customers have been around for five plus years. In that case, some of the larger ones have been around for almost ten years.”
“Oh, the total team's 15 plus another five that are subcontract on the that if you it breaks down into support, like customer service and so forth, implementation training, and the other part of it is the dev development. We're always doing updates and releases, adjusting to what's the need for in the marketplace. So we do a new release every two to three months actually.”
“So a combination of some referrals from existing customers. So we have a program with existing customers that they refer us.”
“Yeah, pretty much. We've had a lot of good cash flow and we had our own investment from some other businesses that we sold. So we've never really had to go outside in the marketplace.”
What Happened Next
This interview captures Promys at a specific moment in January 2022, when John Breakey reported $345,000 in monthly revenue and roughly 150 to 200 customers after more than a decade of bootstrapped growth. The figures here reflect what the guest stated during the recording and should be treated as a historical snapshot. For current revenue, customer count, and other live metrics, visit the Promys company profile on GetLatka.
View Promys’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Company Overview
- 0:32Background: Building Promys from Customer Experience
- 2:56Founding Story and 2011 Full-Time Launch
- 3:07Ownership Structure and Bootstrapping
- 6:14Pricing Model and Average Contract Value
- 7:04Sales Team and Sales Cycle
- 7:38Target Verticals: IT Integrators, MSPs and Physical Security
- 8:23Customer Retention and Churn
- 8:59Team Size and Product Development Cadence
- 9:27Monthly Revenue and Year-Over-Year Growth
- 10:04Customer Acquisition: Referrals and Cold Outreach
- 11:00Bootstrapped Funding and Cash Flow
- 11:53Plans for 2022 and Potential Acquisition
- 12:52Ideal Acquirer and Adjacent Market Buyers
- 13:53Famous Five: Books, Sleep, and Life Lessons
Introduction and Company Overview
Nathan Latka
00:00Folks. My guest today is John Breakey. He created a tool called Promys, which was created as a single solution that could support the growth and complexity of a multi office IT full service business. They achieved this to us of a highly respected integrator by developing industry best practices. Check them out again at promys.com. John, are you ready to take us to the top?
John Breakey
00:20>> I'm ready.
Nathan Latka
00:21All right. So on your website, you say the company is the world's best CRM help desk and professional services automation software. What does that mean? Tell us about a customer who's paying you.
Background: Building Promys from Customer Experience
John Breakey
00:32>> So what happened, maybe just to understand the background that I used to be one of our customers effectively. And so I really understand the business that our customers are experiencing and the issues, the problems, the challenges and so forth. And so the product was really built with best practices in mind. You think about a services based business that also does the technology. Can you
Nathan Latka
00:58name one, John, as you tell the story so it's a real story?
John Breakey
01:02>> Yeah, sure. Well, the company that I was involved with was called UNIS LUMIN and it was the third largest Cisco partner in Canada And it did an array of services from, if you think about it from a consulting design implementation and post implementation services or what's now called managed services. And so if you think about a company that's doing service based business, most of their profitability comes from their services, not from the product sales that they
01:33>> do. And so it's really critical in a service based business to really manage your utilization and to make sure that you're not losing money because you're doing work that didn't get billed. In addition to that, as you're growing and our experiences, we grew from 30,000,000 to 50,000,000 to 70,000,000 and so forth. And every time we grew at a fairly good clip, it really put a burden on our cash flow. So it's really important to be able
02:01>> to think about how you're billing customers, how fast you're billing customers and so forth. So all of those best practices were integrated into Promys. In addition to that, if you look at most people in the market, they're using two, three, sometimes four different products to cobble their business together, whether it's in the sales process, the order admin process, the delivery project services, and the ticketing side of the service post implementation. And what we want to do
02:30>> is have a single place where every time I updated something, it updated across the whole system.
Nathan Latka
02:36So John, if an agency is listening right now with 100 people working at the agency, they can use Promys so all their reps and all their workers can manage their time, their inputs, what clients they're working on, how many hours worked, things like that. So you never miss a billable hour.
John Breakey
02:50>> Correct.
Nathan Latka
02:50Also Understood.
02:51And when did you leave that bigger company to launch Promys? What year?
Founding Story and 2011 Full-Time Launch
John Breakey
02:56>> So there was a parallel process or cutover for a few years, but in 2011, I went full time to just drive the Promys business.
Ownership Structure and Bootstrapping
Nathan Latka
03:07And are you 100% owner of the Promys business or does that agency own a bunch of the business?
John Breakey
03:11>> No, I'm a majority owner, but there's a secondary, owner as well.
Nathan Latka
03:16Was that an investor? Did you raise money or have you bootstrapped?
John Breakey
03:20>> No, we actually, took money that we had from other businesses and use it to do our own investment. So it's an actual partner, not an investor.
Nathan Latka
03:31Is that partner, are they also a customer of the tool?
John Breakey
03:34>> No, they're not active in the business anymore. They're off doing some other things. So they're just really acting in the board of directors.
Nathan Latka
03:43Oh, 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
04:06your 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
04:31get 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
04:52not 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
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05:40you 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 the
06:06interview. Interesting. Okay. But you own, call it 70%. They own 30%, something like that.
John Breakey
06:13>> Exactly. Right. Right.
Pricing Model and Average Contract Value
Nathan Latka
06:14Okay. Interesting. So you launched this in 2011. Tell me more about these customers, these big agencies that use you today on average. So what's sort of a sweet spot that they pay you per month to use the technology?
John Breakey
06:26>> How much do they pay per month?
Nathan Latka
06:28On average, yeah, spot.
John Breakey
06:29>> Well, if you look at it, it's based on a seat license and there are two seat licenses. There's a field license or technical license and a full license for the salespeople and the admin people. And so you're looking at on average about, if you blend those two rates together, about $59 a month per seat.
Nathan Latka
06:51And how many seats is your average customer?
John Breakey
06:54>> The average customer is about forty, forty five.
Nathan Latka
06:57So you're talking these are like these are like sales motions where you're selling 2,300, $2,400 a month plans.
John Breakey
07:03>> Roughly. Yeah. That's right.
Sales Team and Sales Cycle
Nathan Latka
07:04Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And do you have a big sales team? What's your team look like today? How many folks?
John Breakey
07:09>> No, there's only about three and we do a lot of through marketing and referral. And like all of our sales are done remotely. We don't have to visit the customer sites, which is kind of interesting in a COVID world.
07:25>> And the sales cycle is anywhere from about a month to about four months, roughly. Our customers range from on the low side, about 10 users and the high side about 150 as an average.
Target Verticals: IT Integrators, MSPs and Physical Security
John Breakey
07:38>> What they do and they're in sectors. So we have people that are in the IT integration business. We have people that are pure MSPs or managed service providers. We also have a group of physical security and fire suppression and fire security and fire alarm system companies. They all have the same common problem. They sell equipment. They need to quote the equipment and the labor. They have to deliver the equipment and the labor, and then they want
08:03>> to do post implementation support. And that's really the sweet spot for our stuff.
Nathan Latka
08:08And that account that's 150 users, I imagine that's your largest account. What does that ACV represent? Is that like a $100,000 a year contract?
John Breakey
08:17>> That's about right. Yep.
Nathan Latka
08:18Okay. Wow. And have they been with you since the beginning?
Customer Retention and Churn
John Breakey
08:23>> Most of our customers have been around for five plus years. In that case, some of the larger ones have been around for almost ten years.
08:33>> Where we lose customers is actually sometimes they get bought or they go out of business, usually the smaller ones. How
Nathan Latka
08:41many customers are you working with today, John?
John Breakey
08:44>> So we both have, I guess, approximately about 150, 200.
Nathan Latka
08:48Oh, wow. Okay. That's a lot. You're managing 150 customers at $2,300 a month with a team of three people?
John Breakey
08:54>> No, no, no, no. That's the salespeople of three people.
Nathan Latka
08:57Oh, what's the total team?
Team Size and Product Development Cadence
John Breakey
08:59>> Oh, the total team's 15 plus another five that are subcontract on the that if you it breaks down into support, like customer service and so forth, implementation training, and the other part of it is the dev development. We're always doing updates and releases, adjusting to what's the need for in the marketplace. So we do a new release every two to three months actually.
Monthly Revenue and Year-Over-Year Growth
Nathan Latka
09:27But John, my math right? Can I take 150 customers times $2,300 a month on average to get your monthly revenue or no?
John Breakey
09:37>> I'm not sure, I don't do math very well, but
Nathan Latka
09:39Oh, would be about $345,000 a month in revenue.
John Breakey
09:43>> Yeah, that's about right.
Nathan Latka
09:45Okay, very cool. And if that's revenue today, where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember?
John Breakey
09:51>> We're probably about 25% less. Well,
Nathan Latka
09:57so 300,000 a year ago, 345,000 a month now, that's a nice growth rate. Where are you getting new customers from? How are you growing?
Customer Acquisition: Referrals and Cold Outreach
John Breakey
10:04>> So a combination of some referrals from existing customers. So we have a program with existing customers that they refer us. And the other one is we do
10:15>> nice thing about our business is we know who the target customers are. And so we have a pretty strong list of about 4,000
10:25>> prospects where we know their names, we know the people in the company, and so we can market to them and call them and so forth. And it's really about a cycle that somebody's, you call them up and they, I'm not interested, I don't have a problem. A year later, they're not happy with their current solution. And so you just have to keep on remarketing to them and over time, those 300 or so or 3,000, I should
10:51>> say, prospects drop into the sales bucket.
Nathan Latka
10:55And just to be clear, John, you've done all this bootstrapped right outside of the other partner you have, it's all bootstrapped.
Bootstrapped Funding and Cash Flow
John Breakey
11:00>> Yeah, pretty much. We've had a lot of good cash flow and we had our own investment from some other businesses that we sold. So we've never really had to go outside in the marketplace.
Nathan Latka
11:13Yeah, know you're very profitable. The biggest expense typically in SaaS companies is headcount. And so we always look at revenue per head and you have top 25 percentile revenue per head of about $276,000 if it's a 15 person team doing 4,100,000 in ARR. So makes complete sense to me why you're so profitable.
John Breakey
11:31>> Good mathematician there.
Nathan Latka
11:33Yeah. Well, I'm just wanna give credit where credit's due. I mean, that that is why you're able to scale is because you do so much with such a small team. That's great.
11:42Tell me more about plans for 2022. Do you have plans to stay private? Do you have any if someone offered you $10,000,000 all cash upfront to sell the business, do you sell today?
Plans for 2022 and Potential Acquisition
John Breakey
11:53>> Well, I think that what I've learned from some previous businesses that I've owned is the train time is any time, but I've been fortunate to discriminate and make sure that the buyer, if there was a buyer, and we're not looking specifically for one, but you never know, somebody might call you up. But the important thing for me is to say, will that buyer deal with both the employees and the customers? You see some buyers who are,
12:22>> I'll call them financial buyers, who want to strip the company down and you've seen this in the marketplace where there have been some major acquisitions in the past with our competitors and the result is that the service capability drops way off.
Nathan Latka
12:40Can you name one
12:40or two of them?
John Breakey
12:41>> Well, those ConnectWise had a major problem when they had a major investor come in and buy the company and it took them about maybe a year and a half to really recover from that.
Ideal Acquirer and Adjacent Market Buyers
Nathan Latka
12:52So who would be the perfect buyer for you?
12:55Can you name a company?
John Breakey
12:57>> Not really. I guess you could argue sometimes your competitor, but usually it's about somebody who might be in the adjacent market and looking for the synergy. So if you think about it, you're familiar with SolarWinds or what's now split up into two companies and there's N-able, which is the other side. So these are RMM vendors or remote monitoring vendors who want to keep their customers and provide more services to their base of customers. The other ones
13:29>> are some of these companies like Acronis and so forth that are providing a whole suite of services to managed service providers. They're providing security, they're providing hosting and so forth. And so by providing additional stuff like the whole sort of workflow system in the back end, that just means more revenue for them and more stickiness with their current customers.
Famous Five: Books, Sleep, and Life Lessons
Nathan Latka
13:53That makes a lot of sense, John. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
John Breakey
13:58>> Oh, I think that
14:03>> there's a I love innovation and the Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's Solution are kind of a series by two authors. They're just phenomenal about how do you think about always innovating and what's the methodology for basically being successful at innovation.
Nathan Latka
14:24Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
John Breakey
14:28>> Actually, I really like the psychology. Like everything's about people. And there's a wonderful book by a psychologist or neurologist.
14:39>> The book is called Behave and it's by
14:47>> Robert Sapolsky. He's a professor, I think out of Harvard. And just a phenomenal read. It's an easy read. He's a little bit funny. But once you read it, you really understand people, customers, how we think and behave and learn. And that's really critical. Like one thing I want to mention is that in the software world, what's really critical is user adoption. And for the most part, companies do a really poor job at it. And so that's
15:16>> why we studied people like Sapolsky's information so that we could say, hey, we don't want to just buy the equipment or the software. We want to be able to take advantage of it.
Nathan Latka
15:27All right, let's move forward here. Number three, favorite online tool for building the business.
John Breakey
15:33>> I'm not sure that I have one.
Nathan Latka
15:37Four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?
John Breakey
15:40>> I actually do pretty good. I do like six to sometimes seven.
Nathan Latka
15:44Okay, that's great. And what's your situation, John? Married, single, kids?
John Breakey
15:48>> I'm divorced and I do have three girls.
Nathan Latka
15:52Three kiddos and how old are you?
John Breakey
15:54>> Pardon?
Nathan Latka
15:55How old are you?
John Breakey
15:57>> I'm 65.
Nathan Latka
15:58Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
John Breakey
16:01>> Everything that I know now. More about people. People in situations that
16:09>> with age comes wisdom. And it's pretty powerful because my favorite expression is that life is a wonderful teacher. The only problem is it gives you the test before the lesson. And so I like making mistakes because I think you learn much more from mistakes than you do from successes.
Nathan Latka
16:28Guys, there you have it. John launched promys.com back in 2011. He's helping agencies track billable hours, both on machines equipment and also humans to make sure nothing leaks through and profit margins stay high. He's doing about $300,000 a month in revenue a year ago, now $345,000 a month. Healthy growth, 150 customers, totally bootstrapped, which we love. 15 folks on his team, three sales reps, rest mostly engineering as he looks to continue to scale. John, thanks for
16:54taking us to the top.
John Breakey
16:55>> My pleasure.
Nathan Latka
16:58One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called 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
17:23Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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
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