How Proof Analytics grew to $3.1M revenue and 46 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is mark stews he's the ceo of proof analytics a marketing analytics platform that helps cmos and cfos bridge the roi gap by providing cause and effect analytics that shows marketing and sales true business impact on financial worth an award-winning b2b cmo and cco mark is one of the first leaders to connect all types of marketing investment to revenue margin and cash flow impact on complex long cycle companies in 2014 he was named innovator of the year for his pioneering work by u.s marketing leaders marco radio takes the top hey thanks man you bet so just be clear is is proof your baby or you're a hired gun you're a hired ceo here no i i'm the founder uh and uh yeah i'm a i'm basically a former large company cmo turned software ceo all right so your cool factor went up is what you're saying well i don't know about that but certainly it's interesting to kind of connect those two all right tell us what folks are paying you for right now what what are customers using you for uh basically if you know anything about marketing mixed modeling or for that matter any other kind of regression based causal type intellect analytic you know that it's been around for a while it's extremely accurate but it's very difficult to operationalize into the decision-making process and so uh we really mastered that uh at honeywell and other companies like bmc software and hp and we really got to the point where we understood what the next step had to be and so we built an automated platform version of marketing mixed modeling and so particularly given the fact that third-party data has been you know really impacted in the last two years it's been you're seeing even more deprecation there people are really moving rapidly towards mmm uh in general and specifically uh a really low latency very fast uh version like proof okay so so this sounds like an enterprise motion what's the average customer paying you per month or per year would you say so we typically range from year one anywhere from about 65 000 to about 150 000 it's all based on the number of models that you want to compute so you can scale it you know to whatever degree you want to um it's the payback period is less than 60 days we're talking about you know typically on that kind of you're talk about your payback period or their payback period in other words the amount of time that it takes for the customer to realize that they really did well in buying proof is less than 60 days average savings or repurposing of marketing spend is usually in the millions okay very cool this makes sense so 65 000 contract values you can expand from there and go up which is great based off number of models do you upsell based on anything else number of seats any other utility-based pricing upsells no it's it's 100 based on value and the in the increment of value being created is the answers to these questions right these models right the number of models okay this makes sense now now put this on a timeline for us when did you launch uh we launched about four years ago 2019. yeah and uh basically the last uh whoo i'd say the last two years have been really hot you know uh the volatility and the speed of change uh during covid and all the way up to right now has been severe and people have really understood that it's not about just measuring marketing it's being able to understand the cause and effect relationships that exist across time and the fact that we all live in a multi-variable world so it's basically if you're not looking at what the marketplace is doing to you in other words what the headwinds and tailwinds are and how that's impacting the investments that you're making you're not going to get there 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 raised 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 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 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 so you get going in 2019 coming from your own experience you build this thing out have you decided to bootstrap and preserve your equity or did you decide to raise capital and take some dilution actually we you know we kind of took a middle ground so we we have raised but we are absolutely a lean startup so we have sort of hybridized some rays from all family offices so we did not vc at all um give me that history so when did i guess how much total have you raised today from family offices uh about four and a half million so we everything that we have done to date is a combination of that four and a half million plus bootstrapping okay we love bootstrapping that's great we also love raising in the right context so i guess what's the breakdown on the 4.5 when did you bring in the first tranche what year and how much uh you know what i honestly can't remember that right now but we have generally we have stuck with the same family offices and we have re our joke is that we raise money from them uh much like a politician raises money it's based on whenever we feel like we need it right and so whenever there's a real strong opportunity to invest more in proof beyond what is is uh funded through bootstrapping uh they're there and so i guess if you don't remember the first one do you remember the last one when was the last tranche you took from them about a year ago okay and how much was that for about a million okay a million got it interesting now i i've never i don't i know what raising from vc is like i don't know if family offices give you the same standard terms that vc does so are they giving you stand pretty standard terms uh actually we we have great terms um with our with our investors so i would say way better than we would normally see from a venture capitalist firm and i guess what terms are most important to you you know liquidation preferences valuation caps you know what's most important to you uh i think that the the most important thing is that the investors are have the same vision that we have oh mark come on that's a fluffy answer i understand obviously obviously that's important we all know that's important talk to me about terms though specifically you know what honestly can we stop this because i didn't this is not even remotely what i agreed to talk about well mark did have you did you listen to any other episodes before coming on we've recorded but i got this okay and this i'm not here to talk about our all that stuff that's not we've just so you understand the reason we have 15 million downloads because we record top founders and we ask tough questions we don't follow scripts so if you don't like if you don't like the questions i'm asking live we should probably end i won't guys there you have it that's why we do the show we don't follow a script that's why you love us uh we'll catch you tomorrow morning see ya one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 sas 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 if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to 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