Proximate revenue, CEO Ross Andrews, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hello everyone my guest today is Ross Andrews he's an entrepreneur at heart and loves creating things to find new and innovative ways to improve the quality of our lives the way we run our businesses and to make our world a more efficient place his background is in genetic biology and clearly he's taken a few twists and turns in life now running a software company called proximity oh he loves to meet new people learning about why they are working on and discussing new ideas or whatever they are pursuing at the time Ross are you ready to take us to the top give my best all right proximate IO what do you guys do and how do you make money so approximate is designed to be a enterprise SAS sales intelligence solution and so our goal is to make sales intelligence predictive sales analytics really simple and easy and I say whenever I'm talking people I can say we want to make predictive sales intelligence as easy as signing up for Netflix where you just you create an account you sync your company's CRM and we do the rest of the work for you making you kind of headache free for our customers our goal you know so it's a SAS application so you know we run on a you know a typical SAS revenue model and what's the average restaurant paper you per month our license is $200 a month and we do offer you know an annual subscription which is a discounted price two months free for two thousand dollars for the year okay and you're selling typically to the one individual or you're selling bulk deals to teams we're selling to anyone so solo entrepreneurs who just are looking to get you know give an edge and getting their company started and also to large organizations who need you know maybe dozens if not hundreds of licenses they have large dispersed sales teams and that's why the SAS format was perfect yeah I know that's great so how many licenses have you scaled to today how many folks using you so we are actually just in our initial beta phase so we have some beta partners that are gonna be you know using the platform over the next month or two and then we're hoping to roll into a full launch you know later this fall / early winter I love that Ross okay so are you pre revenue today have you have closed anybody we are pre revenue all of our users are on a free you know are using the platform for free at the moment while on the beta you know we're doing bug fixing all that good stuff user feedback and then and at once that's complete and we're confident everything is working 100 percent will roll into our full subscription model okay I love this so a lot of people listening are like Nathan why do you ever ever ever have any pre-revenue people on that's where I am NOT these people doing a hundred million in revenue so this is gonna be a valuable interview for them when did you launch the company was it just did you start coding in this year so we basically been coding so I've a co-founder he's the technical founder he's been coding for about seven months just to get to the platform to where it is today which is in it that beta phase and then like I said you know we're gonna do about a month or two of testing just make sure all the bugs are squashed any bugs that pop up although you get some user feedback making me fine-tune performance changes and then roll into that full launch and it's just the two of you right now there's actually four of us the two of us are the founders and we have two other members who joined our team a little bit later on in the process so we're a four-person team right now we're all under the age of 26 so that young hungry team we all kind of have a diversity of backgrounds both personally and professionally so it's kind of cool we have kind of a unique dynamic but we we have an exciting team and and equity split just between you and your co-founder across all four all four of us yeah but the other two are Equity Partners at this point we're all we're bootstrapping you know like you said so your users want some of those pre-revenue companies we are hard bootstrapping you know to this point all of us work other jobs kind of as we're getting this company off the ground just little side hustles to kind of keep the lights on as we build proximate and you know hoping to eventually get to the point where we can start getting some customers maybe some revenue and then eventually look and they you know maybe closing a seed round yep okay so ever I was gonna ask you so how are you paying everybody so no one's taking any pay right now they're just doing side they're just putting in less time and doing side work yeah most of us I mean I'm full-time approximate and then my side jobs are kind of part-time the other three have full-time jobs and they work on proximate in there there you know nights and weekends I guess you could say is that you know the kind of traditional weekend warrior start-up founder and then we're hoping eventually you know in the next few months here when we get this off the ground more fully that we can get that seed round in so we can really go all-in full-time all for what seat what are you aiming when you do see around well how much do at what valuation our goal is to raise $500,000 for a twelve and a half percent stake in the company so it's a three and a half million dollar Cree money evaluation will be four million once the monies in and that's a really good starting point for us and gives us a 12-month runway to you know start onboarding customers hopefully get some traction get some revenue on the books and you know our goal is to be where our goal is to aim for five hundred licenses in the first twelve months once we fully rolled up the platform out yep five hundred grand in a 12-month for runway means your expenses right now I'll call it forty forty-one grand per month is that mainly salaries or any other big expenses yeah that would be basically the 40 grand month would be all four of us you know at least a starting salary so again we can do this full-time and then some I budgeted in you know some marketing sales expenses travel you know later in September we're sponsoring a startup showcase in the Boston area so little events like that where we're gonna start to go out and really kind of spread the word about what we're doing are you are you all based in Boston two of us are one is in Ohio and one is in Florida we are distributed team at the moment and how did you meet the other you know the two they're now in Boston um so the co-founder was in Florida he and I met through my stepfather who run he also runs his own business so that's how kind of he and I met and then the other two one I met through just another professional connection I had he's our chief data scientist so he does all of our a I programming and then the other one I met her at a just a networking event and I was just really impressed by her resume and her background so I approached her about her interest in joining our team and we kind of just evolved organically from there and Ross I assumed you were like the business guy right oops sorry you broke up there on the last one you know prom I said I'm assuming you're kind of a business guy right yeah I'm the you know sales marketing business ops and it was your idea yes proximate started I started off the concept yeah so let me ask you a question there's a lot of business people right now listening or the analysts of VC firms I want to jump on do their own thing but they always go Nathan I how do I find a technical co-founder and I say well it's gotta be really persuasive right so walk me through how have you convinced all these other people to in their free time do work for you for the past seven or eight months with no salary betting on the chance that maybe this becomes worth something one day yeah you know I think the key for them was when they met me was hearing me talk about proxima and how passionate I was about the idea and how you know from my own experiences I really believed that this platform could make a difference in sales peoples and sales organizations lives in the future and I think for a lot of them they said listen for the three of them they said listen I you seem so passionate about this and you've done the homework you've done the research you know I share with them all of the information that I have sourced to kind of as I was putting the idea together and I think that was just really what helped convince them you know for Thomas Bowles who's my co-founder he was he is the Salesforce administrator for a for b2b company so he's a little bit more first-hand experience of kind of some of the shortcomings in the today's CRM sales cloud environment and he's seen it firsthand so he kind of was a little faster to relate to oh yeah yeah there's definitely a gap here with what sales people need and what's available to them today so I'm I'm excited to kind of go on this journey with you to see if we can come up with a solution together and put this together and then the other two like I said I think they just really how did you incentivize him in terms of equity are you guys just 50/50 partners or how what would you give up roughly you know I you know he and I had two primary shareholders you know I have a slightly larger stake in the company you know being that the concept was - start...