How Pushpress CEO Dan Uyemura grew Pushpress to $15M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is dan huemura he is the founder and ceo of a company called push press helping boutique gyms grow faster dan you ready to take us to the top oh yeah let's do it all right man let's jump in so what came first like the software development brain or your gym brain um there's a little bit of both actually so i was a software developer developer for a couple of companies like my space and stuff down here now um began became a member of a gym here and just was just totally not impressed with the software that they were using did a little research found out that that company was pretty much the behemoth of the industry and decided i wanted to look into making the software so in order to do that we opened a gym because we figured the best way to understand how to build the best gym software is to open a gym itself okay so what company was it that was doing a bad job do you want me to call them out yeah mindbody okay mindbody great so uh you didn't like the software when did you what year did you open a gym 2010. okay and i mean where did you get the capital to do that i imagine that's not cheap uh cam came together with a few partners from the gym opening uh opening a crossfit style gym it's about a hundred grand doesn't doesn't take a ton oh okay that's really well just do it yeah okay so you guys open a crossfit gym together now did you know that you were gonna go into the gym specifically to dig around to learn what software to build or did you think the crossfit gym was the business so i well i had already fallen in love with crossfit so in the world's case if the gym the gym was it i would have been fine but i did it because the bigger picture was to try to build software behind the gym i see okay so now today on average what are jim's paying to use your technology uh about 140 a month okay 140 a month and when did you write the first line of code for the actual software um the first line of code that survived today we threw away a few copies was 20 early 2013 okay so you're running the gym for three years before you really get the code written for the software yeah the first two versions we kind of threw away first version we built on top of wordpress that's why our name is push press and then we decided it wasn't robust enough second version we we built to be our own merchant processor and it was just too much legal um problems so we we we got we got on stripe pretty early you don't enjoy sitting through pci compliance reviews no all right so 2013 you get the code out how much okay well i mean how many months did you spend building the code before the first dollar of revenue um so we we actually have two revenue streams one's kind of a stripes a kickback so we got striped kickbacks pretty immediately but the first real sas revenue we didn't start billing until 2015. so we were kind of like free because we were just we were such an inferior product to everything out there we were free for the first two years and then we started taking money okay how much money did you sink into the mvp between 2013 and 2015 um it was a lot of man hours i was a coder my other co-founder was a coder and we probably put about 50 grand total into like everything else okay so 50 000 mvp plus a lot of sweat equity yeah so if i look at the cap table for the software company is it are all the partners so the same partners that open the gym on it or is it just you and one other person uh it's me and two other people actually me chris and brian three co-founders okay got it and are you guys now 100 focused on the software are you still running the crossfit gym as well no we're all out of our crossfit gym so it's all software now all software and when did you guys get out of the gym all year so chris got out two years ago we ended up we were owning two different gyms so it's got out in 2018 i got out early 2019. okay and then 2013 line of code 2015 for sas revenue how many customers stay paying for this ass product a little over a thousand okay about a thousand okay so can i take a thousand times that 140 you're doing 140 000 bucks a month in revenue correct yeah and where were you exactly a year ago just so you calculate growth rate um i just remember our mrr was about 86. okay that's i mean that's really healthy growth now have you guys bootstrap to raise capital we took a debt round um late last year but that's that was the first money we've taken okay this is like by the way dan and i met guys at dan martell's event in atlanta a couple weeks ago dan by the way is a very impressive golf teacher i mind you and get that later but but dan a lot of people don't understand how debt works can you just explain how you learned about it and maybe what your deal looked like to whatever you can share so yeah we we kind of went down the route initially of looking at the lighter capitals and those type of guys i didn't really feel comfortable with um the repayment terms necessarily although in the big picture it's still obviously much cheaper than taking um venture um if you if you know your revenue is growing um so we we never went with the lighter capital just it wasn't enough money to make sense um for us and then we found out that we could get a pretty decent deal with a um sba backed lender it was a union bank we ended up going through um so yeah that's what that's what we did okay and what was the maximum that like a lighter capital would give you i can't remember the terms now but i think the initial one would have been under 100 grand like it was probably yeah it was it was less it was less than like 1x monthly or something like that i can't remember yeah and then what did you end up doing with union union gave us 500 000 okay and what did you use that money on or what are you still using that money on so we're using that money on marketing some growth getting some sales together and building out a little bit of product as well okay got it and and can you give me a general sense there you know is it is that a term loan with a flat interest rate or do you pay back as a percent of monthly revenue that's the term loan with a flat interest rate so it's sba so we got a pretty good interest rate it's like seven percent or so okay that's interest only for the first 12 months or no no we're paying capital we're paying okay that's where that's where a lot of entrepreneurs man they are just it's incredible because you go raise half a million bucks and you interest only for the first 12 months and then on month 10 you refi at a cheaper rate so you basically use capital to grow super cheap didn't have to pay back principal early on because of how sas works they just game the system and it's smart i'll take that into the next one yeah call up coffee union listen i heard about this interest only thing why didn't we get that in our term sheet all right so so cool you so i'm not i look i'm gonna put you guys but you're bootstrapped i mean you're doing this a smart way you haven't have to give up you didn't have to go up equity you have to give up any warrants or anything right to union bank nope yeah so basically bootstrapped okay now here's the question how much are you burning each month again with this 500 grand coming in net burn net burn right now we've we've actually chipped it down we were 40 or 50 grand a few months ago we're now down to about 15 or 16. okay and how much of the growth over the past 12 months would you credit to the capital from union and your ability to invest it to get customers um that's actually to be seen so we we actually closed that money in november so i think we actually got it funded in december early december so we're still pretty early in spending it but yeah i think this is going to be the year that we grow starting with that how many folks on the team today 16 and how many engineers four three and a half three all right three any quota carrying sales reps or no no no our sales people are full not not quite okay and we talked about this in atlanta but you know churn is so critical in any sas company what's your gross revenue turn each year gross revenue churn per year so well our gross revenue turn per month varies between one and three percent okay so call it worst case 36 percent best case 12 percent annually yeah and what's so now let's add back expansion revenue on top of that how much expansion revenue each year customers expansion revenue i mean we're...