QuestionPro Revenue & Valuation (2025)

[00:00] Questionpro.com finished 2022 at a 30,000,000 run rate, up from 20,000,000 back in 2019. He's bought five companies and done this all organically and bootstrap since launching in 2005. It's a tool that helps you learn from your employees, learn from your customers, all through smart surveys and engagement tools. Check it out at questionpro.com. Hey, folks. My guest today is Vivek Bhaskaran. He is the CEO and founder of a company called questionpro. Bootstrapped, he's done a lot of [00:26] M and A. Last time we spoke, he broke $19,000,000 in revenue, serving over 4,800 customers. He's now in warm and sunny San Francisco while I freeze down here in Austin. Vivek, are you ready to take us to the top? [00:37] >> Yes, sir. Let's go for it. Second time. I love it. [00:40] Second time. Your first your your your recording when you presented on stage at one of our last events where you talked about how you used WhatsApp to text basically another founder and ended up closing a deal with your one page sort of LOI was a massive hit. Are you still today even in a recession looking at M and A opportunities or no? [00:58] >> I'm doubling down. I mean, in fact, I have three deals in the pipeline right now. I think yeah. I mean, from an M and A perspective, the kind of deals we do, like, you know, there are still deals to be made, and we're active. [01:12] So guys, questionpro helps you run surveys to do research, understand your customer's experience, and also get feedback from your employees to manage employee engagement. Vivek, with that context, how are you thinking about M and A? Do you go buy in adjacent product categories? Do you double down on the current niches you're in? How are you thinking about it? [01:30] >> So we doubled down on the current niches we're in. So you had like you said, like, you correctly, accurately pointed out, there are three different buyers. Look at from the enterprise perspective. There are three buyers. Number one is consumer insights and market research. Somebody in a company doing research. They typically follow-up on marketing. Second buyer is customer experience. So people are trying to figure out NPS, like somebody's in charge of figuring out what's going on with [01:52] >> existing customers, how can we prevent churn, how can we upsell them. And the third component is HR, obviously, employee surveys really. So any product or services that sells to each of these buyers, we are interested in. We are trying to kind of build it out. So my model has been, look at a buyer, put the buyer in the center of our kind of sphere and say everything that he spends on or he or she spends on, [02:16] >> we want to have those tools and services around that. But that's the kind of general pattern that followed. So for example, in fact, Valerie from Suite CX, she was on your show a couple of years ago, or maybe a year and a half ago really. So she built a journey mapping platform for the CX buyer, if you think about it. So we do the surveys for the CX buyer, she built the journey mapping platform for the [02:38] >> CX buyer, so we kind of combined forces and we acquired them actually last year. We acquired them. [02:42] Bro, where is my 1% fee? Come on man! [02:46] >> 1% is the hourly, you know, the time that I oh, actually, you know what? The poker money. Since you kill me on poker, every time I spend a grand with you on poker. So the poker money is your 1%. There you go. [02:57] I love that. Well, congrats on giving ideas on how's it going? You know, lot of people say you buy a company and it's so hard to actually merge two companies. How many companies have you bought since you founded the company in 2005? And how is the CX integration going with Valerie? [03:11] >> Yeah. So when people say it's hard, it is hard. I mean, it's not an easy thing. There's cultural issues. The tech issues are, you know, there are cultural issues, tech issues, and then obviously business. The business issues are the easiest one. Like, know, what? Look. Look. You're cross sell blah blah blah. So pretty straightforward. Cultural is the hardest one. Tech is kind of in the middle realistically, right? And from a, you know, with Valerie, and obviously [03:33] >> Valerie and I hit it off, but there are a lot of, you know, it's not just Valerie, she's got a bunch of people. They don't, you know, usually you have at least 20% attrition, I would argue. Anytime you do a deal, 20% of the people in the selling company will just leave no matter what, no matter what you do, really. Because they are like, it's good kind of like break point if you will, the way I [03:53] >> look at it, it's a break point, right? So look, know, if you're working for a company that got sold, you'll be like, Let's take a break. Okay, let's see what's going on. And then once you start looking, you know, you're going find something, quite frankly, you're going to leave. So I think we are kind of, so in my kind of experience, the first time it was kind of a shock, Like, look, you know, we lost a [04:10] >> bunch of people. But the next time, the third time, they're like, look, I'm expecting 20 to 30% attrition. [04:16] Oh, 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 [04:40] your 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 [05:04] get 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 [05:26] not 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 [05:51] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS 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 [06:13] if you 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 [06:40] the interview. [06:41] >> By that. [06:41] And how many have you done so? How many acquisitions have you done since [06:45] >> I've done like five, six or five or seven. Yeah, between five and seven, honestly. The first ones are pretty small. They were only asset deals. And later on, as we got better at it, now we kind of like, we still do asset deals, but we kind of like are looking for more asset plus, you know, asset as in tech, plus customers, plus, you know, the standard operation. We want customers, we want people from a, you know, from an [07:07] >> HR perspective and obviously some tech from a software perspective. And the other thing that I want to kind of like my lesson learned, I would argue, is from a tech integration perspective, the first time I did it, I did not rewrite the platform. It rewrite their code base. And that's, in fact, in long term a huge mistake, right? So because now you have multiple code bases and my team doesn't want to work on that or and [07:33] >> there's all these cultural issues start coming into play. So what I've started to do now is like, hey, you know, we model the acquisition, such that we are going to rewrite the code base. End of story, right? So the upfront, we say, look, we're going to buy this awesome piece of tech, but we're going to rewrite it because we have a way and we have a team and we want to manage it. That is, well, that [07:54] >> seems a little bit expensive, but that's what you want to do in the long run. Because otherwise, you'll have a hodgepodge of, you know, these guys use Ruby, those guys use Java, these guys use Python. And now you have, like, you know, it's a shit show at that point. So if you're not ready to rewrite the tech, I would say, like, then you are in for a lot of pain in terms of, you know, if you're [08:15] >> just going to buy in to unload the company, then I can, don't care. But if you're to stick around with it for three to five years, then, you know, then you can even model the the cost of the rewrite into the acquisition price real estate way. Right? Like, okay, like post post deal, it's gonna take us a year, year and a half to rewrite your tech, and here's how it's gonna cost. And rewriting tech is actually [08:38] >> not that complicated once you know what to build. The key thing that Valerie did was, alright, cool, we know exactly what the product market fit is, everything's working, people are paying for it, oh, it's written in PHP and something else. Okay, cool. We need to write it in Node and React and all that stuff. So that's a fairly easy task. Easy task. Nothing nothing is easy. [09:01] What revenue multiple did you pay for SuiteCX? [09:04] >> SuiteCX, were, like, two x, I think. Not a ton, but not I mean, you know, so it's not super lowball either, and, you know, not five x, 10 x either. So I think it ended up being two x with with some with some kickers if, you know, if it could go up all the way to three x if if if certain, you know, obviously, benchmarks are met. [09:27] How do you structure the two x? You know, obviously, there's the deal price, which is two x, and there's the deal structure. Is it all cash upfront, options, earn outs, kickers? How do you think about that? [09:36] >> Yeah. All of the above. All of the above. Really. Right? So we have to be slightly more creative so we don't have you know, we don't we want to conserve cash, like, you know, frankly, realistically. So from a from a from buyer's perspective, we want to we want to derisk ourselves, conserve as much cash as possible while still getting the deal past the finish line, simply put, right? That's the way I look at it. And in [09:56] >> my case, what I kind of get down to is like how much, you know, everybody's got a minimum cash requirement, frankly, right? I mean, every founder has got some sort of in their head, you know, I think it's in the head, frankly, most of the time. It's like, okay, look, there's the cash I need. And that's what I really kind of hone into and say like, okay, look, can I provide you, can I be comfortable with [10:17] >> dropping this much cash upfront? Realistically? So that's kind of the, you know, ultimately, Nathan, that's kind of what it comes down to. Everything else is kind of like, you can hedge against almost everything, both sides, but if you have minimum cash, if you said like, look, if in your head, like, gotta exit this business with at least 10,000,000 cash, then you gotta find somebody who's comfortable dropping a $10,000,000 check cash up front. Now the deal price [10:40] >> could be $30,000,000 or 10,000,000 or $20,000,000 or $40,000,000 but if your upfront price tag is what it is, that's what matters. What I zone into, at least the kind of deals that I do that I zone into. They're like, okay, how much do you need to kind of like, you know, where you not walk away from it? So if we can get to that number, then I then we can negotiate on the rest of the components [11:03] >> really, right? And if I can pay upfront and then the rest do I pay over time, over two years, over three years, over one year, and do I pay stock cash or stock or, you know, warrants or whatever it is. So all those things can be can be structured. [11:17] >> But to me, the most important negotiating position is the upfront cash element because that makes or breaks a deal, simply put. And it's a subjective argument, frankly, the most part. A subjective argument. Look, you may want you know, it is what it is what you want on a personal level, realistically. [11:34] So for sweet c x, on day one, what was your current cash exposure, I. E, your sunk cost if everything fails? [11:40] >> One x. One x. [11:42] Oh, wow. Okay. Now when she came on my show back in March 2022, she said she had about 850 k of ARR with 30 paying customers. So your total cash exposure on day one was effectively something like 800 k. [11:54] >> Yeah. A little less than 700 and change, I think. Right? 700 and change was my exposure. [11:58] And how'd you get her I mean, a lot of people that wanna be like you and buy other companies are gonna go, how did Vivek get Valerie comfortable paying, you know, a one x cash up front for this? I mean, there's kickers over time, but how did you why was she okay with that number? How'd you get her there? [12:11] >> Well, I think two things. One, I flew in and met with her on day one, straight up. I wanted the deal, and I think this goes down to basic kind of sales, really. Like, you want a deal, you go and chase it down. Even though obviously we were the acquiring company, it's not beyond me to just pick up, you know, go catch a flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, and sit down with her and spend a day [12:39] >> with her saying, Hey, look, I really want to do this deal. I may not be able to pay you, you know, what you exactly want. Obviously, she wants more than one extra cash upfront, realistically, right? So I may not be able to. But here's our who, here's our we are, here's how the combined company, here's the things that we bring to the table that you don't have, you don't have a go to market function, it's pretty [12:59] >> weak, let's assume that. We have a much stronger go to market function. Yes, we don't have a product, you have a product, so let's kind of marry the two together and we can sell shit out of it. And then these are other kind of components that we bring to the table in terms of, you know, size and kind of like, you know, SOC two compliance and there's a bunch of other randomized stuff realistically. Right? So so [13:19] >> going back to your question, how how do we, you know, know, the key one of the key things was like, you know, I kind of like leaned into it, and the second thing is obviously she saw the benefit in terms of her long term value. You know, and we structured the deal such that, you know, again, are not a private equity company, we don't we don't wanna fuck people over their earn outs. Honestly, we've I think [13:37] >> I've never ever kinda not paid an earn out. But if you ask the same question to a PE company, you can get that ratio. [13:44] It's it's I've done it. I've done it many times, and they rarely see the earn out if you're in a being bought by PE company. [13:50] >> Exactly. So and that's the other reason why people wanna kinda like work with me also. Like, I mean, I think I'm pretty sure she would [13:56] >> have probably sold it for even a slightly better price to a PE guy, [13:59] >> but they but they but she wanted to be part of, you know, frankly, a regular normal company. Right? Not not not be bought and sold 15 times. [14:07] How do you how do you get her so you're negotiating. You're saying, listen, Valerie. I'm happy to pay a two x multiple here with a path of three x over time. The upfront cash is gonna be about 800 k, which was one x of our ARR, about one x of our ARR at the time. But in order for her to see value in the extra upside, you know, the two x and then getting to three x, [14:23] I assume you're giving her some sort of options or warrants, you've gotta defend your valuation or the value of questionpro to her so she sees value in those options. How do you go through that? [14:33] >> I mean, the good news for me is like there's like enough public conversations that have happened on my in my business. I mean, look, there's Qualtrics and Medallia, there's SurveyMonkey, there's a whole bunch of really large players realistically. Right? So they have some sort of a benchmark. Right? Right? Agree that we are not publicly valued in any particular shape, way, shape, or form, but we are big enough right now. We are doing $30,000,000 in revenue, so [14:53] >> it's like it's not like [14:54] 30,000,000 is what you finished last year with or [14:56] that's your current run rate? [14:57] >> Yeah. Last So we we finished 2022 with $30,000,000. So it's not like we're a small company. [15:03] Finish this year with? [15:04] >> Well, the target is 40. So let's see. 40. [15:07] Okay. And that's gonna be organic, or does that include some M and A in there? [15:10] >> No. Organic. Yeah. I mean I mean, the M and A's are gonna be small here, like, not, like, five million. And then maybe we do one or two deals of, like, maybe a million bucks here and there, but not necessarily like, 90%. My expectation is 80 at least 80% of that is gonna be organic, maybe 20%, you know, m and a. But, you know, yeah, [15:25] >> maybe eighty, twenty is kind of the benchmark that I would put. [15:27] So how did you defend that? Like, you're you're buying when did you close the deal with her, Suite CX? [15:32] >> Last year. Late last year. Like Okay. October of last year. It took a it took a long time. I'll be honest, it took a long time because she had to get super comfortable with me over a period of time. It was probably the longest kinda [15:46] of since first conversation to close? [15:48] >> About six to eight months, dude. [15:49] >> Right? Usually, I've never spent this much [15:52] >> time, at least personally. But, I mean, it was obviously like every deal. It almost fell apart till, obviously, we kinda pulled through, and both of us kinda pulled through towards the end. [16:03] Because Why it worth your why is it worth your time? I mean, you're rewriting the whole code base. She only has 1,000,000 in revenue and 30 paying customers. It takes six months of your time. Why why is it worth it? [16:14] >> Because she's got an expertise in that particular market that we just don't have straight up. I mean, I'll tell you. She can sell journey mapping better than anybody I've ever seen in my entire life. Yes, it's a pretty small number, [16:29] >> but it's an important element in the ecosystem. If you don't have journey mapping, if you think about CX ecosystem, large companies start the conversation off with journey mapping. They don't start off with saying, Hey, let's do an NPS program together. They start off with, Let's understand the journey of the customer, then find the touch points, and then find the of different elements that we need to measure. From my perspective, that was an important element in that [16:54] >> customer buying journey, right? So if we can get that earlier, we can get the latter part. That was the thesis. And that's why I spent, if it was just another survey company with, like, you know, doing the same thing, then, you know, obviously, it's not it's just revenue acquisitions. It's kinda like [17:10] But so right around close date, Joel, this was late last year, you must have been doing something around, like, 27, 28,000,000 run rate. What what did you value yeah. Based off public comments, like, what do you value the business at as of close date, like October last year? [17:23] >> So we kinda have an internal kinda like benchmark of a five x, simply put. Right? It's not it's not 10, it's not three, realistically. That's the way we kinda like think about ourselves. [17:33] So that'd about a 140,000,000 valuation end of last year is the way you think. [17:36] >> Yeah, 100, a little south of that, like [17:38] >> a 120 is probably what I would put it at and say like look, know, 2024 ish, '25 ish, you know, in that range in terms of, you know, revenue [17:45] So then let me let me ask you a question because Thoma Bravo got very aggressive in this space in October as well. They they spent 800,000,000 previously on a majority stake in user Zoom. They spent another 1,300,000,000 buying Alfonso's company, which he's been on the show many times for 1,300,000,000. You know, their revenue is not that higher than I mean, Alfonso's at, like, 75 in ARR. Right? So you're call you know, what is that, like, [18:05] a third of his? Did Thoma Bravo ask you? Did they they put a deal in front of you? [18:09] >> No. No. I think we are kinda below the radar, I would argue, so we're still kind of under the radar. We've not raised money, of like it's so nobody's shopping us around at, you know, at any any aggressive kind of way. My goal is to get I think if I can get to 70 I mean, I think there is a difference between a thirty and seventy, honestly. At 70 people look at you and say like, look, [18:30] >> we can get you to 200 or 300, even at 30 getting Yeah. [18:33] Mean, paid 1,300,000,000 for 80,000,000 in of ARR at user testing. That's a 16 x multiple compared to what you value yourself at, which you just told us is like a five x. You're saying the reason there's a delta there is because you just need more scale to get a higher multiple. [18:44] >> Correct. That's my analysis realistically, right? Like you know there's a, you know, just like there's a difference between like you know a $10,000,000 company and a $30,000,000 company, there's difference between a 30 and a $70,000,000 business straight up really, right? So I think the [18:58] >> trigger is in the sixty-seventy range where people can look at that and say like, can we get this to 200, 300, 400 really, right? And that's a linear argument. I mean it's still a pretty big lift, but it's a linear argument, right? But from 30 to 300 is still a lot of things have to happen. So which is what I'm kind of working on right now. Like if I can get to 70, then I think you [19:24] >> know, we can get in the double digit multiple range fairly easily. [19:27] Love to see you go on a buying spree during a recession. You're in such a healthy position. I just feel like you could go up to, like, 50, 60,000,000 this year in revenue if you can find the right companies to buy. And by the way, your buddy Nathan's got a little debt fund where if you need to fund those employees. [19:40] >> Yes, sir. Plug that shit in, brother. [19:43] Plug that shit. Make that happen. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome, though. Congrats, Vivek. This is really impressive story. Look. We've only focused on economics and M and A. I want to give you a chance to promote the platform here briefly because I know a lot of our listeners will enjoy it. If people want to test the platform, where can they find you? [19:58] >> Actually, you know what? I have a better deal for you. I'm launching a startup program where, like, if you're a startup, it's fucking free, dude. That's it. I don't even want to, you know, it's, you know, it's just like every other questionprostartups questionpro.com/startups, really, right? And I'll send you a link also, but, like, yeah, mean, just apply for it and and it's $10,000 software we give you for free. It's not no bullshit. It's not like two [20:19] >> months, three months, it's the whole year, and it's the full blown software. It's not like a shitty version of our software either. So it's like [20:25] That's amazing. And guys, his eligibility requirements for that is the startup has to be less than thirty six months old. You have to raise under to have 10,000,000 under that raise, and you have to be incorporated with a domain name. [20:35] >> Not like, know, I got I got an idea and, like, know, give me some free thought. We're like, no. Come on. [20:40] You gotta you gotta you gotta at least get a goddamn domain name. [20:42] >> Go go go pay go pay GoDaddy at least, like, $8 to get a register of goddamn domain name. [20:47] Guys, Vivek Vivek, you know, I have a list of heroes in the bootstrap SaaS space. The founders, I think we need to be celebrating, putting on magazine covers, putting them on cable, promoting the hell out of them. Vivek is one of them. He's competing against so many competitors with hundreds of millions of VC funding. He continues to just grind away since 2005. Keep growing. Buy other bootstrappers. Come speak on our stages. He's an incredible human being. [21:08] So check it out. Questionpro.com/startups. Check that out. Vivek, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book. [21:17] >> I've not read a book in a long time, dude, but Ray Dalio's principles is still fucking, you know, on the money. [21:24] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [21:27] >> I used to follow Bezos be before he became a tech, but that's alright. [21:32] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building questionpro besides one of your own? [21:38] >> So I'm a fan, I love Balsamiq. It's not an online tool, but like, you know, like, Figma is great, but Balsamiq is even like it gets kind of the information architecture really quickly, really fast in terms of what I want to get done. And you don't need to have you don't get caught up with the UI design elements. You get the information elements really quickly, really fast. [21:58] And Balsamiq is a desktop app. So when you're on a Delta flight and they say you have Wi Fi and it turns out you don't have Wi Fi, you can use Balsamiq, but you can't use Figma. Right? That's how I use Balsamiq. [22:08] >> That's right. Yeah. You I know you use it. I know you use it for Founderpath and a couple of deals. [22:11] >> Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [22:12] Number four, Vivek. How many hours of sleep do get every night? [22:16] >> Try to get eight. Usually, end up getting six. [22:19] Okay. And situation, married, single kids? [22:22] >> Two kids. Two teenagers, actually. 12 13 and no. She's just she's gonna tell 13 and 15. So it's like in a different lifestyle now. It's amazing. They were younger, it was different. [22:33] New job in San Francisco. Right? [22:35] >> Yeah. She finished off her PhD in psychology, and she went back to school late, she got a got a job. And so we kinda said, like, let's let's pack our bags and go to [22:44] >> San Francisco for a couple of years. [22:45] Alright, Vivek. And how old are you? [22:47] >> I'm 47. 46. [22:49] 46 years young. Last question. [22:51] >> Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [22:54] >> Oh, I had hustled harder when I was in 20. That's it. Like, I mean, I think I started hustling when I was 24, 25. I wish, like, you know, I had I had started my company when I was right out of college. And it's the best thing I've ever done in my life. I I don't think I can ever work for anybody. [23:10] Guys, questionpro.com finished 2022 at a 30,000,000 run rate, up from 20,000,000 back in 2019. He's bought five companies and done this all organically and bootstrap since launching in 2005. It's a tool that helps you learn from your employees, learn from your customers, all through smart surveys and engagement tools. Check it out at questionpro.com. Vivek, thanks for taking us to the top. [23:31] >> Alright. Cheers, man. See you. [23:33] One 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 [23:58] Central. 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 [24:20] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or 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 SaaS 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 [24:42] for that @nathanlatka.comslashslack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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 [25:02] to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you. Hi.

Intro founders what's going on you guys know i love in-person events and they are back the recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together share intimate details templates kpis okrs about their business and it was something special something special we'd love to meet you in person if you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule the link will be down below in the description if you're listening on itunes check this out on youtube you'll see the links in the description or you can just google founder path or latka next event we'd love to see you in person in the meantime though enjoy this recording it's a good one Backstory all right so uh i did lose a lot of money uh to nathan over here he got me into a poker game i actually don't like um i just play poker for social reasons not not the way these guys play there they i think i lost like a grand maybe that night or maybe even another game tomorrow night if you want to come i don't know well i know i'll try to keep my grind to myself uh i don't have the sexy pants on so it's all right um so very quickly since he brought it up we've not talked about this so i i came to the states as a poor student at byu and i was a in the computer science room a market research professor comes into the lab and says hey i want somebody to build me a survey tool i looked at him and said how much you're going to pay me obviously right it's like 17 bucks an hour and i do a lot more for 17 bucks an hour right now so um and that guy was scott smith his son is ryan uh he was a sales guy i was the tech guy scott obviously was the professor uh they don't tell the story that way but you know that's what happened uh and then we divorced in 2003 2005 is when we divorced they kept survey pro i kept question pro obviously they've done uh 27 times better than what i've done so you know clearly right so uh so that's the back story um so but i want to talk about m a today uh and so most people think that you know i kind of stumbled into this kind of path not necessarily you know thinking through this this kind of like gives you kind of an idea of how we've been doing as you can see we've been doing this for a long time um and we're and what what i want to talk about today is just opportunistically doing deals as they come along and most people you know i was even talking outside like you know how how do how do how do you kind of suss it out and then um and how to actually execute really fast a little bit about ourselves like i said uh we've been at it for a while we started up in seattle um and then currently we're in austin so we were part of the cohort of companies that got the [ __ ] out of bay area i guess and into austin and uh and let's talk a little bit about my journey i'll obviously in the next 15 minutes i'll just talk very very briefly through my journey for a couple of years now or many years now the first zero to one is obviously a hustle everybody knows this every one of you guys are in some way shape or form have done it we'll do it and for us also that's me that's actually my garage and the story here is that i used to build my own computers because i was too cheap to buy a regular computer and the most important part was that cd-rom that you see um in my hand so yeah you have to install linux on the on the computers uh i was so cheap that i used to install the cd-rom install linux and then take the cd-rom out and put it on the next computer so you don't have to buy multiple cd-roms so uh so that gives you an idea of being cheap but also in fact uh the other gentleman was and you were talking about revenue based kind of like acceleration like uh you know i did that quite a bit in the first part which i said like i never said no to any feature right anybody said that they wanted something i said i'll get it done really right will you buy it and i was just like on the spot um i've done deals where like you know like pay me 10 grand i'll build this feature overnight uh and i was you know obviously i was the developer slash janitor slash customer success and everything else in between so that the zero to one angle About SEO was um that that one thing worked for us really well obviously and the second thing that i want to talk about in terms of seo is something that we anchored on even back in the day because we we jumped onto seo uh because you know before seo was kind of frankly seo but in this particular case uh uh we also kind of like did a latam expansion and this gives you an idea of how we did the latin america one so that gives you kind of how much we grew in the last couple of years um we almost 9xed our traffic um and the game plan for the latime stuff was pretty straightforward we had a bunch of content we translated everything auto translated all our content into spanish obviously and then we waited for traffic to come okay and as soon as traffic came to any particular piece of content we started manually optimizing that content right because the auto translation obviously does not work long term but it's a great strategy for say like if you have a bunch of english content and you want to get into a particular market but obviously you've created tons of english you know we had almost like 2000 blog entries on our blog in english so we're like oh we want to optimize this in spanish so the normal way would have been like oh look you know we're going to you know hand translate 2000 and it's just too much work so we auto translate 2000 articles wait for traffic and look and every week we usually look at the traffic and the traffic that bumped up which means obviously you know google was picking it up and so and then we go back and fix those uh uh fix those ones um so this gives you Competition an idea like and obviously we compete against surveymonkey type form a lot of people um in we have better traction than most of those guys and and if you think about it seo is a game of not how good you are but how everybody else is playing that game really right if they have you know sorry monkey has 15 guys working on english seo we have four guys working on spanish seo let's put it that way so we can win the spanish market and we did the same thing for german and uh so we even obviously english is really hard because the whole planet is fighting for it really right so that's Pivoting that was one of the kind of hacks that worked uh for us at least and these are some examples of kind of you know pretty fairly fairly generic keywords they're pretty difficult to get uh to number in the top three on uh now let's talk about going from one to one to ten uh we have to really pivot at this point and i i struggled quite a bit uh because the hustle was on it was fun uh you did everything uh and you really have to put process in play really right i mean as founders we're all doing everything janitor slash customer success slash developer but then you know from the one to ten you really have to kind of step back and say like look everybody needs to have a function and each function needs to be optimized and more and most importantly you need to have people on all those kind of you know you know all those functions and it took me honestly it took me quite a while to understand that uh since we were bootstrapped and i probably don't like listening to other people also so i never figured out what to do and then eventually we figured it out you know we struggled for for two or three years we struggled quite a bit or four years we struggled so we got up to like uh three or four million dollars really fast right so from 2005 to 2009 we got to 4 million bucks then we got stuck over there right for for almost four years i got stuck i'd be now even four to four point two to four point three um and then eventually kind of six point five and so it's when then we get from six 6.5 to 10 that's when that happened because we put all because all the process systems started working kind of together at that point Hiring that's pretty important so but we have talked a little bit about m a so another way to get and i was talking about this another way to get people into the company into those systems is to hire you know smart people right and one way to hire founders i mean obviously we're all founders here we don't want to you know we don't want to work for anybody uh but you can hire founders by just acquiring their companies simply put right smaller companies that they they're kind of either exhausted or they're looking they just need more they're not able to get beyond the one million dollar er function uh this is an example of like i just said like look i needed you to be the president of kind of one of the divisions i'll just pay you some cash i'll buy your company and i'll and you can keep all the money that you have through that process and and in fact all the invoices that are going to come through and i'll give you all the kind of support around you uh that you're kind of like obviously those functions are in there as a smaller company then then this is where things got really interesting um and i'll tell you the story around uh you know as you can see over here uh let me just go back a little bit yeah so this is that so this is in the middle of the pandemic in may of 2020 a private equity company calls me and says like hey vivek i've been talking to a bunch of pe guys one way or the other like heavyweight we really want you to buy this company one of our portfolio companies i'm like dude are you kidding me right you're the billion dollar pe firm why are you calling me up and i'm the bootstrap guy and it isn't supposed to be the other way around right no no not me they're like no no you you really have to take a look at this like and i knew the company too it was called in prison and they're like okay cool send it you know they kind of we have a call and i said okay i'll spend and first of all it's may of 2020 who's doing anything right like we don't want to do anything nobody knows the world's going to end day after tomorrow what's going to happen really right and so they said like all right let's talk about it and then i talked to them the one important thing the managing director of the pay firm said like tell me what's it worth to you that's a good point i can get behind that i don't know how much you think it's worth but i'll tell you what's worth to me right so it was making three and a half million bucks i said well i'm not going to pay anything for this so i typed in that email i just put an offer letter on my on my iphone and i offered them 800 grand and they came back and said would you do 1 million like oh [ __ ] we have a deal now right i'm at 800 you're a millionaire somebody's gonna close at this point and i'm getting three million bucks in revenue i'll take that deal any day of the week the key part was just making that making the call now the back story is really like they needed to sell obviously they needed to sell the company because they were shutting down the fund so it didn't matter whether they got whatever they got they just needed it and most importantly i offered them all cash 30 days that's it right no [ __ ] around no screwing around with the you know you know you know burnouts and this and that and all that stuff like dude it's a foreclosure sale you know 30 30 days you know you get your money you can shut down your fund and you're happy i'm definitely happy so so Setting up LOI let's do this so that's the way we closed that deal and that's kind of a quick example of you know a lot of people kind of think through like hey how do i set up an loi and this and that and loi and term sheets are nothing but just whatever you think just write it down it's not that complicated just write down like okay this is how much i'm gonna pay right now is how much pay in the future and so on so forth i just wrote that down in like 24 minutes send it over and they said well okay it seems like seems seems going to work let's do this and then we kind of like then went through 30 30 eventually it took more than 30 days um to go through diligence it took more than but that doesn't nobody cares once you're in loi like you know if it takes 30 days 60 days who cares really it just goes through um this was this was regal right yes it was yeah i'm probably going to get sued for saying all this [ __ ] but i as you can see i don't care [Laughter] so they're pretty uptight about it but whatever we're building the slides and vivek goes i'm definitely getting sued for this and i said wonderful Global Expansion great content yes um the other thing that worked for us is global expansion so uh so we we can obviously as you know we are competing against you know folks who have 24 times the money that i have in terms of marketing spend execution and everything else uh and so one of the one of the one of the goals was like let's just open up offices and sell in those markets right and we have a pretty good playbook now and and the whole story started off because um we are at one point this was like five years ago we said like you know what we should sell in spanish right i mean like you know half the world speaks spanish and we should start selling in spanish so we hired the sales guy who walks into the door in seattle and he's a mexican-american guy i'm like of course you speak spanish dude here's the phone from now on you're gonna you're gonna handle all the spanish conversations right and so so we do that and then at some point he comes whacked after after us he's a regular ae really right he walks into my room and says hey i got a question for you he's like yeah hey look i'm in seattle does it make sense to you that we are selling to a bunch of mexicans from seattle i'm like no it makes no [ __ ] sense right i'm going to go down to mexico i'm going to build the team there i'm going to build a team there i'm like oh here's the ticket i don't know just go do it uh so we started off at 100 grand and now it's four and a half million bucks just out of latin america not just mexico but all of latin america mexico that includes brazil and everything else really right and that thing is going to hit 10 million bucks i'm guaranteeing you that and and and that has been and so we replicated that same model in other markets so same thing i had somebody in dubai sahara you know in dubai we can beat out qualtrics and medalia very very easily because we walk into the door and say hey look we're right here in our enterprise sales is largely about hey you work on sundays we work on sundays all right do you drive on that side of the road i also drive on that side of the road you know whatever right so so so my sales team can walk in and say hey this is what you know i'm here you know and then they're like yeah screw caller extreme medallion there because some irish guy is gonna show up from you know london at some point we don't like that [ __ ] right so um so we can win that deals i mean we can't do that in the states obviously right you know so so but we win in those markets so our global revenue is going up uh fairly well and in conjunction with that what we did that was interesting and i think was actually needed we just built out other data centers so our platform so so that was our kind of conversation said hey look we are here and we have a data center here in you know in your region and all the data issues are kind of like you know it's all [ __ ] but you know everybody wants to talk about it and so gdpr and all that crap so so that that Growth Strategy saw that solved that problem together and that you know obviously you know accelerated revenue uh what do we do to go from 20 plus actually i don't know i'm i'm writing it as as we go along um but you know one thing that we've started doing is kind of you know build out more products more offerings right round out the offering one of the ways that we do it now is like we look at a persona and then they say like okay all the products that a particular person i need so typically we are selling on the enterprise we're selling to three different personas one is the director of insights market research and insights so they need native audience services they need you know qualitative quantitative research services so we kind of provide tools for all of them the other persona that we sell to is cx you know so then a whole bunch of kind of tools around cx we are building and obviously the hr buyer for employee experience so we are building a bunch of tools around that so so when you start getting to this kind of scale we just have to have more product to sell to the same buyer and we round it out and we i call it the share of wallet model so you know that's how we do it uh and yeah i mean this is how most m a conversations start like somebody sends me a text and i just make an offer on the spot uh and uh the thing hold on How QuestionPro Started you have to break this down what i mean someone just sends you a text how did this thing start so this this is an interesting one so this guy calls me up and says like uh hey he had a dev shop um and we needed more developers obviously who doesn't need more developers i mean come on right so and so we were i mean obviously our go-to-market functions have scaled up but we need to get we were having a tough time just recruiting developers and he had 10 of these guys and he was telling me on the fact that hey you know give me some work let me do let me do work for you right typical you know dev shop hustle and i said like no i'm not going to do like individual dev job stuff but you know why are you kind of like you know bugging around he's like yeah i mean i have some spare capacity i'm having a tough time finding new buyers i'm like why don't i just buy your company and just all your developers can work on all the stuff that we need to do that's it so i turned that around immediately and said like look i'll give you this much and you know and in the anatomy you know The Anatomy Of A Deal you know on every deal is you know most people think that you cannot afford it it's actually not true like you know if you think about it like whatever price tag you give you can divide it between what you pay today and what you pay tomorrow and you what you pay the day after and whatever you pay tomorrow and the day after usually has some contingencies right if you think about it like yeah i mean you're in the shared board at that point so your risk on that money is nearly zero in fact it is zero um so the real risk you're taking is how much are you going to pay cash up front today that's it that's the only number that you really care about that's at risk to the conversation so if you're going to keep that thing as low as possible that you can absorb and that's like you know in the bragal deal like we all looked at each other and said like dude we don't know anything about this company okay great it makes three and a half million bucks with from seven clients so high concentration so two of those clients are paying a million bucks each which means if those two clients cancelled we're done right i mean the whole company is done so it's not really a great kind of asset from a sas kind of evaluation perspective so then you have to make a decision how much are you willing to throw money into it and not worry about it that's it right i mean if that goes away that goes away but you know you do that risk reward analysis and that's the upfront payment so so that's why we just offered i was like okay how much can i throw at this problem with without stressing myself out it'll be 800 grand for 3 million okay that that's a good kind of like ratio if i had paid 3 million for 3 million then everybody would be stressed and then we have to do all this drama and all that stuff really so the smaller companies what you can do is just you know negotiate the price first i've seen a lot of people and even i've done to make the mistake of oh we're doing we want to talk about tech diligence we want to do this we want to do that we want to do kind of all this other conversation all those conversations are irrelevant the only only thing that really matters is like dude how much are you going to pay that's it right so get that conversation at least that's what i do get that conversation out of the way first and then start worrying about the diligence and everything else because now now the deal's on your side right so you've you've made you've at least anchored the price and once you've anchored the price then you can figure out whether you want to do this this deal or not otherwise you spend three months talking about all kinds of stuff and in the end then you're like oh look you know what the founder wants two million okay you can't pay two million that's it now now you're back to now now that's a that's a problem so so you might as well and it's a pretty easy way from my perspective at least i know how much i can afford that's it it doesn't matter how much you're worth really right because we are not chasing after kind of competitive deals if it's a chase of a company deal we are not in it really we are trying to do you know we we try to do m a opportunistically not structurally if you will right and if you're opportunistic just like sales you will win a few it's not that you're going to win all of them you're going to win a few of them and the last thing i'll say is like and i'm done it's just the formality really i mean i think everybody thinks that oh we got to go through a process the process is whatever you do that's it right and you could send that term [ __ ] on an email send out a term sheet or text message who cares really right they just need to know the numbers and you don't have to even think about it too hard like okay you know this is how much i can afford this is what i want to do and uh and then you and then the negotiations begin and then then you definitely will close at something or the other i think that's about it guys with question pro give a round of applause thank you guys

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 vik boscaron he is the founder of question pro a bootstrap 20 million run rate startup that has helps companies measure and transform experiences vivek you ready to take us to the top yes sir let's do this you're my man i love bootstrap this is great when'd you launch the company what year uh originally i started the company in 2005. uh then i took a break between 2010 and 2014 and i've been running the company since back from since 2015 onwards okay what drove the break i wanted to do a couple other startups so i started another company called idea scale uh and that's grown to about 7 million bucks so and then i decided to come back and run question pro again okay so 2005 was launch date um and how many customers are now serving today uh we kind of divide the business between our enterprise and uh non-enterprise customers the enterprise is about 800 customers and non-enterprise about 4 000 customers okay and when you look at kind of the average price points on both of those what are they on average would you say so the enterprise size about 12 to 15k and then on the non-enterprise side it's about 450 bucks i think sorry 450 per year yeah 400 per year okay okay got it and then so when you you said right now you just passed 20 million run rate last month yep you cut out sorry yes yeah for this calendar year will be around yeah so the era for this calendar year will be in the the 18 to 20 million dollar range so just to make sure i understand what you're saying you're saying in december of this year you will hit 1.6 million a month in revenue which is equivalent to a 20 million dollar run rate yep and where were you exactly a year ago uh year we were about doing about 15.5 we were about like you know less than about just about a million and one in it per month yep and is all that sas revenue so about 35 so we are going at about 30 30 35 percent effectively um not bad for a sas company by the way yeah i mean i think 90 percent of it is we do a little bit of services uh for our enterprise clients um and we kind of layer that in on top and and walk me through so you bootstrapped i mean how did you versus the temptation to raise i'm sure you got outreach all the time actually uh back when i started the company it was not cool to raise i guess i'd honestly to be brutally honest with you guys uh i just stumbled into more customers customers give me more money and i never look back frankly um back in the day i think when we started the company we started off the first year i think we made like 200k and the next year we made 800 the year after we made 1.5 million and so we just kind of kept going that way we didn't go out and raise money because and we were super profitable from day one uh you know you know we're pretty profitable even today we run at about you know 15 to 20 margins um and then back then we were you know back when i started the company we were running almost 50 60 margins at that time so uh so the need for raise wasn't there um we were making money and so we decided to kind of stick to our game plan and and service the customer and instead of servicing the investors we decided to service the customer so just to be clear on 1.5 million a month right now on revenue if you're taking 15 to 20 to the bottom line per month you basically have 200 thousand dollars in free cash flow monthly that you're trying to figure out what to do with yeah we are going to we do acquisitions using that money we've done we've done a couple of acquisitions tell me about the last one you did the one was a company called work exo um a guy by the name of charlie he developed this model for employee engagement and employee culture measurement um using surveys actually uh to figure out you know what you know how do you define culture and how do you measure culture with an organization so uh and he kindly runs our kind of employee engagement practice all together um so we we we acquired work exo about a year and change ago right now almost almost 18 months ago now and were you buying a revenue stream there or just a tech stack uh tech stack and uh and people on talent um charlie is an amazing guy and he's been there how many people were there uh about three three guys pretty small company three guys charlie and a couple other guys whatever and was the company pre-revenue are they doing revenue uh very tiny bit of revenue it's really talent acquisition as well as kind of access to access to access to their technology realistically and that cost you cash or was it utica skim stock and question pro basically yeah so cash plus stock nobody wants you to just do it all stock deal i mean by the way like less than 500 grand in cash yeah okay cool um and and so i mean look i want to understand more about how you're driving growth but help me understand once you land people i mean are they are they sticky what's what's your gross revenue trend look like over the past 12 months yeah so the enterprise the enterprise side is super sticky obviously and that's why we layer in the services so i think layering layering and services makes you know makes you know makes the customers stick um to a very large extent so on the enterprise side our kind of you know retention uh net revenue retention is 110 effectively so we usually make more money from a customer every year uh back though right so growth that's made up from gross revenue churn and then expansion to get to 110. so what are gross revenue return on expansion so the gross revenue charge so unit tron is about on the enterprise side is about 90 percent ninety-eight now but ignore unit churn because that doesn't matter for you your rpus are so different just look at a revenue churn right so on the revenue side we are we are you know for for every customer for from a revenue perspective we grow accounts by about 30 effectively um our goal is to grow every account by about 30 so if you paid me a dollar yesterday i'm gonna try to make a dollar thirty out of you this year and dollar sixty and two dollars out of you and you said net revenue retention is 110 yep okay so if that's the case right 110 percent minus 30 expansion right that would mean your your gross revenue turns about 20 that's how you get the 10 net revenue retention number correct yeah okay interesting and most that revenue churn um is it i mean it could be split evenly between both cohorts uh what do you mean the the enterprise enterprise no no this i'm talking about really the enterprise side the smb return you know the smb we lose a lot more customers so it doesn't be more likely it's like you know we the revenue sorry we're talking past each other okay number of customers does not matter when you're talking about revenue churn we divide the business between the revenue the enterprise business and then i understand that i get that what i'm saying is revenue churn though is specifically for these use cases where there you could have a thousand logos that make it one percent of the revenue so if they all churned right and that's like a hundred percent logo turner ninety percent logo churn but they only made up one percent revenue doesn't matter that's why we look at revenue churn so what i'm looking at is across the entire business gross revenue turn annually is it sounds like about 20 percent yeah well we don't look at the entire business in one shot we always split it up if you look if you ask me like okay we made we made 20 million bucks out of which i would say 50 million dollars from the rev for the enterprise business and 5 million from the non-enterprise business realistically uh the reason we do it that way is simply because the businesses are so distinct the operating models are extremely distinct one is a pure the five million dollars in the bottom line the bottom side is like pure sass kind of like you know people come in buy the product use their credit card whereas the 15 million bucks on the top is really around enterprise realistically it's a more hand-to-hand compact we have account managers customer success people so how many people are on the team today full time uh about 140 people how many are quota carrying reps uh so about 40 35 40 um sales folks and how many engineers again 40 40 45 ish fair enough that's good so when you take into account those those quota carrying reps plus any other kind of acquisition you're doing what does your fully weighted cost look like to get a new 15 dollar a year enterprise customer so yeah i mean i think our kind of cat approximately is and i think our analysis is somewhere in the in the six to eight thousand dollar range you know in terms of getting people into the into the door uh and one of the things you know we don't do a ton of kind of outbound you know we do a ton of outbound marketing we don't do kind of we've not gone into kind of like hardcore outbound sales um right now so we do a lot of kind of marketing work that brings in traffic um a lot of our work is through seo and you know that's kind of that has been our driver for our business for a long long time um give me dive into that for a second so name like an seo keyword that performs extremely well for you uh question types for example you know people are looking for different types of question types your number one for survey question types survey question types okay yep or survey question types itself or survey design where within the top 10 for survey design maybe these are high traffic words that drive a lot of traffic uh granted a lot of it is not buyer intent they're more informational intent around it um so so i would say you know the tougher keywords are obviously service software device of the customer survey these are and obviously extremely competitive and they're slightly more difficult to get to uh on the top um and and but there are kind of a whole long tail of kind of secondary keywords that we we rank on yeah i mean so so looking at like survey questions types right or examples the volume monthly on that keyword is called like 12 000 or so surveymonkey has that top spot there uh and then you've got type form you're competing with as well you're in the fourth or fifth spot i mean are there are there ways for you to milk more out of that can you get ahead of type form and survey monkey or it's just too difficult no we were you we used to be at some point i mean they've kind of obviously beaten up it's a cat and mouse game obviously so we used to be number one for survey design survey questions back in you know a couple of years ago and they've kind of obviously kind of you know gotten ahead of us in a couple of different areas um so i think another interesting stat is you know around especially on seo is that you know you know a lot of a lot of new keywords are coming online every day so effectively you know people are looking for advice on the customer survey or customer experience survey and all these kind of new keywords are coming online so we can fight those battles over there uh the other thing that i've invested in is kind of global expansion uh so we have a business in uh we have a we have an office in latin america rather mexico that serves the latin american business in a place called merida uh in near cancun in mexico uh that you know then we kind of dominate kind of you know that area and it's much easier to do seo in spanish than to do seo in english so there's a there's an entire team uh that is kind of you know operating in that so add all this add all these tactics together total organics to the to the site each month is about how much uh i don't know the time i had to honest with you sorry what about new trials uh so we do about four thousand five thousand new trials per month okay how about about ten percent convert to paid uh no not less than that so we we have a lot of information so we about we convert about two percent to two and a half percent so they're not converting at ten percent we're creating a two percent effectively okay so what is that about about 80 new customers per month yeah about 100 ish i think on the on the on the floor uh but our kind of ticket really is as you can see in the market in the space really like you know that's why we distinctly divide the enterprise and the what we call the self-service business so it's just you know there's an output jump of you know over ten ten thousand dollars if you think about it right so you know on this side i'm making about three to four hundred bucks up pop and that side we're making 12 grand to pop realistically right so so our goal is to we don't care about the bottom part as much as we can we want to convert most of these folks into the onto the enterprise are you in acquisition talks right now in terms of anyone buying question pro no uh we're in talks with a couple of private equity firms to help us kind of scale up um from 20 million to 100 million um what we think we need is kind of you know other other acquisitions revenue acquisition so most of that reasons we've done so far our kind of product like you like we talked about earlier our product and and people acquisitions but not necessarily you know growing revenue effectively so but that's kind of the next phase of our of our business what would the perfect deal what would the perfect deal with a private equity firm look like uh it's a primary secondary deal so obviously we've been running the company for quite quite a while that's why we're not going to talk into venture firms which are friends you know there's a lot of people who want to put money into this but they want you know 100 of the money to go into the company uh at this point given kind of where we are we want to take out you know half the have the cash out cash out half hour chips and then put a bunch of money into the company of what so what would the ideal round size be uh so somewhere between 30 to 50 million dollars is probably what will make sense for us because you know we have a couple of five million bucks in the bank frankly at this point to to do deals of our own but we want to we want somebody with like a little bigger bigger kind of checkbook that can that can help us you know frankly acquire revenue at a much larger scale yep uh so just to be clear if you go do a race from private equity forum and raise between 30 and 50 million you're saying you'd live to take about 50 or half of that 50 of that to yourself early shareholder or early employees yeah exactly and cash out all the early employees at least half of their stock is cashed out and then we kind of put a plan together to go out and buy a couple other companies and kind of grow you know blow up the business what um obviously you're still negotiating this right but what what like how little of the company do you think you can sell if you go get a 50 million dollar round done i think they'll want pr i think at that rate they're very likely most of most folks want to have some control premium so they'll they'll want us to control at least 50 60 of the company in fact okay so you think you'll have to sell you'll think you'll have to sell like 60 of the company for 50 million yeah okay i mean that's only giving you a valuation of i mean 100 million bucks basically you're doing 20 million right now that's only a 5x multiple on a company growing 35 year-over-year bootstrapped is that undervalued yeah maybe you could argue it's undervalued but that's kind of that's what i've talked to a few folks and a few folks are willing to do that kind of a deal right now um if you are growing a slightly higher i think we you know we would probably commend a better premium simply put i will tell you we we're not kind of probably under invested in marketing uh obviously you know if people look at look at the space and look at you know surveymonkey and qualtrics and and so on and they said look you are you're a much smaller player in this larger market uh we just it is probably true frankly uh and so we want to kind of you know figure out a way to kind of get our profile up uh if we were if we were a little bit more visible then i think we could have controlled a better premium but obviously they're not do you definitely want to raise this as equity would you ever raise debt uh know that would be a tough one for me to swallow because we we like our kind of current kind of mechanism where we we keep most of the money and we use the money for acquisitions really if we're going to start having debt the amount of time start making debt payments and all that stuff granted i have some cash sitting on the other side uh but i i would probably not go down that route given let me let me give you let me give you an example right if you if you put this five million to work right there's tons of deals i'm seeing right now where companies are doing exactly what you're doing but they're only like when you buy a house they're only fronting 10 of the equity so you're gonna get let's you could work with a debt from right now and get you know 10x leverage on your 5 million so basically 50 million in cash to go to acquisitions on just the five year holding in the bank and go do this you're buying revenue streams without using your own money would you ever do that uh good point actually to be honest with you i've not thought about it that way um because you know then you don't have to sell 60 of the company i'm not sure that's what i say i was going to say this seems obvious to me but i'm sure you see it yeah i mean the debt deals uh get slightly more complicated so far we've not i mean frankly even on the piece we've not really like like dug ourselves into it because we're you know we have money we are making money and we are kind of focused on kind of trying to grow it you know there's a lot of time that we spent on just trying to grow it at you know 30 itself that itself is a you know a reasonable amount of work that we are we are working on uh and that's uh that is that is that is a that's a fight and a battle that we're fighting already uh so going back to your point i mean you do have a point on the death side to be honest with you the finances inside we have not thought about it that that deeply or that creatively frankly uh and so i mean you you raise good points but um so that's something that you know probably i should consider which i don't haven't considered the institute listen i'll i'll put a i'll put a big great deal together for you i'm not a broker so you can't pay me any fees but if i get a deal done for you i want a big beautiful golden money truck in front of my house when it's all done okay it's paid i was freaking golden i'll be spray paint [Laughter] i'll tell you what i'll give you something internal money track do you know what an auto rickshaw is by anytime no tell me uh richard google it up rickshaws are those three wheeled uh motorcycles that that run in thailand and india have you seen have you heard of that it sounds like a death trap of like i would drive that thing and i would kill we have one in san francisco we have one so i imported one in san francisco i'll send you a link to it i have one of those i live in school and i drive that around in san francisco i have it so i'll send you it can handle the hills uh not all the hills you have to pick and choose what hills you go up no then you gotta figure out how you you know you gotta have a special map to figure out how you go around town um altos you know go back and forth so so so it's actually fine for for for for you know inside city driving that's absolutely we registered as a as a three-wheeled motorcycle so we imported it from india we wrapped it with our crusher brand and we write it around and it's it's a hoot actually that is hysterical all right good stuff man let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh principles by ray dalio number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh jeff bezos amazon he's crushing it number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides your own uh i think uh email marketing i wouldn't say like a tool but any all email marketing tools i'm like infatuated with email marketing tools because me to be email marketing works really really is that your next acquisition email marketing tool uh not really not really i mean there are tons of email uh you know marketing tools i don't think there's any synergies between what we do in email marketing in general you know we sell to a different buyer quite frankly so so we're selling to research and customer experience not necessarily marketing number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night i think i get eight okay okay what's your situation married single kids married to amazing kids 11 year old and a nine-year-old to two daughters so we got backpacking uh road tripping all the time so you know life is life life is good and how are you back your daughters i'm 43 43 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh hustle harder simple simple guys there you have it founded in 2005 question pro now doing 20 million dollars in arr up from 15 million just about a year ago all bootstrapped which i love taking 15 to 20 percent in free cash so every year to the bottom line or said differently about 200 000 in cash every month the bottom line reinvesting that in acquisitions 5 million in the bank right now a team of 140 people 110 net revenue retention looking at doing a deal with private equity firm between four between 30 and 50 million bucks to sell between 50 and 60 percent of company potentially to go out and fund more acquisitions and scale all right vivek thank you for taking us to the top all right thanks a lot take it easy these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now