How Rallymind CEO Mark Michael grew Rallymind to $2M revenue and 113 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is mark michael he is running a company called dev hub a data powered experience i.e landing pages all right mark you're ready to take it to the top yep so what's the company do uh specifically and maybe can you name a customer using you and how they're using yeah uh okay so basically it's a platform but we always say people are using us to build 10 to 60 000 experiences i.e today's websites microsites and websites you don't need us if you're building under 10 you need us if you're building more than 10 all the way up to 60 000. uh one of the customers that we work with is winstar cruises they use us to roll out about 400 uh port let's say specific pages as part of the seo and hybrid sem play you have search engine marketing yeah yeah there's a lot of people doing this they'll launch like thousands of landing page every single month relative to long tail keywords and if you do it at scale you can actually start to get a lot of organic traffic that way and we're seeing also like a lot of demand gen kind of companies for like the enterprise uh one right here in our backyard in seattle uh rolled out about eight hundred pages is that behind language but uh behind me like well i guess yeah behind us there's a couple companies right there's amazon one block over there's another one across the pond microsoft uh one of those two rolling out about 800 pages for like six different languages obviously pumping their cloud services yep so what are i mean generally speaking i'm sure you have a lot of different customer cohorts here but on average what's the customer going to pay you per month or per year to use the technology uh it's between about 20 well between eight thousand twenty four thousand and then fifty thousand plus uh a month or a year a year okay so i mean is it fair what would you say hold on sorry sorry uh the fifty thousand ones are monthly well screw it per month it's anywhere between uh 499 bucks a month all the way to about 50 000 a month okay yeah so i mean that's obviously a massive range so would you say what is a fair average like five grand a month 500 a month well i would say it's closer to probably 15. 15 grand a month okay interesting when did you launch the company what year i mean technically the company launched in uh september 2007. okay and what's the difference between rally mine and dev hub are they the same company that's really what i wanted thank you thank you thank you so much so basically like dev hub to us like to us a website or landing page or micro site at the end of the day the engine that generates that all is the dev hub technology but like it's the craziest thing i think sometimes we get caught up in like this terminology aspect where someone's like well we want to build location pages well what's the difference between like a location page and a landing like i mean it's just it's legit the same thing but it's all semantics and what people are calling it so when we simplified kind of we basically built a product site called it rally mine it made that focus around landing pages and all the uses of landing pages especially at scale then that's what kind of turned everything over in the last two years but it's all the same company it's all i mean it's all the same technology too okay so so today how many customers are you serving 113 that we count okay 113 now can i take 113 times 15 grand a month to back into your mrr i would go it's a little bit higher just because there's a couple that are in the 50 000 range that really skew that um but just i mean between you and i slightly under 5 million bucks in terms of ar yeah yeah so okay but one of those numbers then is very different right so 113 customers at 15 000 rp a month is 1.6 million a month in revenue you're at 5 million which is about 450 thousand dollars a month so is your problem lower no yeah annual not not monthly okay got it yeah so you're more at like yeah that's more like okay well even if that's so fifteen thousand dollars a year is actually annual right call it fifteen hundred bucks uh a month that would put you at some like 150 grand a month you're north of that yeah so just to be clear like last month what did you do right around 200 000. okay so you just told me 5 million run right 200 000 a month is not 5 million run rate no it's under 5 million okay under 5 million got it so you're doing essentially two today where were you exactly a year ago do you remember just call it one okay so you've about essentially more than doubled your year yeah where's most of that growth come from new customers or expanding wallet share on existing customers it's a it's a perfect mix of both okay so you have 50 percent of new customers adding to the revenue and then the other it's 50 upsell yep what are you upselling what's your most powerful upsell metric um i mean it's basically kind of what we call i guess new units added right so typically you know because we are white labeled right someone will roll us out with like say one huge national brand um and then they'll be like holy that worked really well we want to try this with our other two three four five six customers okay so when you when you kind of look at the cohort that signed up exactly a year ago what was annual revenue churn on that cohort annual revenue churn on that cohort i don't know what is your turn like two percent okay and we don't really like how do you measure that what so how do you measure that well those are like failed kind of onboardings like we have we actually haven't lost a customer once they've been with us for almost eight years okay so you're saying every one so what is the two percent churn then so have they given you a credit card and they stop paying via credit card yeah basically like we set it up they thought you know they wanted they think they're gonna crush 600 pages for this automotive brand whatever a month they only get to like 10 and they just it fails kind of in the onboarding system okay so they were paying they stop paying use about two percent of your of your revenue annually is that accurate in terms of turn okay that's fairly low i mean for for for this kind of thing are you priced too cheap um it's you know honestly i sometimes blame us for being in too deep you know like it was this year obviously things have gotten pretty nuts around here and uh we've had a couple people through our office and right over here on those are a couple dashboards up on the office big screens and like someone walked in and they saw that two percent one of our technically investors walked in and was like holy you know what you guys can do with that kind of churn you know and i was like no what they're like you can hire sales against that you can do a bunch of stuff i just we just never thought of it like we just i think we're just in too deep how much have you raised a date i mean like just under 2 million bucks okay so about to all equity or some of that debt uh i guess there was a little bit of debt but basically all equity okay like you raised a convertible note that converted equity or something no we did one of those you know sas kind of loan thing who'd you take it from lighter capital sas capital mark who'd you take the loan from lighter capital sas capital espresso there's a bunch of these firms i know it was lighter okay it was lighter so i mean you're being a bit hesitant there did that not work out how you thought it might i i don't know i don't know i i have like i mean it's i think it's a weird thing well it's becoming the reason i'm asking that it's becoming more popular i mean there's a lot of people using some form of debt now there are all kinds of different debt providers right so you have to get with the right you have to get the right deal right so if something didn't work well for you it is valuable for my audience to understand why it didn't work i know i know um like one day i'll kind of i i don't know listen trust me if you watch anything about me in real life like i'm pretty i live like right here right now you know um what was it was it a fixed was it a fixed interest rate mark or was it a percentage of revenue that you're paying back percentage of revenue okay somewhere between three and eight percent per month yep okay and was it a three to six year term uh yeah and repayment cap was something like 1.4 or 1.5 x of the total money you got yup okay and how much did you raise about 100 uh no about half a million okay about half a million so and what year was that 2000 and i believe 15 or six i think it's 2016. okay so did you are they off your i mean is that done now have you paid that back or shut that thing down uh almost okay are you looking to recap that with a new debt provider hell no okay um why do you say hell no the alternative is to take equity and take delusion no we make money okay then why why did that your if you're making money you were able to use that 500 grand to drive growth i'm just trying to figure out where the friction is okay i mean i mean again like i'll tell you this is for a certain...