How Reamaze CEO Lu Wang grew to $3.2M revenue and 10K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is lou wang he's building a company that's helping folks do multi-channel support especially in the e-commerce space it's called reamaze.com he's also a serious entrepreneur with a lot of experience in helping small businesses lou you ready to take to the top hey yeah i certainly am and how are you doing i am doing well man i appreciate you coming on so a lot of a lot more people think about e-commerce these days since the last time you came on back in 2018 how's it impacting your business yeah i mean the world certainly has changed right i mean almost in a forceful way um you know when the pandemic first happened it was actually tough for us to gauge how things would play out um obviously we have customers in industries like tourism uh certain like sort of hospitality and services and clearly we were affected um as things played out it what basically ended up happening is you saw more and more businesses shifting their business online right people who had a more physical presence now are doing business online in a primary way and that's even true with restaurants if you think about the way we get takeout nowadays is very different than how we might have gotten take out just a few months ago and so e-commerce has really taken off um you can see some of the major platforms like shopify uh even big commerce i think had a pretty successful ipo recently yeah if you look at those companies um and how well they're doing and of course amazon which is the big gorilla in the room when it comes to e-commerce are you are you so on e-commerce like when i go to your website i don't see it there's nothing that says like you know better conversations happier customers for e-commerce brands you really are using branding you know better customer service better customer engagement is this really for anybody it is i mean we do serve for everybody and that's why i said like we have customers from all industries um but about 60 to 70 of our customer base is going to be in the e-commerce space specifically um you know i think this is people who hit product market fit in the e-commerce space if you think about businesses that need to have interactions with customers through like a chat medium e-commerce certainly fits that bill for e-commerce customer conversations happen pre-sales and post sales right whereas for a lot of other businesses potentially chat and support is most of a like a post-sale nurturing type of relationship now when you came on last this was about 28 months ago you said that the average customer is paying about your pro plan which is 40 per per team member per month is that still the sort of average rpoo or has it increased uh yeah we've seen some growth there certainly almost double that in fact if that was the i forgot the last number that i had i had given you but hearing it now two years later we're looking at a lot more of an arpu and obviously a bigger customer base as well and things have gone well for us how many customers are now working with uh we're doing i think just north of uh you know the term that's used often is logos we're doing just north of 2500 logos or something like that it's a little complicated in our case because a lot of accounts actually have multiple brands we have a plan that allows you to bring multiple brand entities so actually the number of logos is higher than that but the number of paying logos is is in that ballpark okay yeah i'm trying to compare that to you you told me 3 600 customers a year and a half ago so i imagine you were giving me a different number than maybe number of seats or number of individual logos or something like that yeah exactly and so i think we're at in terms of seats we're at the 10k range at this point okay got it so you have 10 000 seats across 2500 brands that's right i see so and then 10 obviously per seat average price is 40 bucks per seat not 80. 80 is actually the logo average two seats per logo yeah we're doing uh i think we're doing about 100 per logo so we're doing because we're in the three million dollar revenue range right now so that's that's about 2500 times the 100 per logo that's right yeah well first off congratulations if you're you're so what does that mean you did about 280 grand in revenue last month uh yep exactly we're in the yeah we're in that ballpark range we're actually 250 260. okay yeah 250 times 12 again that puts you right at that 3 million run rate which is great i mean that's almost doubling uh since the last time we spoke where's most of the growth come from um you know most of our growth uh i think the last time we talked uh characteristically speaking we do growth both in terms of new logos but also in terms of the number of seats right and so we've seen growth both in our existing base in terms of staff users added we've also seen growth obviously from new businesses i think part of it again as i mentioned new companies coming online for the first time mom and pop shops certainly for the first time but we're also seeing a lot of growth from non-organic sales meaning sales where we're going out and looking for businesses that would be a good match for our value proposition so that's something new that we probably weren't doing two years ago you know proactively looking for businesses that we can have a relationship with and just so we can understand how much of the growth came in 2020 do you remember what run rate you finished 2019 at uh you know i don't have that number off the top my head but i will say 2020 has been a pretty crazy year for us um certainly faster than 2019 so i would it would be fair to characterize most of the growth having happened in the last six months or so do you know like how much revenue you did in december of 2019 mrr i don't yeah i don't have that number off the top of my head i would imagine it would probably you know just just this is a guess by the way i don't have this number but it's probably around 200 less than 200. got it so you've added about 75 000 in new mrr over the past 10 months i think that would be fair now i mean don't quote me on that but yeah it certainly seems you know back of the envelope calculation would probably put us there and remind everyone what year you started uh 2016 is when we went with revenue uh like middle middle of 2016. so we've done we're about four years in now do you remember what you finished 2017 with in terms of total revenue it was tiny like how small yeah i mean it's uh well certainly less than a million because i think we were we were at just a million ballpark when we were we would talk to you two years ago um so even a year before that we were way under that number um those are the days that we put way behind us and it's actually funnies i don't really revisit where we were those days and maybe we should retroactively look at how far we've come no no i'm just curious i'm just curious um okay very cool i guess the reason i ask is i want to understand like distribution channels right so you've gone from 3600 seats to 10 000 seats obviously some of that comes from expanding old logos but you also have to add new logos where are you getting customers from today specifically yeah so the shopify platform is big for us and so is the big commerce platform so those are two e-commerce platforms that have organically grown on their own or you know organic to us at least um and a rising tide floats all boats right and so we've seen great success uh being able to utilize both the uh shopify app platform and the big commerce app platform as growth channels for us about how many trials does it drive you per month um per i would say per day we're in the like let's say 20 to 30 range now per month you'd multiply this i'm probably probably a little under a thousand i would say um that's again back of the envelope calculation less on weekends more on weekdays right yeah um and how many of those let's say you get a thousand new trials in a month about how many we can work to paid usually um that's a good question i i would have to take a look at that um i know you know usually what we we don't really look at things you know from my perspective i look at things in terms of net growth on the revenue side and some of that happens with new accounts some of that happens in seats we focus on those two things equally like when we have our sales people in our account people reach out to folks we're we're very focused on you know how many number of seats they're going to be able to bring in and less so on whether this is a new account right and because to us an account with one seat you know is probably worth less than harvesting an existing account and bringing them from five to ten seats of course of course it's way way less effort too um what about funding are you still about 500 000 raised or did you raise more yeah we haven't raised anything nice you know we have not raised and uh i think last time i was here with you i don't remember that conversation exactly but i was probably in the same situation where we said you know what we don't have to raise if we don't want to but we are in a position now where we might say hey we've got some substantial revenue coming in and you know more than raising money for the sake of the money aspect like we're not we're not on a burn right now where we have to worry about spend how much are you burning per month oh significantly less than the revenue actually so we're we're right now looking to grow our team we're looking to reinvest the money that we're saying you're profitable per month right now you're making money yeah we are yeah we are profitable and we're running a very efficient team right now so uh i forgot what the numbers were last time when i when i visited you but our team hasn't grown that much since then we've hired a couple of engineers here today we're um we're right under 20. i think i just did a head count recently this month and we're at 18 at the time and how many engineers that's over eight engineers and any quota carrying sales reps or no uh we have we actually just hired one sales rep uh few months ago so that's a big hire that is that's like uh well we used to do like the founders and myself we would actually go on calls and do those sales calls so quantum code we had sales people you're one of the families though right i i am yeah yeah and one of the founders but uh so what do you say oh we do it in terms of right now um what's interesting is we do it based on number of calls so we're not setting because we're new to this right we're not setting any hard hard uh revenue cut-offs where we say hey you got to bring this out of redmi what we want to do is explore the number of calls that we can do and then mathematically back out from that you know so what's the target for the ae how many calls um it's gonna be something like five or six calls a day um so back that out to maybe about 20 to 30 calls a week multiply that out to you know whatever that is per month 120 a year yeah yeah and what we're really trying to focus on is uh is not just calling again new leads but we're also doing a lot of nurturing with existing existing accounts right having these having the sales rep talk to the existing accounts and seeing how much more we can do to to meet their existing needs and potentially that you talked about churn expansion or networking retention what is your gross dollar return annually today so yeah that's a good question you ask about churn on a dollar basis because that's how exactly how we measure it because of the way we do accounts both you know existing accounts plus new accounts it's really hard to track churn in two dimensions so we do it on a dollar basis we're about three percent net churn under a three percent net churn on a monthly basis and growth on top of that or net or gross term per month uh it's sorry yeah it's gross turn and then net growth on top of the churn is going to be anywhere from four to seven percent so we're looking at a gross growth of somewhere between seven and ten percent monthly yeah so just to multiply those out annually you're basically seeing something like 36 percent revenue churn annually but 72 expansion on that same cohort so net revenue retention is around 130. yep exactly yeah no it's obviously healthy economics now have you found sort of an arbitrage way to get new customers uh it sounds like the app exchanges do this for you but what's your tack for uh for a new customer um you know i don't have those numbers off the top my head we are focusing heavily on ad spend in those platforms uh because those platforms both have an organic you know component to it as well as an ad spend component we're spending a significant amount of ad spend there we're doing channels like quora as well we're seeing some pretty interesting uh dynamics on quora especially with promoted questions we're doing things like facebook we're also doing things like google which are pretty traditional how much did you spend last month total in ad spend across all the platforms uh yeah that's a good question um we have a budget that's in the five digits per month okay i don't know the exact number because you know we have marketing folks who take care of that now we started to take a look at it in aggregate and you know how effective it is i will tell you though obviously channel specific spend is the most effective so in our case shopify ad rev or ad spend is is the most effective one that we have now because so many shopify customers come from shopify on your three million dollar run rate does a third of that go to shopify 30 percent uh no not all of it right so you know we're not so yes so of the of the leads that come to us from shopify we do pay them the 30 and if you think about it we're also paying them ad spend so clearly we're contributing to shopify's bottom line here but we also do have channels like uh you know organic channels again like i mentioned we do bring in people from google facebook quora where we're doing ad spend and in those cases we don't have to give anybody a revenue share and and so if you do think about raising capital right you're growing i see here how much would you target to raise um that's a good question i think what we would think about is more than the money is the relationship that we would have we're looking if we were to raise again we're profitable so we're not too concerned about the monetary aspects it's more about what you know if an investor coming in what other benefits can they get us what can they do to be a partner in the growth of our business going forward you know how can we how can they help us take the next step and sometimes the next step you can think about it in a revenue term right if we're doing three how can we get to 10 how can we get to 20 how can we get 30. um but more important than that is you know what can they do to show us you know they've worked with companies potentially that have gone through this right what can they help uh they do to help us makes good sense you're asking the right question what can they help you and remind everyone your origin story here right so when you were launching the mvp did you come out of an agency was it just your sweat equity how'd you get going yeah so i was sort of a fortunate um situation where i had my previous startup acquired and um riamaz was sort of just taking learnings from the previous previous business that i ran i kind of understood what the market needed in terms of money obviously having built relationships from running that first business really helped the second one so yeah so yeah that's that's sort of where we come from do you remember how much you sort of spent personally on the mvp before your first dollar revenue um it was mostly time more than more than money right it was a lot of a lot of uh long nights building the mp myself i'm an engineer by background so the first version of rio may's you know in terms of the dna of it was probably 80 my sweat equity really and right before launch we brought i brought on a couple of co-founders that i felt could one bring it in a certain dimension technically so we brought i brought on a technical founder and then on the marketing side someone who could tell our story so i brought on a non-technical co-founder as well and you're obviously again the one who just sold a company you're putting up probably a lot of cash i imagine originally to pay these folks i mean how do you split up the equity when you go the route you did you're an exited founder you bring on smart talent i assume you don't just go 30 30 30. right exactly so the equity for our my two co-founders are the same but i'm slightly higher than those two without going into specific details on those numbers i see got it got it got it so again i won't push you further but what you're saying is you might keep 40 and then let each of them split 30 or something like that yeah sure that's that's a fair characterization got it got it got it okay fair great um and again what's i think what's interesting about this is one thing i always look at especially early stages revenue per employee and you've managed to go from like a one million dollar run rate with 15 people to a three million dollar run rate hiring only two or three more people so your revenue per employee is now through the roof you're profitable you really can do anything you want uh really fascinating story lou let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um wow you caught me off guy here you know when you said book the first book that comes to mind is actually not a business book it's actually pragmatic programmer pragmatic programmer number two is there a ceo you're following or studying elon musk number four how many are sorry number three what's your favorite online tool for building rmas um online tool recently is probably github number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i get a lot more now i'm getting seven to eight very good yep and situation married single kids i'm married with two kids oh great and how are you i'm 37. just turned 37 yeah just doing turn at seven five days ago oh nice man somebody october i'm october third turn 31 october congratulations man yeah you birthday you too man maybe i'll beat you to 40. we'll see what happens uh last question lee what do you wish you knew when you were 20 oh explore the world a little more travel a little more maybe guys reamaz helping e-commerce brands 60-70 of their customers are e-commerce brands they're serving 10 000 different seats each sheet pays about 40 bucks a month they're doing about three million dollars in terms of run rate today up from two point caught four million running at the end of 2019 and up from about a million run rate the year before that doing this very effectively in terms of revenue per employee very few hires over the last two years an 18-person team today profitable as they look to continue to scale adding customers directly via the shopify and big commerce app exchanges again got this going after he sold his first company looking to scale out of four or five 10 million or more in 2021 lou thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you for having me on one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 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 sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan laca dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

hello everyone my guest today is lou wang he studied computer science at ucla and stanford then founded ronan app.com in 2008 before selling that to godaddy in 2013. he then founded his current company rhea maze in 2012 which is multi-channel help desk software lou are you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right this is a hot space tell us more about the company and how you make money sure yeah so as you said we're multi-channel help desk and what we do is we help businesses talk to their customers you know as you mentioned we i did my first sas startup a few years ago and one of the things that i noticed from there was that having conversations with customers in a meaningful way leads to sales right and so um part of our story is helping businesses make money by talking to their customers and that that comes in a variety of ways so support obviously is is one of the central channels that comes through email chat mobile but also sort of outbound messaging and proactive messaging and this is a sas platform this is sas yeah okay how much does the average customer pay per month would you say so we have two we have two plans that we sort of publicly list pricing for and one is on a twenty dollar per seat and the other one is forty dollars per seat okay we have about a 50 50 roughly distribution of that we also have an enterprise plan where we do custom contracts with folks for sort of like a yearly contract yearly commitments with things like training and they pay a little more for that it sounds like there's like maybe an upfront senate fee which is great for you because it makes them stickier once they go through it yeah for sure and and and it helps larger companies our larger base um sort of get onboarded uh with with training and things like that we put up time up front they put time up front and that certainly helps with things like retention and what's the difference between someone paying 20 versus 40 what additional things they get at 40. yeah so at 40 we have things like multi-brand we have things like a live dashboard you can see who's on your site practically engage with them we find that typically companies who are running multiple identities maybe different product lines different storefronts this is a procter gamble or something like that exactly they're going to go with the 40 plan and then the 20 plan you'll see smaller businesses um e-commerce shops that are sort of a mom-and-pop shop would sort of nicely sit there and how you know when i think customer service like this kind of stuff especially doing some research on your ui i think front app and when i think like website engagement i think like intercom right so i mean are you kind of a combination of both and if so how do you carve out a niche specifically for yourself yeah that's a good question and like you said it's a hot space we have competitors i think what we do is we focus specifically on the support aspect of of conversations more than those folks do i mean as you mentioned uh proactive messaging is a part of their stories as well what you'll find is we have a lot of the traditional help desk features that you also find in in things like the zen desk got it we do it in a more modern way interesting okay and let's kind of put this on a timeline when did you launch this company uh we actually launched in 2012. it was interesting because uh my first company i was running that at the same time too and i was approached by godaddy to acquire that company and so what we ended up doing is sort of putting riams on hiatus for a little bit came back to the company in 2016 actually so that's sort of the timeline we've had two years now where we've been sort of going full speed ahead why did godaddy want to acquire your first company [Music] um well go to godaddy's interesting company because they're also in some ways one of the largest sas companies in the world so you know people typically think of them as a domains registration website hosting company they also have a portfolio of sas apps and and the the sas app that i was working on at the time fit really well with what they were doing there did you build significant wealth for yourself through that exit or no it was more like an aquahire uh yeah i did fairly well out of that but you know being an entrepreneur i've always wanted to be running my own company so as soon as we felt like the situation there made sense and and that sas application was in good hands um you know it was time to to give it another shot again was that a function of something being in your control or more about an earn out kind of thing and you left right when that was done uh no i actually we had we the deal that we struck with godaddy was actually very favorable um to me as an entrepreneur because no earn out there was no forcing you to stay there was there was a little bit of an app but i actually stayed longer than then oh great what the terms were yeah okay and you come back to rhea may so that what you said was in 2016. that's right okay got it but you started working on it back early in 2012. yeah okay interesting to the company and who's we uh my co-founder david and uh and a co-founder on the technical side hey okay so three no did you guys just say okay we're gonna just we're best friends we'll do it either 33 33 33 or no was it a little different than that it was a little different than that why help you know it's a hard conversation for founders to have give us some insight there how the conversation go um so part of it was uh sort of the effort up front that i had put into it so the cap table looks a little different based on that um so different people sort of came on as co-founders at different times and when you think co-founder you know everyone's there day one that's not always quite the case effort does get put into it beforehand sort of putting together the app a lot of software um can be built before you sort of have an entity around it yep that makes good sense so waited obviously towards you because you were there you know four years earlier yep take me through uh again some of the growth now today so how many how many customers are you serving today so uh we have over a thousand customers so last i checked it was um right under 12 uh 1200 sorry and that's businesses and we have a very interesting distribution wherein we have very small customers and we also have very big customers as i mentioned well normal normalize that for me for a second so the logos is important but you also kind of build your product and everything really around per seat so across 1200 logos or like are we talking about double that in terms of seats or quadruple that or how many seats are on the platform so so we sit between three and four seats on average per per logo as you say okay got it so you could then say you know somewhere between 3 648 you know and five thousand seats basically yeah that's right okay fair enough and then have you bootstrapped to raise capital we raised capital at uh 500k okay why and when was that was that before was that in 2012 the early days or 2016. uh yeah that was that was early days we did that and that was with friends and family so it was a it was an interesting situation obviously with that but the reason why it was because sort of the upfront development cost of putting together the software before we knew we had revenue so this is uh given that it is a b2b situation um it was very apparent up front that this would be a company that would get recurring revenue in a sas model and so putting together the application up to the point where you could get to a revenue uh you know it requires a little bit of investment there yeah so that was 2012. let me ask you how did they all feel when you went full time on your other company and left them sitting there on the cap table um it was an interesting conversation and i think uh given that it was friends and family situation um that that helped that conversation and i think they all knew that this was going to happen again um even with the conversations with godaddy at the time it was it was publicly known that i had this other entity that was going to happen got it so once you sold you said okay i'll now focus my time back here they're still same cap table same everything and they're all excited to see what you build now yep are you are you raising today or no you don't need to well we don't need to because we're uh operating fairly well no of course when it comes to raising money that's one of those situations where we feel like if the right situation came along with the right valuation that's always you know something that we can talk about yep what's the team size today the team size is at 15 and that includes so we have a remote culture here um and so given i'm i'm based in the bay area yeah the cost of living here is a lot higher what i've found is that you know building a team remote allows you to bring on more folks expertise from all over the place without necessarily hampering you in terms of cost yep and what are you know since you've doubled down on this in 2016 what are you now growing the thing at year over year so for example uh in 2017 i think we were we were under 500 k a arr and when we're over that so we've more than doubled in since the last year yeah i mean we can get a minimum kind of where you're at now right if you have the minimum 3 600 seats and then you multiply times a minimum of 20 bucks a seat price it's like 70ish grand a month are you north of 100 at this point yeah yeah okay good are you north of 200 well that's no we're not north of 200 so we're right in that range but it's we do significantly more than twenty dollars per seat because the average tends to scoot towards the 40. yeah yeah yeah i'm one look look let's give you the benefit out there right even at 40 times 3 600 seats that puts you at like 144 months so somewhere between 100 and 200 is great somewhere between a call it a you know 1.5 and 3 million dollar run rate that's obviously healthy growth over 500 and 2017. so congratulations where's most that growth come from is it is it expanding from one person on a team to 10 or getting new logos entirely yeah so we do that through a combination of content marketing through sales um and then we're also integrated with the several platforms that bring us sort of the smaller company smaller logos that 10 toward the sort of the 20 uh seats and this these kinds of price points i assume you probably dealt this i'd go with with this at godaddy as well churn is critical right what is your turn today and how do you manage it yeah so i turned last night looked i think we're at under two percent i think it was like one point seven percent and that's uh customer churn like logo churn per month yeah per month yeah and and we don't really measure revenue churn um and that's just because they're sort of revenue growth on a per account basis as well so you know there's that whole term of negative churn or negative revenue churn are you in that negative churn yeah so we our accounts in terms of revenue um on a monthly basis the revenue per account grows faster than say the the revenue churn yep yep which is obviously what gives you that net negative churn number so that's not easy by the way so so nice work there um and then what do you what do you pay to acquire these customers typically uh so we go through uh google adwords facebook quora you know you could all the various channels that you've probably heard of we pay on a cpc basis the average cost per customer ends up being slightly higher right now than sort of what we get back from the ltv wise and that's just because what is that number before you dig the story um i think i think it's about two hundred dollars per per account okay and why do you and why do you say that that's that's lower than ltv because if you're only training 1.7 logo churn that means they stay with you on average for 50 or 60 months at a 40 price point it's like sorry i i i i misspoke it's not really ltv it's sort of the upfront revenue that we get from them from month one month too it takes a while to reacquire that right so yeah so what's your payback period today about um it's it it's about three months i believe yeah and that's you know that's going to depend on the size of the company that we capture usually when we go through these advertising channels it's usually self-serve customers and then once in a while we get a warm lead that we can go send you know sales and do sort of white glove sales on that lead yep yep yep that makes sense um so what do you i mean you've sold a company before you've kind of done that so there's nothing about your ego that's saying let me do it again i've never done it before i'm curious what it's like i mean what's your what's your mission what's your mission with the company what do you want to do with it grow it i mean it's it's one of those things where as you said like having had an exit before i've sort of had the luxury of not having to chase that and so uh you know i just enjoy doing what i do um growing this company and sort of building it working with the team growing a team that's also something that i didn't really get a chance to do the first time around so we sold the company very early um at two three people basically at that time and so seeing sort of a different experience with growing a team a much larger team is kind of exciting one of the biggest mistakes i made at my first company heyo is when everyone else was raising huge rounds and i thought it was very frothy i had a large acquisition offer on the table and i walked away from it and then sold for way less than that four years later trying to just stick it out waiting for the new feature or the better on boarding blah blah many would argue this space i mean right you just saw 50 going to drift you saw 50 some odd go into to matilda and front up a while ago you saw you know intercom is raising like crazy well many would argue that it is a frothy overvalued space right now and if you're in the space you should take advantage of it and sell if you get a 5 or 7 or 10x multiple on revenues if you got a 7x multiple on your current revenue would you sell uh you know that that's very tough conversation to have and one of the reasons why is because that depends on the buyer so one of the things i learned during the first acquisition is the buyer does matter what situation you get into after the acquisition does matter and sort of that integration period and what they plan to do with your team and all of those things are considerations that it it's hard to just say given a dollar value would you do it yeah are you are you based off what you've learned are you the kind of guy where you'd say hey yeah take the company but i want to keep my team and go launch a new company with them and just keep doing that the rest of your life uh you know yes but uh i would say that depends on team members right certain team members are going to be better off in that new situation where you know especially if you're going to a large company and they're they're doing things like benefits and 401 some employees are going to want to say hey you know what that's a pretty nice situation i kind of want to do that and some are going to say let's let's let's do it again right yep yep and then last question that kind of talked about the exit scenario again would you raise capital today if the right offer came along and if so what would that rightful kind of look like yeah i think we would and i think honestly speaking i i think we're in a stage where we're going to have to grow a little bit more to get that favorable valuation that we would want um but yeah we i mean that we're open to that conversation with someone to come along what kind of evaluation make you really happy i mean what do you think is fair that also makes you happy um it's gonna be sort of a maybe 10x the arr you know that's in other terms obviously when you're raising capital other terms do matter as well but that's sort of a rough ballpark of what you kind of would expect so assuming you're like call it one five ar today or two million you're saying we'd love to see a 15 or 20 million pre-money something like that that's right yeah and and and how much capital would you like to raise because you know you could deploy to drive growth yeah so one of the uh things we want to do obviously all software companies want to do is hire good devs right and so having have enough money to go and build out a team that can sort of accelerate the product is important and so i i don't have a dollar amount in mind but i kind of know if if i saw that amount i would know based on you know could what kind of what kind of devs what kind of sales and marketing folks am i able to bring on board with that yeah let me just be more specific for you a lot of vc's listen to the show and they'll reach out to you afterwards and be hey i heard you wanted this much boom here like let's talk more about it if you're if you're raising out of 15 or 20 and you only want to sell 10 on a company you're looking to be looking for like call it 2 million bucks or something like that is that kind of is that kind of money meaningful in terms of you being able to expand the engineering team i think it is um especially given that we hire both remotely and sort of locally here in the bay area we can sort of get talent from work for two or three i think you can get some pretty good talent yeah good stuff lou let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um probably lean startup by eric ruiz number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now well yeah actually i i given that godaddy situation i actually had a good chance to uh watch the uh inner goings of that company and it's a very large task company so scott wagner at godaddy is someone i i watch and sort of study from number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own [Music] um i'd probably have to say something like stripe given just how easy they make making money number essay that's that should be our new slogan we make we make making money easy all right number four lou how many houses sleep to eat every night uh six six hours probably okay and what's your situation married single kiddos uh yeah so that's i think that's a little different than most entrepreneurs you get on your show i'm actually married with kids two kids why do you say it's different than most actually i can give you the exact data 79 are married with at least one kid really okay so not not not the ones i maybe it's just sort of the sample sample size i was watching but oh you listen to the show yeah oh good so i've i've been married for a long time okay married two kids and how old are you i'm 35 35 okay and uh by the way someone who's listening right now is like 50 that's been married for like 30 years are going to be like what does he mean he's been married a long time how long have you been married uh i got married when i was 20. so it's been 15. okay 15 years well congratulations that's great and uh last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh enjoy the process i think you know one of those things is as a young entrepreneur you're setting a lot of goals for yourself and you have all these ideas of where you want to be but i think sometimes along the way you can sort of lose track of it just enjoy the process of getting there guys there you have it from lou enjoy the process he launched this coming back in 2012 raised 500 grand on it then refocused on a different idea that then sold the godaddy after that sale and after he worked there a couple years he then shifted back to remaze in 2016. really you can think of them almost like a front app or intercom but dedicated exclusively to the support function not just kind of outreach on a website or things of that nature today there are 15 people remote locations they've got about 3600 sorry they've got 1200 logos using them with between 3 000 and 5 000 seats total doing called 140ish grand per month today that's up over over 100 churn is one point seven percent logo churn per month net negative revenue churn because expansion is uh driving a lot of growth right now two hundred dollar tax about a three month payback period on a lifetime value of between caught 50 and 60 months or about two grand lou thank you so much for taking us to the top thank you