How Redbrick CEO Tobyn Sowden grew Redbrick to $152.2M revenue and 10K customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have now it's $20,000 per Tov I haven't experienced his happens on global domination we just broke on a hundred thousand units full mark and I'm your host Nathan Lakha I just finished traveling Southeast Asia for 41 days and I usually always get sick when I travel and quite frankly eating is difficult for me it's hard to find a restaurant and I'm spoiled in Austin with my personal chef well I took these little packets with me this time thirty of them in my carry-on suitcase they kept me totally healthy with eleven different secret ingredients you can see them at making like a thumb forward slash juice I'll tell you more later on the show that Nathan lock accom forward slash juice folks many of you reach out to me and you say Nathan so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching so whenever I try and batch you tell me this you go Nathan they don't booked back-to-back times so you and when they don't show up after they both it's frustrating the answer is guys you have to use smart tools I use a tool called a QT scheduling Mathematica calm /schedule on how you specifically how I use it later on in the episode this 639 be sure to tune in tomorrow morning for episode 640 with Bill Bryce's company called Blondo sign they've just had three inner enterprise customers with fifty to five hundred thousand annual contract value that's the average he'll manage secure signatures good morning everybody Nathan Lasky here our guest this morning is Tobin Sowden and he is the CEO of red brick the second fastest growing software company in Canada and the birthplace of a product called shift Tobin are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right tell us first that's a big statement red Brook is a second fastest growing software company in Canada how do you measure that we didn't measure it it was a independent organization and it was called profit problem spot how they measure it they measured it on revenue revenue growth over the five-year period so fascinating so it's kind of like like kind of an Inc 5000 but for Canada yeah you could you say that definitely a smaller version of it and what is the so how's the company how many years of data did they have they took of the bought a whole live here auger period and so I think the the beginning was around 2010 and 200,000 in revenue and then we were we were reported in the range of 10 to 20 million as far as our final fiscal fiscal year in it and only that I remember 2015 it was 2018 reported in 2016 got it very good and what is the I guess my question was did you what was that launch year was 2010 or were you around before that launch year was yeah was 40 yet okay great very cool all right cool so now that we have some of those metrics tell us what what redbrick does and and after you do that maybe that's focusing on shift sure yeah I think it's probably just to give you the history to you know the way we started at the business was was from a chromatic distribution perspectives were helping other developers acquire users for their products usually on a performance basis we girona McCosker install or revenue share or a percentage of or you know like a CVS copper sale and that business ran over very very quickly for us and when when I was really an ad agency right here uh well it was it was it was a was a very specific software distribution business and so we developed our own tools in-house to to track and provide analytics internally in order to really grow that quickly and so all the time I realized that as a business on its own let's open that up and admire software publishers to use our own analytics and as we did that we have a desire to build some our own products and in some cases actually use those products as a proof of concept to show how our analytic solutions really worked and how we could grow products using them so our main software our desktop software I want a solution desk metrics is integrated industry and it's one of the ways we've been able to rapidly integrate on the product and grow it so quickly and you say offering the website desk metrics currently has 500,000 active users how do you define an active user at least you want to then in a monthly in a model okay and what could an event to be could be as something as simple as a sign in yeah it could give you anything but mostly the heart event so basically we know that the user is online is active at least once during during the 30-day period and then what's the relationship between those 500,000 active users and the other metric you put out which is 800 million downloads tracked well the I guess the relationship is just Donald almost become active users and so download the reason why we call of downloads versus active users because some of our technology actually provided attribution and so attribution can be a complicated thing it's talked about a lot on the mobile side but not a lot on the desktop side we've got some unique features in our energy cage that a lot of stat repeat across from the browser into the desktop environment and it connects together the reason why we know low downloads and users is because it can actually attribute those directly to your act together got and those are non tech folks listening SDK just means software development kit that's impressive those tobin 800 million I mean how are and it sounds like you come from the world of driving app downloads so so maybe make sense for that numbers is so high but you give us some perspective for somebody listening right now looking to drive new app downloads for maybe their desktop software where where would they start all the amenities are with us well we can provide some consulting service as far as where where to acquire users from however I think you know one of the big sources of juice transition right now is Facebook base it's got a phenomenal ad platform their their tracking is is one of the best and the ability to distribute not just on a on a download but also multiple points through the funnel and kind of working in conjunction with solution like death metrics it works wonders and it can optimize very quickly and obviously with the you know with the size of the audience that Facebook commands you can grow up probably quickly if you using those tails right tools how much are you spending per month just on paid acquisition exclusively through Facebook um we are currently spending probably thirty thousand dollars but we've got a commitment to grow to a million dollars reporter oh interesting the way you phrase that you have a commitment what do you mean by that it's just a goal well it's more of a greater we're working closely with some teams at Facebook we don't use to grow to grow our businesses and some of our businesses and they're there supporting us in a way that requires us to commit to be at a level is a million dollars where yeah I'm going to try and put a more brackets on that and you can confirm if you can that basically sounds like a you know from Facebook well then we're happy to give you early access some of these things we're testing in exchange you've got to grow your eyes better this much by this state something like that the idea got it very cool okay take us through and then in the business model let's now focus on on shift and instead of Desa metrics so what's the revenue model how do you generate money so behind shift originally was a lecture on the framework it's really starting to become something we're seeing you don't have a patient lay like a slab where you can build one for the net asalaam and deploy or else all the flowers and then it's like a great example of a company that's done that well so we got a one Wingull software analytics for people that are building on top of the electron framework well like should we go on do it let's build it out ourselves so we had another building shift to do that and it turned out we can launched a preview preview release in September that with something that group you know people really wanted and so what should I lie to switch between your Gmail accounts your Google accounts in general in between your your mail your calendar and drive I think spending a lot of people about this issue whether whether or not they're using you know multiple browsers or incognito mode or account method or they just straight-up use IMAP or pop it's not an easy thing to do so it was it was an issue that we wanted to scratch ourselves and shows is iterative solution there a lot of motion player that shipped it's great solution for us and so as we were experimenting this just showcased our analytic service we realized that these are here on its own and so we decided to increase the team from a single developer to later that we're I think we have about ten developers working on the project and we launched on December 20th and we have acquired about 15,000 users in very short period of time how did you do to my model early well so the business model is that is specifically you know software that service $20 here we we feel down when he aided by price of Gmail today and so we wanted to have some sort of a reasonable amount on an annual basis that we were charging it so we can continue to iterate a little product and so also by charging for for the product we knew that we could probably acquire users so today we're using primarily basically upper world advertising on Adwords as well as Twitter...