How Redbrick CEO Tobyn Sowden grew 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 Cora we're on some of the native networks and I have a lot of legs and what is the how many total customers are you serving today q1 2017 just on shift I think we've seen about 20,000 installs on any given day or week I think we have so in any of the week we have about 10,000 active users and and our free of our free to pay in birdie rate is around the 4 to 5 hour said margarita ok so I can take a route at a minimum 4 percent of 20 thousands about 800 paying customers something like that yeah so that was just kind of our this is our initial launch it were iterating iterating for hitting a goal of 10% yeah this is also say this is just like I mean this is only 2 months 2 or 3 months old right yeah yeah I mean by the way why pink a lot and that's a hell of a launch date 5 days before the holidays was that strategic or your developers must have been killing you because that's usually how the bugs pop up and they're on christmas trying to fix the bugs or why'd you decide that date yeah that's a great question it wasn't the original date like so many projects watch the original leak was was a week early we earlier and so we animated top station whether or not to launch on December 20th or wait until first or second week of January and I decided that based on how we were investing in the product it was better to get it out of there intensive testing before spending any more money on stolen yep and you said you said price point was twenty per month or per year per year per year got it so good so look at twenty thousand installs 800 paying customers times twenty bucks you know 16 grand early on that's that's a good way to say hey yeah there's a market for this right yeah I'd love which are anymore yeah why did you decide interesting question here you mentioned that there's other a lot of other people in the space and a lot of them choose to attack this problem via extensions or things in browser why'd you decide to go to desks like it literally I mean if you guys go try shift which you should in the show notes it's actually a desktop download why'd you Tobin decide to attack the problem that way well I think we could show up desk metrics well yes I would originally that sort of it at the end we came from however I think if you look at your on the browser model when it comes to how sessions work it's not an easy thing to to build the experience what we build with shift within the browser just the technical restrictions on how browsers are built and we watch it it was was you know the back way I solve a problem and I think what you'll see in the future versions of shaft it's we're going to continue on the path keeping that and a you know activity experience with with engine rather than and when you go to a go to go to derive and cling on it on a dock and also into your browser be about that issue again we're going to try it over eight more of those things within within chin so obviously we don't want to recreate the browser and that's not a nun you know engage with a lot of questions images from my own team why don't we have a support a sauna why don't we support flash let's let's continue to add these tender of integrations into Shannon and I think that as we do that it's going to as the number of integrations goes to infinity are our ships becomes rather so so everyone avoid that and continue to make us focus of ships mostly on communication and a little bit of activity as far as how it's linked to those those primary mail accounts and then let's quickly jump back to desk metrics if it is indeed a SS metrics or your main source of revenue to date no no it's uh well as to what is yet help us understand that you have all these SAS products but what is the main source so we have really two three parts to this as we ever app distribution does this where we're distributing our own app as well as our customer data we have metrics which I don't with a solution and then we have a hold an ombr�� dollar so shaving example okay got it so the majority is coming from your software distribution business kind of your what you were born with yeah and that's the model people can come pay you active Ella person can pay you for distribution and you take whatever either a cut or percentage of spend or something like that yeah yeah and I think we're on the software as much as we love that and it is been very good to us around with Lumineers now is build what we have today it's not it's not permissible as I existed we can which you know it's really hard to continue to grow business when you don't know how that will fluctuate on a given month and so that's why you see our later products like des metrics is only where we're looking for retiree routing yep what's your team size right now I'm heading for around 37 - 37 where guys all based we're in Victoria BC on background which is on the west coast of Canada everybody or anyone out promote we have a small team in Poland and a small team in Brazil why I you know honestly they're just great people that we've come across in our physical life where whether they were in Victoria or we've been somewhere and we've just wanted to continue work of it and so we brought them all into contracts in their hometowns promote very cool well before we get into the final part of the show a little bit more spotlight on desk metrics here for a second so you know tell us tell us more kind of about what it does for somebody listening that might be a perfect customer for you yes death metrics is primarily a desktop software analytics platform it an educated for windows with it and Mac as well as some unique ones that are based on JavaScript or things like electron as well as extensions so you integrate an SDK and then a number of events are automatically tracked the things from install and launch to heartbeats to uninstall etc as well as you integrate your own custom event one of the big value propositions that we have is is attribution on the desktop space Andrew talked about the ability to track a user from the web and on to on the desktop their activity within the app now that it relates back to your marketing campaign essentially it's what we're using for and it's working phenomenal and what's the average customer paying you per month we have our pricing very high on finance app is this pricing dollars in flash and we're definitely still you know searching for the right arises and like I would say the average you know the average customer a point being a soda pop - 200 500 dollars and then we you know Tobin our monthly monthly and what are the key what are the key kind of drivers you're using to get higher articles from people as a seed based or number of install based or impression based or what levers so uh previously and how we started our business was is the number of users the more users you have the more expensive it is and we had no gate on arm a number of best and the idea being is that we believe you should track everything so we don't want to stop you from tracking things just because you wanted to limit why you're paying guest metrics and so what we've always realized is that it just doesn't work we've got to change tomorrow where we actually we've got real cost associated with events and you know we see user videos that are small highly valuable and they want to track a lot of things and so we're moving to the model now where it's a combination of users and this on and what year did you launch test metrics then what is it like late 2016 early I yeah miss Marsh or in a role and I guess equation should be no should be noted as well that we've been building the technology and using it Alice for our distribution business or you know the street where useful for that did you have a is that enough of a historical kind of sample size or historical cohort for you to be able to kind of pretty accurately predict the lifetime value because that would lead to my next question of what you're willing to spend to acquire those customers yeah so we have a lot of predictive models that we use and it is a obviously we're using deff metrics to the underlying data store and we use those in house for our owned and operated products but it's something that we're exploring as far as how can we open up and predictive analytics in a scalable way a lousy sort of black as well because I get asked all the time Nathan you posts all these interviews hundreds of them per month how do you do them efficiently and guys answer simple people always agree to my calendar meaning I batch my injury is to stay very efficient and the way that I do it is I use a tool called acuity scheduling at Nathan Lockett calm /schedule and the reason I use them is very simple they keep my no-show rates are very low because they stand out remind ourselves when the interview or the meeting is coming up and also they make it very easy to schedule time right I don't go back and forth via email 10,000 times of people I'm trying to meet with and make them less kadam /schedule helps me so much and by the way look how you like have so many meetings I'm the best in meetings okay get the master back very very efficient do you guys know me many people send the most efficient they've ever seen okay so I use this tool it's so efficient and by the way I got Gavin I did Gavin he's a CEO I said I want a great deal for my people he said Nathan well most people get a 14-day trial is not great I said no he's going to a 45 day free trial at Nathan Lanka calm /schedule that's not gonna stay up forever so go get it now Nathan black and dot-com /schedule let's wrap up here Tobin with your favorite book and some other things these are the famous aside you ready yeah number one what's your favourite business book Halloween threads a date those people number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now no number three is there besides your own is our favourite online tool you have like hostgator Hostgator favorite online tool we're using in divisional all right now envision it oh that's a design and product management right yeah I love that out number four how many hours sleep you get every night for little sticks okay and what's the situation married single getpid there you get area with kiddos alright and are they I always does inspection because parents always say I can't launch a business because I have young kids but then I have you like you on that are doing are they young or they old or that of health there's seventeen months apart and they're aged one in the holy mackerel so two young ones yeah alright and so well how old are you 30 last question take effect 12 years what do you wish your 20 year old self now so much one-year-old self really struggled whether or not I get to read business or to get an attack of a technical degree in computer science or engineering and I think if I want to go back I would tell myself technical all the ways because learning business is a lot of fun and I think there's a lot of value that comes with that process I learned in the real world world as well you would have told your 20 heads up that you had wish you got a technical degree I did need a technical degree but it took me six years ago oh god I got it got it see what you got it earlier yeah awesome there you guys have it from Tobin he wishes he got a technical degree earlier again building redbrick fastest growing software company in Canada by third party launched in 2010 at about 200k by 2015 doing between 10 and 20 million bucks in a revenue they're getting out of the space of kind of professional services and 101 consulting for distribution and moving into kind of SAS plays with their new companies launched in 2016 desk metrics and shift each with several hundred or sorry yep several hundred hi hundreds of paying customers that's the shift specifically about eight hundred paying 20 bucks per year about 16 grand therefore good signs of early traction Tobin thank you for taking us to the top if you enjoyed Tobin today go back missing the Patrick yesterday he breaks down alternative investment ideas and I dig deep into his book deal where he negotiated a 10 percent royalty and a $100,000 advance it would mean the world to me if you guys got any value from this episode if you would go leave a review on iTunes right now and then subscribe you know I hustle like have to get these episodes out every freaking day for you guys and struck me I love it I would do with no listeners but boy oh boy makes my day and make my team day when we see great reviews and get your feedback so thanks so much okay so I'll Drive I love giving away free money I feel like people are giving away cars I have something special for you today how many of you have heard our super sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook into glass well all of you listening right now if you're listening you get a hundred dollars in free AdWords here's how you get it okay again thanks for listening get the 300 dollars from Google right when you sign up with my website post provider Hostgator go sign up now to get your free money hostgator.com forward slash Nathan again that's hostgator.com forward slash make them tonight I'm so glad to be back in Austin I just got back from a major tour of Southeast Asia I went to Sydney Bangkok Bali and Japan and you know I always get sick when I travel and this particular trip my gosh 15 different airports 20 different hotels I mean imagine flushing in airport values I was worried about germs and getting all the nutrition I need I mean finding a restaurant Japan difficult because nothing's in English so it's hard enough to figure out the train system but my point is I had a guy named drew Canole on this show who said Nathan if you're concerned about that take these little green package with you you just mix them once per day with water they'll keep you super healthy all your nutrients and they'll keep you from getting sick so I took them and guys they worked unbelievably well I got no sickness just mixed with water once per day they didn't make my water bottles all sticky that's like nice a lot of these mixers that make them sticky it's very clean and smooth to them once per day never got sick they've got 11 superfoods and the purpose if you're not traveling but you're just on the go from your office to work so you can check them out and make like a calm forward-slash juice that's making lenka calm forward-slash juice [Music]