How Resource Guru CEO Andrew Rogoff grew Resource Guru to $6.1M revenue with a 22 person team in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is andrew rogoff he's the co-founder of resource guru an online team calendar that's changing the way teams manage their time follower of all things digital and part-time eco warrior as well andrew are you ready to take us to the top i am all right all right so tell us about the company what does resource group do and what's your revenue model how do you make money okay it's a it's an online team calendar um and it also tracks uh time off people's time off um and we're changing the way teams manage their time trying to help companies become more profitable more efficient and get them away from their old you know spreadsheets and other things they used to use to for to track their their team's time and is it a sas model it's assassinated uh so we're a sort of very typical subscription-based app uh we have three pricing plans um andrew what's the average company pay per month for this uh average average is uh about a hundred and five dollars a month and what will people get for that how many team members can they manage uh for that you get it's about the average plan is about five dollars a month so it's a team of 20 people 25 people roughly yeah yeah that's great very good put this on a timeline for us when'd you launch company what year uh launched in 2012 2012 very good and then what have you scaled to over the past four years how many or sorry past six years how many customers have i scaled to uh we're up at about 1450 customers very specific you're counting every morning right we do we actually have a channel a slack channel that shows us all the customers as they come in well let me be extra specific with the numbers so 1 450 customers at 100 105 bucks a month that would put you guys about 152 250 bucks per month right now in mrr is that about right uh yeah i think so that's yeah so we're coming up to about 2 million that's right yeah so 152 grand per month obviously times 12 puts out about 1.8 million in terms of run rate so do you think you'll hit 2 million by the end of the year we've got 30 days left um we might squeeze probably not probably i think that'll be early early next year okay walk me through how you're driving this growth where i mean where are you getting these customers from um it's mostly through sc seo uh that's kind of how we how we started in the beginning what keywords sorry what was the first keyword you optimized for um i think it was resource scheduling uh it was as simple as that um we we had a hunch that people were searching for that and it kind of turns out to be true okay that's kind of how we got going that is that people found us on on the web through through good seo at the beginning when i search resource scheduling now today you guys don't rank for that are there other terms that you rank really high for that bring you in customers uh if you look at uh i don't know where we are for resource uh resource scheduling you guys are at uh position 11 they're at the bottom of the first page one oh okay okay yeah still good yeah it's very it's lots of different terms around that that where we're ranking well how many so walk me through instead of saying actual terms tell me the process so others can do it in their own industry so how did you find all the keywords you wanted to rank for uh we used tools really um things like moz um and just uh you know good seo work which is kind of looking at competitors in the early days that wasn't possible because we didn't actually have that many competitors but uh now you can you can look at competitors keywords and what they're targeting uh so andrew this the all the all these things spit you out a list of 700 keywords you should rank for between your competitors and ones through the keywords tool that you don't get searched what do you do with that list um well you've got you've got to prioritize them um so you've got to look at things like relevancy although how relevant are they to the product that you're you're producing uh and then you've got to look at volumes so how how how many times are people searching for those keywords um and then use those kinds of factors to to prioritize them um and uh so what i'm trying to get at what time what i'm trying to get at is once they're prioritizing you know the ones you want to rank for i mean do you have a team member dedicated solely to seo did you hire an agency how did you actually implement them um we actually started off with me doing seo which is um probably not the best thing in the world but um uh and we kind of to be honest we've spent more time building products than we have with seo and marketing since since we launched well so with this tactics though i mean what does the growth look like so if you're at 150 grand today per month where were you about a year ago do you remember um [Music] i can't remember exactly it would have been it would i mean it's an easy right it's an easy round number it would have been the end of last year the end of 2017. do you remember uh not off the top of my head or whatever you have to know generally i mean you doubled year over year you tripled you over here you're you're flat uh no we're not we're not tripling every year we're our uh our um our sort of monthly growth is uh which i can't um i'm not too sure we were growing about 40 we we've grown about 40 in the last year oh that's great okay so so if you're at 150 grand today you would have been out i'd call it maybe about 105 grand about a year ago yeah north of a million bucks still so over the past year you've basically gone from essentially a million to two million in run rate yeah yeah that's great and uh very good and have you uh raised uh capital or bootstrapped uh we raised capital oh andrew i was liking you so much and now you're on the dark side how much we haven't raised a huge amount we raised uh we raised 695 000 pounds which is about 870 000 was angels or equity or what sorry was it angel was it an equity round venture debt what was it uh the first round was kind of friends of the family um and then we had another round which included index ventures which is uh large vc in europe yeah so this is this is this is typical like this is typical venture capital not debt or convertible equity or anything like that no it's yeah okay and what's the team size today how many people we're 11 11. everyone based in london no we're we're all over the place we're we all work remotely uh we've got some people in sweden uh some in south africa uh all over the place london and ramona that's good uh and and churn's obviously critical in a company like this what's your churn today and how do you make sure to keep it low uh churn is about three and a half percent month on month uh customer channel um and the kind of key way for us to keep it low is to roll out the features on our roadmap uh we've got customers absolutely crying out for for the things that we've got planned um and every time we release something we find that our churn goes down so 3.5 that's revenue churn per month no that's that's customer what's revenue churn uh net well net revenue churn is about point eight percent okay point eight percent a month or about twelve percent per year so so so just to be clear if net revenue churn is about twelve percent uh per year that obviously is about one percent per month and what you're saying is the three point five percent logo churn those logos are usually paying less that's why revenue turns lower than the three point five percent yeah and we get we get yeah and we're getting expansion uh revenue so how are you doing that what pricing axes are you upselling against um well the expansion goes by number of customers down to their accounts so as as they add uh sorry a number of people add to their accounts the more people they add the more revenue we get is that the only leverage you have to upsell is just they have to grow their team and no we have also have different plans so you get access to certain features through uh upgrading your plan are there any other utility-based things you upsell against like you know number of resources managed or any kind of quantifiable axes well it is based on the number of resources so it's a per resource charge basically okay i thought you said it was it was per team member no it's per resource so so you could you could have one user of the app one person that actually logs in and uh 80 people and you'll be you'll be paying for 80 people so we would charge per per person in the app as opposed to per logged in user sorry you just said you charged per resource then you just said you charged per person are they the same thing yeah to us to us their resources so it's kind of um you know it's a project management term resources uh a lot of people don't like it they're really people uh people along with other things that you can take which is ultimately resources yep very good uh what about what about acquiring these customers in terms of fully weighted cac so to get a new 100 a month customer what are you willing to pay for them do you know uh our cac is about 325 okay so you get paid back in what three four months yeah roughly that's good and where do you spend that money when you do spend it um it's mostly spent on i think on sort of software directories um and also on sponsorship of relevant um events and and that sort of thing what was the last event you sponsored um digital project manager i think okay uh summits and things and we're talking like two three four grand that kind of range in terms of what sorry the sponsorship uh i'm not too sure i'm not it's not my i don't take care of that area so uh i we kind of my co-founder and i split uh our responsibilities and i'm sort of more product focused and he's more sort of marketing focus so fair enough is the is the company profitable cash flow positive today uh yeah oh that's good okay so even though you've raised your cash so positive yeah exactly congrats on that that means you're raising capital right now or you're selling to your biggest competitor which one is it uh we're going to be raising soon how much do you want to raise um i think it's going to be roughly in the ballpark of about five million yeah right now yep so hoping to raise 5 million obviously you're still probably negotiating this but ideally what would you like to raise that in terms of pre-money evaluation uh i don't know and that's not that's not a number i would want to check out there either well nate what don't share what you're actually potentially going to do it at because obviously it's sensitive and you're negotiating but what's something that would make you happy what's something that feels fair um probably what uh in terms of uh multiples of revenue yep um i would say eight might make me happy and how do what i'm most interested in is your thought process so how do you get to that um based on typical sas valuations i mean i keep it keep an eye on what sort of you know generally what sas companies are valued at and anything between five and i don't know what some of the recent crazy ones have been not 17 or 18. th those are the crazy ones see the problem is you know you never hear you never hear about the crazy ones on the other end of the spectrum which raise at point five x or one x yeah if we ever you know if we were if we were ever in that position we would just uh take a loan yeah and in fact in fact that's that might be the way that we we sort of go forward is is through like a venture debt yeah that type of thing yeah do you have a us-based outlet yet or no not yet yep no very good i'm always good always talk about that market but we haven't got an outlet there yeah very good let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five andrew number one what's your favorite business book uh i don't read a lot of business books um but i would say uh getting real by 37 signals is is a is a book that's really helped me number two is there a ceo you're following are studying right now uh not really jason frieda kind of from also from from base camp i kind of uh keep an eye on him from time to time he does some puts out some really interesting stuff number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company uh we use something called clubhouse uh which is which is a really good tool for for software development uh definitely recommend that number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh i try to get eight um but uh something's keeping me awake at night these days so what do you get uh i'd think it's probably more like six or seven okay six we'll call six and a half and what situation andrew married single kiddos i'm married and um i've got a adulterer on the way next month oh very exciting next month i mean in the next couple of weeks that's extremely well i'm glad we got the interview in beforehand congratulations and how old are you i'm 52 52 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh apart from kind of uh things like lottery numbers and that type of thing um i think how little time you end up with when you start a business like this um would be good to know that so that you you can get on with some of the your passions before you dive in guys remember how time sensitive is to to launch a company as extremely intense uh coming from andrew launched resource guru back in 2012 now 1450 customers paying 105 bucks a month so about 150 grand per month right now and revenue that's up from 105 grand just a year ago so 30 40 year-over-year growth they follow an seo playbook to drive that growth 870 grand raised they are profitable team of 11 in london and other remote locations one percent revenue churn per month that's gross and the net revenue churn per year right around 12 percent spending up to 325 bucks to get a new hundred dollar a month customer so four month payback again as they help teams manage the time of all their resources or their people or employees andrew thanks for taking us to the top pleasure well thanks for having me great show