How Aloha (formerly Review Wave) CEO Matt Prados grew Aloha (formerly Review Wave) to $20M revenue and 5.9K customers in 2024.

please help me in giving Matt Kratos from our V wave a warm Round of Applause [Applause] welcome Mike welcome welcome this will be your mic we'll grab a seat for you get up here get you featured all right so um talk first guys who knows about review wave have you used the product you've seen the product you've heard about it okay how would you describe review wave you know this guy uh new customer all right I just there we go perfect our product is definitely not for the SAS Market it's for doctors so um so tell us more about that yeah what's the product do review wave doctors sure so uh about six years ago I was running a digital marketing agency and did an analysis of all our clients who was getting the most new patients and I found who had the most reviews got the most new patients because we was in the same website the same ads all this kind of stuff and so it literally started as a little side hustle let's just show them how to get reviews coaching didn't work everything we went into technology it was manual that kind of worked but then we automated it by connecting to the electronic health records that they already used which you've heard that strategy over the last couple days integrating into their stack it was magic we just automatically started asking the reviews the reviews came in they got more new patients and you know that was the kind of the aha moment we're on to something we've certainly grown Way Beyond just asking for reviews we're in a complete patient engagement engine online scheduling appointment reminders automated campaigns you know it's it's a beast now vertical integration is beautiful now everyone wants to I don't know about you guys but some people my age um us Millennials they wake up on their bed and the first thing they look at a Snapchat on their phone or Instagram me it's the stripe dashboard it's always the stripe dashboard it's did I sell while I was sleeping and then I have a good day if you sell everyone wants to wake up and see this on their stripe dashboard so what are we looking at right here what is 25.53 in Gross volume look like yeah so I mean as you can see it's not the hockey stick yet we're still in the small you know upward tick but it's doing the the hard things over and over again consistently growing we've doubled year over year every year for the first five years and you know that's what it looks like and it uh got us to you know these different graphs I'm not a big graph guy I'm actually in um PowerPoint jail right now Nathan had to walk me through because I don't do decks yeah I'm like man you have such a good story but this deck is just not gonna work just let me do a deck and let me just interview you and he was game you're letting us do it so that's good so I mean I'm just I'm an operator I don't go around I don't speak on stages you know literally Nathan asked me to speak and I was like no I'm I'm actually not going to come I just archived that email I was like I got too much going on I went home that night and then I felt guilty because I've been exactly where you guys are in these seats and needing to hear one or two nuggets that will allow you to go home and do something that'll change your business so uh I guilted myself into coming uh had no time to be here literally was he was trying to get me to do this deck while I was on my 25-year wedding anniversary in Laguna Beach and I was like really bad now that looks so bad now okay but okay so let's type into that guilt right what are those things where like man I really gotta tell these Founders these couple things about our early days yeah so I mean there's so many lessons that you learn from different stages right uh you know in the beginning you know when you're just trying to you know make any kind of money from you know like zero to 100 clients uh you have to just be on top of everything right um that we've come to learn was wartime like that was the wartime CEO in me where it's like you know you're screaming it to get stuff done like you're breaking everything like systems don't matter at that point just getting result matters and then you know you evolve into you know having more people and and then you have to have systems and Training Systems um you know I think one of the biggest realizations you know in the last year that I've had is whoever starts with you is typically not going to finish with you and that's something that most people don't talk about and they don't tell you so you're not emotionally prepared for that when it happens uh so if you have people that you're really close with that have started this company they've been with you for a while you know life changes and sometimes they leave and so wait Matt let's dive deep there for a second so all of you guys think about your original cap tables from however many years ago the original Founders just raise your hand if you had some sort of well it's not dramatic I won't call on you to like throw your old co-founder under the bus because they won't let you buy back their Equity but just raise your hand if you had some old co-founder someone that had Equity where there was some kind of friction raise your hand high this is like come to this is the Oprah moment of SAS right we're all together right so what was your story it's not even just the cap table right it's it's just it's also employees you know uh had a had a gentleman who was with us from very very early on and he was with us for uh over three years and you know had a life change where you know got a girlfriend she was a ways away um he wanted to work remote we said absolutely not we are not remote first we're remote never I hate that business model um but uh you know so then he got mad at us and you know put in his notice like hey I'm gonna leave and we said cool you know you can stay as long as you continue producing and uh he just stopped doing good work right he started slacking on how he handled clients and caused some upsets Matt what's context here how big was the team size when this particular thing happened he started with us when we had like seven people and I mean he got let go this year and were you know over 70 people now seven and was he leading some VP of Revenue some critical it was high up in our support team he was great he was he did great work for while he was here uh I mean literally I had him over at my house every Thanksgiving for three years you know like he was part of the family right but life changed and he had to exit and then I'll tell you what he didn't like us on glass door somebody needs to start a review site for employees I know it's illegal so we can't do it but can you imagine if you got to look at the reviews from employers about employees before you hired them because man the things they say about us that's an amen moment someone's got to start that there's a there's a billion dollar business in here someone's got to just build that and go to town um okay so talk to me before we get into actual doctors pricing packaging things like that what what any co-founders what did your Captiva look like on day one uh I owned 100 you still own 100 no okay so what happened you didn't raise though right it's bootstrap yeah so I mean certain you know key employees and and whatnot um we did have one small like early early you know 150k from uh Angel at that point was a strategic kind of deal but uh we've never spent the money it's been in the bank the whole time uh it did allow us to you know tell people we had money in the bank so made a few hires easier but but no we've uh I'm 100 you know bootstrap guy we've never had a burn rate uh I couldn't sleep at night having a burn rate uh I would just go nuts so that's amazing okay so how were you able to do that if we go back to your Revenue growth here were you pre-selling contracts in 2018 to 2020 like what was the average price point these doctors were paying you per year yeah so we started at 99 a month and I hate annual prepays so we never did them so we literally and we were free trials so first for first 30 days was free and then it was 99 bucks a month on a month-to-month kind of contract and uh We've over the you know six years moved that from a 99 starting point to 299 399 499 and with another 300 available add-ons so we definitely pushed the you know go up Market scenario there I was gonna say so on this screen right now everyone's saying you're spending 1800 bucks to get these doctors as customers but the average initial ACV is it was about what today so I mean you know you've got 35 000 is what our um you know guys calculated but in reality at our growth rate half of our customers came on in the last 18 months so you can't even I mean you can't really get an LTV when they've only been with you for you know one to 18 months because but at the end of the day is our is our attack on there no it's not yeah so you know 0.76 so less than one percent logo term month over month so they're not going anywhere they stay with us what do you guys care about more when you guys run your monthly financials do you care more about...