How Ripl CEO Carey DiJulio grew Ripl to $6.2M revenue and 70K customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is clay mcdaniel he's a ceo of a company called ripple a marketing software company used by millions of small businesses and independent marketers worldwide he spends most of his career at the intersection of software marketing and emerging media and lives in seattle and rides his bike in the rain clay you're ready to take us to the top yeah thanks do you code in the rain too or no do you raise capital in the rain uh unfortunately when you're on a bike you can't really talk by much so mostly i'm in my head when i'm on a commute fair enough all right talk to us about the company what's ripple do and is it pure play sass uh it is yeah so we are a marketing software tool for small businesses um really the focus of ripple since the start has been helping small businesses create their digital content and get it published to all their social channels okay when you say small business i mean give me give me a sense here on average what are they paying you per month we're talking like 10 or 20 bucks yup you got it and um unlike a lot of uh sas tools that are out there we focus on businesses that have 10 or fewer employees and a meaningful part of our customer base is actually just single entrepreneurs solo why have that target well i mean from the outset really the mission of the company has been to kind of empower people that didn't otherwise have marketing knowledge or technical skills and just let the magic of software help them stand out online and on social media so we figured the least served piece of the market for small businesses were young entrepreneurs people just starting out who didn't even have any team at all around them and so we figured if we could build a tool that was beloved by them it was a great value prop you know we kind of have a bit of a moat around ourselves and wouldn't get a lot of pressure from above from the bigger software providers and that's proven to be true and who would you say are your bigger enterprise competitors well i mean canva has really shown the way um they've proven that you know a simple easy to use digital content creation tool can just absolutely explode in the market but they're not enterprise right no no i think talking about small medium business tools um we look at the ones that have a focus on small businesses but have managed to kind of creep up into mid and large sized companies just through the beauty and the sort of elegance of their product from an enterprise standpoint i mean honestly we don't see very many i mean many of the companies that have built marketing automation tools email platforms they're not really pushing into our piece of the company sorry mike my question is if someone starts on you guys and they get big they start taking off 10 30 40 50. where do they graduate to yeah i gotcha um well i mean i tend to think they graduate to the adobe creative cloud for digital content video creation and then to kind of the larger email platform tools um but one of the things that um even the website hosting companies like squarespace and wix and weebly and these guys have shown is that you know they can scale as companies get bigger and bigger and provide that solution for those larger companies similarly you know we're coming out this year with tools that enable multi-person marketing teams to use ripple so that's our goal is to kind of continue to build the product roadmap so that we scale as our customers find success okay and put this on a road map for me when'd you launch the company what year uh company has been around about seven years but in market for about four and a half as ripple um actually the first incarnation of the company that my predecessor our founder he brought out was really a video creation and influencer engagement tool and about four and a half five years ago found that the video creation and publishing capabilities were of greatest interest pivoted the company rebranded and renamed his ripple and since we've been in market with the ios app the android app and now as of last year our web app um we've just found that being much more broad based and kind of agnostic as to which small business vertical we serve it's um really driven the growth when did you join the company what year i've been here about three and a half years uh came on as coo and um uh middle of last year um was asked by the board to take on ceo so did you come in in 2017 as co as part of a funding round um just after um the second funding round had happened and then about a year into my tenure we did a third seed round brought on um a little bit more funding from our existing vc and a whole range of the previous investors out of the angel base and um haven't needed to raise since how much total have you guys raised uh just shy of seven okay just just shy of seven okay so just to be clear there wasn't a moment in 2017 where it was like hey we need capital where they basically told the prior fountain or that they told the founder hey we're happy to be more capital but we need clay to come in the company as ceo no it was actually 2016 so mid-2016 i came on and i joined when the company was only about seven eight people i had worked with the founder and the chairman of the board previously on a couple of startups and um they reached out because it was starting to kind of get air under its wings and they knew that um you know as a business person i liked growing businesses and wanted to help yeah i mean i guess the reason i'm asking is i think there was a debt around back in 2014 which by the way i love debt it helps founders keep more equity uh and then there was something i mean that aligned the elect the alliance of angels that wasn't a debt that was not debt financing no no no so um you may be seeing old data falling through crunchbase or something that um we actually bought the rights and the brand from a previous company that had folded early in the 2010s okay and maybe a little bit of some legacy data but we've only done um three rounds we had a convertible round early on um that converted into equity but yeah that would have been listed essentially as debt right it kind of convertible note so was there a 1.4 million dollar like angel round early on control note yeah so that was back in 12 13 something like this yeah yeah i guess the reason i'm asking is because typically once you see that round of funny come in like you are saying we're on the vc train i mean like you're in and and you know fast forward two three years when trilogy equity came in that was you know around the time you joined in 2016 it looked like it was like a two million dollar round so so not a lot of you know you know there's like a little thing in between there so you kind of go hey what's going on here was something flat was that a big down round no actually that was the explosive period of our growth um we've taken a non-traditional approach to financing um you know maybe it's because we're up here in the pacific northwest um maybe it's because we have such a significant and healthy list of angels um maybe it's just because we were able to grow quickly and generate say again what would you say is non-traditional uh not kind of going for these like monster big impressive like written up in techcrunch rounds um you know we have wanted to keep the balance sheet in the board compact we've wanted to keep the discipline around financial management in place and i think that's served as well because there have been periods where we've had dips either cac went up or ltb came down and we needed to be able to manage through that and having you know a balance sheet that's adequate but not um bursting with cash i think has been useful yeah yeah no it's fair enough i'm all about managing delusion obviously um okay so 2013 launch date you come in three years after that 2016 some capitals raised you launched the web ios and android apps double down on video focus on smb where yet today how many customers are you serving so we've got about 70 000 paying um any given month you know quarter million 300 000 plus in maus we've got that mailchimp model of how do you define sorry how do you define an mau folks that come into the app more than a couple times in a month so one session alone doesn't do it for us you know we might just have somebody respond to a push notification or just be coming to check their stats they really need to come in with intention um so um but yeah serving more than 70 000 i'm paying subscribers today um we're a little north of 10 million are um and looking to kind of put the foot down and grow faster this year ahead where was uh if you're at about 10 million a day do you remember we were at about a year ago we've only been up by...