How Ripl Hit $10M ARR Serving 70,000 Small Business Customers (Interview with CEO Clay McDaniel)

Nathan Latka

00:00Just 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 thirty 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

00:18way 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. Alright. For thirty minutes. Enjoy the interview.

Guest Introduction and What Ripl Does

Nathan Latka

00:27Hello everyone my guest today is Clay McDaniel he's a CEO of a company called Ripl 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?

Clay McDaniel

00:45Yeah. Thanks a lot, Nate.

Nathan Latka

00:46Do you code in the rain too or no? Do you raise capital in the rain?

Clay McDaniel

00:50Unfortunately, when you're on a bike, you can't really talk by phone much. So mostly I'm in my head when I'm on a commute.

Nathan Latka

00:55Fair enough. All right. Talk to us about the company. What's Ripl do and is it pure play SaaS?

Clay McDaniel

00:59It is. Yeah. So we are a marketing software tool for small businesses. Really the focus of Ripl since the start has been helping small businesses create their digital content and get it published to all their social channels.

Target Customer, Competitors and Roadmap

Nathan Latka

01:12Okay. When you say small business, mean, me a give me a sense here. On average, what are they paying you per month? We're talking like 10 or $20?

Clay McDaniel

01:18Yep. You got it. And unlike a lot of SaaS 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.

Nathan Latka

01:31Why have that target?

Clay McDaniel

01:33Well, I mean, 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

01:58build a tool that was beloved by them, it was a great value prop, 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.

Nathan Latka

02:08And who would you say are your bigger enterprise competitors?

Clay McDaniel

02:11Well, I mean, Canva has really shown the way. They've proven that, you know, a simple, easy to use digital content creation tool can just absolutely explode in the market.

Nathan Latka

02:21But they're not enterprise, right?

Clay McDaniel

02:23No, no. I think talking about small and medium business tools, 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

02:47our piece of the customer.

Nathan Latka

02:48No. No. Sorry. My my question is if someone starts on you guys and they get big, they start taking off ten thirty forty fifty on the... Where do they graduate to?

Clay McDaniel

02:55Yeah, gotcha. Well, I mean, I tend to think they graduate to the Adobe Creative Cloud for digital content and video creation, and then to kind of the larger email platform tools.

03:08But one of the things that 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 Ripl. So that's our goal is to kind of continue to build the product roadmap so that we scale

03:31as our customers find success.

Nathan Latka

03:33Okay, and put this on a roadmap for me. When did you launch the company? What year?

Company History and Rebrand to Ripl

Clay McDaniel

03:37Company has been around about seven years, but in market for about four and a half is Ripl. Actually, 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 as Ripl. And since we've been in market with the iOS app,

04:02the Android app, and now as of last year, our web app, we've just found that being a much more broad based and kind of agnostic as to which small business vertical we serve, It's really driven the growth.

Nathan Latka

04:13When did you join the company? What year?

Clay Joins as COO, Becomes CEO

Clay McDaniel

04:15I've been here about three and a half years, came on as COO and middle of last year, was asked by the board to take on CEO.

Nathan Latka

04:23So did you come in in 2017 as COO as part of a funding round?

Clay McDaniel

04:26Just after. The second funding round had happened, and then about a year into my tenure, we did a third seed round, brought on a little bit more funding from our existing VC and a whole range of the previous investors out of the angel base and haven't needed to raise since.

Funding History and Total Capital Raised

Nathan Latka

04:45How much total have you guys raised?

Clay McDaniel

04:47Just shy of 7.

Nathan Latka

04:48Okay. Just just shy of 7. 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 found... Or they told the founder, hey, we're happy to give you more capital, but we need Clay to come in the company as COO.

Clay McDaniel

05:01No. It was actually 2016, so mid twenty sixteen 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 they reached out because it was starting to kind of get air under its wings, and they knew that, you know, as a business person, I like growing businesses and wanted to help.

Nathan Latka

05:20Yeah. Mean, I guess the reason I'm asking is I think there was a debt round back in 2014, which by the way, I love debt. It helps founders keep more equity. And then there was something... I mean, that... Aligned... The Alliance of Angels, that wasn't a debt... That that was not debt financing?

Clay McDaniel

05:35No. No. No. So you may be seeing old data falling through Crunchbase or something that we actually bought the rights and the brand from a previous company that had folded early in the two thousand tens.

Nathan Latka

05:46Okay.

Clay McDaniel

05:46And maybe a little bit of some legacy data. We've only done three rounds. We had a convertible round early on that converted into equity, but

Nathan Latka

05:54Well, yeah, that would have been listed essentially as debt, right? A convertible note. So was there $1,400,000 like angel round early on convertible note?

Clay McDaniel

06:02Yeah, so that was back in '12, '13 something like this.

Nathan Latka

06:06Yeah, I guess the reason I'm asking is because typically, once you see that round of funding 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 $2,000,000 round. So not a lot of, you know, you know, there was like a

06:24little thing in between there. So you kind of go, hey, what's going on here? Was something flat? Was that a big down round?

Clay McDaniel

06:30No, actually, that was the explosive period of our growth. We've taken a non traditional approach to financing. You know, maybe it's because we're up here in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe it's because we have such a significant and healthy list of angels. Maybe it's just because we were able to grow quickly and say generate a

Nathan Latka

06:48again?

06:49What would you say is non traditional?

Clay McDaniel

06:51Not kind of going for these like monster big impressive, like written up in TechCrunch rounds.

06:58You know, we have wanted to keep the balance sheet and the board compact. We've wanted to keep the discipline around financial management in place. And I think that's served us well because there have been periods where we've had dips, either CAC went up or LTV came down, and we needed to be able to manage through that. And having, you know, a balance sheet that's adequate, but not bursting with cash, I think has been useful.

Nathan Latka

07:22Yeah. Yeah. No, it's fair enough. I'm all about managing dilution, obviously. 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 you at today, how many customers are you serving?

Current Customer Count and MAUs

Clay McDaniel

07:37So we've got about 70,000 paying any given month, you know, 250,000, 300,000 plus in MAUs. We've got that Mailchimp model of

Nathan Latka

07:46How do define... Sorry. How do define an MAU?

Clay McDaniel

07:48Folks that come into the app more than a couple times in a month. So one session alone doesn't do it for us. Know, You 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. So but yeah, serving more than 70,000 paying subscribers today.

ARR and Year-over-Year Growth

Clay McDaniel

08:06We're a little north of 10,000,000 ARR and looking to kind of put the foot down and grow faster this year ahead.

Nathan Latka

08:14Where was if you're at about 10,000,000 today, do you remember you were at about a year ago?

Clay McDaniel

08:18We've only been up by about three, 4% year over year from 'eighteen. 'seventeen to 'eighteen, we had huge growth, more than 200%. And so part of that was intentional. We kind of backed off the accelerator a little bit on customer acquisition. We saw CAC creeping up early in the year. We wanted to get that under control, bring our CAC back down. We're entirely a direct response marketing driven customer acquisition model. So no sales team at all.

08:44And that means when we see inefficiency creeping in on CAC, we kind of back off a little bit, go back and look at our approach. And so for the year ahead, know, we're looking to push harder on the revenue growth.

Nathan Latka

08:54Yeah. So just to be clear, like right now, you're doing something like $830,000 a month. About a year ago, you were doing like 800,000 a month, something like that.

Clay McDaniel

09:02That's about right on ballpark for gross sales.

Nathan Latka

09:04Okay. A lot of people do not have the discipline that you had to understand that their CAC has grown to a point that's not scalable and to pull back. So how did you know when that moment happened for you?

Clay McDaniel

09:17Well, we are tracking monthly cohorts, we're tracking cohorts by customer acquisition channel, and we run LTV CAC and ROAS, not only monthly, but like weekly, because we have a seven day trial period. So we just have so much discipline around the instrumentation of our CAC and the upper funnel, that if it goes a few, you know, more than a few weeks with coming out of round where our LTV CAC ratio needs to be, that's where we'll

09:44back off and look at efficiency, look at the quality of our ad creative, look at the qualification of our customer acquisition. You know, we're running this stuff like week in and week out to make sure that we don't throw bad money after good.

Free Trial Volume and Activation Benchmark

Nathan Latka

09:55Yep. So so how many people in a given month will sign up for a seven day free trial?

Clay McDaniel

10:01It depends on our ad spend, right? But, between 7,500 and 15 thousand, depending on how well we're doing organic, how efficient our ad spend is, etcetera.

Nathan Latka

10:11And what do you know you have to get these users to do activation wise in the seven days to drastically increase the likelihood they convert to paid?

Clay McDaniel

10:18At least three pieces of content created and posted.

Nathan Latka

10:22Interesting, not just created, but also posted.

Clay McDaniel

10:25Yeah, we can see when people save, but they don't post. And we've got integrations with eight of the different social media platforms. So when they save, but don't post, we see that there's like interest in the core value prop of content creation. But when they post, what they're really doing is they're giving their trust and faith to Ripl as an alternative to like Instagram or Facebook or one of the native apps.

Nathan Latka

10:25Yep.

Clay McDaniel

10:25To go ahead and

10:47publish that content for them, and then to tell them how it's doing. And that to us really signals like trust in the whole value prop, whole arc of that kind of user experience.

Nathan Latka

10:55Yep. And then Clay, so same question going out of the funnel, but how many new customers will you sign up each month typically?

Clay McDaniel

11:01On a registration basis?

Nathan Latka

11:03No, no, like new paying customers. So let's say there's between seven and fifteen. Yeah, yeah.

Clay McDaniel

11:06Yeah, I got you. We convert about half.

Nathan Latka

11:09That's a massive conversion rate, 50%?

Clay McDaniel

11:12Well,

11:13so yes. But obviously, the conversion rate is much, much lower if you were to compare it just to free users who are registering. So on a free user conversion rate, we do about 20% of those, right? So in any given month, you know, we might get 60, 70, 80, 90,000 new registered users in, that's going to generate something like, you know, 10 to 15,000, less more depending on the month of folks trying the subscription. And then

11:40we keep about half of those.

Nathan Latka

11:42Okay, got it. So yeah, just repeat that 80 ks new register, they give you an email 10 ks actually try to seven day trial, do you require credit card upfront?

Clay McDaniel

11:49In most cases, I mean, and Google actually administer that for us. So we don't have to re enter the credit card info if they've got valid information in their accounts. But for the folks we acquire through the web app, we go ahead and ask for that upfront at the point of trial.

Nathan Latka

12:02Okay. So 10,000 do that. They try to send a subscription and you're basically saying about 50% of those people post three pieces of content, they create it and post it and about again, that leads to the conversion. So about 5,000 new customers per month on 80,000 registered.

Clay McDaniel

12:15Yeah. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Depends. And we've got a couple partner programs running too that just bring folks directly in, where they're at... We're bringing them straight into the subscription.

Nathan Latka

12:25So so... And this is a tough question because I can tell you're extremely disciplined analytically. So there's going be a lot of caveat you're going want to answer this with. But looking across channel, generally speaking, to get a new $10 to $15 a month customer, what are you willing to spend to get that customer in terms of payback period?

CAC, Payback Period and Churn

Clay McDaniel

12:39I mean, I'll tell you our CAC. We've been running somewhere between $35 and $45 for more than a year now.

Nathan Latka

12:39Okay.

Clay McDaniel

12:39And that's, that's CAC against, you know, first billing event, right? Customers that are actually converting not to trialers, but folks that become billing customers for us.

Nathan Latka

12:54So that's not horrible. I mean, that's a three month payback period.

Clay McDaniel

12:57Yeah. And, you know, that's on gross, right? So we got to account for the commissions. Apple and Google take a pretty healthy slug out of the first year. So you know, you're like looking at it net, it's a few more months than that. But the thing for us is like, we just have always been about, you know, running and growing this business in a way that's sustainable and not sort of burning off cash for the sake

13:19of acquisition if we don't think we can keep those folks. At least keep them long enough to make the LTV CAC work for us.

Nathan Latka

13:24So what is gross revenue churn over the past twelve months?

Clay McDaniel

13:27I mean, it's significant. Like, you know, on average, we only keep our customers across the whole base a little more than a year. So it's high, right? But that doesn't really provide the nuance of the cohorts, right? We've got a significant group of folks, and we continue to sign up more and more on a proportional basis every day who are on the annual SKU. So we keep them, you know, for several years. And we've even got

13:48folks that go back three, three and a half, four years of subscriber life for us back to the iOS days when that was the only app we had. So we lose a lot of folks up front, the steepness of the curve in those first few months is quite high, we've got to improve that. Everything we're doing in the product roadmap is to bring that down. But once we keep somebody for four or five, six months, we're

14:07pretty confident we're going to have solid LTV out of those folks.

Nathan Latka

14:10Yeah, you'll have them for many, many years. Yeah. Obviously, that's pattern you've seen a lot of SaaS, but looking at a weighted average, again, the customers that are paying you a year ago, let's say they're paying total. Well, we know the number actually, you said about $800,000 per month. If you ignore new customer signups, what you're saying is about $700,000 of 800,000 will disappear, you have to replace that each

Clay McDaniel

14:10It

14:30is about right.

Nathan Latka

14:31Yeah. Yeah, mean, so this is the reason it's interesting to me is like most people will look at that and say it's a massive weakness. But if you can figure out knowing that your churn is high, if you can figure out how to keep CAC really low, you can still build a great business.

Clay McDaniel

14:44Yeah, I mean, every VC we've ever spoken to specialty is enterprise, just as like, wait a minute, those are monthly churn numbers, like you got to be using annual, you know, that surely you mean annual, right? And now we say no, this is a fickle audience, they're extremely price sensitive. They have a very high bar on the value proposition and the standard they hold for what they're going to pay for and what they're not. But building

15:05a business around that, if you can do in a way where your LTV CAC, you hit the right numbers in the right ratio, and you really deeply understand this target audience, we believe there's just an enormous amount of goodwill there. You know, our ratings are like over four, 4.2 on the App Store as we have incredible NPS. And so while it's a really challenging audience to manage that churn for, look, Mailchimp, Canva, many others have shown

15:29that if you do it great, and you do it at scale, like, it can become a beautiful business.

Nathan Latka

15:32What's your team size today?

Clay McDaniel

15:33How many folks? 30.

Nathan Latka

15:3530 people. Okay. How many engineers?

Clay McDaniel

15:37It's about half.

Nathan Latka

15:38Okay.

Clay McDaniel

15:39QA engineers.

Nathan Latka

15:40In Washington?

Clay McDaniel

15:42Everybody here, we've got a couple folks helping us on overnight regression testing out of the country, but all the FTEs are here in Bellevue, Washington.

Nathan Latka

15:50Now this price point is too cheap to have any full time sales reps with quota. Correct?

Clay McDaniel

15:55I can't imagine this company ever having a salesperson.

Nathan Latka

15:57Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say just that the math doesn't work. Now what does work are like channel partnerships and things like that. So name name, just paint that picture for us. What channel works really well for you?

Clay McDaniel

16:07Yeah, I mean, is really nascent for us. To be honest, this has been a direct response, direct marketing driven company from the start. We have one meaningful small business services company, a financial services company that I can't name, but which will become public here in q one, which has been helpful for us in the last year. It's kind of been helping us cut our teeth and learn how to run a partner program. And we just hired

16:30a couple folks here starting in February are going to help us spin up partnerships.

Ad Spend and Direct Response Model

Nathan Latka

16:34So direct response, mainly, give me a sense of scale here last month, how would you spend total on on direct ad spend?

Clay McDaniel

16:42It varies because we bring it up and down based on CAC efficiency, but never goes below about 200,000.

Nathan Latka

16:48Okay, and what would be like the max BF economics we're holding that month?

Clay McDaniel

16:52When we see LTV real point really pulling through, which means our trial churn is looking good or month one churn is looking good. We'll go up to 400,000, a 500,000 or more.

Nathan Latka

17:01Okay.

Clay McDaniel

17:01We've got a lot of flexibility on being able to ramp up and down spend, particularly on Facebook, but obviously in display channels and in the long tail, just because our balance sheet's solid. And so because we drive that discipline weekly, not monthly or quarterly around how we're doing on the return, you know, we're pretty nimble on ramping up and down based on efficiency.

Breakeven and Capital Plans

Nathan Latka

17:20Yeah. And your last raise was back in 2017. Any plans to raise capital right now or no?

Clay McDaniel

17:25We don't need it.

Nathan Latka

17:28You're breakeven then?

Clay McDaniel

17:30Yeah, yeah, we're on the right side of that right now. And you know, as we hire a few more folks who might step down to burning again, but the intent here is to run this thing at breakeven or better and to continue to scale it, but at a faster rate this year. So a little bit more aggressive reinvestment rate in customer acquisition.

Hypothetical Buyout, Outlook and Churn Debate

Nathan Latka

17:47Mhmm. Obviously, again, churn is something that anyone's gonna have to get over, whether it's a VC, a debt provider, or an acquisition like a buyer. But if someone came in and offered you something like, you know, 3x on the company for you to sell for $30,000,000, I mean, you guys take that deal?

Clay McDaniel

18:00That's a board decision, and I'm only one member of the board. I think we're pretty optimistic. I think we have a pretty aggressive sense for the depth of understanding we have for this target customer audience and a pretty optimistic view of where we're gonna take the product this year. So I don't think three x would do it for us.

Nathan Latka

18:20Do you... Are you married, Clay?

Clay McDaniel

18:22I am.

Nathan Latka

18:23Let me ask this question differently. If you went home tonight told your spouse you turned down a $30,000,000 acquisition offer, do they kill you?

Clay McDaniel

18:31No. And I would tell her that.

18:36We don't reckon that's a fair valuation at this point. And we're pretty bullish, actually, especially in light of what's going on with investment marketplace and macroeconomic everything else. I mean, ironically, there's a countercyclical effect. Small, there are more small businesses that come in the market when the economy gets tight, entrepreneurship explodes, and our TAM is huge. We've got five years of slugging away having to be this really disciplined, really grinded out kind of a company. And

19:03so we reckon, you know, fulfill our product roadmap ambition that we should be growing faster this year.

Nathan Latka

19:09Yeah, somebody listening right now is gonna say, he's totally right on the macroeconomics, Canva Mailchimp, they're doing great. But Canva Mailchimp don't have 90% gross revenue churn annually. They don't have to replace their whole base basically each year. And oh, by the way, Clay, you know, you guys are flat year over year. There's no way you're worth 3x. You would counter and say, listen, we got a great product roadmap for this year.

Clay McDaniel

19:27Well, yeah, and we're not churning all that revenue on an absolute. Like averages are averages, right? So a meaningful portion of our customer base, we're keeping a meaningful portion of our revenue, we lose a lot right away in those first few months of those billing periods through that high churn. But, you know, more than half of our paying customer base we've had for longer than a year.

Nathan Latka

19:45Oh, wait, just to be clear, sorry, Gross revenue churn, again, take, you know this, I'm preaching to choir, you clearly know your metrics. You take your total customers a year ago who were paying $800,000 a month, and you look at how many of them and what they're paying and the dollars they're still paying today. If you have 90% churn, that means today they're paying about $100,000 per month, that cohort, right?

Clay McDaniel

20:05Yeah, I'm running out metrics for you that had to do with looking at month over month, looking at year over year. My point is like, we've got higher churn than what we want. But we have kept a meaningful portion of our customer base for longer than that. So the averages, you know, month over month, year over year are not gonna line up perfectly for

Nathan Latka

20:22But that's not a... Sorry, that's not an average. Like gross gross revenue churn annually, that's not an average of anything. That's looking at the same customer base over the last twelve months.

Clay McDaniel

20:32I don't have that for you. We look at it month over month. So what we do is we run out our month over month, and then we look at what that looks like on an annualized basis. If I went and I took the exact paying customer base at the end of calendar year 2018, looked at the end of calendar year 2019, I think it would be well north of 30% actually. So on a gross revenue basis,

20:53it's not as high as that on an annual year over year basis.

Nathan Latka

20:55Sorry, well north of 30%. Sorry, north of 30% retention?

Clay McDaniel

20:59That Yeah. We carried

Nathan Latka

21:01I see. So you think gross revenue churn annually might be more something like 70%, not 90?

Clay McDaniel

21:05We have we have not lost on a year over year calendar year over year basis as compared to end of twenty eighteen to 2019. We have not lost that much. But we pay the most attention a month over, right? The 75%, 80% of our customer base is on a monthly SKU. When we're looking at that month over month churn, and we see month over month churn creeping up anywhere north of 7% or so, that's where we

21:26start to get

Nathan Latka

21:26Yeah, but that's what the actual average is. Like that's actually not you just told me you see when you look at your retention curves a lot in months one and two, and then after they say past four or five months, they could stay for years. So why would you look at? Why would you split your cohorts? Yeah.

Clay McDaniel

21:42Well, because we want to see where the cohort gets set at the start of the curve. We want to see that so that we can kind of run our LTV models and estimate what that behavior is likely to look like. Because as you know, the shape of the curve never really changes, but the position of it does depending qualification

Nathan Latka

21:57Exactly. Of

Clay McDaniel

22:00And so where that flatlines, like, we're running that out and looking really with discipline month by month by month at those cohorts. And on a year over year basis, you know, we're keeping a healthy portion, losing a significant number through our churn as well. But if the economics are working straight away in those first few monthly events, then our payback period is going to work fine, and we're doing well on cash.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

22:20Yeah, very cool. Alright, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Clay McDaniel

22:25I love Dalio's Principles. I just think that running a company is as much about your decision making and your philosophy as it is about the numbers.

Nathan Latka

22:33Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

22:43You can say none, by the way.

Clay McDaniel

22:45I, you know, I honestly am learning every day on this job. And the folks that I tend to pay the most attention to their running companies are like me, the folks that have come in second or third, and have had to figure out

Nathan Latka

22:57can you name one though?

Clay McDaniel

23:01I'll decline. I'll think on that.

Nathan Latka

23:02Alright, number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company?

Clay McDaniel

23:07SendGrid. We use an awful lot of Ripl for our social media activities, but I love the flexibility of SendGrid for email.

Nathan Latka

23:15Number four, how many hours of sleep you get every night?

Clay McDaniel

23:18Shoot for six. And what's going on with my kiddos and their homework.

Nathan Latka

23:22How many kids?

Clay McDaniel

23:23Three.

Nathan Latka

23:24Wow, you're okay, busy guy. Married three kiddos and how old are you?

Clay McDaniel

23:2846.

Nathan Latka

23:2946.

23:30Last question, what do you wish your 20 year old self knew?

Clay McDaniel

23:37That it's okay to take significant career risk early. Anything you do before you're about 30 or 35 is all about learning.

Nathan Latka

23:44Guys, there you have it. Clay McDaniel building a Ripl. Think of it like quick video and content creation for small businesses. Over 70,000 small businesses pay them, but they're doing about $10,000,000 in ARR right now. They are flat year over year as they focused on getting some new products to market iOS, Android, web apps, looking to really stomp on that growth this year. Paying careful attention to unit economics got between about a four to six month

24:05payback period, spending anywhere between 200 and $400,000 a month on ads depending on if CAC and LTV stuff holds out. But again, looking to scale with their team over the next year up there in Washington. Clay, thanks for taking us to the top.

Clay McDaniel

24:18Yeah. Nathan, I wanna thank you, man. Everything you do for helping create transparency and a sense of community in this market is just incredible.

Nathan Latka

24:25I mean, I should be I mean, I should be thanking you for playing ball and being vulnerable and sharing numbers. I mean, this is what people learn from. So thanks for playing ball and coming on.

Clay McDaniel

24:32Yeah. You got it. Hey. Appreciate the time. Have a good one.

Nathan Latka

24:37These CEOs rarely give these kinds of interviews. I hit them hard. I get the data, and I wanna do it more. So if you wanna get more of this stuff, make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally, go check out one of my other CEO interviews right now.