How RippleWorx CEO Angie Sandritter grew RippleWorx to $6.3M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is angela sanders she's building a company called ripple works with an ex on the end.com of people analytics and retention and optimization platform angela are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right let's jump in here so what's the company doing and what are companies paying you for yeah good question so people analytics and that's a really broad spectrum of things but i think what we really focus on is trying to understand the sentiment of your employees or your workforce and how you can individually motivate them and retain them so we really see um how do we you have you have so many systems that are available to manage your machines your processes that you have for efficacy and so forth but really you have little to understand the heartbeat of your workforce and that's what we're really focused on doing does that mean you're selling mana to hr managers uh leads team leaders things like that it can be hr absolutely um if hr is a champion for this then absolutely and i find that in today's day in industry hr has taken a whole new road than they have two years ago so now they are the strategic workforce course to really drive the company forward when you think of your key individuals within your company which are your assets so yes absolutely hr but then if it's a champion within a business unit or an operational head then that individual wants to see that they're keeping their workforce strong and so we definitely work with operation leads or hr you have a very cool dashboard for folks to use to manage all this what are customers paying you on average per month to use the technology um yeah so we have a sas license we have a module it can start anywhere from four to eight um dollars per user per month so it all depends on the types of um features that you're using and so what is the average like team sign up was it a 10 person team typically a thousand person team what's the average brand paying you per month to use it it is when you start to see that you can't talk to every person in every day um and you start to see that the workforce is distributed so i would say starting out maybe with 50 individuals and then moving all the way up into the thousand individual types of organizations when you look across your current customer base so is it fair to say the average team is starting with maybe 50 seats at four bucks a pop or about 200 bucks a month um so you would typically see this closer to 500 users i'd say that's probably our average um customer base size and so in the four to six dollar range would probably be the average price point so you're more like mid market not smb you know obviously 500 seats at four bucks pop is about two grand a month on average versus a smaller a smaller team okay very cool um let's let's get your back story here when'd you launch the business what year um 2018. that's what we're doing how did you come up with the idea it was based on the ripple effect and so we found that many organizations had annual performance reviews but this wasn't really addressing are they developing their individuals correctly are they training them in the right needs within the organization so thinking of sort of the if you look at the um kmo model i don't know if you're familiar with that but when you're thinking about knowledge motivation organizational needs and you know this is something even my husband has written his dissertation on so it was kind of something we talked about within our family and is he your co-founder he is absolutely who owns more equity you or him that's a great question come on hopefully you own you're 51 he's 49 right actually we're support we have more people that are part of the founding team so we we started working with athletic teams i'm the tech brains he's the inspiration behind the methodology and uh then we've we translated this into initially for human performance or a tactical athlete of how do you help to optimize their performance and how do you get teams lined for this particular goal and so we saw that as our initial pilot market but then it started going to high performing teams so we worked with production studios where they said we're kind of like athletes and then we work with law enforcement where they say we have to think about motivating retaining and even thinking of cultural changes within the workforce so that's where ripple works can really shine in those types of organizations i see okay so first customers were athletes and athletic teams you didn't scale from there how many customers are you serving now today that's a really good question so um yeah probably close to 50 or so customers okay yeah so 550 teams police you know so that could be one one government or one city with a police team would be one out of 50. yeah yeah i see do you have any geographic concentration are you focused on one city or area we started in the southeast so i would say you know within atlanta huntsville um where we are headquartered was the initial start of our customer base buddy has since grown so now we have customers that are located um throughout the us we have international customers etc so it has grown uh beyond just the southeast region of the u.s now how many co-founders are there you your husband who else there are six of us total i have to do that we macro six co-founders yeah we expanded that group i would say so it wasn't all initial founders but uh we've kind of expanded the group of people that have fallen into um adding strategic value uh to the team but who was there in 2018 how many that's a good question i think it started out initially with about four of us and then it grew beyond that um so six team members own equity you're calling them sort of co-founders what's the total team size today 35 35 and is it heavy engineering how many engineers the majority of our workforce are the engineers and so i would say we're looking at about 15 or so would be in the engineering space and then you go into sort of the sales engineering realm or the customer support team which is still kind of that engineering mindset so and then uh business development beyond that i see do you have quota carrying sales reps yes oh wow how many of those uh so right now we've got two of those three of those which is angelo that's that's a key driver i mean that's once you start hiring those and they're running a playbook ideally you can just hire them effectively scale not infinitely obviously but that's a big moment for a sas startup how did you have the confidence to hire your first sales rep and how did you know what quarter to give them yeah no good question so we really when we started to see that we could articulate the the value proposition within a particular market and we saw that it was scalable and the system could be more turnkey or um be able to drive itself within those markets that's where we determined to bring on some quota sales people at first we weren't so successful at this but with the last three we've been able to get this model right and to bring it forward can i ask you what quota you set them on like do they have to close a million bucks of new revenue per year what target do they have yeah some are at that amount of money yeah interesting and do you fall pretty standard playbook here where if their quota is a million and they hit it they're earning about one-fifth of that as total comp so 200 000 total salary if they hit it uh it's a typical model yeah so i would say it varies but depending on the market and what they may have come in with the base and so forth so there are some determining factors on there but yeah okay interesting and other question obviously capital allocation have you guys bootstrapped or did you raise a bunch of capital um we bootstrapped and we raised some capital but we haven't gone for any series um serious type so it was still kind of our friends and family network okay how much have you guys raised today and when um [Music] i think part of that is confidential so i don't know how much i can really say of that but um yeah we we bootstrap some and we've uh yeah i'll just leave it at that well how do you i mean this is obviously a key piece to getting your mpp launched and going is do you choose to bootstrap or not and it requires different parts of the brain whether you throw capital upon our creativity can you share any information there right i mean are we talking like millions of dollars raised or under a million and you're being pretty creative um yeah it says upwards of a million though okay okay why and um i don't know how to ask this maybe don't be offended by this i'm generally curious i mean what is what makes this heavy lifting why do you need so much capital to launch a tool like this yeah i'd say because we were expecting somewhat of a sas model right so when you think about it most of your upfront costs are in the development cost upfront and so therefore you don't have the customer base you're developing the product and determining market fit and mvp and getting that solidified so that you can go into that scalable market model so the upfront cost oftentimes for a sas company or the traditional models of that hockey stick are going to be up front and so we paid a lot of poor development up front and so we're getting to the point that we're looking at the scalability and then the upside but i mean there's a lot you know we've interviewed now maybe or 3 100 or so sas founders directly and there's a big subset called maybe 20...