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 that boots dropped their way way past a million bucks in revenue they're all sas models um obviously the flip side is maybe you can move fast with capital but how do you balance investing in software early versus getting in front of customers so you can fund yourself from customer revenue yeah no that's a really really good question um so i would say what we looked at was bringing in intelligence too so we wanted to have a very um we wanted the product to be the star of the show and that required some level of business intelligence that covered beyond just us developing it ourselves within the team or bootstrapping what could be developed so i would say because we wanted to bring in the expertise and develop the really stable intelligent using the predictive modeling business intelligence so that it was informative and could scale to larger organizations i'd say our customer base was different at the beginning so where other people may try to go to a more friendly customer base that would be looking at specifically helping you work out the kinks we were already going to customers and getting the name brands behind some of our early customers that required a more stable product so therefore we invested more into development because that was our strategy and our customers size was larger than just a smaller type of initial footprint what's the next big feature update what are you most excited about uh continued um intelligence i think one of the things we're really leaning into is natural language processing and being able to understand the myriad of contextualized data and being able to correlate it and make actions based on that so it would be really intense i'm sorry hold on andrew that's all those are a lot of big words i know i know i know that's good intelligence i need to quit uh speaking that way well can you make this very real okay i am a policeman working on a police force in georgia where am i writing as a police individual police person writing information so that my organization can analyze it yeah good question so um just being able to understand the qualitative feedback that you may get so even if it's just to a survey response which is pretty basic to be able to say we're seeing the sentiment of the force um getting stronger weaker these are areas that need to be addressed over time and making that more precise and being able to correlate it to workload 911 calls and other factors so that it is really um articulate and actionable i see okay now in terms of it does yeah that was helpful thank you um in terms of growth so i mentioned first customer uh athletes back in 2018. you mentioned you've scaled up to 50 now to date you do have an inside sales org so you're growing you mentioned average price maybe around two thousand dollars a month can i take two thousand a month times fifty you guys are north of a hundred grand a month right now on revenue yeah yeah absolutely what's the next big goal what are you excited about revenue-wise um i mean i think we're trying to scale to you know i mean eventually we'd love to see a 10x model so i think that's where we're setting our sights on and continue to get a stable and repeatable marketplace do you think you can break 10 million revenue next year by the end of next year oh um we'll see we'll see it depends it makes it a little uncomfortable but maybe a stretch goal right yeah we'll see how we end up for the year so do you think you can grow up to that sort of scale 10 million revenue without raising more capital or do you think you'll need to raise more um we'll see how that goes too we're we're always open uh we're not in the hunt right now if that makes sense got it so you don't think i mean growth right now you can keep driving growth without raising more capital using what you've already raised plus customer revenue yeah yeah that's obviously a great way to do it very cool all right um let's wrap up with the famous five number one angela what's your favorite business book right now it is never split the difference number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh just one um i think there are several that i'm following are studying so i guess it depends on the market so i'd say pick one uh pick one ceo that i'm following or studying i mean it's always it's always interesting to see what um [Music] yeah what's going on with space force yeah it's always interesting to see what's going on [Music] with space force sorry which ceo are you talking about yeah no i mean i i'm looking at we're looking at the uh several things within the department of defense so that's been interesting to see and then um yeah there's there are several that i'm following right now okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business that's a good question i think i enjoy the intelligence of salesforce number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night oh that's a good yeah easy answer about four four to five that's not that's not healthy yeah yeah it depends i catch up on the weekends but i i love to get up early for a run and i um oftentimes do my best thinking when the house is quiet at night fair enough and what's your situation married single kiddos married definitely and kiddos yes how many kids three oh but you are busy busy busy okay angela can i do is it do you mind me asking how old you are uh yes okay take us take take us the reason i ask is take us back to your 20 year old self what's something you wish that she knew um no that's a good question i think it would be just to have more confidence um in the in the beginning and speak up i was a you know a lone woman in tech uh for a long period of time and so i'd say in that situation just learned to speak up earlier guys ripple works in a very competitive and fast growing hr tech space they help they start off in 2018 helping athletes and athletic teams manage the sentiment of those teams now working with police forces production studios and 50 other logos and brands paying on average 2000 bucks a month to help them manage again their people on sentiment analysis doing about 2000 bucks a month per customer over 100 000 a month in revenue they look to scale they have raised some capital but are trying to be smart about it with their team of 35 15 engineers onboarding new sales reps as we speak to keep driving growth she's excited about the new nlp modules they're releasing here shortly angela thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally 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