How Rising Team CEO Jennifer Dulski grew Rising Team to $2.5M revenue and 55 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Jennifer dolski she's the CEO and founder of rising team a SAS company that helps organize organizational leaders build engaged connected and successful successful teams through authentic team development workshops around key leadership Concepts she's been leading teams for more than 20 years as an executive at both big tech companies and scaling startups including Facebook Google Yahoo and change.org our lifelong passion is centered on empowering people to reach their full potential follow along at Rising team.com Jennifer you ready to take us to the top and I am all right so hey just cleared the year here for a second would you consider this more coaching or is there a SAS product you've built your software this is absolutely a SAS product in fact there are no humans involved other than the leader of the team that uses our software so essentially what we do is equip managers to run team development sessions with their teams by following the prompt in our software it has everything from you know warm-up to learning goals to an activity to count down timers all in the software itself interesting so what what's sort of the kind of thing that would happen where a leader at a company might use is it like a team Retreat or the monthly All Hands call or yeah you can use it in any so we have teams all over the world using this sometimes they just set up dedicated time for these sessions sometimes they run them at off-sites you can do them remotely or in person we have two different types of sessions one are what we call learning kits which are around all the topics that drive high performing teams like psychological safety and appreciation and so forth those sessions take about two hours so you gotta block you know a little bit of time for them but we recommend once every six weeks so two hour hours every six weeks is less than one percent of your time and then the second type or what we call connection boosts these are shorter so one hour and they're just like deeply understanding each other as human beings and those can be done anytime okay very cool now how do you price for something like this what's the average customer pay you per month to use it yeah it's a subscription product so you subscribe and then you get access to all the kits to use however often you want we do have some bottom-up sales so individual managers that the pricing per team is 99 a month per team so a team is a manager plus up to 10 people and then most of our customers actually come in through kind of a top-down mechanism where ahead of a division or the head of people for a company will want to use Rising team to increase engagement or scale their talent development and those deals can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars when you how do you price those the number of heads head counts so we have two ways to price it if it's sort of a partial org we price it on number of teams so again teams of up to up to lead plus 10 and the pricing goes down as you add more teams obviously and as you pay up front and then when you get to full org we go to per employee per month pricing or per okay um and how do you check that what if someone says no this is just the the pro I only need 10 seats and I'm one lead just give me that one 99 bucks a month versus wait a second that's your whole organization you should be on the bigger plan yeah well we can tell how many employees exist at a certain company so and it's actually way more affordable for them to go to the per employee per month it's actually you know that's a better deal for everybody because you get unlimited teams so if you think about it when you're paying by team let's say you want to do yourself and your direct reports and then you want to run a second team with your cross-functional project folks or you want to run just another session just to get to know people in the company if you're paying by team each one of those would be a separate team you pay for when you get to per employee you can do as many team as you want mix and match I see oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so on that full org model you threw out I think several hundred thousand per uh per year uh for that is that like your highest customer is that which that's a fair average is you know a hundred thousand two hundred thousand bucks a year it really depends on the size of the orc so you know if you're our per employee per month pricing ranges from kind of six to ten dollars per employee per month so it's gonna depend on the size of your org you know we have something that's right that's gonna say that's I'm trying to get a sense of are we talking thousand person orgs or ten thousand person orgs or 50 person orgs right what's your sweet spot if you had to pick an average yeah you know it's so funny when we thought about our ICP like who's our ideal customer profile originally we thought it's kind of mid-sized high growth tech companies you know maybe someone with a low glass door score because what we do is actually really Drive Employee Engagement and retention up um but as it turns out all these really big companies wanted this too it's you know what's happening in the workplace is you know it's just Everything's changed people are hybrid and everybody wants to quit and you know well-being is kind of down and so you know we have customers like the Bank of Hawaii and other kind of multi-thousand personal orgs yeah so do you mean yeah like our average if you had to take an average it's probably in our average contract size right now is probably like five thousand dollars because we have a lot of people signing up on their own for a single team and then we have a bunch of people as I said in the hundreds that's five thousand per month 60 a year probably yeah something like that again yeah sorry go ahead We're not gonna say what would someone paying you 60 000 a year how big is their team probably so again the way to think about it maybe on average is a hundred dollars per person per year 100 per person per year okay fair fair and then the average team setting up with you might be something between you know 100 and 500 employees something like that you know what I would say is it's real it really varies so the the companies where we're signing full org some of them are are you know 2500 5 000 people and then sometimes what happens usually organizations start with a pilot so they might say okay we'll start with 10 teams see how it goes then they might expand to 100 teams and then you know my hope is that they will expand to all the teams in their org so sometimes what we have right now are divisions of larger companies so you might have a 2 000 person division of a 50 000 person company so I think there's a lot of upside for us there yeah yeah yeah well and that would...