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 be a good way to reverse engineer your net dollar retention opportunity right is you're penetrated but you haven't expanded yet what's the expansion 145 net dollar retention so far so it's amazing that's amazing congrats um help me let's put this on a timeline so folks can understand trajectory here when did you write the first line of code for the platform so I bootstrapped the company on my own for the first year 2020 and I actually worked with an agency and built a prototype and tested it with real people um we learned a lot from the Prototype actually that the first prototype was about was a tool that managers could use one-on-one with their employees and what we learned is that it took too much time people wanted less time and they wanted more team Focus especially in the pandemic era and so we rebuilt the whole thing as a team-based you know team development product with the same agency no I hired a team so I did I boot dropped use an agency built to prototype tested it wait hold on how much did you think how much did you sink into the in the agency building MVP are we talking like 10 grand or like 100 grand more ah okay was that painful um it actually wasn't because we were able to reuse a bunch of the things that we built and we learned so much that by the time I hired a team and we built the product we kind of knew exactly where to aim it um so I feel like the learning was worth it um I don't know maybe that's also having done this is not my first startup so I you know it wasn't like I was just throwing it in the toilet I knew exactly what I wanted to find out and I felt like I did learn that okay so you learn that's good that's that's helpful you learn then you hire now are you still bootstrap today or did you raise we did raise we raised a three million dollar seed round in February of 21. and I am super Scrappy with the funding we still have about a million dollars left from that round and you know now we're generating Revenue so it's quite low burn and are you profitable not yet but we're not very far off okay I see a path to profitability here and now I'm not saying not far off if you're Adam Newman you could be burning 5 million a month and you're not far off for others not for office 10K 10 km like your plus or minus 10K a month sort of deal no we're probably more like 100k a month but okay honestly like a few deals and that is done right yeah does that make I mean let's go back to the macro conditions right now right if you've got a million in the bank you're burning 100 Grand a month that's you could say 10 months of Runway does that make you nervous right now not at all actually because we we actually got preempted for some additional funding so we are taking a bit more money now it's going to get us another 24 months of Runway we don't need a ton of money to get this thing you know to keep growing and get to profitability so we took you know we're going to take the money when people came to us some strategic folks that I think will be good to have on board less than three million though yeah less okay um got it so I mean I'm you probably already answered this question because you said they're strategic but right now would be like obviously a terrible time as a SAS founder that's growing quickly to take money because evaluations are so compressed but you just think these folks are so strategic it's it's worth it yeah and we're also we're doing it on a safe so it has a higher cap and I think that's oh I see I see was the three million seed Capital priced priced round it was priced oh interesting so how does that work when you do a priced round and then usually it's the other way around right you do a priced run now you're gonna do a cardinal note I know I mean it well it's just we it made sense to do it this way this time and we have a better sense of where the valuation might go over time and people are comfortable putting a higher cap on it now we have much more visibility less risk yeah and way more way more traction sounds like yeah um very cool most folks when they're raising seeds last year you know you're selling 15 to 20 in your seat that's sort of standard we're sort of in that same range yeah okay fair fair so you're talking like 15 million ish valuations are in that range and you and the cap that you are now negotiating you said is better terms than that yeah okay fair all right let's talk more about um product right and sort of how the team is fueling the product so how many folks total are on the team today we have 11 full-time people and about 16 if you count the part-timers okay and how many are engineers we have five engineers and sort of Two and a Half designers so I would count more than half the team as product development yeah so what are the engineers working on is there any you know future products you can talk about or where you see the space going yeah actually it's really exciting because what we're doing so we started by building the software and again like the way to think about it is traditional leadership development happens in one of two ways there's there are what are called Learning Management Systems these are flat content like udemy or LinkedIn learning where you're watching videos and you're kind of solo doing this learning by yourself it is really low usage and pretty low satisfaction and then the alternative is you hire these outside facilitators and they come in and everybody has a great time but it's expensive it's hard to scale and it doesn't have a lot of follow-up built in and so what our software does is turn every manager into an interactive expert facilitator so you can get the interactivity but still have it be at the price of software and the first version of the product we were building the content so you know I've been doing this 20 years I also teach two classes at the business school at Stanford I've like I look I have all the access to the research on high performing teams so I started making some of the content I hired two Consultants who you know one on the Dei side Eureka Blackman is amazing and we made our own content the big idea in what we're working on now is platformizing the software so that anybody can create these interactive kits and that means companies can too so they have their own philosophies about leadership development sometimes they want to use our content but sometimes they want to use their own but today what they do is literally they'll like make a two-page facilitator guide or something and they give it to people they have no idea whether it's used or whether it works now they can use our platform to create interactive sessions out of their own content and that's going to be super effective and super sticky and you mentioned you could go on in 2020 with the agency MVP some test customers and Pilots what about today how many cups not not seats but how many individual Brands like I think you said the Bank of Hawaii are you working with we have 55 logos right now 55 okay wow and how much expand like if you added no new customers over the next 12 months how much additional Revenue do you think you can drive just into those 55 customers yeah I think so I've I've run the pipeline I think over 12 months it's like a million and a half to two million and over three years it's like 15 to 20 million just from the customers we have already yeah that's a very cool math to run now can I take I it sounds like you have massive ranges some companies have two seats or a team license at 99 a month others are 2500 employees and they're paying 100 bucks per employee per year but can we take 55 logos times that arpu of 5 000 a month you're doing somewhere around 250 000 a month in Revenue today no not not quite yet I would say we are um can you break it this year you think next year next year is when I would put that very cool well again it sounds like you have a very healthy motion for expanding accounts is that happening in a no-touch fashion or as part of your 11 person team CS reps that actively drive that expansion yeah we have a basically three-person sales CS team that also includes me um and so we have we do do some Hands-On expansion work actually most of the revenue upside I think comes from signing the deals and then expanding right now we're converting 60 of demos to deals at some level so wow conversion on you know getting people to sign up at least for a pilot and where we need to put more attention is how do we get those Pilots to larger rollouts so we're working with people on like success plans you know one of the things that's really helpful is we have we do pre-post measurement before and after you start using Rising team and we can see that after just three sessions 85 of the core engagement scores that we measure are moving in a significant way so you know almost every company out their measures engagement and what usually happens is like you get the scores back you have some gaps and then you're like oh what do we do it's you know let's start a task force or let's go back to the Whiteboard and it's really hard and so what we're showing is we can actually not just measure it but move it for you and that's what's causing people to want to expand so we're working on building these kind of success plans for people where we track and measure their movement and help me understand growth over the past 12 months you got extra Capital last year hopefully you were able to reinvest that back in growth but if you're doing between called 100 and 150 000 a month today in Revenue what were you doing exactly a year ago if you remember yeah so we're still we're actually under a little bit what you just said I mean a year ago we were doing zero Revenue okay so it's like infinite yes the revenue you know started coming in in Q4 of last year and then it grew a little bit in q1 and then between q1 and Q2 at like 5X right between Q2 and Q3 it'll 3x again probably well congrats then on breaking you in the past couple months you broke the million dollar run right congratulations on that that's a big goal thank you um very cool well hey look we're out of time this is a fascinating story obviously rooting for you um let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite Business book my favorite Business book is gung-ho by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles it's a story of what we can learn about business from a Native American folk tale about animals wow number two is our CEO you're following our studying I watch a lot of one person I Brian chesky from Airbnb 's built a really impressive large business in a way that has a meaningful Mission behind it so for instance the work they do housing refugees and so forth I think it's a really powerful way to use your business for good number three Jennifer besides your own what's your favorite online tool for building Rising team okay I'd say there's sort of internal and external so the internal tool I think we use the most that I like a lot is figma it's so easy to collaborate about how we're building the product and the external one I am a big LinkedIn fan I'm a LinkedIn influencer I write a lot about leadership and so I we get a lot of leads that way great number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night um I I would say I aim for eight but and I might even stay in bed for eight hours but I don't sleep all that time fair enough racing yeah and what's your situation married single kiddos I am married I have two awesome daughters they are all grown up 20 years wow okay you're super busy then um and then do you mind me asking how old you are I am 50 years old amazing okay just read a stat that Founders in their 50s are like three times more likely to be successful than family I believe it yeah more you just have more experience in all of us I I get it uh take us home here last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. yeah I think I wish I knew and I spent a lot of time in my 20s thinking about what other people thought about me and I wish I knew that everyone is too busy thinking about themselves to be thinking about me that's a good one guys risingteam.com a more effective way to help all of your teams learn faster they've signed up 55 logos to date tens of thousands of seats and folks using the platform already to date just broke the million dollar Mark in terms of run right which we love and pretty Capital efficient 3 million raised on their seed still all that money in the bank with a path to profitability team of eleven five Engineers there's a lot of tech behind this platform check it out risingteam.com Jennifer thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their 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 if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya