How Sprig CEO Ryan Glasgow grew Sprig to $24.4M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everyone nathan here my guest today is ryan glasgow he was previously on the early team at weebly obviously acquired by square also at verb which is required by snap he was also at extra bucks which required by ebates a life fire by adobe and graph science by centro you can probably guess he's based in san francisco that's how you get that kind of history ryan now you're working on user leap you're ready to take us to the top yeah usually a sick startup here now and helped quite a few other companies get started and really grow and launch and and build out their customer base and you know one thing that i always found particularly at weebly is that companies at scale it's always this continuous journey of understanding those gaps between what your customer wants with your product and that marketing product experience that you're delivering yeah and it's not something that just early stage companies need to figure out it's a continuous journey you know even beyond ipo and it continued to grow from there and just found out that you know it was incredibly difficult particularly for companies at scale you know more or less even the early stage as well but companies of scale very very difficult so it was a problem that really resonated with me ryan we jumped ahead of the problem here so tell tell people what user leap does and and are you pure play sas like what do you think the revenue model is going to be yeah we are at sas business what we do is we help companies understand using micro surveys their product and marketing experience and how it actually is able to fulfill the customer need and what that customer is looking for with that product or service yep and now you told me before the hand so you're just now launching so you're pre-revenue right uh we do paying customers we are live we're launched um with you know we are live with customers okay now right now we're still staying low and really focused on delivering amazing customer experiences um and so we're you know gonna be sharing more details publicly in the future yeah no that's great so so okay i guess put this on a timeline for me and then i want to get more into patterns you've seen at the experiences you've had so you launched the company in what year started user leap last year early last year in around february and since then building it out we you know really started working with customers last summer okay and they went live with the product they started to see a lot of value out of it and starting to build out that an initial early set of customers as we continue to build out the product offering okay that's great and then what have you i mean how did you know it's a beautiful moment to go kind of figure out your initial price point you're going to market with and this is very much like an art i'd say not a science you've done a lot of pricing being at you know six different companies so what price point you decide to go to market with for user leap you know early on it was really about asking people to pay something that was meaningful to them for every business it was different you know there are different sizes different revenue points and it was really a one-on-one conversation with all the companies and you know a lot of it was through my personal network saying hey how big a problem is this for you how much would you pay and it started with there this is i mean it sounds good though in theory but these are this is very difficult to actually quantify right you're going hey nathan i'm going yeah i want to use leap brian i love you i work with you a weebly man i want to support you and you're going great how big are you know how big a problem are customer surveys at your company i'm going right i don't know how the hell to quantify that but i want to pay you to support you right it's like i mean how are you actually quantifying that yeah in terms of quantifying our goal is to actually help drive funnel conversion from home page to churn and so what we can do with our pilots is actually hopefully not churn right what do you mean by that so improve churn yeah their conversion funnel you know including churn and actually preventing churn um and so you know what we do is with the pilots and a lot of times even leading up to a subscription is saying you know what does this mean for you you know what if we can increase that conversion by five percent what if we can reduce churn by two percent or ten percent and you can start getting the numbers and actually model out what the impact is on their business and actually you know we'll it'll hold us accountable to what we think that we can do yeah you're basically arguing take the mechanics of how a funnel work right and if you change even a couple percentage points increase at certain things because of how a funnel works you actually get massive output in terms of value if you improve these things that's essentially the sales pitch is that accurate yes that is it interesting okay so are you i mean give me a general price point right i mean it sounds like you have a couple customers here are you talking kind of 10 bucks a month or like 10 grand a month or what space do you think you're gonna be playing in small medium or enterprise yeah we're very focused on the enterprise i mean contract values are an annual basis between 50 000 up to you know 500 000 you know that this is really the top of the market that's where the unmet need is in the market and that's what we're focused on as a company that okay so yeah so that's by the way congratulations i mean that surprises me a little bit that you're able to convince people to spend this kind of money on these things it sounds like you've done a really good job at actually modeling the value the funnel is losing because they don't have this kind of thing installed i mean is that really a one-on-one kind of coaching call where you're articulating the potential losses or do you have some tool like website grader that says your seo sucks now pay us to do your seo yeah you know it is really those one-on-one conversations a lot of times we'll get under nda they'll share their numbers they'll know exactly how their business is doing and then and then from there we can dig into specifics and say you know what would a few percentage points look like if we move the needle here or if we made this type of impact on your business and you know on our site it's really around just a spreadsheet and modeling it out and coming back to them and saying this is that revenue impact and here's what we think we can do um talk to me a little bit about history so far it sounds like you have fundraised why'd you make the intentional decision to fundraise instead of bootstrap yeah you know with every company it's really around finding the right talent and with san francisco it's a very expensive place to live wanted to really bring on people who you know were the best at what they do i mean our data scientist has a phd he has eight years of experience with ai and you know when you want to attract the type of kevin yes yeah kevin and joe you know joe's over 20 years of experience he's our our lead architect and came from another ai company down the street from here you know when you want to attract this type of talent you know they want to see investors bought into that vision and that business model and it really you know gives a stamp of approval for that a lot of these people in silicon valley to move forward and take that step and join particularly early stage companies so how much did you end up raising how much in the company to date we did technically what's called a pre-see the terms keep changing you know every couple years but we did a pre-seed right around 700 000 and i put in some money myself as well and it was really getting people who are committed to that enterprise story you know if you look at smb surveys and smb it's you know there's a lot out there if you look at product you'll see a lot of survey tools you know we're not really focused on that and so is finding the right investors who are saying hey we actually understand there is an opportunity at the top of the market it's going to take a little bit longer to get there but we believe in you and we really want to invest in what you're doing yeah i mean by the way survey monkey's been on and i mean you see a kind of type forms beyond what you could argue is kind of in the space i mean there are all kinds of kind of whether they're starting off at freemium 10 a month plans i i haven't heard of someone i will say this i haven't heard of a product like this starting off enterprise so it's i'm excited to keep chatting here for another five ten minutes to figure out kind of kind of the thesis here and it sounds like you actually saw that opportunity i mean this is like a very intentional thing yes yeah the enterprise space there are a few customers that top into the market the enterprise survey tooling and you know the challenge though is that if you take the same product like survey monkey and you add a sales model and you really bring that to market you know the companies at scale have very specific needs and they have millions and millions of users using their product and so what does it look like to actually help run and conduct surveys and analyze all that survey data at scale across you know hundreds of thousands or millions of users it's a very unique challenge...