StartADAM revenue, CEO Adam Stone, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

startadam.com they want you to install their application so that your Trail can talk to your jira board or your truck and talk to your slack hoop or your slack group can talk to your Microsoft teams group if your team is split up once they own that they'll then launch Services behind it so you can say hey in the Trello board at start atom we need a animated graphic designed for our product hunt launch and he will jump in and do that that's his bread and butter because he comes from speed Lancer where he raised one point he caught one million bucks for it to build that starting in 2015 pivoting now here this year into startadom.com to build distribution first and then go back to the marketplace model we will see what happens hey folks my guest today is Adam Stone he's a Serial entrepreneur in Forbes 30 under 30 list maker with experience in e-commerce Marketplace and SAS having found its speed lancery spun up the software that was built into a standalone SAS called start atom it's uh he's automating data automating management and start Adam unifies communication and project management tools helping teams align faster and get more done quicker Adam you ready to take it to the top let's do it all right I guess first question you spun this out of speed Lancer so let's start there what was speed Lancer and what year did you spin it out speed lenses started in 2015 basically my my business Endeavors started when I was 11 or 12 but I started in uh e-commerce when I was 14. and I couldn't hire people sitting next to me in high school and then universities so um I ended up being a big user of odesk and Elance at the time which merged to become upwork and so I decided to start my own freelancing Marketplace called speed Lancer and in 2015 there was no verticalized freelancing marketplaces we were probably the first one after Fiverr I guess if you count them as verticalized but we tried to eliminate the firing picking choosing recruiting process of Freelancers um we built a lot of Technology around that we raised a little bit of money but really VCS didn't really believe in us how much uh it was less than a million dollars over a number of years um a few different rounds but we did build amazing technology that we have a paid and pending on and stuff and so that led into star Adam because kovid led to a proliferation of freelancing marketplaces I don't know about you but it seems to me like every second business hobby business is a freelancing platform of some sort connecting people to companies now um and uh I guess I saw that Trend start to shift and so we've decided to bring our technology out for other uh agencies and marketplaces and and teams in general so start Adam uh is a communication project management app without an app we connect existing tools that you use together so for example you can create cross-platform communication groups between slack Microsoft teams uh WhatsApp telegram Discord SMS you could be chatting with a bunch of people clients whoever you like you're accounted through any tools we also extend that with Integrations to existing tools to bring them into the conversation so like very cool give us a sense of uh give a sense of Economics here right so it sounds like a great product what are companies paying on average to use the technology per month so we actually just launched like two weeks ago we're working at a pricing model right now um so happy to talk about a bit of the thoughts that's going into that but we have an API and then a sort of Standalone product what do you think you're going to launch in terms of what your pricing structure is you've got a pricing page on the website yeah we were looking at user-based pricing and now I think we're looking at um we want to incentivize all users in the company to use it so we're not so much looking at user-based pricing now it's more communication-based pricing are we going to charge per group per channel that we create sort of thing um and so it'll be like affordable but hopefully it'll scale up nicely as well for us what's on what happened with speed Lancer did you shut it down or someone else bought it or who's running that it's operating but to be honest we're winding it down as we're focusing on the SAS so it's the same entity and we actually raised around four star Adam and our new investors are very supportive of our vision um and so how much how much did you raise in that round uh we actually haven't announced it but happy to announce it here we're ready to go one point one seven five I think it was in the last one okay and you just CL like you just closed the money's hit you just closed it this week no the money we closed in April last year and we just watched the um we launched the product a couple of weeks ago on product hunt um it was a big build because we have a lot of Integrations that need to be developed with basically underlying Tech infrastructure that's built to scale my CTO is an AI Professor retired AI Professor from Brazil he built out the banking infrastructure in Brazil in the 1980s it's still used today um so our infrastructure is built to scale and so that was a very it was a long-winded process but I guess that's our emotional way 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 evaluations 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 round 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 valuations 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 you raised a million between 2015 and today you raised a million bucks for Speed Lancer and then you communicate to the board this isn't working we're going to do something new they said Adam we love your vision here's another 1.175 million so you raised about you call it 2.1 million to date across the combined entities yeah 1.9 or something like that yeah but it was actually different investors so our existing investors some of them followed on but yeah we had a different lead I see and then I guess when you did the original round in speed Lancer most folks even back in the day were selling you know 15 20 of the business in the pre-seed round is that sort of where you were uh we did pretty well um I'm not going to talk like actual valuations but if you talk about like our team being you know led by an AI Professor for example uh that was a big a big deal I think the fact that our journey has taken so long was actually kind of a benefit because the investors knew and trusted that we knew the problem set inside and out and they really just believed in US it also the timing is was everything right so if you look at April last year um I'm not talking about the April round I'm talking on the round before that before you even had Adam before that um yeah I'd say that was accurate yeah okay you sold about 15 20 yeah I mean look most folks I mean you're five six seven years and eight years in now at this point into the combined sort of entity so um hopefully we'll get a better evaluation you know obviously give up less less percent of the company I guess this begs the question though why not just shut down speed Lancer and start from scratch...