StartADAM at 800 Installs and $1.175M Raised: Building Distribution Before Pricing (Interview with CEO Adam Stone)

Introduction and StartADAM Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Startadam.com. They want you to install their application so that your Trello can talk to your Jira board or your Trello can talk to your Slack group 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 startadam, we need a animated graphic designed for our product launch, and he will jump in

00:19and do that. That's his bread and butter because he comes from Speed Lancer where he raised, call it, $1,000,000 for it to build that starting in 2015, pivoting now here this year into startadam.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 and Forbes 30 under 30 list maker with experience in ecommerce marketplace and SaaS.

00:40Having founded SpeedLancer, he spun up the software that was built into a standalone SaaS called startadam. It's he's automating data, automating management, and startadam unifies communication and project management tools, helping teams align faster and get more done quicker. Adam, you ready to take us to the top?

Adam Stone

00:57>> Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:58Alright. I guess first question, you spun this out of Speedlancer. So let's start there. What was Speedlancer and what year did you spin it out?

SpeedLancer Origins and Founding Story

Adam Stone

01:06>> Speedlancer started in 2015. Basically, my my business endeavor started when I was 11 or 12, but I started in e commerce when I was 14. And I couldn't hire people sitting next to me in high school and then university. So 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 Speedlancer. And in 2015, there was no verticalized

01:32>> freelancing marketplaces. We were probably the first one after Fiverr, I guess, if you count them as verticalized. But we we tried to eliminate the hiring, picking, choosing, recruiting process of freelancers. We built a lot of technology around that. We raised a little bit of money, but really VCs didn't really believe in us.

Nathan Latka

01:50How much?

Adam Stone

01:51>> It was less than $1,000,000 over a number of years.

Nathan Latka

01:53Okay.

Adam Stone

01:54>> A few different rounds. But we did build amazing technology that we

01:58>> have a paid and pending on and stuff. And so that led me to startadam because COVID led to a proliferation of freelancing marketplaces. I don't know about you, but seems to me like every second business hobby business is a freelancing platform of some sort connecting people to companies now. And I guess I saw that trend start to shift and so we decided to bring our technology out for other agencies and marketplaces and and teams in general.

What StartADAM Does

Adam Stone

02:24>> So startadam 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, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, SMS. You can be chatting with a bunch of people, clients, whoever you like, your accountant through any tools. We also extend that with integrations to existing tools to bring them into the conversation. So like

Nathan Latka

02:50Very cool. Lone G. Give us a sense of give us a sense of economics here. Right? So this sounds like a great product. What are companies paying on average to use the technology per month?

Pricing Model in Progress

Adam Stone

02:57>> We actually just launched like two weeks ago. We're working out our pricing model right now. 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.

Nathan Latka

03:08What do you think you're gonna launch in terms of what what your pricing structure is? You've got a pricing page on the website.

Adam Stone

03:13>> Yeah. We were looking at user based pricing and now I think we're looking at we wanna 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 gonna charge per group per channel that we create sort of thing. And so it'll be like affordable, but hopefully it'll scale up nicely as well for us.

Nathan Latka

03:34Well listen, what happened with Speedlancer? Did you shut it down or someone else bought it or who's running that?

Adam Stone

03:39>> It's operating, but to be honest, we're winding it down as we're focusing on the SaaS. So it's the same entity and we actually raised that round for startadam and our new investors are very supportive of of our vision. And so

Nathan Latka

03:53How much how much did you raise in that round?

SpeedLancer Wind-Down and Pivot

Adam Stone

03:55>> We actually haven't announced it, but happy to announce it here. Raised Let's go. 1.175, I think it was, in the last round.

Nathan Latka

04:05Okay. And you just like, you just closed the the money's hit, you just closed it this week?

Adam Stone

04:10>> No. The money we closed in April last year and we just launched the we launched the product a couple of weeks ago on Product Hunt. 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 nineteen eighties. It's still used today. So

04:35>> our infrastructure is built to scale and so that was a very it was a long winded process, but I guess that's our moat in a way.

Nathan Latka

04:44Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually, saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

05:07your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:32get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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.

Adam Stone

05:45>> Right? So

Nathan Latka

05:45the 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 founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter

06:09by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than

06:35what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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 wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and

06:59go 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. So you raised a million between 2015 and today, you raised a million bucks for Speedlancer, And then you communicated to the board, this isn't working. We're gonna do something new. They said, Adam, we love your vision. Here's another 1,175,000. So you've raised about you call

07:19it 2,100,000 to date across the combined entities.

Adam Stone

07:22>> 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.

Funding History and Round Details

Nathan Latka

07:32I see. And then I guess when you did the original round in Speedlancer, most folks even back in the day were selling, you know, fifteen, twenty percent of the business in the pre seed round. Is that sort of where you were?

Adam Stone

07:44>> We did pretty well. I'm not gonna talk like actual valuations, but if you talk about like our team being, you know, led by an AI professor, for example, 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. And also the timing is

08:13>> was is everything. Right? So if you look at April last year

Nathan Latka

08:17I'm not talking about the April round. I'm talking about the round before that, before you even had startadam. Before

Adam Stone

08:22>> that? Yeah.

08:25>> I'd say that was accurate. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:26Okay. Sold about 20%. Yeah. I mean, look, most folks I mean, you're five, six, seven years, eight years in now at this point into the combined sort of entity. So hopefully, we'll get a better valuation, you know, obviously, give up less less percent of the company. I guess this begs the question though, why not just shut down SpeedLancer and start from scratch at the clean cap table?

Why Keep SpeedLancer on the Cap Table

Adam Stone

08:44>> I love these questions because they're not too relevant, like, the majority of founders listening wouldn't have to consider that question. Right? So I love that you're asking it because it's relevant to people who are in this similar position. But, yeah, to answer the question, we did it to look after our investors, for one. So we had these previous investors who are on us on an eight year seven or eight year journey with us, right? And backed

09:10>> us every step of the way. And so it was important to me that their notes actually converted into something and our new investors were quite supportive of that. The second thing is, although we're building a SaaS now, our long term vision is that we reintegrate services into it. So once we own the communication between say, you and me, if we're communicating, we don't have to do that via email anymore. We could do it from your WhatsApp

09:33>> to my Slack account, for example. What if in that channel, you can say, hey, I actually like, let's say we're collaborating together and you want a headographic made for the podcast. You could go at speedlancer within the channel and say, need a head of graphic made. So I wanna reintegrate services down the line when we own the marketing distribution.

Nathan Latka

09:55Do you think that's a a big enough value add to get people to switch? I mean, look, the only what I just heard you say is, like, the friction I have when I use Freelancer, Upwork, or whatever is I've gotta go post the job. What you're saying is you never have to leave your communication tools. You just tag Speedlancer, and we know what the job is automatically. And and I guess my question is, do think it's

10:11a big enough is that a big enough value add to get people to stop, you know, using the Upwork or the Freelancer?

Adam Stone

10:17>> Yeah. I think if you own the distribution channel and you plug in directly where it matters, I do think so. If you're the most convenient way to get work done, then yes. So for example, we actually already Speedlancer already plugs into Trello now using startadam. And so you can set up a Trello board and send tasks to Speedlancer up from Trello. And we're the first marketplace to do that. So I think, yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:38Your your ability though to get stuff done quickly in a marketplace is obviously very, very dependent on how you recruit your folks doing the jobs and then how you recruit the businesses asking for the job. So I guess talk about that supply demand for a second. How many folks in the past thirty days did at least, you know, a worker did at least one job via speedlancer or startadam?

Adam Stone

10:55>> Yeah. So I can talk to like when we were fully ramped up with speedlancer. Right now, we're in the ramping down stage. So I think it's gonna look like this for speedlancer, like an arc where Speedlancer will come back once we own the distribution channel. Because I don't really wanna be paying for acquisition right now in such a it's a it's a red it's a red ocean right now in terms of freelancing platforms. So I'm staying

11:17>> out of it. We're not spending any money.

Nathan Latka

11:19Okay. You're avoiding the marketplace risk by saying, let me just get B2B SaaS companies to stick us in between their communication channels between Slack and Microsoft Teams. Once I own that, then I'll go spin back up the marketplace. It'll be easier.

Adam Stone

11:30>> And a bunch of other what we call superpowers. Right? So you'll be able to do time tracking from within the communication. You know, you could maybe talk to something like chat GPT from within the channel.

Nathan Latka

11:39Understood. But but how do you so you're what you're saying is you're betting on your mouse edge. Your your wedge right now is getting folks to use this communication tool. But, like, how do you beat established firms that spend much more on r and d like like ClickUp, Asana? I mean, Jira. I mean, there's so many tools like this already. How do you win?

App Exchange Distribution Strategy

Adam Stone

11:57>> Yeah. It's funny. That's actually going in our deck right now. And our as our investors said, it was it was very very interesting of them. It's a massive market, but it doesn't seem to be when it takes all. So I'm just gonna say it's like a trillion dollar industry. Like, even Salesforce itself is a 200, $100,000,000,000 market cap or whatever they are. You combine them all together, you're you're edging on multiple $100,000,000,000 industry between CRM project management

12:20>> tools and other SaaSes. What we do is sort of glue them together, not necessarily in a Zapier way, but we do it through communication. So how do we beat other tools? Well, we're gonna work with them. So we're already getting leads from the Trello app store, for example. We're launching on the Jira app.

Install Numbers and Daily Growth

Nathan Latka

12:35How many how many leads did you get from the Trello app store last month?

Adam Stone

12:38>> We've had like 700 or more to date over the last couple of months.

Nathan Latka

12:43Wow. Okay. And that's from startadam?

Adam Stone

12:44>> That's actually installs. Just startadam. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's from one app store. Right? So we're launching on Microsoft Teams, Slack, Jira, and Trello. So we're hoping that that's actually gonna be a good distribution strategy for us. SEO is also very good for us, which is great because my background happens to be in SEO, so it's very handy. But yeah, we wanna work with other platforms and help them bring in their tools into the conversation.

Nathan Latka

13:11Adam, let's talk about the distribution though because there's people listening right now going, I wanna rank really high in Trello. I want 700 leads per month from Trello. Right? You're listed under the power up section of Trello. Trello, from what I can tell, doesn't use anything like number of reviews of all that to decide who they show first, second, third. So I'm on the startadam profile right now. You have great animations, by the way. But how

13:29do people find how do people find the app in the Trello app store, which is very busy?

Adam Stone

13:34>> Yeah. I think every app store is gonna be different. So we're learning and I'm I'm happy to share more as we learn. But what I do know about Trello in particular is there's a randomization component, which to me is really nice. Because it means that they give everyone the opportunity. So if you click on the communication category, I think we said in two categories, they give you two. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:54Is also Power ups and communication and collaboration.

Adam Stone

13:56>> Yeah. There you go. So if you click on communication collaboration and you click on it every time, you'll see it's a different rotation.

Nathan Latka

14:02Yep.

Adam Stone

14:02>> So what that means is we can actually predict a steady volume of traffic and installs from that.

Nathan Latka

14:09Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Got it. So you're getting leads from Trello right now. That's working nicely. Sorry. What's the next AppExchange you wanna go to?

Adam Stone

14:16>> We're gonna be on Jira hopefully in the next couple of weeks. We're just revamping our Trello app to fix a bunch of onboarding issues. Mhmm. So hopefully that we'll see those changes in our analytics start to appear in terms of usage and activation. So Jira is coming next. And then Slack, we're just waiting for them to approve us, and then Microsoft Teams.

Nathan Latka

14:36So what's let's talk about mean, elephant in the room is like, okay. Why haven't you asked anyone to pay yet? Why isn't at least one person paying it? What's taking so long?

Why Pricing Has Not Launched Yet

Adam Stone

14:44>> We only just set up analytics last week. So we set up with a platform called Amplitude. So we're now able to see everything happening within our SaaS. So before that, I felt like we were sort of walking around blind. And I think now we can start to charge people. We are working at our pricing model. But here's a question here's here's a question that's going through our mind. Right? If we charge per channel, we have an

15:08>> innate viral coefficient. Because if I wanna use it and I want you to use it to communicate with me, then I've onboarded a new user. Then let's say there's a 10% chance you're gonna create your own channel. If you create your if you if you take that 10% chance and invite someone else, then we've created a two to one viral coefficient or maybe you've invited two people. So do I a question?

Nathan Latka

15:28Like, this is a massive mistake founders make those. You don't wanna charge for what's driving your viral coefficient. It's why Zapier doesn't charge by number. Like, they charge by number of Zaps for a reason, not by number of things you've connected.

Adam Stone

15:40>> Yeah. So this is what we're we're trying to think about. I don't I don't I don't we're right in the process of of modeling this out. So it's a it's a really great question. I don't wanna disincentivize that. We might give a certain number of channels away for free, but actually, if they're all viral, like, we don't wanna charge for that. So how are we gonna charge? And do we have enough features? Like, we would definitely

Defining Power Users and Billing Strategy

Adam Stone

16:00>> wanna charge for our Trello and Jira apps. So we can charge for extensions. But maybe the communication piece is our wedge.

Nathan Latka

16:07And and I guess, how do you know right now how many users love your platform? How many like, if I you today, how many active users? Even if they're free, how many active users do you have? How would you measure that?

Adam Stone

16:17>> Right now, we're looking at installs and distribution and we're working on usage. So we just launched. Right? We saw that the other the other day, we had 17 people try to create a channel and then abandon the process. So that's what I wanna fix.

Nathan Latka

16:30How many people How many installs a day?

Adam Stone

16:33>> We get about 10 installs a day.

Nathan Latka

16:36You got, like, total installs right now on startadam?

Adam Stone

16:39>> Including the Trello app, we would have 700 or 800 or 900.

Nathan Latka

16:43Okay. And so how do you know, like, if you're gonna charge you can only charge put pricing in front of 10 people. How do you sort that 800 to figure out which 10 to show pricing to first?

Adam Stone

16:51>> So right now, we're trying to calculate who our power users are, rather how to define the power users. So we've got that in Amplitude. We've got a little metric setup called power users. And we can obviously change what we define as that, but those are the ones that we're trying to define as billable users in theory. And then we'll reach out to them and we'll say, hey

Nathan Latka

17:09Well, no. But I wanna know what the actual I don't know. Wanna that's what I'm asking. I wanna know what the actual thing is. Right? What is how do you know who a power user is? It could

Adam Stone

17:15>> be let's say they've let's say they have more than three active channels in a given month. I would call that a billable user. Or a power user, maybe they're two diff I think they're two different concepts. A power user is I think people have sent more than three messages in the last few days. So they're actually using us. And obviously, the bar will get higher and higher as we get more users.

Nathan Latka

17:40Yeah. I mean, lot these premium tools, the way they reverse engineer pricing is they say we only wanna charge 5% of our base. And we want only we need to find the top 5% then of the power users based off number of contacts, number of channels, whatever. And then that's how they figure out who to show pricing to. That's the reverse engineering.

Adam Stone

17:55>> So And I wanna speak to those people and see what they're willing to pay. Right? So yeah.

18:00>> It's a fun Yeah.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

18:01Well, you're in that process now. We're certainly rooting for you. We appreciate you coming on prelaunch. We hope you come back on in a year, give us an update. But in the meantime, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Adam Stone

18:12>> Favorite book? It's gonna be some psychology book. I don't I don't know which one.

Nathan Latka

18:17Okay. Number number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Adam Stone

18:21>> It's always like Elon Musk, I I I have to say. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

18:24Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building startadam?

Adam Stone

18:30>> My favorite SaaS historically was always Help scout. Right now, I'd have to say maybe Amplitude.

Nathan Latka

18:35Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Adam Stone

18:38>> I get eight hours.

Nathan Latka

18:39Okay. And situation, single, kids?

Adam Stone

18:42>> I'm I'm partnered, but not married. I have a dog, a Alright.

Nathan Latka

18:46And how old are you?

Adam Stone

18:47>> I'm 28.

18:48>> 28.

Nathan Latka

18:49Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Adam Stone

18:55>> It's a marathon, not a sprint.

Closing and Recap

Nathan Latka

18:58Guys, there you have it. Startadam.com. They want you to install their application so that your Trello can talk to your Jira board or your Trello can talk to your Slack group 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 startadam, we need a animated graphic designed for our product launch,

19:17and he will jump in and do that. That's his bread and butter because he comes from Speed Lancer where he raised, call it, $1,000,000 for it to build that starting in 2015, pivoting now here this year into startadam.com to build distribution first and then go back to the marketplace model. We will see what happens. Adam, thanks for taking us to the top.

Adam Stone

19:33>> Thanks, Nathan. See you.

Nathan Latka

19:35One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

20:00Central. 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, 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

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20:44up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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.

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