SwipeBy Revenue & Funding (2026)

[00:00] What swipe by just is, is the AI marketing department for Main Street. We take real time data and then help a business owner that has no time doing social media, doing remarketing, doing reputation management. You can think about us as a super boring agency, just that there is no one actually in the agency and it's AI. We're growing incredibly fast. Know, we are at like 400% year over year. And so we are exclusively selling door to [00:21] door. We are a solar company, a pest control company, a roofing company. Right? Like and it's incredibly scalable. I think people would be surprised at [00:29] >> how much revenue you're doing. [00:30] We we are right now at, like, $3.5M ARR. [00:33] >> I think it's amazing, by the way. [00:37] >> Hey, folks. My guest today is Carl Turner. He's the Founder and CEO of swipe by. Originally from Berlin, he studied finance and computer science at Wake Forest University and previously worked with Google and other companies before launching swipe by the AI marketing department for Main Street. Carl, you ready to take us to the top? [00:53] Yes. I am. [00:55] >> Alright. I wanted to have you on because there's a lot of folks building AI tools, but very few are going niche and hyper focusing. Help us understand what you're selling today. [01:03] Yeah. The the number one pain point that that we're trying to solve today is that SMB brick and mortar owners. So, you know, a very niche environment here where primarily we're actually going even more niche, is SMB restaurant brick and mortar owners work in the business, not on the business. Right? And you're sharing our website here. They, you know, they make the food. They call Spectrum when the Wi Fi is out. They call the oven guy [01:24] when the oven breaks. They serve the food when two staff members didn't show up. You have to help small medium business owners working on the business while being in the business. Actually, have to help most founders with that too. Right? But in SMB, it's even more brutal. And so what swipe by just is is the AI marketing department for Main Street. We take real time data and then help a business owner that has no time doing [01:44] social media, doing remarketing, doing reputation management with the core differentiator, right, which is really the AI economy, that it is on fully autopilot. But you can think about us as a super boring marketing agency, just that there is no one actually in the agency and it's AI. [01:58] >> I think people would be surprised at how much revenue you're doing. Are you comfortable sharing your revenue today? [02:02] We're still in the early stages, you know, we are here, I mean, yeah, we are right now at like $3.5M ARR, right? But it's growing at, [02:11] >> I think it's amazing by the way. Like, when people look at your Web here, they might go, maybe he's pre revenue, but you're you're three and a half. I mean, you are growing, and you're really focusing on jobs to be done. You took out automated. You're like, look. We'll actually just do the phone answering. We'll do the social media management. And you knew this was important because you actually came from the industry. You know, and you [02:28] >> feel the pain. What So does it actually mean for the audience that's never been in restaurants before? When you say done for you phone answering, are you literally you're not standing in every in every SMB, you know, answering the phone? What does that mean? [02:38] And what what it really means is just, I mean, AI will answer the phone. Right? Like and cool the thing is we can clone the business owner voice. Right? Like, if I run a German restaurant, Carl Schnitzelhaus, right, I maybe want that Carl was my slight German accent. [02:50] >> That's very German. [02:51] Right? Actually actually picks up, you know, picks up the phone. So, yeah, we can clone the the the voice of the business owner, answer whether one person calls or a million people calls, but here's the the core thing. There's a lot of competition in this, right? Like, and what we always think about in the world of AI, I think there's still a lot of companies focusing on the transaction. So you have an AI voice answering to [03:11] help someone to buy a burger. That's good and great, but that was what the phone call did before. We are helping really just a little bit. For us, it's more about can we capture the data? Can we get an express verbal consent from a phone call to turn a phone call for a burger into 20 more burger transactions down the line. [03:27] >> There are a lot of people that say, look, when companies use us, we're building an internal brain, a, you know, context we can feed to the AI to make it, you know, more powerful in the future, one burger to 20 burgers. But there's very few people, when you pull back the curtain, that are actually talking in terms of data lakes, rag databases, ETL processes on the data, context windows, you know, eliminating hallucinations, things like that. Help [03:47] >> me understand what your team looks like today and who's handling all this sort of deep engineering data tasks. [03:52] Yeah. I mean, we're a pretty lean tech team. And what actually our biggest part of our team is is distribution. Right? So, I mean, we have we have a CTO. We have some devs. I'm heavily involved in in the architecture. Right? I have [04:03] >> a I have a tech Are you in engineering? [04:05] So it's, I think, like a lot of founders, I have a computer science degree. I was not involved. And since the beautiful world of Claude Code, I'm back involved. In the industry that we're selling into, it's about going from zero to one. Having data being used for the first time and building primarily a lot of smart pipelines. And I think the one thing which in this world of AI is the reality is also not everything needs [04:26] to be AI. A lot of the thing is deterministic, right? Like, it's we're now trying to AI fy everything there's a lot of workflows that can be actually just deterministic. But long story short, mean, have obviously a top notch tech team that builds all of this, but I think so [04:38] >> how many folks are full time, though? [04:39] Just to get the number. And in the entire company, we're, like, over 25 full time. [04:44] >> And how many are engineers? [04:46] Out of that are three engineers plus me. So tiny. [04:48] >> Okay. How many customers do have today, and how are you getting more customers? What's your go to market? [04:52] We're growing incredibly fast. You know, we are at like 400% year over year. It's actually accelerating. Right now, I'm seeing primarily our competitors go to market cold calling, automation, email. Right? And and it's it's becoming equalized. Everyone uses the same Databricks, Clay, Eleven Labs, you know, AI pipeline, and, is calling on the customer. So business owners already gone bombarded. I get bombarded with cold calls. Right? And so we are exclusively selling door to door. So what [05:19] we actually are is we are a solar company, a pest control company, a roofing company. Right? Like, and it's incredibly scalable because this has been there has been billion pharmaceuticals. Another fantastic example exclusively was outside salespeople. But it allows us in a relationship driven industry to actually build relationships. Right? Like restaurant owners, they are caring like, there's crazy churn in SMB SaaS. Right? And I think every founder, you know, that is trying to sell an SMB [05:45] SaaS will will found the hard part the moment you get to a level of customers is keeping up with the ones that just go out of business at the top and keep, you know, adding on top. And the and and then just churn in general. Right? Business owners are super flaky. Like, you maybe add so much value, but someone else beats you a little bit on price, business owner will switch in SMB. I don't wanna be [06:03] Toast. I don't necessarily wanna be Google. I wanna be Microsoft because that's a big sales org, but really, like, selling Heinz ketchup. Like, how is that differentiated? Selling fried chicken. Right? Like, it's identical. It's based on a relationship with a food rep. Right? And so that is our inspiration. Building a sales org in the thousands full time, building relationships with the customer because every AI cold caller or human cold caller will hit a wall of us [06:29] having a beer. [06:30] >> Are they a 100% commission based? [06:32] It's commission heavy. The money's in commission. You don't have to close much deals. We have a fairly high ticket, but we have a false stop. So, normally, people get promoted within six months to w two. No commission anymore because we put them through this through this fire test of being on the ground, right, which is actually quite brutal. [06:47] >> So what would it look like if I applied today to join you as a commission sales rep? What would my base look like and what commission would you give me? What's my quota target? [06:54] Yeah. So, you know, quota target is actually fairly low. It's still not a walk in the park, but it's around six locations a month. You would bring in about 36,000 of ARR a month at around six locations, plusminus, right? Depending if you [07:07] >> six sell our systems or other ACV on average. [07:10] Correct. Exactly. Okay. So, you know, you take home between 30 to 40%. So that's real money. We're giving a lot of year one revenue away to the rep, which allows us to actually build and scale the company. On the flip side, from a biz dev side, you know, we're pretty open about this. Well, we don't spend money on ads. Right? So we have virtually zero CapEx on a growth perspective for us, and we have a distribution [07:31] that scales and actually builds a natural barrier of entry. [07:34] >> Are you comfortable sharing how you work with Founderpath? [07:36] Yeah, for sure. [07:37] >> Help us understand why you did that deal. And if you're not spending using it on ads, where [07:42] are you spending it to drive growth? We got $450,000 I think that is the right number, right? We have the absolute luxury that our growth is profitable and our unit economics are extremely profitable. So I don't need to raise money to keep the lights on. That puts us in a somewhat nice spot. I mean, all the growth we're doing, we're doing plus minus EBITDA profitable. Some months we lose a little bit money, some months we make [08:04] a little bit money. But yeah, we primarily use it to scale our outside sales operation, right? Like, since we promote so fast, we kind of have a step function. People are really good on the ground, they bring in money, but then we promote them to open up a new market. So we're actually growing market by market. The moment we do that, we lose that person on the ground making money, so we lose that delta on actually [08:25] cash coming in. They do get a base, and now we have to put ads in Indeed to find good candidates. Right? We are spending to ramp up the market. Was Founderpath the first outside money you've ever taken? No. So, you know, I started everything raising angel money, angel family offices, some high net worth individuals, and then we have been actually doing some level of factoring, non dilutive funding from Stripe before, right? But so, built the company [08:51] and I've been here through a lot of pivots. I failed twice with this company, right? And failed hard. I mean, failed hard. And, you know, and I was really fortunate to have a pool of angels that have been always seeing the vision. I was always able to sell them on the light at the [09:04] end of the tunnel. [09:05] >> So has Founderpath enabled you to keep more of your equity than otherwise you would have been able to keep? [09:09] Yeah, 100%. You know, you negotiated with me hard. We gave you a sixteen month payback, which, you know, gives you more runway to invest in those commissions. [09:16] >> Why do you switch from Stripe to Founderpath? [09:18] I mean, I think the core thing, right, is that when we plan on cash flow, having fixed payments just as you know, extremely effective. And so So in your case here you like there's $35,000 a month that's fixed, you know you can plan it. Exactly. With Stripe, which I mean nothing bad to say about Stripe, they have been helping us to grow tremendously, right? It's a great company, great product. And the only challenge is that with [09:39] Stripe we're taking on a percentage of every dollar that comes in paying back. Which is great if you're somewhat flat in growth, but with our, you know, insane amount of growth we have been paying Stripe loans back within three months, the full loan, right? Which is pretty insanity if you think about it. Stripe has fairly good terms if you pay them back over a year and a half, if you pay them back within three months, time [10:03] value of money and you know actual what was it internal rate of return for them or whatever, like interest is kind of insane. And so that was the core reason you know why we wanted to just have more fixed so we can actually plan more and plan more for our not just EBITDA profitability but real profitability, right? Which in the end matters, because finance payments can become a big chunk, right? Was it quick or slow working [10:25] with Founderpath? Just what would you recommend to other founders there? Yeah, Extremely quick. Right? Extremely quick. And I think I just, you know, the one thing so Founderpath, path, right, working with you, Nathan, has been has been amazing, has been super smooth. When you look at financing, you just always have to be aware. Right? Like, any cases, if I take on $500,000, and let's say I pay a $100,000 on fees on that or whatever. Right? Like, [10:44] man, whatever the number is. Right? My cost of capital was a 100,000. Well, a $100,000 for 500,000 is a pretty good deal considering if I would take $500,000, 10x that as a result, my cost on capital would be 4,500,000 when that investor takes $5,000,000 at an exit. And again, everyone is winning when things goes well, right? But taking that on can be one of the most effective ways, right? But you have to be in the luxury [11:07] that you know your actual EBITDA, you know your profit margin, because it can also and so far we don't see that happening to us, right? But it can screw you because you have that cost. [11:16] >> Talk more about the product roadmap, right? What, you know, if we refresh your website in a year, what does the product likely look like? [11:22] I think really how we are seeing the market, and this is pretty interesting, I think, is point solutions having a tough time. And so what that means is, you know, in the vertical we're selling into a website as a point solution, online ordering as a point solution, reservations as a point solution, scheduling as a point solution. I mean, the point of sale can become a point solution, right? And they're all becoming extremely easy to build, and [11:45] they're all having an amazing amount of data. So currently, what part of our business model is we do free websites, free online ordering, free loyalty and rewards, where there is other companies where that's their bread and butter. And we can come in and cut them out entirely. And we then monetize with the AI layer on top. [12:01] >> You undercut with free pricing? [12:03] Entirely for free. The things that should be commoditized in today's world, like a website, anyone who charges to design your website is just insanity in today's world, in in my humble opinion. It is commoditized. Processing a transaction, I mean, yes, have to pay Amex and Visa, but building online ordering, even building an app, I mean, that has been commoditized. And so we are doing that for free, but we monetize the agency service, which are obviously AI [12:27] services on top of it. And so in a year from now, we're really working on having more of these point solutions. We do your entire reservation stack. We do your online ordering stack. We do that already. Your website stack. We maybe even do your staff scheduling stack. Right? And then on top of that, we'd already do remarketing. We do social media. We do reputation management. We do phone answering. We're launching print. Super cool thing here. Again, [12:48] in the AI world, we all get from Starbucks that email or that text message, happy birthday. Here's a free coffee. Imagine you would get from a local business a postcard, Nathan. Hey, Nathan. Happy birthday. You know, scan this QR code and come back. Like, now that is a real experience. Right? And so with AI, it becomes scalable. [13:04] >> Your funnel requires a demo to be taken, which is surprising because you come from this industry, so you know how busy restaurant owners are. So two questions. One, why do you require they book a demo instead of just put a credit card in no touch? And two, how many demos are you doing per month right now? [13:18] When I talk to a business owner and I say, I can help you with email. The first thing what they will think is, oh, I have Mailchimp already. Well, the question is when is the last time you used it? Also, 99 of our competitors, their websites look very similar to ours, AI, AI, AI, but it's always automated automated. And then when you look at it, someone still has to click the magic wand to write an email. [13:37] The email just doesn't write itself, schedules itself, which it does with us, right? That's the core differentiator here. So that's the first one. We kind of really want to make sure that the customer understands so we don't lose them in the setup in between. And that then leads to the second part really. We don't do free trials. We would never ever do free trials because if you are and and so, you know, because if you are [13:56] signing up with us and we don't as a business owner, you don't have skin in the game, you will not go live because clicking on your email connect to Google button will be delayed, delayed, delayed because the oven broke, because waitstaff didn't show up, because the Wi Fi went out, because the delivery guy forgot to bring the chicken, and now you have to go to Walmart to pick up some extra chicken for your restaurant, right? Like [14:16] and so minor things get pushed out, but they don't get pushed out if the business owner has skin in the game. So we don't do free trials. Majority of our customers pay upfront for the year. We're pushing incredibly hard for that to actually have a long term partnership. And for that, we need the demo. Everyone who has the self sign up service, they have not built a relationship with that customer. And so now we are going [14:35] in in person, and we can cut out any cold call solution, quick sign up type of solution out there because we actually have that relationship. How many demos are you doing per month? 400, something like that. 300 to 400 right now. Again, all outside sales, not a dollar on marketing, not a single inbound funnel. Who's giving the demo? The market leads that are in the markets actually will do the demo virtually. Right? So we have an [15:00] outside salesperson with the customer here, then we have the customer here, and we have someone over the screen doing the actual demo. [15:07] >> The rep you have on the ground in any major city, just to be clear, they're making no base salary, right? It's 100% commission in first year? [15:14] No, so they have an activity guarantee, what we call it. So if you don't close anything, but you knocked on doors and you set appointments, you will make money. So, How right, because then [15:22] >> much would I make? [15:23] Like 36 ks, 40 ks a year. Nothing crazy. Generally, we want to have you to have around 70 touch points a week. A touch point is not unique, so this can be right? Maybe you go to the same account three times in a day. That would be three touch points. [15:35] >> Okay. [15:35] And then we have a key that goes against that as you do closing activity. If you do 10 demos in a week, you can't do any more walk ins. Right? If I signed up because I [15:43] >> saw your ad on indeed.com, and I'm the rep on the ground in Miami, your expectation is Nathan will pay you 30 to 40% of any new sales you drive, which average six k ACVs. We want you to target six new accounts per month. So that's 36 k of new AR company. [15:57] Locations. Good. One account number. Okay. Yep. [16:00] >> And you want me to knock each week on at least 70 doors or take at least 70 demos. So that is equivalent to about 10 doors or demos per day. And if I do all those things, I at least know I have a good base salary, and then I can earn more on commissions. If I really crush it in Miami, you'll notice, and in my year two with the company, you'll say, Nathan, we wanna promote you [16:19] >> to manager of Florida or something like that. Is that right? [16:23] Six months in. And then the cool thing is, because I took Founderpath, I have little dilution. Nathan, you also get actually a little bit of equity. Everyone who joins us gets equity because we are still so early stage that everyone who survives here for two years, right, and has a lot of fun here hopefully for two years has done their due to help us to get where we have to get. So you're vested after two years [16:43] on obviously a small sliver, but everyone gets equity. Can you sort your database by, like, revenue to see which customers you serve that are running the best local businesses? [16:53] Yes, we can. [16:54] >> Would you ever consider making them all acquisition offers and rolling it up cons considering you have the data to know which ones to roll up? Like buying restaurants? [17:01] Yeah. You have the data. [17:02] >> I mean, that's the what everyone else reason they don't do it, it's like they don't know which restaurants they should buy because they don't have the data. You have the data. You're running them already. Look. [17:12] We are way too tiny. Like, right now, we are so busy building a AI growth company here. Right? It's actually an interesting thought. Yes. We have some of the data. I don't know if we have all of the data, but because we actually have point of sale integrations, we can grab out even all in store data, all payments data, sometimes even capital finance data. Right? Like, there's a lot of stuff there. Right now, I stay in [17:30] my lane. Right? Like, what for us is more relevant, I think, before we would think in buying restaurants is we have a huge market opportunity in hair salons, nail salons, gyms, doctor offices, car dealerships, [17:41] >> like Why do want to go cover so many industries? Does that make doesn't that make you weaker on everything else? Like, knowing what brain to build for a salon is different than the brain for a car dealership? [17:51] Car dealership, let's take that out of the equation. Salon and restaurant, very, very similar. So that is the one we would look at first. But, it's a good question. I mean, for now, we are exclusively every time we hire new reps, everyone is, Can I go into others? And we say, No. We are only in restaurants. But if we think bigger, Main Street has such a big need. I don't see and I see a, you know, [18:11] big opportunity. When our product is there, we own the distribution on the ground. It could be an easy flywheel to unlock. But exactly, that is the challenge. Like, we did open up to hair salons, nail salons late last year, and exactly what you mentioned we found. We are just missing 5% to be perfect for them, and that is why we stopped it. With building becomes more bottleneck, the question is how easy can we adjust for this [18:32] 5%, right? And we're not answering that question over the next six to twelve months, but we might try to answer that question next year. [18:39] >> Well, this my official sort of call for startups for Founderpath. We are we are looking for what we call ABC, and that's atoms plus bits plus capital. Bits is Carl. He has data that sits on top of the atoms. He knows what restaurants are performing, what hair salons are performing. And then you have the capital to then go fund the software and the roll up of the physical assets. I think this is the future in the [19:00] >> a of AI. Carl, I'm thinking about launching a fund called ABC Capital, but we'll see what happens. [19:04] Alright. I love that. [19:06] >> You're at $3,500,000 ARR today growing nicely. If someone offers you $15,000,000 all cash today to sell the company, [19:12] >> do you take it? [19:13] No way. No way. We have term sheets higher than that from VC, by the way. Significantly higher than that. [19:18] >> How high? How high? [19:19] Close to double. Less than double. A little less than double. [19:23] >> Are you going to take one of those [19:25] VC deals or no? Fiftyfifty, right? Like, if we find the right partner the right term, so we're trying to push valuation even more. So what we are actually trying to land on where we are today is in the 60s to 75s, right? I mean, we're growing 60,000,000 valuation? Yeah. 60 to 75, right? [19:42] >> Million, which would be like a 20x multiple, 25x multiple. [19:46] Correct. On a 10,000,000 type of check, Right. [19:48] >> Do you get nervous about trying to push your valuation to 70,000,000 on 3,500,000 of ARR because then you have to actually grow into that valuation and you risk a down round in the future? [19:56] Yeah, definitely concerned. Right. Like, think, I mean, the thing is what I'm the down round, again, I'm not so worried about because I don't need money to grow the business. Right? Like, I'm not gonna be in six or twelve months. I'm out of money again, and I keep the engine going because I open AI burning through a lot. The challenge more is is actually the the liquidation preferences. Right? So that is where would I negotiate on. [20:18] At $10,000,000 it's not that risky, right? Because I mean, even if you would have a 2x on it, meaning, you know, I have to make a $20,000,000 exit, I would see nothing because on $10,000,000 2x liquidation preference, $20,000,000 would go to that investor. I think where it becomes interesting when, you know, if we would go that route, if we would ever start to raise the 50, the $100,000,000, right, that is where the issue becomes. You raise [20:36] 100 at a two x, I mean, you're screwed if you don't sell for less than 200,000,000. And if they're then afterwards participating, I mean and I think that's what sometimes founder oversee, right, is really the the risk of that. It always makes [20:47] >> me sad when I see founders that are doing $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 of ARR. They've been building for five or ten years, and they are personally just broke. It's because they didn't push for a secondary when they gave up control. And so how are you thinking about that? Were you will you really demand or require a portion of your next round be secondary so you can take [21:06] care of yourself and employees a little bit? Every friend that I have that had successfully has raised rounds, successfully has rebuilt startups in, you know, Silicon Valley, hundreds of millions of dollars valuation has one recommendation. So this now doesn't come from me, it comes from others is yes. Do actually take some secondary. Take care of yourself and every investor will apparently understand. Again, did not really have these conversations yet because I'm still in this primary, primary, [21:29] primary type of mindset. But the more I have now conversations as we are out there, you know, collecting some term sheets, seeing what we can get, right? Beggars can't be choosers, but we're actually not be we're not beggars right now. You know, but the one feedback I always get is, yeah, get some secondary in and it's actually a really nice storytelling to the investor also that you are doing it to have more peace of mind, be [21:51] fully be able to focus on the business. Right? There is something to be said about you are a better founder, a better person to grow at if you are not eating ramen every day. So yeah. [22:00] >> If you're gonna give up future optionality, you should derisk by taking a little off the table today. And as you're seeing by OpenAI and Anthropic today that are recruiting and doing tenders and secondaries, it's a powerful recruiting tool if your employees actually believe that you will create liquidity options for them before, know, an IPO that might happen in ten years. So there's a lot of benefits. I'm eager to see sort of where you wind up. [22:21] You can bet that when we get to the half payable point or something like that, we wanna double up and grow faster. Right? [22:26] >> Carl, if people wanna follow your story online, where can they find you? [22:29] You can find me on LinkedIn, and you can connect there. Otherwise, I don't have a big social media presence. It's the one shortcoming I have, but find me on LinkedIn. Just search for Carl Turner, swipe by, and that's why I'm in. Otherwise, obviously, if you're restaurant, check out swipe.by. [22:42] >> Guys, company again, swipe.by, the AI marketing department for Main Street. Carl, thanks for taking us to the top. [22:48] Thank you, Nathan.