How Teamera CEO Rae Hames grew Teamera to $440K revenue with a 4 person team in 2025.

she launched work Sandy and agency and grew up to 5.5 million dollars of Revenue launched again in 2017 but she was a 50 50 partner and I wasn't always quite sure who was really driving the thing what she was excited about was an internal tools agency had built to manage Freelancers they hired an outsourced Dev shop they spent 800 900 Grand building and we're actually selling it internally for a bit and Ray said you know I want to spin this bad boy out so she negotiated with her partner at the agency split it out samara.com is now her company she's running with two co-founders and Tamara is also still on the cap table but they're about to launch their pricing this is effectively the tool that has enabled them at the agency to have only 18 full-time employees but still manage all their Freelancers in one spot really high margins uh great profile there she's launching now today hoping to turn on pricing here in the next couple of months we'll follow up closely hey folks my guest today is Ray Haynes she's an industry veteran worked as an agency operator brand site leader and freelancer herself she's now building a pool called tamara.co which helps you solve operational challenges of managing Freelancers Ray you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right I am convinced that we are within five years of somebody taking company public with a billion in revenue or at a billion valuation because they manage Freelancers and part-time talents so well tell me what you're seeing in the market yeah you know I think that there's first of all there's a massive rise of freelance Talent just across the board my experience as you mentioned is squarely in the advertising space um you know you see every creative and marketer out there taking freelance roles leaving the agency space um and being hesitant to go brand side um for a lot of reasons and the freelance life just appeals to a lot of people and I think that um we're seeing that grow more and more and there's so many freelance marketplaces out there there's so many tools out there that manage piecemeal Solutions of managing Freelancers managing the experience of being Freelancers but what we are trying to solve for is the experience of building true freelance teams so you know when the within the agency space it takes a village um and as brands are bringing in more and more marketing work in-house they have to think about not only how do I find one good freelancer where am I going to find them is it somebody from my Rolodex that I worked with three years ago do I need to go digging on a freelance Marketplace to find new talent but when you're trying to build an entire team that's you know flexible Project based and there's a lot of operational complexities around finding the talent in the first place and then certainly managing those contracts and managing that team to success like if I could if I could book a demo on your site and you were on a demo and you show me your UI like are you gonna basically like do I post a job on Tamara and then you're aggregating from Fiverr and upwork and freelancer.com and all the sites and you're showing me you know candidates the higher and managing your platform like what's the software actually do so what it's designed to do is to help Brands manage their own pool of Freelancers um this is really built from the Insight that every single creative director I've ever worked with has their own Rolodex of Freelancers that they're literally calling up on a phone every time they have a new role saying are you available what's your schedule like can I book you in and that's a really time consuming process um and there's some Brands you know that have made it maybe a little more down the line in terms of sophistication But ultimately most people I know are still operating in freelance spreadsheets yeah who do they know who do they want to bring in and this helps Brands who are bringing on say five to even up to 50 Freelancers at a time um bring the right people into the into the fold and so what the actual UI looks like is that to answer your question is that they're uploading their own Talent data um we're sending invites to those folks to build their profiles and then we're able to manage those contacts and relationships and you know obviously keeping those profiles active is something that every Talent Marketplace um struggles with and I've got a lot of background on that um but ultimately helping Brands keep tabs on their favorite Freelancers and then you know if and when there's gaps to fill we can help fill those roles through we've got you know a growing list of talent Network Partnerships that they can tap into and post a role where those folks can then see oh I'm really interested in that and they'll end up on a talent listed within our system um all the way down to partner recruiting efforts where we can help in find individually hard to find roles and so Ray just to be clear too you're just getting off their are you guys pre-revenue Market we're pre-revenue yeah we are um we just launched yesterday we announced our company launch yesterday um but we how long have you been working on it up till launch day yesterday so um we're spinning out of a former consultancy that I had started back in 2017. and there's a long history here of the technology that we've built in-house within that consultancy to help um to help ourselves and then now what we're doing with Team era is that we're taking that kind of core nugget of technology that we built and building it into a true self-serve tool set for Brands to manage freelance teams themselves 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 evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 I don't want to skip over that part of the story because one of some of the most successful SAS companies they do this exactly the same thing they spin out of an agency so tell me brass tax how you actually did it you know a lot of people they don't know what the capital should look like of the spin out because you spent agency dollars to build the internal version so who owns the code base your products at the agency own part of the SAS company how do you deal with this yeah and it was you know um it was one coming from a point of we have we had a successful consultancy business it's um generating solid Revenue um it's grown year over year and more than four five six million Revenue uh we did five mail last year in Revenue um you know it's pretty sizable and we've got a small core team running the business so you know felt really good about that and like I said we had start to build we'd started to build some of this um core technology for ourselves to help just make our jobs easier in managing freelance teams on behalf of our customers um and we looked at ourselves you know late last year and said we've got two different business models in play here you know do we want to be a SAS company or do we want to be a Services Company and you know the kind of adage that guided a lot of the decisions is like this out there real quick because people...