How Teamera CEO Rae Hames grew 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 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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 listening won't know this I just I mean I'm on work Sandy that's the agency names in profile there's 18 full-time employees listed the fact that you guys have 5.5 million Revenue with 18 full-time tells me you have a well-oiled freelancer machine running that are not listed as full-time Talent on LinkedIn so it's very effective I mean imagine your margins are much higher than other agencies because you know how to use Freelancers I mean it's a successful model and the goal of that business is to help Brands build their in-house capability their in-house marketing capabilities so it's one part strategic Consulting it's one par recruiting um and it's one part freelance Team Management on behalf of those customers that's very impressive okay so did you have a partner like were you 100 owner of work Sandy no so um I had a co-founder at work Sandy we had started the business together in 2017 and as I was saying we got to the end of last year and looked at ourselves and said we've got two different business models in play um we've got a successful business here but we know that there There's an opportunity to grow this side of the business and I've always been really interested in scalable technology like you know I've been in the Bay Area for 13 years you don't spend that much time there without trying something yourself um and you know we made the decision that I was going to take the tech side and spin that out and he um the trade-off is that for the IP Sandy and my co-founder have a little bit of equity on the cap table with Tamara and you know and in exchange I left the cap table of Sandy um with a little bit of an exit clause that if that business ever gets acquired or sold then I get to see a little piece of that pie bye ultimately that's basically your concentration of equity on the spin out they got a little equity in the agency because of that and they still but you both each still have a little upside of each other's Venture the studio and the Agents that's cool yeah exactly it felt really across the board Fair felt like it acknowledges who's running the day-to-day business of each of those companies um you know the majority of Tamara today if you own more than 60 percent no I don't I have two other co-founders two other primary co-founders with Tamara um both of which came over from work Sandy um and I am I'm the CEO primary shareholder and then um like I said I've got two other co-founders who have a significant Chunk on the cap table and then we've got you're the largest individual shareholder on Tamara's cap table today correct correct so it's very clear who's leading it now was that part of negotiation like I imagine you took the most talented people from the agency and I imagine your partners of the agency said wait don't take these other two people like we need them I mean was that part of the negotiation you know it was really about who on our team had been focused on the tech side I think that as as Sandy evolved over a handful of years like it was really clear that there was folks who were running um the Consulting side of the work working with clients Hands-On um really guiding client priorities which is really important and then a team that of us that was really more behind the scenes building tools to help that team so it actually felt like a pretty clean and logical um division of the team at that point but I do know personally speaking this is kind of like a bit that made the other early Founders may find helpful is like I was a 50 50 um owner in Sandy and sometimes that created confusion honestly about like who's doing what and who's the most best who has the most bested interest here and I think that um for me going into Tamara I needed to know at the end of the day it's it's my fault if we screw up you know um and that responsibility's on my shoulders yeah yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense okay was there any cash transaction here did the agency put 200k into Samara to get it going no so the agency had spent um you know along the way we had had a part-time development team building building our tool set that the agency was using like I said behind the scenes um but we ultimately looked at that as part of the IP transfer deal how much was that though we're saying like 10 grand 100 Grand a million from the you know a lot yeah I mean like just shy of a million just shy of them okay okay yeah okay so you could argue the agency sort of funded the the MVP of which that's why the agency is now has a little chunk of equity on Tamara's cap table yeah and to be and to be fair you know we were making some revenue from that technology within the agency so you know we can start text enabled Services we're charging a subscription fee to our customers um you know and so it wasn't all a sunk cost yeah yeah okay this makes tons of sense uh this is great so how long did that whole negotiation take by the way was that easy and clean or it took months and months and months um you know it's been about three months since June now um so it's been about three months end to end um kind of from making the decision that we were going to fully spin out um to negotiating the terms and um getting it done so yeah that's awesome that's awesome all right what's the plan to start my customers I see when I click book a demo on your site you say first core opens July 1st yes yes well um there's two there's a couple things that are happening obviously we just announced our launch yesterday so this is really where like rubber meets the road um truly and this is about kind of fundamental bootstraps like I think it's really up to us to find our first handful of customers because the type of customers that we were servicing in our past agency were Enterprise scale customers they needed a consultancy to help you know Drive some amount of strategy of their in-hosing um past and with this new Venture we're looking at customers who are willing and able to kind of self-serve their way into building an in-house team and so I think that that's going to look like the smaller end of mid-size brands um so it's just a new there's just some new focus on finding our new customer base right and understanding truly what what they need and what they react to but the first two pieces that we'll be launching over the course of the next few weeks are our guide to in housing so you know it's a couple lead magnets right is functionally what we're talking about where we're launching a guide to inhousing that will help Brands understand the path of identifying which roles to bring in-house from traditional agencies um where it makes sense to hire flexible support versus full-time support um and some operational knowledge and know-how that we've built along the way doing this for several Brands um in our past lives all with the intention of helping people understand like there's a lot of value in the technology that we've created to help check those boxes faster um and beyond that we're also building out it's a little bit more sophisticated but it's a in housing calculator so if you think about the average Ad Agency markup like a healthy Ad Agency is running a 3X markup which like hardly anybody's getting away with these days but any agency that's still in business is running at least 50 markup on hours and so if you think about that even if you've got a team of 10 people over the course of the year that's a significant chunk of change that companies could be saving and reinvesting in more strategic ways and so that's what um we can help them we can help them identify that cost and we can help them justify what kind of cost savings we're going to be able to provide for them with these self-store tools yeah yeah that all makes loads of sense well I'm excited to watch how it does over the next couple months I'll be watching closely hope to have you back on in a year and get an update yeah I would love that so let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book I read a lot and so I don't know if I have a favorite um I just finished stolen Focus which is um which is a fascinating read so I would put that just on my most my most recent read list number two is there a CEO or founder you're studying um again like I've I look up to a lot of different Role Models um I think Melanie Perkins at canva is an amazing female founder like really love following her story um I also use canva religiously um which might answer your next question yes so is it canva I love canva yeah I'm a really um visual communicator and so I found it really easy to use and really helpful in um communicating to our team about you know everything from marketing to product that's great how many hours of sleep do you get every night I'm a big sleeper a solid eight I love that all right um and situation married single kids I'm married married no kids um small dog small dog fair enough and can I ask how old you are right I'm 36. last question something you wish you when you were 20. 20 feels like so such a baby um I would just say chill out you know like I've always been a real type a driver and I think that um I yeah I could probably have enjoyed my 20s a little bit more than I actually did um so looking back I would say have a little bit more fun to chill out and loosen up folks you met Ray today she launched work Sandy an agency and grouped 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 racing 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 enabled them at the agency to have only 18 full-time employees but still manage all their Freelancers in one spot really high margins great profile there she's launching now today hoping to turn on pricing here in the next couple months we'll follow it closely right thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much for having me take care one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their 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 SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this 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