How Tettra CEO Andy Cook grew Tettra to $3.2M revenue and 548 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Andy cook he's building and is co-founder and CEO of a company called tetra knowledge-sharing for growing teams prior to he was probably manager at HubSpot where he helped start their free marketing product line he was the co-founder of rent abilities which was acquired by HubSpot back in October of 2013 and he already takes to the top I'm ready to go all right did you get rich from that acquisition why aren't rying a beach somewhere doing nothing I have too much adv not to work all right so how long did you stay with with HubSpot after that acquisition in 2013 I was there for two years okay so then would you go right into tetra on 2015 yeah we came up with the idea for tetra while we were growing our team the product at the time at HubSpot was called leading to regarding this product called lead in it kind of was like a start up inside of HubSpot and as we're growing our team myself it might now co-founder of tetra Nelson were in Cambridge and our entire engineering team was in Dublin Ireland and so we communicated a lot over chat and there are a lot of times where we needed like asynchronous you know more long-form communication and we just didn't have a good tool for it that was hooked up to chats we came up with the idea for a tetra is so would you compare this to slack today or no we're not like we integrate with slacks or a supplemental tool that works with the slack platform so like slacks more chat synchronous communication in tetras more documentation asynchronous communication I see I guess so I was getting at was did Brian miss out on this little science fair nest egg which could have been slack but it ended up leaving HubSpot and being spun out no so technically Brian didn't miss out on it because he invested in Tetris a you know become ex slack he's he's got a small piece of that and then the product we were working on inside of hub spots actually doing really well too it's their low-end free marketing automation a sidekick tool so if sidekick was like the free tool for sales lead in which is now called hub spot marketing hub starter or something that was the free tool for marketers yeah you know you become public and all the names become more complicated yeah I totally they made us change the name at one point but it was it was the right call that's funny and was this a science fair project I know bro gave great detail when he came on the show about how you may use science Harris drive innovation was this a science fair project this is a HubSpot labs project so basically the way it worked is my first company with rentability it was acquired will be up front as the talent acquisition so did not get rich but did okay for myself especially for like you know a 25 year old who invested all of his time and money into his first startup it's nice to have a job - that was a huge benefit and I learned a ton on spot but I'm so ledin started in HubSpot labs and on my first day they took me put me with another person who had been working there for three years who I also happened to be friends from middle school with Nelson and the then chief product officer at the time David cancel who's the CEO of Toulouse enemy David can sell proper pronunciation as the CEO drift he was the product chief product officer at the time and he just told us like hey we want to build marketing software for like very small businesses we don't normally sell do don't know what should cost don't know what you do just make sure you use orange in the logo go so we worked on it just the two of us Nelson and I for about a year grew to about seven thousand small businesses using it and eventually got more funding which is like budget headcount inside HubSpot from brian and our mash and JD and all those people to grow the team and build it out more and then having so how do you leave up spot oh yeah good question so we left UPS one on good terms so we came up with the idea for tetra probably the beginning of 2015 there's nothing fail like I mean what got you off with a small business tool oh right yeah so it didn't fail at all we hit our milestone which was to rebuild the entire product which was only built for WordPress at the time on the HubSpot infrastructure so there's like a cloud version and a wordpress plugin so we got we built that out with the team in dublin and then we actually got it announced on stage at inbound as like a big product launch as well so when we left it was in good hands they knew what they were doing there was another product manager who's recommended to so we kind of like transferred all that knowledge I was in our heads into the heads of the team moving forward and then we left to go start Tetris so all as well it's very good friends with so a synchronous asynchronous communication really got going 2015-2016 help me understand pricey model is a pure place and if so on average what our customers paying per month for it would you say IP replace ass our our pub so like ever driven per count is about 110 dollars so it's like $1,300 per year yep and and what is that typically plays at a team size of two people ten people so it's all over the map and like we've had many different pricing models and we just constantly changed with the gue change pricing like 8 times since we started to four years ago but the average team that works really well with tetra is between 50 and 500 people and they're growing and hiring frequently and walk me through how you got you how you got your first five or maybe first hundred customers this is really interesting so for the first six months we just hustled reached out to people we built the whole product people said they would use it we built it like an MVP and I don't know eight weeks or so gave it to them no one used it that was kind of like the oh crap moment do we make a huge mistake quitting HubSpot but then we realized that the reason why they weren't using it wasn't because they didn't have a pain point ways the way because no no I want to get in your head here at this moment how much money had you spend the MVP at that point where you're like oh my god I hope this thing works so we I mean there was a big opportunity cost right like I and Nelson both left a bunch of unvested options that were worth actual money because how about a gun public at that point and then like salaries as well I put in a bunch of my own money just like fund our expenses because we didn't have any investors so it's probably like I mean in today's dollars like is the stock their stocks gone up like four four hundred grand it least sounds like doubling engineering opportunity cost all that stuff 400 count the MVP yeah well known on the MVP tweet you know just spent our time in like probably 10k of like my own money for like an office and random tools and that type of stuff I'm just thinking like opportunities here who are you the engineer while you're paying a team in Dublin I know so tetra was just Nelson tonight to start we're both technical I'm more like back in engineering he's more product from an engineering and then we kind of split the business so 10k and hard cash to get it going but maybe another 350 an opportunity cost something like that right yeah yeah exactly fair enough okay so you launch and then you go oh my gosh no one's using it well then what so at the same time fortuitously slack opened up their platform and so we took that product idea brought it back to all those same people were like what if we hook this thing up to slack which you're using and everyone was like yes I want that can I have that right now so we threw out the whole first MVP we had built rebuilt a new MVP 100% on the slack platform over two weeks at the end of 2015 launched that got in their App Store and got like 500 custom 500 companies to sign up like to author slack account and create at that time we we were onto something that the product was crappy over what period of time did the 500 coming out what heat a server that that was probably like three weeks maybe and it was released on slack yeah so we were probably I don't know the exact number but we were probably one of the first 50 apps in the slack App Store mm-hmm and now it's just really lucky to kind of realize that opportunity and ride that wave and it was also kind of the Wild West for the slack platform at the time we're like anyone on any team could off any app without getting permission so like we just had huge huge brands coming in and trying out the product and then we manually sold like the first ten of them with fake fake product mock-ups and demos did the did the slack fun invest in you guys we didn't take slack fund money because they have a requirement where you have to have institutional capital which we haven't raised any institutional capital so we can't raise from them how much have you raised to date we've raised 1.6 million did you how would you do that again or no I mean it sounds like you had some financial with all bootstrap for a while do you regret giving up that equity if I were to do it all over again I probably wouldn't raise that much in the get go so we raised nine hundred K in our first round and then kind of did a follow on angel round of six hundred K...