How TitleCapture CEO Alex Samant grew TitleCapture to $5.6M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

titlecapture.com launched back in 2013 they finished 2021 with 280 000 a month in Revenue they've grown nicely five to ten percent year over year the the definition of a healthy bootstrapped company they profit 30 every month so on 333 000 bucks a month in top line revenue today call it 90 000 bucks worth of profits which they keep 50 of that in the bank to grow their cash balance now over 600 000 bucks he likes to see three to five months of expenses in the bank to stay safe now thinking about Capital allocation what can he buy can you buy distressed assets to keep growing the company he's got the team to do it 35 folks 10 Engineers as they look to continue to scale in a bootstrapped way hey folks my guest today is Alex samani is the co-founder of titlecapture.com where they helped us title agents real estate agents and loan officers provide hyper accurate cost estimates to home buyers and sellers the company was founded in 2013 100 bootstrapped and now doing almost 4 million in AR he's got personal skills and background including product to design and marketing Alex shorty takes to the top yeah um really uh thankful for being uh on your podcast Nathan you bet did you start off sort of as a broker and said you know what I don't like this whole commission structure let me go build a SAS company instead no no no it's the story is actually uh a lot simpler and not that glitzy and you know we me and my co-founder were developing you know software basically outsourced getting projects and whatnot and at some point in 2013 it kind of got fed up of uh that business model and then we decided hey let's build something that we own and we sell a subscription instead of just constantly going back to step one with every new client and so what happened was that um we had a the we had a company who wanted us to build a rate calculator app for them right and that's when we decided well hold on instead of actually selling it to them let's find out more about this need and let's do some research because they're pretty big and if they needed chances are that the whole Market might need something like this and we do the homework and we proposed to them hey you don't have to pay us hundreds of thousands of dollars just pay us a thousand dollars a month you know going forward and we'll cap It lifetime deal and we'll build it but let's get we're going to own it and they said yes and that was the start of what title capture are they still paying 1K per month today yeah but they were acquired by one of the biggest uh type of insurance companies in the country first American did they cancel capture after they were acquired or they're still they're still paying and using no no the funny story is the um the acquiring company already had a solution but the people that were using us they sort of were activists and they didn't want to let go of it and so they kind of opposed uh canceling and we're still with them sounds like you need to write a book The activist customer yeah that's also be a good customer success book that would so so how did you structure this in the early days because I have a lot of Founders listing that are launching their first product someone has told them yes we're willing to pay but making the leap from someone verbally saying yes to actually signing a DocuSign and maybe actually wiring via stripe the first you know down payment is a whole other issue so how did that work for you well I mean we were pretty fortunate um what what happened in the OR well here's another funny story We were supposed to be three Partners right um I was kind of on the design side and you had a programmer and then my co-founder who was doing sales and Business Development right and when we decided that we were going to build this thing we also in parallel booked a booth at the annual convention in West Palm Beach called Alta one like out of being the American Land Title Association the problem was that three weeks or four weeks before the trade show our programmer kind of went missing in action like forget about it we didn't have any code we didn't have anything so I had some background in computer science and I did figure it out on my own so obviously our V 1.0 I don't think it was very functional it looked great it was something to show people at the trade show um obviously we pivoted and we made it work you know the coming weeks but we went at the trade show and our go to market strategy was practically system we got lucky because one person at the trade show who was a the national sales rep for a large title insurance company uh loved it right and our customers are the title agencies right they're the resellers for title insurance policies the title insurance company is they're like the Brokers the middleman right and so every title insurance company has tens and hundreds and thousands of title agencies that they do business with so this guy saw our product it was like dude I would love to put it in front of all my title agencies because I'd like well I know I mean I don't want to disrespect you but you weren't our developer how are you able to build something that this guy's never seen before and you're not even a developer I mean why why hadn't someone else done this thing yet it's a slow non-tech Savvy industry you know and back in 2013 um there weren't many solutions uh and the ones that existed looked like they're from the 90s I see so when we came in with a responsive modern looking thing that was easy to use and you know I mean we had background in creating product so it was obviously Superior and what we added as a nice touch was that we branded it uh we basically emitted a white labeled web app for each and every single customer so that when they put out this rate calculator it was representing them and it was nicely branded and all that so it won with ease of use and Aesthetics 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 around 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 valuation 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 so fast forward to today how many customers are you working with we have signed up of 1500 title agencies thus far the market in total is thirteen thousand um you know so it's limit competitors and everything we're pretty uh you know satisfied with how how far we've come what did each of those 1500 pay per month on average the the ACV is about four grand so that's annual value per year right so it's a slightly above 300 a month um average but we have customers in the thousands a month so can we take the 1500 customers times four grand ACV that would put you like a six million run rate today but you said in the bio you're more four million yeah we've signed up we've signed up 1500 and when you take out the churn companies um I don't know we're about around the Thousand active Okay so a thousand active at four grand a year puts you at a four million run right today or about 330 000 a month in Revenue yeah and where...