How TitleCapture CEO Alex Samant grew 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 were you exactly one year ago one year ago we were um six percent less because I remember the growth in 2022 was six percent um the real estate market definitely took a bit of a hit towards the end of of the year last year when you have seen a bit more churn than usual our turn is normally at about points 6.7 percent month over month um but in the sort of last couple of months of 2022 we did see it up to 1.7 1.8 um people got scared a lot of title agencies decided to kind of cut costs across the board because they didn't know what was coming you know so they take took all this sort of preemptive action um but it has come back down since then so people are starting to get a little more confident about where the Market's going but there's been kind of three four months raw for our net new mrr was negative okay so 313 so 313 000 a month a year ago would be six percent yeah up to 333 today take us back one more year what'd you finish 2021 with MRI wise do you remember 280 something like 280 okay so I mean this is the definition of like you know people say overnight success but no you're just plugging away five to fifteen percent your rear growth for the past seven eight nine ten years right yeah it's actually totally but bootstrapped and what's actually uh now becoming very evident is that growth is tapering because of the fact that we're going higher into the sort of market share um quota and because you have other competitors because whatever you've already signed up the people who are tech savvy and you know they want to use technology it's getting increasingly difficult to growth or to maintain stable growth by sheer new customers so now what really becomes a necessity for us strategically is to start looking at building more product to increase that ACB so for example um you know our uh product is is a rate calculator but the next uh step of the process is a full-on settlement software which helps the title agency manage the whole transaction you own that product you want to sell that product we don't have that product yet there's another competing company that came along in 2016 that that disrupted that market why don't you buy this why don't you build an improvement um what do you mean well why didn't you go by if you know that's the next upsell why haven't you guys built that internally to start upselling yourself or or why have you not gotten bond that bought in that competitor we just didn't get around to making that definite decision right so it's it's because of internal decision making um that's slightly slower and um but we definitely have to start moving either by or build whatever because that's a 40 000 ACB product it's a 10 times so if you want to grow from this point on you have to really start going out there and building more value Alex what's the team size today how many folks 35 to 40 people oh wow okay how many engineers um up to 10 not more than 10. are they all full-time or do you use sort of Outsource uh developer shops they're full-time I think our Dev pops Engineers are outsourced your what okay okay so what like five ten of those or no no it's about two people two or three okay interesting um very cool and then I guess talk to me I mean this is a great bootstrap story it's not every day you hear a bootstrap or going up to four million bucks in ARR so I want to focus a little bit on that um are you running it sort of right at break even or do you guys have profits every month oh no the company's hiding profitable it's 33 profit Market okay so you guys will do that in about ninety thousand dollars a month in profit on your 330 000 up Top Line yeah yeah what do you do so what do you do as a capital allocator as a capital allocator what do you do with that 90 grand each month in profits do paid out as dividends do you reinvest it what do you do we pay it out right now but again we're also um making sure the the cash is there to kind of sustain whatever might happen right so we're taking all kinds of uh you know good Financial you know safety measures so what makes you think it's distributed how much cash in the bank makes you feel safe three months worth of expenses you know which is how much well it should be about uh half a million 500 600 000. okay interesting that's a good Target to get there yeah as a as a cushion just to make you feel safe that makes sense now how do you structure the ninety thousand dollars in payouts each month we had burden on with you can book me who had a whole profit sharing plan she does each month how do you guys think about Distributing well just um make it half half because we have two partners fifty percent each and uh well we don't take it all right we kind of limited um to the point where half stays in cash um you know just adds to the cash every single month so 45k of the 90k would stay in the business so your cash balance is now 650 000 and you guys each take whatever 20 30 000 a month you split the rest yeah yeah pretty much and that's your salary or is that on top of your salary yeah no that's that's basically what we pay ourselves I see you know I see so that's great I mean I love this model now if we look at like personally what you what maybe you would make on the company over time like right 25 Grand a month from the dividends times 12 months I think it's like 300 000 per year and the reason I set that context is if someone came to you and offered you and your partner to buy the whole company for you know say uh 10 million all cash up front today right do you sell uh it's a tough that's a tough question to answer um we're definitely open to an exit opportunity but at the same time we know there's room because of my conversations with all the our customers there's a lot of opportunity and on one hand there's more we can build and grow the company um on the other hand um When comparing a financial buyer's offer with the existing bigger sort of settlement software or Insurance Company the value of our customers that we have today to them is a lot higher than what a financial buyer would offer right we were actually doing the math I'm not going to name any names but we realized that for one of our partners a buyout would be in the range of 60 to 80 million you know that would be fair value to them actually that would be a discount you know so that would be really I mean look I see a lot of deals in today's market that would be a premium exit valuation so why are you not signing and taking that immediately because we didn't get the offer yet we don't have any offers because we haven't been as proactive as we should have in networking and just being in front of all the potential um strategic acquirers right so we have to do a lot more of that you know that's my take on it well so what are so Focus too much on the work you know yeah I mean so how are you thinking about the business I guess moving forward you know um it sounds like you're very comfortable and this is not a bad thing by the way I'm not this is not a disc against being comfortable this is It's a compliment you're in a very comfortable spot so you can keep doing status quo no problem I don't know if you're competitive you play Varsity Sports back then maybe you want to go build a billion dollar company that would be a different model or maybe say you know what I want to go build a family and get out of operating and free up my time and sell the whole thing which of the buckets do you fit in or a different bucket um I would I would be in the second because I always want to challenge myself and build a bigger thing and more so the way I see it it's you know this is an asset so I need to grow its value or build more assets if I can't do this it doesn't matter right we've the sky's the limit and no matter how small the niche is if you dive deep in it you'll find opportunity everywhere we've actually discussed finding a distressed insurance underwriter that we could buy you know that we we would need an investor obviously when it you could take outside money buy that distressed underwriter and use our technology right to position it to create an angle and start competing with the bigger render writers and and that's a different Market altogether because we're talking about hundreds of millions in Revenue every year it's insurance right yep so there's there's all sorts of things we I feel like the best um the most important thing is is for the owners and the founders to get on the same page and and make these calls you know because you don't always have the same values you don't always have the same uh you know wants right and so I think moving forward is usually slower very good when there's a pie in the beginning there's no pie you move to the speed of light but then yeah you know yeah Alex we're out of time so let's wrap up here quickly with a famous five number one favorite book favorite book I'm gonna plug in my you know Dan Martell's buybacker time let's go that's a good one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh many of them but if I had to choose one why is this so difficult man um I don't know I know yeah let's say Elon Musk because he's on Twitter a lot and it's funny number three what online tool do you use uh as your favorite online tool for building title capture uh HubSpot number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night well that's about six okay that's good situation married single kids married two kids that's two daughters how old are you Alex I'm 39 I'm going over 40. that's awesome congrats uh happy early birthdays last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. something I wish when I was 20. yeah I wish I knew that oh man you're asking tough questions man um damn that building a business um that actually um how should I put this and no I'm having a hard time putting it because it's very complex um we can skip it it's no problem yeah we can skip but it's all right ideas like I'm having a hard time guys there you have it 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 bootstrap 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 Alex thanks for taking us to the top thanks Nathan 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 2PM 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 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