How Trex CEO Benjamin Cohen grew Trex to $56.8M revenue and 225 customers in 2023.

this is the top where i interview entrepreneurs who are number one are number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have i'm now at twenty thousand dollars per top five and six million he is hell bent on global domination we just broke our 100 000 units and i'm your host nathan latka when i do webinar interviews or i give big speeches to thousands of people all over the world i usually will talk about data and sometimes show my dashboards like my sas dashboard as i'm going my sas company the top inbox or my website dashboard which shows how i take impressions to convert them into email leads and convert them into customers for nathanwacka.com the funny thing is guys i build these dashboards with myself no developer and it's basically free and i use one tool to do it you can see the tool at nathallaca.com forward slash analytics i'll tell you more later in the show all right guys i talked about this earlier but i schedule like so many meetings it would blow your mind i mean all my podcast interviews right hundreds of entrepreneurs i talk to monthly i schedule and you know what i do it so efficiently i get them all to agree to my calendar so all the calls are back to back to back that means i'm not switching in between tasks all day long i get them to batch so i can be very efficient it's so critical and i use a tool called acuity scheduling to do this at nathanwatka.com forward slash schedule it eliminates back and forth between me and people i'm trying to meet with it makes it very simple and most importantly they help me keep my no show rate very low because they send out reminders helps you look very professional so go to nathan micah.com forward slash schedule to sign up and you get a great deal you know you guys know this i hit people hard i make great deals and gavin the ceo has given us a great deal if you sign up like normal people okay on their website you only get a 14 day free trial to use my link made from micah.com forward slash schedule to get 45 days free okay it's the best it's free go to nathanwacka.comforce schedule right now to sign up and i'll see you there nathan lacka here this episode 650 coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from garth of a company called people indexes which it indexes 3.5 billion people and helps get you contact data that really works like email addresses good morning everybody my guest this morning is benjamin cohen he's the ceo and his leading t-rex with a strong vision for the future of enterprise financial technology and its impact on marketing and making markets more transparent and efficient he has built the t-rex team in the trx software platform by combining the most sustainable elements of finance with modern software as a service technology benjamin are you ready to take us to the top i'm ready nathan all right tell us what that means elements of finance with modern sas technology what's t-rex do so t-rex is a fintech company that makes complex capital markets more liquid by making them more transparent and efficient energy go ahead um i i was going to say that that that means that you sort of take everything that uh happened during the financial crisis what happened there was lack of transparency and a lack of efficiency especially in markets that were not as well covered and that lack of transparency meant that there was a lack of price discovery and assets just didn't trade and so capital was constrained and thus you had no liquidity so getting to that ultimate liquidity is the key for these smaller more esoteric markets and i'm seeing kind of in the screenshot and the research did on the site you've got like th this image where it says trunch a 113 trunch b 213 trunk c and then residual etc with maps and things spotted i mean are you basically taking these things that were these very bad things that were all wrapped up together that lipstick on them and made them look very pretty in the form of a triple a rating and breaking them down so they're easier to track down exactly so we're providing institutional investors or the ultimate holders of these capital who are holding all of our money in pension funds insurance companies etc and we are providing them with a familiar framework where they can slice and dice everything uh in as many ways as possible so they can get complete transparency into the risk we're not de-risking things we're just making that risk more transparent got it and what's your model how do you make money so we have an enterprise sas model where we have subscribers and those subscribers can be anywhere in the ecosystem of the deal can be from the originator of an asset if you look at our beachhead market which is renewable energy fintech for renewable energy you can take somebody who is who's putting in place a loan for you to put solar on your house and you then have a 20-year contract to pay that back so we have the originator of those assets the intermediaries the lending banks and the investment banks who are packaging these up and then ultimately the institutional investors and they can all interact across our platform together and what are they just on average we don't have to break down individual customer cohorts what are they paying you per month would you say they're paying anywhere from two to twenty thousand dollars a month uh and that depends on the functionality that they need okay got it and then take us back to kind of the history here so what did you launch this then i launched this company almost exactly five years ago five years ago two days from now uh when i met with uh venture capitalists out in san francisco saw that there's a big need in the renewable energy market specifically in connecting it to capital markets because completely fragmented exactly 2012. was this a case where you know we have a lot of vcs on the show some very successful ones like elon musk's first investor and many of them will tell me the way they do deals is they actually they target a space typically they go research the hell out of the space and then and then try and get in with the leader if they can if not get in with second place was this a scenario where this vc brought you in because they were interested in this kind of solution and then you went and built it because of you know them convincing you uh it was close to that though i i actually had the solution in mind i met with this vc uh and it fit their investment which is perfectly it was ecosystem integrity fund they're our series a lead investor participated in our series b as well uh have been tremendous at incubating the company from basically pretty early stage through to to this point in our success and so obviously you're you're not bootstrapped how much total have you raised to date we've raised about five million dollars today okay we're sorry not five i've understood that that was in our series a uh that we're at 15 million 15 one five and uh i i'd be shocked if all those were or notes in debt i'm assuming you've had a priced equity round at this point we've had two price equity rounds in a beam nice very good and uh tell us more about the team how many team members we have 21 people on the team uh we're based in new york where i am at the moment and we have almost half our team in tel aviv israel where we have most of our software engineers it's an incredible market for software engineering on par with new york city and the bay and uh and the talent there is just incredibly deep and and very loyal and economically what makes it so comparable and competitive the cost of living there is lower um but the the market for software developers is also incredibly hot and we we have a good niche there in that we're fintech which is interesting it's also challenging which developers like and we're doing it for our first market which is renewable so we're also doing some good for the world even though we're entirely focused on risk in return and providing that analysis are you from television are users i'm not i was constantly born in new york my parents just moved from south africa and i grew up in north carolina oh very cool all right and what is the uh that's really interesting what is the uh how many customers are you serving uh today q127 we have over 225 users uh and including those that have renewed from the institutional investor and and uh originator of asset side and when you say you know these terms get all mixed up all the time when you say 225 users are those you know paying customers yes those are paying customers uh or paying via uh by transactions so we we want to get as many institutional investors as we can because that provides the liquidity aggregated on the platform that makes it attractive for the originators to come in and say look we want to sell this portfolio of assets we have nobody to sell it to or it's impossible to sell it using old microsoft excel models and so part of it is a freemium upsell service on the institutional investor side where they can use this during the transaction process but then they won't uh they won't be able to thereafter unless they they pay for a subscription so just to be clear the investors are coming in kind of looking for different deals that originators have put together which include basically different loan portfolios right now specifically in the renewable energy sector that's correct interesting so for for could a common man think of this like when they go to the bank and get a mortgage and it's bb t basically bb t puts all those things together and tries to sell them to fannie and freddie same kind of model except for...