Tribe Technologies Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Siavash Mahmoudian. He's the co founder and CEO of tribe, a customizable online community platform serving SMBs. Now before this, he was co founder and CTO of Breezio, an online community software used by organizations like NASA, the state of Maryland, and other enterprise and government organizations. Siavash, are you ready to take us to the top? Of course. [00:19] >> I'm excited. [00:20] I'm excited you're here too. So tribe. So is the link. We were just sort of talking about one of your competitors Circle. Is that the right that's the space you're playing in? Am I on the spot? [00:30] >> So I think like Circle mostly targets the creators. In our case, like, we mostly target businesses. So it's a little bit of overlap on like the outcome and what we do. However, when it comes to the audience that we are tackling, it's a little bit different. [00:45] So what's an example of a feature that you might build that Circle would never build because you're focused on businesses and they're focused on creators? [00:52] >> So in general, first of all, the idea behind tribe is that we are a platform that is very customizable, extensible, and embeddable into other products. So we usually target people that already have a product that is out there, and they want the community to be in the user's journey of their audience inside the product. So that's one of the main differences. And also, when it comes to extensibility, we focus a lot on building apps on top [01:24] >> of Tribe. So Tribe handles all the hard stuff like feed notifications, analytics, moderation, member segmentation, and all those things, and everything else is an app built on top of Tribe, and it's very simple for others also to customize our platform. Now, when we go to the apps, for instance, Amplitude integration is something that is important for businesses because they want better analytics, as an example. Or we can say, I don't know, Salesforce or Pipedrive integrations where [01:55] >> they can easily, like, integrate the community with their CRM and all those So, Siavash, how [02:00] much do you overlap with someone that's leading community at a business and that person's role is to activate community members into, like, trials for the actual business? In other words, Commsor is sort of playing in the space a little bit. Do you overlap with that kind of analytics as well? [02:13] >> So again, because we are a platform, the good thing about it is that somebody else can come and build an app on top of tribe and say like, I want to integrate like your audience on Slack or Twitter and bring it to this community platform. So we see products like that as some sort of feature that can be added to Tribe. Again, the idea is we should be very customizable and we want to The same way [02:38] >> that, for instance, in iOS, there is a better app, but a third party person can build a better, better app on top of iOS. That's the exact same thing that we see it. So we build all these integrations, so we have Q and A or events and all those sorts of things, but somebody else can build actually a better one if they want to. Understood. [02:57] Well, one of our heroes is Nathan Barry. Ben, we love Bootstrappers and we know that Hailey Chamberlain who leads content community convert kit is a big fan of tribe. So I'm excited to learn more here. Help us understand pricing. What's the average company paying you to use the technology per month? [03:12] >> Yeah, so we have like three different plans as we speak other than the free. So first of all, everyone can start with free up to a 100 members. You can do whatever you want, basically. And then after that, we have the Plus plan, which is more focused on smaller businesses or maybe individuals who have some sort of course and those sorts of things. So creators can actually kind of land in that plan as well. Then we [03:37] >> have the premium plan where it starts from, like it's around like, 200, dollars 190 per month. In that plan, usually it's for businesses that want single sign on and more integrated members can they have? They can have like, on the plus, they can have up to 10,000, and on premium, they can have up to 100,000. If you are bigger than that [04:02] two a month for that. [04:04] >> Yeah. Yeah. [04:05] I see. That feels really cheap. If I'm running a community with a 100,000 people in it, I'm like IBM, and I should be paying you, like, $200 a year, not $2 a month [04:13] >> for two Well, 100 a if you're an IBM, you will need some of the apps that we have. For instance, you need, like actually, IBM is a customer, so we have like five or six deals with them. [04:24] >> In those cases, you want like SAML integration and higher security levels. So the pricing is not only limited by number of members, it's also the use case. So there are some apps that are available on different plans that you can actually utilize those. Got it. Another example [04:42] number of members and also application access. And so, with those kind of upsells, Siavash, what's the largest customer paying you today? What's like your highest ACV? Is it like $100, $200? [04:52] >> Yeah. It's around like more than $100 is the Wow. Highest [04:56] Okay. Really interesting. Give us the backstory here. When did you launch the company? [05:00] >> Yeah. So we launched Tribe actually three years ago. The story actually starts I mean, I'm a technical CEO at Tribe. Started programming when I was like nine or 10. [05:11] How old are you today? [05:12] >> Right now, I'm like 33. Okay. So, yeah, I built actually a dating app. I'm originally Iranian. I built a dating app back in my home country. It was used by 400,000 people. And I was- [05:27] So that means you're married. Did the dating app work on you or are you still single? [05:29] >> Well, I didn't find my [05:31] spouse You didn't find true love, through love. That. But actually I found like two [05:36] >> of my co founders through the next app that I've built. But the funny thing is that I was underage to use my own app. I was like 17 and then I needed to be 18 for the dating app. Then I built this Yahoo Messenger where it connected experts through Yahoo Messenger together. It was a chatbot. I found actually my co founders through that. So I know them from a long time ago. [05:58] But so what year did you officially launch Tribe though? 2018? [06:01] >> So we launched Tribe at the end of like, yeah, 2018. '20 then the idea was, yeah. So the story behind it was that, well, I immigrated to The States around ten years ago, a little bit more than that. [06:17] >> Well, one of the companies that I founded there was Breezio, as you've mentioned, and the initial customers were larger organizations. At some point, it became a custom shop for these large organizations because when NASA comes in and says, We want this little button somewhere, it's really hard to tell them. [06:34] So it was more like an agency then? [06:36] >> It's still a startup. It's still active actually. And well, but it's not as easy to change it for the need. So the thing is that every single community is unique and we talk about that a lot. [06:54] >> Similar to classroom and, I don't know, a church and a meetup where you need different venues and different setup for it. Communities is exactly like that. Online Communities is like that as well. So you need different environments. And what I learned at Breezio was if you want to tackle this market, there must be a platform. So it is customizable, so people can actually customize it to their needs if they want. And the other thing was like, [07:22] >> it should be enviable because, well, you have already a product, you don't want, for instance, to have this community platform and then your product to be separate things. You want it to be inside that. So that's the reason that we built actually tribe around three years ago with my two co founders, basically. [07:40] Got it. And now when you launched, did you guys split equity equally or no? [07:44] >> Split what equally? Equity. Oh, equity. Yeah. So when we launched yeah, of course. It's the equity with my co founders, you mean. [07:53] So 33, 33, 33%. [07:55] >> So it's almost that. [07:56] Okay. Okay. [07:57] >> Well, you have like 10% on like the ESOP for your employees, of course. And then, yes, the equity is almost split it like similarly. [08:06] I see. And did you so your ESOP pool is 10% now. Have you guys bootstrapped or did you raise capital? [08:11] >> So initially we bootstrapped. Basically, did raise the pre seed round, but it was just to get some of our friends that we thought like should be involved in and all those things. So the pre seed round was insignificant, was very small in general, and it was a convertible note. [08:31] What's small though? Mean, we talking 100,000 or 500 Yeah, thousand some or [08:35] >> number, 100,000, something like that. [08:36] Okay, okay. [08:38] >> But then, well, we faked a lot of things on the first version of tribe. Now we built, like, the new version. So in the first version of tribe, we basically have an app store. Excuse me. [08:51] Oh, Siavash, hold on. Let let's go back to your product in a second. Let me stay on the equity just for one extra thing here. [08:56] >> You did [08:56] you did the 100,000 pre seed to get things going. You're faking a lot of stuff before you rebuilt it. Now, did you do a more recent round or is a 100,000 all you've raised? [09:03] >> No, we did another round as well. So the 100,000 round, to be honest, like when we raised like our pre seed round, we already had money. We didn't need money. And when we raised our seed round last year, we had like 500 grand in our bank. So we didn't use that pre seed. Again, we didn't need money at that time. The reasoning was just to involve people there. Then our seed round was led by Bessemer and [09:27] >> CRV. It was a $7,500,000 seed round, basically. And that was last year? That was last year. [09:36] Yeah. I see. So 7,500,000 raised, and what valuation did you guys target on that? [09:42] >> Well, it's not public. Is it okay if we don't share it? [09:46] Yeah. You don't have to share it. I just always you know you know, I I don't wanna promote on the show people just raising capital at all costs because then you end up slaving for ten years, maybe with the opportunity for upside in the future. So I I am curious how you think about dilution. [10:00] >> Yeah, of course. Actually, it's okay. Let's actually share it. So we raised yeah. It was on a $43,000,000 post money valuation. [10:09] 42 posts. So you guys sold what? About 20% of the company? [10:13] >> Around 20. Yeah. [10:14] Yeah. And did that feel right to you at the time? [10:17] >> Yes. I think it felt right. And the reasoning behind it was again, we faked lots of stuff. Now we wanted to build real that [10:24] real Love that you admit that by the way. I love that you admit that you faked a bunch of stuff. Think that's great. [10:28] >> Of course. Like we had like app store and the app stores technically were like feature flags where you can enable and disable apps. [10:35] So it's like, it's like, it's basically a wait list. Like, do you want the intercom app? And if your wait list got big enough, you No, can actually fill the [10:41] >> Actually we had 50 apps on the first version and interestingly, 33% of it was built by our community. Like actually our community translated the first version of tribe into 33 different languages. [10:53] Why can't I see that? Well, I can't see those apps. When I go to your apps page right now, see Google Analytics, question and answer, discussion [10:59] >> Because right now, it's the new version. So we launched our new version a few months ago, but on the first version, like, had like 50 apps, basically. [11:07] I see. [11:08] >> Yeah. Okay. So you eliminated it. [11:09] You eliminated a bunch of them then. [11:11] >> So we rewrote the whole thing from get go because we wanted to become a platform first company. Now, I use I usually don't do that. Just like rebuilding the whole thing. You usually like take things out and then replace them one by one. But the idea was like the first version was to just get to promise market fit, building something that everyone actually loves to use. And we got that. Many people want actually a platform that [11:36] >> is customizable, extensible and like being embeddable. [11:40] Siavash, can you quantify that? How many customers are you working with today? [11:44] >> Yeah, of course. Like, we have around like a 100,000 communities built on tribe so far. And every single day we have around like 200, 300 new communities being built on tribe. [11:54] Those are free sign ups, which is great, though. How many are paying? [11:57] >> So we we have around like a thousand paying customers right now as we speak. [12:03] That's not horrible. I mean, that's a 1% conversion rate from premium to paid. That's not bad. [12:07] >> Yeah. And to be honest, like, it will be way bigger than this in the future. Again, we faked a lot of stuff. Right now, the product that we have out, well, it has all the infrastructure and everything to build apps on it. Now it's the time to just customize it, release new themes, making sure we can actually build presets similar to Notion and Miro so people actually can start their community very simply. [12:34] And Siavash, can I do the math there? A thousand communities paying $200 per month would mean you guys are doing about $200,000 per month in revenue right now? [12:43] >> Kind of. Yeah. It's very close. [12:45] And where were you if you're around there today, where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember? [12:51] >> A year ago, I think we're at like 800 k, like I think like 700 k, 800 k in ARR. [12:59] Got it. So maybe $60,000 per month. So you've more than three x'd year over year. [13:03] >> Yeah. I mean, hopefully next year we'll 5x. [13:06] Yeah. That's incredible. And now take me back one more year into 2019. Do you remember what you finished 2019 with revenue wise? [13:11] >> I think like we were like very small, like almost insignificant, I think. So the funniest story is that when we co founded tribe actually from no product, so we didn't have anything, it was just an idea. I built like the prototype in two weeks and then my co founders started selling and marketing it. And in four weeks after that, had actually $1,500 in revenue, which in monthly. So five customers who was willing to pay us like [13:36] >> $300 a month in like six weeks, and we didn't have a bank account. So then we actually co founded, picked a name, co founded the company and collected the money. [13:46] Well, the growth between 2019 and 2020 must have been impressive because you're basically, you know, dollars 800,000 run rate, but you raised it at $42,000,000 valuation. I mean, that's like a 50X multiple. [13:56] >> So the multiplier was very high. Yeah. The multiplier was very high. [14:00] That's incredible. I mean, you can say that's really good or really bad. You're either now you have to grow into the valuation to avoid a down round, but also it's a great partner and it's a lot of money to invest. [14:07] >> To be honest, like we wanted to raise like way less than that, but actually we had like eight term sheets. We closed the whole round in two weeks, so it was a very nice story. I think I had like around 130 meetings in that two weeks basically, so back to back thirty minutes meetings. And without COVID, I think that wasn't possible because I had to fly around and do all those things. [14:32] Are you guys raising right now? [14:35] >> Not right now. We have enough money. I think we want now the product market fit. So again, we had the promised market fit. We have something that when we show to anyone, they want to buy it and they want to use us and they cheer for us. But I think the product, need to build all these apps and all those things before we get to our next round, basically. [14:56] That makes sense. Talk to me a little bit more about how you've structured the team. How many are full time today? [15:01] >> So we have around, like, 37 people. How many engineers? Half of it is engineers and product. [15:07] Okay. That's amazing. Okay. So call it, like, fifteen, twenty are engineers. What do the rest do? [15:12] >> So we have, like, CS team and sales team. We are an inbound company in general. We don't have any outbound. And people and believe it or not, like, say 70% of our reach is organic. We don't pay anything for it. [15:26] What does that mean though? When people say organic, to me what I hear is that people don't understand how they get it, so they just call it organic. How are you driving organic? Is it a powered by tribe Content. [15:36] >> Content strategy. So you search for community platform, like we're there at the first page, mostly in most companies, countries like number one, alternatives to Facebook group, all those things. So we rank pretty well. We, we spent a lot of time writing really good content And the content are like content that, I mean, I really believe in. Like, I use it. So it's not just generating content. It's generating like really valuable. [16:03] What about webinars? You guys are doing a lot of webinars. [16:06] >> Yeah. We do webinars as well. We did one with Richard Millington, another one with like, next one is with Jono Bacon. So we were doing, like, lots of those as well. Those are very [16:18] good How many people sign up on average for the webinar? Around, like, thousands. And how many actually show up? [16:24] >> Around like three to four hundred. [16:26] And what do do on the webinar with them? [16:29] >> Well, it depends on the subject of the webinar, basically, and also the guests. So mostly we just facilitate the guests, and the idea is building a community is 10% around technology. It's 90% around building a sense of belongingness and all those things, right? So we need to educate our customers as much as we can, and these webinars are for education. We don't look at them as lead generation. We look at them that we want to educate. [17:00] >> We want to actually make sure everyone understands what's the value of a community for a company and how they put them the end? [17:08] The last three slides. Do you do you sell them on something? They book a demo? What's the call to action? [17:12] >> Yeah. Usually, it's like, if you need more help, like, book a demo or things of that sort. We also promote our guests. If they have a book or something, they can also promote that. [17:22] Interesting. Churn's critical in a SaaS company. [17:24] >> What does your guys'churn look like today? So again, because we have a promise market fit and not a product market fit, we have like, I would say [17:38] >> it depends on our plan. On enterprise, almost we have a plan called enterprise as well. I think we were caught up there. It's for larger organizations. For instance, like ASUS, like IBM, Pipedrive, Convertkit, and all those sort of like customers that we have, like Tim Hortons. So for these customers, the churn rate is very minimal. Almost cannot say 0%, but it's very minimal. When you look [18:04] at revenue churn though across your whole base trailing twelve months, what would you say that is? Gross revenue churn annually? [18:09] >> So right now, actually it's pretty high if you get it like for everyone, it's like around like 30%, something like that. And there are many different reasons. Most of it actually comes from our Plus customers, which are like kind of creators. That's another reason we are focusing more on businesses because for Plus, for creators [18:29] Well, to clear though, the 30% churn you just told me, that's not logo churn, that's revenue churn, correct? [18:33] >> That's revenue, yeah. [18:34] Okay. Do you have expansion revenue that makes up that 30% churn gap? [18:37] >> That's another thing that in the first version of Tribes, like, we didn't have that much of expansion, so you could just change, switch between the plans. Now in the new pricing, we have an expansion that we are actually trialing, which is the number of admins that you have. So we will actually expand. So it depends. The reasoning behind it is that larger companies will have more admins. So if you want to see, like read for instance, [19:07] >> internal notes, if you want to see like Zendesk tickets next to these discussions, if you want to have that sync between, like, Salesforce and other stuff, right? So the idea is, like, the people who have access to these are considered as seats, and you're going to expand based on the seats. [19:23] Do you have expansion revenue yet or is it too early? [19:25] >> Yes, we do have expansion. Actually, many of our customers actually start with more seats than the limits that we have. Can you quantify that though? [19:34] What was expansion over the past twelve months? [19:36] >> So, well, I cannot give a good number to you because we just launched our new version and new pricing. So it's like three months of data. But right now, with the historical data that we have, the churn rate is way less on the new product. So that's a good sign. We have You [19:53] know what net dollar retention is? [19:55] >> Yeah, of course. Yeah. So our net dollar retention right now is lower than 100%, which is a problem that we are fixing. [20:02] That's cool. That's why I'm digging here. Right? So that's that's gotta be a big red flag, but you guys are are working on it. [20:08] >> Yeah. I mean, mean, the version two, the whole point of it, Well, you cannot get above net 100% net dollar retention when you don't have expansion. [20:17] Because the only thing that can is You told me though that you upsell based off number of members and number of apps, and now you're adding on number of admins to give you more leverage to drive expansion. Correct? [20:25] >> Correct. But in each plan, the idea is that you should be able to expand under each plan. So in the previous version, when you were on Plus, the only way you could expand was go to Premium, So that was the only way you could expand, which does not make a ton of sense. The idea of the new product and the new pricing is that under each of these plans, you should be able to expand. So if [20:52] >> you're on premium, you can stay on premium because that's your persona, you're a business, you're a small and medium sized business, right? And then as you grow in the size of the company, you will grow with us. So that is the idea. As you get more value, you will actually get that. And that is the idea. That's why I'm saying that the previous version didn't have expansion, because you don't change persona that often. You don't become [21:12] >> from a middle sized company to a really large company that often. And for that reason, I mean, we knew that this is a net dollar retention is a problem. And with the new pricing, we think we can actually fix that and become more than 110%, 120%. Mhmm. And that's another thing that we need before raising our next round. [21:32] I would agree. I would 100% agree. The highest multiple, like, in the seeds, like, based off the interviews I've done in the past, like, three weeks, the folks that are getting the highest multiples on their series A rounds are not the ones growing revenue the fastest. It's the ones that have the highest net dollar retention, you know, 120, 130%. I would completely agree with that. We wrap up here, what does your family think about this? [21:55] >> So interestingly, the first users of that prototype that I talked about were my family. So it was my mom, my father, my spouse, the first users that used it. And it was initially a Q and A site about something that we thought was cool, so we started with that. And to give you an idea, my father can barely use a remote control for the TV, so he's not tech savvy at all. But he was actually getting [22:25] >> in and typing with the iPad and all those things, so when I saw like, Hey, the prototype, my father can use it, I was like, Okay, now it's working. So they are, I believe, super supportive. My wife actually was the first employee of the company. Oh, amazing. An idea. So she's still with us. She handles like the- she's in the customer success team and helping us a lot with the product. So the cool thing is that [22:54] >> initially, Ellie, my wife in the CS team, when we had, I think, the closest loop between customers and product engineering because my wife was there and then there were some days that, hey, hey, [23:08] You're literally sleeping with that feedback loop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. [23:12] >> That's funny. So the idea was like, hey, I won't talk to you until you fix this bug. So this was like a very interesting initially. It's a little bit hard to, many people ask us like, [23:25] how do you work, with your wife? Like, is that [23:28] >> for us right now, it's easy. It's a little bit hard to learn from it and learn how Where is to she? [23:33] Is she there in your same room at her desk? [23:35] >> No. In her in her room. So, have, like, two offices. Yeah. So, this is, my office. She has her own office. Think Tal is a customer right now. [23:43] Siavash, this is a great story. We're out of time, though. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book? [23:49] >> So my I really like Homo sapiens. Yeah. Number two. So that's yeah. And Antifragile. That's another one that I really like. [23:58] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [24:04] >> Of course, like the the I think most common one is, like, Elon Musk. So looking into, like, what they're doing, that's, I think, the common answer. [24:14] Three, what's your favorite online tool for building tribe besides your own? [24:19] >> For building what? For building the company. For building the company. Okay. The favorite tool, I would say, I really like what Notion is doing. [24:30] >> Notion. [24:31] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [24:34] >> Depends. Like, from four to six Okay. [24:39] And we know you're married. You're 33 years old. Do you guys have any kids? No. Nothing. No kids. Alright. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? [24:56] >> I think when I was 20 I think that's a very good question. [25:06] >> A lot of things does not matter as much as we care for. [25:13] >> We take things really hard and really seriously, but the idea is like, how can we have the most amount of impact in this world? And if you think about that thing, you won't get sad about anything, I think. [25:26] Guys, a community management platform for businesses launched in 2018. They broke $60,000 a month in revenue exactly a year ago, now doing over $200,000 a month in revenue. Raised $100,000 from their friends and family in 2019 before doing a 7,500,000 seed at a $42,000,000 post money valuation in 2020. Now scaling. They want it. They got Promise Market Fit is what they call it. Now working on Product Market Fit, serving over a thousand customers who pay on [25:49] average $200 a month. Siavash, thank you for taking us to the top. [25:53] >> Of course. Thank you so much for having me here. [25:57] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM [26:22] 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, the 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [26:44] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [27:06] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We [27:26] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.