Founder Interview
How Tribe Technologies Reached 1,000 Paying Customers and a $43M Valuation with a Customizable Community Platform (Interview with CEO Siavash Mahmoudian)
- Interview Date
- November 4, 2021
- Interviewee
- Siavash MahmoudianCo-Founder and CEO
Company Metrics at Interview Time
Valuation (2020)
$43M post-money
Paying Customers (2021)
1,000
Seed Round (2020)
$7.5M
Team Size (2021)
37
Gross Revenue Churn (2021)
30%
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Siavash Mahmoudian during his interview with Nathan Latka in November 2021 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Tribe Technologies’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways
- 01Tribe Technologies was founded in 2018 by Siavash Mahmoudian and two co-founders with equity split nearly equally, plus a 10% ESOP pool.
- 02The seed round closed in two weeks with eight term sheets after approximately 130 meetings.
- 03The $7.5M seed was raised at a $43M post-money valuation, selling roughly 20% of the company.
- 04Around 1,000 of the roughly 100,000 communities built on Tribe are paying customers as of November 2021; the rest are free sign-ups.
- 05Gross revenue churn is approximately 30% annually, driven primarily by Plus plan creator customers.
- 06Net dollar retention is below 100%, which the team is working to fix through a new seat-based expansion pricing model.
- 0770% of Tribe's customer reach is organic, driven primarily by SEO and content strategy.
- 08Enterprise customers include IBM, ASUS, Pipedrive, ConvertKit, and Tim Hortons, with very minimal churn at that tier.
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Year Founded | 2018 | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Seed Round (2020) | $7,500,000 | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Post-Money Valuation (2020) | $43M | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Equity Sold in Seed Round (2020) | ~20% | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| ESOP Pool (2021) | 10% | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Paying Customers (2021) | 1,000 | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| New Communities Per Day (2021) | 200 to 300 | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Team Size (2021) | 37 | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Engineers and Product (approx.) (2021) | ~18 | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Gross Revenue Churn (2021) | 30% | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Net Dollar Retention (2021) | Below 100% | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Organic Share of Reach (2021) | 70% | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| Webinar Attendees (avg.) (2021) | 300 to 400 | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
| ARR One Year Prior (approx.) (2020) | $700K to $800K | Founder interview, Nov 2021 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
Siavash indicated the company was at roughly $700,000 to $800,000 ARR approximately one year before the interview. The new version of the product launched a few months before the interview, and the team is focused on building out apps and expansion pricing to improve net dollar retention, which was below 100% at the time.
Customers
Tribe had approximately 100,000 communities built on the platform, with around 1,000 paying customers as of November 2021 - roughly 1 in 100 of those communities pays. Enterprise customers such as IBM, ASUS, Pipedrive, ConvertKit, and Tim Hortons show very minimal churn.
Team
The team stood at 37 people, with roughly half in engineering and product. The remainder covers customer success and an inbound-only sales function, with no outbound sales effort at the time of the interview.
Funding
Tribe raised a ~$100,000 convertible note from friends before the seed, then a $7.5M seed round in 2020 led by Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV at a $43M post-money valuation. The round closed in two weeks with eight term sheets. The company was not raising at the time of the interview and planned to reach stronger product-market fit before pursuing its next round.
Growth Strategy
Organic SEO and Content
Siavash credited 70% of Tribe's customer reach to organic channels, primarily SEO. The team invested heavily in writing high-quality content, ranking on the first page for searches like 'community platform' and 'alternatives to Facebook groups' in most countries.
Webinars for Education
Tribe runs webinars with community-building experts such as Richard Millington and Jono Bacon, drawing thousands of sign-ups and 300 to 400 live attendees per event. The goal is education rather than direct lead generation, with a soft call to action to book a demo at the end.
Platform and App Ecosystem
Tribe is built as a customizable, extensible, and embeddable platform, allowing third parties to build apps on top of it. This approach differentiates Tribe from point solutions and creates stickiness, particularly for enterprise customers who need integrations with tools like Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Zendesk.
Inbound-Only Sales Motion
The company operates entirely on inbound demand with no outbound sales team. Customer success and sales resources are focused on converting and retaining inbound leads, supported by the organic and content-driven top of funnel.
Seat-Based Expansion Pricing
To address net dollar retention below 100%, Tribe launched a new pricing model based on the number of admin seats, allowing customers to expand within their existing plan tier as their organizations grow rather than requiring a full plan upgrade.
Best Quotes
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“So we launched Tribe at the end of like, yeah, 2018.”
“So our net dollar retention right now is lower than 100%, which is a problem that we are fixing.”
What Happened Next
This interview captures Tribe Technologies in November 2021, a few months after the team rewrote and relaunched the platform. Siavash Mahmoudian said the company was not raising at the time - the $7.5M seed had left it with enough money - and that lifting net dollar retention above 100% was something the team wanted in hand before going out for its next round. The figures shared here, including the customer count, churn and valuation, reflect what he reported that day and may differ significantly from the company's current state. Visit the Tribe Technologies company profile on GetLatka for the most up-to-date available data.
View Tribe Technologies’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Company Overview
- 0:30Tribe vs. Circle: Target Market Differences
- 0:52Platform Philosophy: Customizable and Embeddable
- 2:57Pricing Plans and Structure
- 6:01Founding Story and Background
- 9:03Seed Round: Bessemer, CRV, and $7.5M
- 10:00Valuation and Dilution Discussion
- 10:41First Version of Tribe and App Store
- 14:56Team Structure and Inbound Sales
- 15:12Organic SEO and Content Strategy
- 16:03Webinars for Education
- 18:09Churn, Net Dollar Retention, and Expansion Pricing
Introduction and Company Overview
Nathan Latka
00:00Hey, 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.
Siavash Mahmoudian
00:19>> I'm excited.
Nathan Latka
00:20I'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?
Tribe vs. Circle: Target Market Differences
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
00:45So 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?
Platform Philosophy: Customizable and Embeddable
Siavash Mahmoudian
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
Nathan Latka
02:00much 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?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Pricing Plans and Structure
Nathan Latka
02:57Well, 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?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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
Nathan Latka
04:02two a month for that.
Siavash Mahmoudian
04:04>> Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Latka
04:05I 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
Siavash Mahmoudian
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
Nathan Latka
04:42number 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?
Siavash Mahmoudian
04:52>> Yeah. It's around like more than $100 is the Wow. Highest
Nathan Latka
04:56Okay. Really interesting. Give us the backstory here. When did you launch the company?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
05:11How old are you today?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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-
Nathan Latka
05:27So that means you're married. Did the dating app work on you or are you still single?
Siavash Mahmoudian
05:29>> Well, I didn't find my
Nathan Latka
05:31spouse You didn't find true love, through love. That. But actually I found like two
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
05:58But so what year did you officially launch Tribe though? 2018?
Founding Story and Background
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
06:34So it was more like an agency then?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
07:40Got it. And now when you launched, did you guys split equity equally or no?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
07:53So 33, 33, 33%.
Siavash Mahmoudian
07:55>> So it's almost that.
Nathan Latka
07:56Okay. Okay.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
08:06I see. And did you so your ESOP pool is 10% now. Have you guys bootstrapped or did you raise capital?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
08:31What's small though? Mean, we talking 100,000 or 500 Yeah, thousand some or
Siavash Mahmoudian
08:35>> number, 100,000, something like that.
Nathan Latka
08:36Okay, okay.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
08:51Oh, 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.
Siavash Mahmoudian
08:56>> You did
Nathan Latka
08:56you 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?
Seed Round: Bessemer, CRV, and $7.5M
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
09:36Yeah. I see. So 7,500,000 raised, and what valuation did you guys target on that?
Siavash Mahmoudian
09:42>> Well, it's not public. Is it okay if we don't share it?
Nathan Latka
09:46Yeah. 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.
Valuation and Dilution Discussion
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
10:0942 posts. So you guys sold what? About 20% of the company?
Siavash Mahmoudian
10:13>> Around 20. Yeah.
Nathan Latka
10:14Yeah. And did that feel right to you at the time?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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
Nathan Latka
10:24real Love that you admit that by the way. I love that you admit that you faked a bunch of stuff. Think that's great.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
10:35So 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
First Version of Tribe and App Store
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
10:53Why 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
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
11:07I see.
Siavash Mahmoudian
11:08>> Yeah. Okay. So you eliminated it.
Nathan Latka
11:09You eliminated a bunch of them then.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
11:40Siavash, can you quantify that? How many customers are you working with today?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
11:54Those are free sign ups, which is great, though. How many are paying?
Siavash Mahmoudian
11:57>> So we we have around like a thousand paying customers right now as we speak.
Nathan Latka
12:03That's not horrible. I mean, that's a 1% conversion rate from premium to paid. That's not bad.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
12:34And 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?
Siavash Mahmoudian
12:43>> Kind of. Yeah. It's very close.
Nathan Latka
12:45And where were you if you're around there today, where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember?
Siavash Mahmoudian
12:51>> A year ago, I think we're at like 800 k, like I think like 700 k, 800 k in ARR.
Nathan Latka
12:59Got it. So maybe $60,000 per month. So you've more than three x'd year over year.
Siavash Mahmoudian
13:03>> Yeah. I mean, hopefully next year we'll 5x.
Nathan Latka
13:06Yeah. That's incredible. And now take me back one more year into 2019. Do you remember what you finished 2019 with revenue wise?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
13:46Well, 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.
Siavash Mahmoudian
13:56>> So the multiplier was very high. Yeah. The multiplier was very high.
Nathan Latka
14:00That'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.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
14:32Are you guys raising right now?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Team Structure and Inbound Sales
Nathan Latka
14:56That makes sense. Talk to me a little bit more about how you've structured the team. How many are full time today?
Siavash Mahmoudian
15:01>> So we have around, like, 37 people. How many engineers? Half of it is engineers and product.
Nathan Latka
15:07Okay. That's amazing. Okay. So call it, like, fifteen, twenty are engineers. What do the rest do?
Organic SEO and Content Strategy
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
15:26What 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.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Webinars for Education
Nathan Latka
16:03What about webinars? You guys are doing a lot of webinars.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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
Nathan Latka
16:18good How many people sign up on average for the webinar? Around, like, thousands. And how many actually show up?
Siavash Mahmoudian
16:24>> Around like three to four hundred.
Nathan Latka
16:26And what do do on the webinar with them?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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?
Nathan Latka
17:08The last three slides. Do you do you sell them on something? They book a demo? What's the call to action?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
17:22Interesting. Churn's critical in a SaaS company.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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
Nathan Latka
18:04at revenue churn though across your whole base trailing twelve months, what would you say that is? Gross revenue churn annually?
Churn, Net Dollar Retention, and Expansion Pricing
Siavash Mahmoudian
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
Nathan Latka
18:29Well, to clear though, the 30% churn you just told me, that's not logo churn, that's revenue churn, correct?
Siavash Mahmoudian
18:33>> That's revenue, yeah.
Nathan Latka
18:34Okay. Do you have expansion revenue that makes up that 30% churn gap?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
19:23Do you have expansion revenue yet or is it too early?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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?
Nathan Latka
19:34What was expansion over the past twelve months?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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
Nathan Latka
19:53know what net dollar retention is?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
20:02That'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.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
20:17Because 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?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
21:32I 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?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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,
Nathan Latka
23:08You're literally sleeping with that feedback loop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Siavash Mahmoudian
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,
Nathan Latka
23:25how do you work, with your wife? Like, is that
Siavash Mahmoudian
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?
Nathan Latka
23:33Is she there in your same room at her desk?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
23:43Siavash, 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?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
23:58Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
24:14Three, what's your favorite online tool for building tribe besides your own?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
24:31Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Siavash Mahmoudian
24:34>> Depends. Like, from four to six Okay.
Nathan Latka
24:39And 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?
Siavash Mahmoudian
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.
Nathan Latka
25:26Guys, 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
25:49average $200 a month. Siavash, thank you for taking us to the top.
Siavash Mahmoudian
25:53>> Of course. Thank you so much for having me here.
Nathan Latka
25:57One 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
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