How Tribute.co CEO andrew horn grew to $3.2M revenue with a 40 person team in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is andrew horn he's the founder and ceo of tribute.co as a speaker and executive coach he's been called the dale carnegie for the digital age by forbes in addition to building companies andrew trans organizations and leaders around the globe on social flow a simple framework to cultivate real confidence and connection in every situation he's now building tribute.ceo a group video montage platform all right andrew ready take it to the top let's do it all right so yeah what is what does montage platform mean i've never heard of this before all right so nathan when's your birthday october 3rd october 3rd so on october 3rd imagine what it would feel like to wake up on your birthday and one of your best friends sends you an email you open that email there's a big play button you click on it and that opens a video montage of 20 of your closest friends and family members who've all recorded a one minute video telling you why they love you so you watch that thing and just like 82 percent of our customers you cry tears of joy because that's the most meaningful gift you've ever received in your entire life so that's a tribute montage and uh eight years ago we built the first ever collaborative video montage platform that turned what used to be a 15-hour laborious process into a 15-minute enjoyable one and so yeah totally on i was just totally understand the use case here graduation just happened my aunts my like my younger cousins were graduating high school they sent emails going please record a video attach it to the email it's an mp4 file then they have to edit it all together you're basically automating this whole process exactly you you get it that's awesome okay this makes tons of sense so just be clear though your turn's gonna be higher than most b2b sas coming so you're selling direct to consumers i imagine right we are selling direct to consumer but one of the things and like why you know especially when we're talking to investors and partners it's like why we are somewhat of a sas product is because like not only do we have subscriptions for enterprise partners you know everyone from bed bath and beyond to 100 flowers you name it but also there's a baked in virality to our product where just the way that you talked about that graduation tribute this is not a traditional consumer product it's really if you're creating a tribute you're inviting on average 31 of your friends family and coworkers to join you in the process and so because of the baked in viral coefficient of the product every customer that we that we acquire is actually getting us a new customer in the process which is a cool part of our growth which most of it is truly kind of baked into the the product that way it's rare i get the opportunity to go down this question stream i can with you because you actually have vowel coefficients so obviously key making rob coefficient work is you need to have at least you know one user invite at least 1.1 new users right so you've got 30 invites going out the next part of that math equation is how many of those invites then sign up to tribute and activate yeah so you know i mean i would i would have to look to my my product lead and my marketing is actually converting i just know that like our our main kpi around the virality it's like you know 85 of our new user growth is coming through the virality of the product itself and so as long as we're keeping that above one like i'm happy and so in terms of like what actual percentage of those is converting i'm not sure the actual number okay okay understood and i guess give me a general sense of sort of growth rate how many new users signed up last month uh so we are you know last month i don't have that information or whatever you remember whatever the month the most recent month that you remember yeah would be 300 000 last time i looked in march oh wow okay this is that's huge so so you're saying 85 of those came from effectively by virality interesting okay um now i guess help me understand pay right so my aunt when she sent out this this request to all the family to record videos for the kid who's graduating high school right she's gonna is she gonna pay five bucks for one video like how do you keep her sticky yeah so there's there's really two tiers to it so it's a pay-per-use product so that basically she's either gonna pay 29 to do it herself 99 for one someone on our team to edit that together and then we have add-on products which would enable her to put that onto a bamboo sustainable usb or an lcd video card so she can deliver that video on a physical gift but then what's cool about tribute as well is that we have the social commerce element so that all of those people who are going to record videos not only have the opportunity to record a video but they can also add a gift themselves so we have this gift card marketplace so that of all those people that you just experienced for that graduation tribute imagine them all having the possibility to add a gift card to their video so that not only is the recipient going to open that video montage full of love and appreciation but then after that they're going to get another one and say like hey we're not done here's all these gift cards you got from your friends 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 really interesting okay so let's talk about again your average sort of use case which is one person sends out 30 invites of those 30 invites how many of them are likely to add a gift card to that transact or to that recording yeah so right now about 60 of those people are converting to actually submit a video okay of that 60 uh right now you have about 10 of participants and this is a newer feature that's three months old so about 10 of those people are adding a gift card to their video which is another huge opportunity for us to actually kind of improve the social commerce uh growth of the company yeah so 30 invites 18 submit a video 10 of 18 so call it two years on average attach a gift card that's i mean that's actually higher than i would have expected and what is it usually like an itunes thing or a bed bath and beyond thing to pay for college dorm stuff best sellers amazon apple nike 1 800 flowers interesting really interesting and what's that i mean are people doing like a five dollar gift card or you're seeing like 500 gift cards well you know because i think that what's cool about tribute is most people are doing this on bigger occasions so you know we we don't want to give them kind of uh choice overwhelm here so we just have basically the the 10 25 and 50 are your presets and then you have a custom but our average gift card right now is actually 50 from those customers really okay so you have really interesting data then on what's like the most um high spending event is it a college graduation is it a wedding wait let me guess is it a honeymoon like a wedding i'd put a wedding at the top i bet that biggest amount gift cards are attached to weddings and then second would be like maybe like a high school graduation going to college but what are the big what are the big spending events you know so about 80 of our our traffic comes through birthdays and so i would actually say that the the biggest ones are milestone birthdays and so milestone birthday i consider anyone that has a five or a zero at the end of it and i think that those really do trigger as a very special instance for individuals where they're used to giving gifts there i think that a lot of people's uh kind of gifting for something like a wedding is oftentimes going through the actual you know the knot or zola or the actual uh i'm blanking on the term right now but uh the registry there you go totally yeah yeah this is really interesting so how do you um i guess let me get more of the backstory here you said you got this going back in 2014. so um when you launch i guess how did you when was it always the same product or did you evolve here did you pivot for away from something else yeah so i mean what was so great about tribute is is the reason that we started this was because i was fortunate enough to receive one of these that was hacked together by my girlfriend now wife mickey in 2014 i was in the back of the room balling my eyes out because it was so amazing when i went to you know tell her that this was the best gift i've ever received i said how did you do this and she said well it sucked i had to email people hundreds of times like hacked all these videos and imovie and so immediately i realized that there was this incredible experience that i just had and that there was uh not a really great way to create this and i'd also seen other people doing this much like you are for graduation and so immediately we had a very clear problem that we were solving right there's this amazing experience not easy to do let's solve that problem and so in the process i mean you know we've certainly fine-tuned the product itself but the core mission of making it easy for people to create a meaningful group video montage has been there and then we've just looked into like how can we actually improve the virality the conversion how can we give other people who are contributing more opportunities to uh to add a gift along with their video and then we've started to iterate it more and more of really tweaking the products so that it's more usable within the b2b workspace you think about value something like this for employee engagement and recognition you know we have companies that are using tribute for every single one five and ten year anniversary in our company we have companies that are using this for every single employee who's on boarded their new team will record a video telling a little bit about themselves so they have a video montage to get to know everyone on a deeper level more quickly so we've tweaked it to make those types of subscription opportunities more available in the b2b space which is a newer and really exciting kind of growth channel for us right now now be honest in 2014 we got that video from mickey do you have any idea this is gonna end up being a b2b product for employee anniversaries i had no idea because i i was a nonprofit guy it started two children's non-profits before that i had teams of five and ten people and at that size and especially it was it was really young i was 24 at this time i just had never really thought about employee recognition is the thing because we were so close to each other we hung out with each other that i didn't really think about the need to ritualize it and there was actually a pivotal moment when uh there was a really large company this woman had spent 35 years there and she was receiving a retirement tribute so she received this tribute and she sent a message to our team which in 2014 you know there was four of us so we saw pretty much every email coming through the doors and uh and just for context how many today uh so right now we're around 50. and that's including our core team as well as our experience team which are the video editors and the customer service agents that's one of the different is for tribute is that we've got 24 7 customer support we've got the hands-on white glove service for editing which none of our competitors really offer um and uh so i got this email from this woman and she said i just wanted to let you know that this has been like literally the most meaningful gift i've ever received and then she finished her email with a sentence that i will never forget uh she said i didn't know they cared this much i didn't know they cared this much and just think about that like we'll spend one third of our lives working right one-third of our lives with our co-workers to spend 35 years of your life committed to a company to a mission to a cause you name it to not know how respected appreciated you are for that work i was like that's a travesty in that moment i realized the opportunity and the need to to normalize this type of appreciation and recognition and these important milestone occasions it makes complete sense to me and then i guess go back to march how many like how many of these feelings are you creating per month right now right i mean you must be getting close to maybe 10 000 events like this per month right uh it's uh just under that yeah yeah yeah so i mean you can probably break that run rate at this year at some point right whether it's this month or december well i mean we so we had a roller coaster of a ride through covet you know i mean like we were running the company we were stable from a revenue uh standpoint but we're a smaller team of five people going into 2020 and then covet happens and imagine no one being able to travel birthdays all your graduations are canceled no one's going to win anymore so how do you celebrate people when you can't be with them in person tribute comes up as basically kind of like the the ultimate way to do this and we really realized this opportunity that we've always been a mission-driven company and so we decided to make our core product the diy tribute free of charge to anyone who wanted to use it and we saw this massive uh resurgence of of pressing is it still free or they have to pay today 29 bucks we've come off of that starting in the beginning of like it was latter half of 2021 so i think that officially the deal ended uh probably about october of last year um and that ended up being a great business decision as well as something very aligned with the mission because so many of those people are upgrading to concierge products adding these add-ons and so even though we made this free we had this massive growth uh and you know over from 2021 uh 2020 to 2022 we were inc 500 number 26 which is what was revenue i think inc publishes that right what was the revenue they did not publish revenue so oh what was the range can you share range uh we prefer to keep that a little tighter to the belt we're in some some conversations right now so when did can you maybe share the year that you passed a million dollars in revenue uh was 2020 oh it was 20 20. oh amazing okay cool um it was our first year over a million that's awesome well congrats for that um i mean wait so i mean can we if you're close to breaking like 10 000 events done like per month and you charge everyone 29 bucks at least because you can upgrade to 99. i mean can we multiply those 10 000 times 29. we'll have a lot of like so a lot of the tributes that are started we have strategic distribution campaigns so like for distribution we'll launch free tribute campaigns to get ourselves into new schools we'll do campaigns with non-profits and so there's definitely a heavy contingent of this which is a lot of our distribution strategy does rely on us giving away the free products i was going to say you'd be at 300 000 bucks minimum a month right now or 3.6 million run rates and not not there yet there's a healthy there's a healthy contingent of that that's a strategic marketing because again the number of individuals who are introduced to the product through those free tributes makes sense for us in the long run it's a great value to them to introduce them and this is still a new customer experience the same reason that you're creating a graduation tribute without using one of these is because it's not common knowledge that these platforms exist everywhere and so being the leader in the space a big opportunity for us is to to saturate the market just on awareness and trust that we'll be able to maintain our lead as as kind of like the industry leaders so a million in 2020 uh growing you raised capital we don't kind of dive deep into that but i think what four point something million raised total yeah a little bit more than that yeah okay cool let's wrap up here with the famous five number one andrew favorite book uh favorite book i would have to say uh fiction probably chantaram i don't know if you've heard that before great great insights to india and non-fiction i'll say into the wild because it inspired me to quit my job after college drive across the country with my dad and connect to this uh deep desire to be of service in the world and change my life number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh a ceo that i'm selling right now a mentor is a guy named randall kaplan the ceo of live nation who is uh just i mean he what he did at uh what is a clear niche clear channel before live nation and just the the tact and love that this man brings into leadership at the highest level is deeply inspiring to me so randall kaplan number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business uh one of my favorite maybe not the most like effective or efficient is loom as a video company like i find that for me i send videos first in any important uh introduction or connection and i find that like not only does it save me from typing all day but it actually is so much more emotional it's what we believe about tribute so loom for me has led to just a absolute transformation in hit rate and conversion on email introductions for everyone across the team so that's one minute number number four andrew how many hours i sleep to get every night i'm a solid eight a night okay that's good and situation obviously married with mickey any kids i have a i have a five-year-old son hero oh wow okay so one kid on how old are you i'm 35 35 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh something that i wish i knew when i was 20 uh is that um your truth and authenticity is inherently an act of service and provides space for other people to be authentic and honest themselves trust me guys he got a great you got a great video from his now wife mickey back in 2014 a nice tribute video on his birthday said man i want to create this enable others to do this now he's got over 300 000 people signing up per month to use tribute.com broke a million dollar run rate in 2020 he's raised a bit of money team of 50 to help more people create these moments whether it's employees wanting to celebrate teammates at an anniversary or a big birthday like 25 30 35 or a wedding or anniversary you name it they're helping you create that video montage to celebrate it and show your love and support for that particular person andrew appreciate it thanks for taking the top thanks so much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 p.m 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 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 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas 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 for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode 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 got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya