How Tribute.co CEO andrew horn grew Tribute.co 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...