How Tribute.co Reached 300,000 New Monthly Users and Broke $1M Revenue in 2020 (Interview with CEO Andrew Horn)

Introduction and What Is a Group Video Montage

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, 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 trains 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.co, a group video montage platform. Alright, Andrew, you ready to take us to the top?

Andrew Horn

00:23>> Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:24Alright. So what is what is montage platform mean? I've never heard of this before.

Andrew Horn

00:28>> Alright. So Nathan, when's your birthday?

Nathan Latka

00:30October 3.

Andrew Horn

00:32>> October 3. So on October 3, 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% of our

00:52>> 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, eight years ago we built the first ever collaborative video montage platform that turned what used to be a fifteen hour laborious process into a fifteen minute enjoyable one. And so that's Yeah. I was gonna say

Nathan Latka

01:11totally understand the use case here. Graduation just happened. My aunts, 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.

Andrew Horn

01:23>> Exactly. You you get it. That's awesome. Okay.

Nathan Latka

01:25This makes tons of sense. So just to be clear though, your churn is gonna be higher than most b to b SaaS companies. You're selling direct to consumers, I imagine. Right?

Andrew Horn

01:32>> 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 SaaS product is because like not only do we have subscriptions for enterprise partners, everyone from Bed Bath and Beyond to one-eight hundred Flowers, you name it, but also there's a baked in virality to our product where just the way that you had talked about that graduation

Virality, Enterprise Subscriptions, and B2B Angle

Andrew Horn

01:51>> tribute, this is not a traditional consumer product. 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 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 product that way.

Nathan Latka

02:15It's rare. I get the opportunity to go down this question stream I can with you because you actually have viral coefficients. So obviously key making viral coefficient work is you need to have at least 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?

Andrew Horn

02:33>> Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I would I would have to look to my my product lead and my marketing converting. I just know that, like, our our main KPI around the virality of, 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

02:55>> not sure the actual number.

Nathan Latka

02:56Okay. Okay. Understood. And I guess give me a general sense of sort of growth rate. How many new users signed up last month?

Andrew Horn

03:03>> So we are you know, last month, I don't have that information in

Nathan Latka

03:09front Or of whatever you remember. Whatever the month the most recent month that you remember.

New User Growth and Viral Coefficient

Andrew Horn

03:13>> Yeah. Would be 300,000 last time I looked in March.

Nathan Latka

03:17Oh, wow. Okay. This is that's huge. So so you're saying 85% of those came from effectively virality? Correct. Interesting. Okay. 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 $5 for one video? Like, how do you keep her sticky?

Andrew Horn

03:38>> Yeah. So there's there's really two tiers to it. So it's a a pay per use product. So that basically, she's either gonna pay 29 to do it herself, 99 for one of 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. Then what's cool about tribute

03:58>> as well is that we have this 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 that so of all those people that you've 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

04:18>> gonna open that video montage full of love and appreciation, but then after that, they're gonna get another one and say like, hey, we're not done. Here's all these gift cards you got from your friends.

Nathan Latka

04:27Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

04:50your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:15get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

Pricing Tiers: DIY, Concierge, and Add-Ons

Nathan Latka

05:36not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22 of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

06:02going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But

06:24if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation 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. Alright. Let's jump back into

06:50the 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?

Gift Card Marketplace and Social Commerce

Andrew Horn

07:04>> Yeah. So right now about 60% of those people are converting to actually submit a video. Okay. And of that 60%, 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 growth of the company.

Nathan Latka

07:25Yeah. So 30 invites, 18 submitted video, 10% of 18, so call it two users on average attach a gift card. That's act I mean, that's actually higher than I would've expected. And what is it usually like an iTunes thing or a Bed Bath and Beyond thing to pay for college dorm stuff?

Andrew Horn

07:39>> Bestsellers, Amazon, Apple, Nike, one eight hundred Flowers.

Nathan Latka

07:44Interesting. Really interesting. And what's the average I mean, we are people doing like a $5 gift card or you're seeing like $500 gift cards?

Andrew Horn

07:50>> Oh, do 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 wanna give them kind of a choice overwhelm here. So we just have basically the the ten, twenty five and fifty are your presets and then you have a custom. But our average gift card right now is actually $50 from those customers.

Nathan Latka

08:08Really interesting. Okay. So you have really interesting data then on what's like the most high spending event. Is it a college graduation? Is it a wedding? Wait, let me see if can guess. Is it a honey like a wedding I would put 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

08:25are the big spending events?

Andrew Horn

08:26>> 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, kind of gifting for something like

08:48>> a wedding is oftentimes going through the actual, you know, the knot or Zola or the actual, I'm blanking on the term right now, but, the registry. There you go.

Nathan Latka

08:58Totally. Yeah. Yeah. No. This is really interesting. So how do you, I guess let me get more of the backstory here. You said you got this going back in 2014. So, when you launch, I guess, how did you was it always the same product or did you evolve here? Did you pivot away from something else?

Origin Story: From Nikki's Gift to a Platform

Andrew Horn

09:14>> Yeah. So I mean, what was so great about tribute 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, Nikki, in 2014. I was in the back of the room bawling my eyes out because it was so amazing. When I went to tell her that this was the best gift I've ever received, I said, how'd you do this? And she

09:32>> 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 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

09:53>> to do, let's solve that problem. And so in the process, I mean, 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 of the conversion? How can we give other people who are contributing more opportunities to add a gift along with their video? And then we've

10:15>> started to iterate it more and more of really tweaking the product so that it's more usable within the b to b workspace. You think about the value of something like this for employee engagement and recognition. 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 onboarded. Their new team will record a video telling a little bit

COVID Impact, Free Product, and Recovery

Andrew Horn

10:38>> 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.

Nathan Latka

10:49Now be honest, in 2014, we got that video from Nikki. Did you have any idea that this was going to end up being a B2B product for employee anniversaries?

Andrew Horn

10:56>> I had no idea because I I was a nonprofit guy. I'd started two, children's nonprofits before that. I had teams of five and ten people. And at that size, and especially I was I was really young. I was 24 at this time. I just had never really thought about employee recognition as a 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

11:15>> it. And there was actually a pivotal moment when, there was a really large company. This woman had spent thirty five 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

Nathan Latka

11:31And just for context, how how many today?

Team Size and White-Glove Service

Andrew Horn

11:34>> So right now we're around 50. And that's 50 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 twenty four seven customer support. We've got the hands on white glove service for editing, which none of our competitors really offer. And so I got this email from this woman and she said, I just wanted to let

11:53>> 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. 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 coworkers to spend thirty five years of your life committed to a company,

Employee Recognition and the B2B Opportunity

Andrew Horn

12:14>> 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. And in that moment, I realized the opportunity and the need to to normalize this type of appreciation and recognition in these important milestone occasions.

Nathan Latka

12:32It 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?

Andrew Horn

12:43>> It's, just under that. Yeah. You're close to it.

Nathan Latka

12:47Yeah. So, I mean, you you can probably break that run rate at this year at some point. Right? Whether it's this month or December. Well,

Andrew Horn

12:53>> I mean, we so we had a roller coaster of a ride through COVID. You know what mean? Like, we were running the company. We were stable from a revenue standpoint, but we're a smaller team of five people going into 2020. And then COVID happens and imagine no one being able to travel birthdays, all your graduations are canceled, no one's going to weddings anymore. So how do you celebrate people when you can't be with them in person?

13:16>> Tribute comes up as basically kind of like the ultimate way to do this. And we really realized this opportunity that we've always been a mission driven company. 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, resurgence of of pressing.

Nathan Latka

13:33Is it still free or they have to pay today? $29?

Andrew Horn

13:35>> We've we've come off of that starting in the beginning of like, it was latter half of twenty twenty one. So I think that Yeah. The deal ended, probably about October of last year. 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.

Revenue Milestone: First Year Over $1M

Andrew Horn

13:59>> And you know, over from 2021, 2020 to 2022, we were Inc 500 number 26, which is

Nathan Latka

14:06pretty What was revenue? I think Inc publishes that right. What was the revenue?

Andrew Horn

14:09>> They do not publish revenue.

Nathan Latka

14:11Oh, what was the range? Can share a range?

Andrew Horn

14:13>> We prefer to keep that a little tighter to the belt. We're in some some conversations right now. So I

Nathan Latka

14:18When did can you maybe share the year that you passed a million dollars in revenue?

Andrew Horn

14:22>> Was 2020.

Nathan Latka

14:23Oh, it's 2020. Oh, amazing. Okay. Cool.

Andrew Horn

14:26>> 2020 was first year over a million.

Nathan Latka

14:28That's awesome. Well, congrats for that. 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 at least cause you can upgrade to 99. I mean, can we multiply those? 10,000 times 29?

Andrew Horn

14:41>> 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 different distribution campaigns with nonprofits. 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.

Nathan Latka

15:01I was going say you'd be at $300,000 minimum month right now or 3,600,000 run rate, so not not there yet.

Distribution Strategy and Free Tribute Campaigns

Andrew Horn

15:07>> There's a healthy there's a healthy contingent of that. That's a strategic marketing point 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.

15:28>> So being the leader in the space, a big opportunity for us is to saturate the market just on awareness and trust that we'll be able to maintain our lead as kind of like the industry leaders.

Nathan Latka

15:37So a million in 2020 growing, you've raised capital. We don't tend to dive deep into that, but I think what 4 point something million raised total?

Andrew Horn

15:44>> Yeah, a little bit more than that.

Nathan Latka

15:45Yeah. Okay. Cool. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, Andrew, favorite book?

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Habits

Andrew Horn

15:51>> Favorite book. I would have to say, fiction, probably Shantaram. I don't know if you've heard that one before.

Nathan Latka

15:57Great great insights to India.

Andrew Horn

15:59>> 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, deep desire to be of service in the world and change my life.

Nathan Latka

16:12Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Andrew Horn

16:15>> A CEO that I'm studying right now, a mentor is a guy named Randall Kaplan, the CEO of Live Nation, who is, just I mean, he what he did at, what is it, Clear Nation, 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.

Nathan Latka

16:36Number, three. What's your favorite online tool for building the business?

Andrew Horn

16:41>> 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, 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, an absolute transformation in hit rate and conversion on

17:05>> email introductions for everyone across the team. So that's what my

Nathan Latka

17:07Number number four, Andrew, how many hours of sleep do

17:09you get every night?

Andrew Horn

17:10>> I'm a solid eight a night.

Nathan Latka

17:12Okay. That's good. And situation, obviously married with Nikki. Any kids?

Andrew Horn

17:16>> I have a I have a five year old son, Hero.

Nathan Latka

17:18Oh, wow. Okay. So one kiddo. And how old are you?

Andrew Horn

17:20>> I'm 35.

Nathan Latka

17:2135. Last question.

Andrew Horn

17:22>> Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

17:25>> Something that I wish I knew when I was 20, is that

17:32>> your truth and authenticity is inherently an act of service and provides space for other people to be authentic and honest themselves. Trust me.

Nathan Latka

17:42Guys, got a great he got a great video from his now wife, Nikki, back in 2014, a nice tribute video on his birthday. Said, man, I wanna create this and enable others to do this now. Got over 300,000 people signing up per month to use tribute.co, 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

18:02an 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 us to the top.

Andrew Horn

18:14>> Thanks so much, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

18:17One 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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19:26for 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

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