How Visible.vc CEO Mike Preuss grew Visible.vc to $7.2M revenue and 600 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is mike prus he's the ceo and co-founder of a company called visible he's from the midwest and lives in chicago attended indiana university and is also an alumni of the orr fellowship he was previously the head of business development for form spring based in san francisco again now running visible dot vc micro you're ready to take us to the top i am all right so i think you play in kind of the investor update space talk to us about what visible vc is doing and how you make money yeah so uh visible vc is a web software application we're sas based business so recurring revenue is is kind of our go-to business model and customers are really buying our solution to report data updates kpis back to their investors potential investors and their team and and so you look i'm in lp a couple of funds and like you know the fund managers will send out you know once every four or five months kind of an update via email or or the company is if we invest direct we'll send an email update you know why is this so much better that they'll start using this versus just sticking with email yeah i think skype cut out for a second there but i think i got the gist of the question so uh companies are uh connecting to accounts they already use to run their business so whether that's salesforce hubspot strife google analytics mixpanel we integrate with a suite of different applications to automate that reporting process so rather than pulling data down from your accounting file from your crm from your own database we automatically consolidate all that data for you we visualize it in a really professional beautiful manner and then we let you send it out again like you said through email but you know you can also send it to slack channels shareable links and then word tracking analytics behind all of that so you you know exactly how all your different investors and stakeholders are engaging with the updates that you're sending and imagine someone listening right now because we have you know a large audience who are constantly sending investor updates the first thing that comes to mind is like security how to make sure the link doesn't get in the wrong hands i mean so how do you really make sure this stuff stays only to investors yeah that's that's a great question so uh you know for us everything is is rendered directly first and foremost in email and that's kind of our our baseline right so if someone uh if you're sending email anyways if you're looking forward around so uh it's really up to you kind of you and your investor and making sure they're good stewards of the day that you're selling with them uh in terms of the security but uh you know we take privacy really seriously and coach people through that but uh it would be no different than if something you know you're sending a pitch deck or different piece of communication through email and an investor sending that around got it okay interesting um walking through some of the other economics here so on average what's the custo a customer paying for this yeah they're paying on average about 150 dollars a month uh so any you know kind of ranges but our acvs right about 150 a month that's great and then put this on on a timeline for me when did you launch what year yeah so we started in 2014 and we were actually born out of a venture fund uh so we built this product internally to kind of solve the problem of getting updates and data from uh our portfolio companies uh from there we've got pivot on the model a little over two years ago to really focus on companies we kind of learned through that whole process that investors are a great distribution channel but we should really focus on a core experience for companies and and how they can properly uh leverage their investors and update them so starting 2014 we now have about 2000 organization organizations using visible not all of those are paid uh but you know arr is is growing 200 you know percent a year so we're doubling trying to double every year that's great um how many of the how many of you have paying today yeah it's it's uh it's it's above 600. uh so we have roughly a third of our of our organizations um you know paying to use visible that's great so you just recently passed a million bucks an ar something like that yeah yeah yeah that's great yeah so 600 times 150 is 90 grand a month where were you about a year ago if you're going 200 year over year i mean obviously it'd be like what 30k something like that yeah something like that okay oh that's that's accurate it was about 30k a year ago per month uh we don't disclose um revenue numbers but it yeah right around 30k yeah no i'm just i mean i'm just going off the data you gave me and then backing into the growth um okay good and then have you done this bootstrapped or did the fund that you spun out of kind of fun this early on yeah so a little bit of both so we we've raised some a small run of venture capital so we've raised around a million dollars ourselves uh and have taken a really lean approach to the business in terms of growing and scaling it um but we we definitely raise some capital to higher initial employees build a product and continue to invest back into the business so total money into the company today is how much uh 1.1 million okay so when you say you took on some earlier you're talking like 100 grand really to get stuff going yeah yeah yeah i mean that's great nice and lean and how many folks are at today in terms of team yeah so the team's currently five full-time folks uh and we're we're hiring for two open positions right now but a full team of five we also uh was just listening to sids podcast from git lab we're yeah also a distributed team as well yeah that's great yes what would you think about that episode it was awesome uh i mean talk about a company that's uh scaled incredibly fast uh it's it's easy to fall in love with with those metrics yeah i was still pissed because i flat-out asked him i said sid two questions are you selling to anyone right now and he said no then i said are you raising right now and he said no now he smirked a little bit and sure enough a month a month after i do the interview you know gitlab raises 100 million dollars i'm like this guy of course he couldn't tell me when we did the interview but right still impressive numbers um yeah okay good so uh you're five people uh where's everyone based yes we have some folks in dublin chicago indianapolis uh and uh hopefully a couple more in europe coming up soon as well so truly fully remote okay great yeah and and the two spots you're hiring for out of curiosity what are they yeah one's a full stack engineer so uh you know development of the application and demand generation come marketer so one of the things we're trying to figure out is how do we try learning the business uh you know no one at the company right now is a quote-unquote kind of professional marketer we've kind of bootstrapped it and duct taped ourselves and looking for someone to handle that for us interesting how sticky is this thing which churn today and how do you keep it low yeah so turns under two and a half percent so we keep it pretty low in terms of per uh that's for a year um so we have really low churn what is that logo or revenue uh revenue revenue trend right here and local revenue kind of match almost actually uh but you know one of the things that we do pretty well is we're very we very very hands-on with the customers so if we're seeing a customer's not sending a monthly investor update out or update to their team we can we can jump in automatically provide a hand but you know the the one risk for our business really right is some of our customers are more early stage companies so that's really our risk when it comes to churn but once we have a customer sending a one update out and publish it uh we have like a 95 chance of landing them as a customer so that's really our kind of true north kpi is what percentage of our trialers and then what percentage of our customers are sending out uh an update every single month so we can look at data 30 60 90 days you're trialing folks i mean you don't you don't have a free plan i don't think but you do have like a timed 14-day trial it looks like is that accurate that is correct yep okay and no credit card on the front so you're basically saying how do we activate these people in 14 days and then get them to pay yep okay interesting i mean so what if someone goes hey listen like a month is 30 days i only get this for 14 days our rep doesn't go out until the end of the month so our trial is going to end yeah that's a great question uh so we're pretty flexible when it comes to trial links uh in terms of like extending trials but uh one of the things we ask you when you sign up for visible is when do you want to send your next investor update out and then we kind of do the back of the envelope map there and know how to reach out to you and then if you jump in after uh you know you send an update out or haven't got to fully experience yet we've automated extending the trial process so you can always jump back in after the trial ends and extended because you know we don't want to start charging until there's value in the product yeah that's interesting um i imagine just because of your your the company age and the price points...