How Visible.vc CEO Mike Preuss grew 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 you don't have significant expansion revenue yet at this point correct yeah it's pretty small um as of right now but we're starting to see a lift in that so we just revamped pricing where we kind of have logical jumps before it was kind of just testing different price points now we have some you know uh at least two plans to pick from so we're starting to see a little bit of expansion with plans to uh you know start figuring out more net news or sorry uh yeah because kind of net negative uh revenue turn as well yeah or or or net revenue retention above 100 even yup yeah yeah i know it's always interesting when i go to pricing page and i see the delta between two plans is like marginally small which i would say yours is it's very rarely do you see expansion but once you see a plan that's like you know 30 bucks a month or one that's you know call for custom pricing you know there's probably an expansion machine built in there yeah we're i would say we're probably like three months away from from having that nailed down the product side i think we have a pretty good idea in terms of where we want to go um just as you know kind of building now but building that in the road map yeah what what so let me put a hypothetical question to you right now um if you wanted to invent a plan where you could charge three grand a month to companies what would it include yeah i think uh you know what we've heard is let me take that experience of investor updates investment communication and put that on my essentially my own domain or brand it myself so right now we do a lot in terms of you're sending into visible uh you're pushing uh updates out uh if you can remove that branding obviously but even can i create an experience in my own uh domain for my investors to log into and then even take it a step further we're starting to go down this path of uh nurturing investors so uh how do i acquire new investors how do i nurture them properly because the one thing that we see is our customers kind of start and stop fundraising processes but as we both know fundraising's you know 24 7 365 but most ceos and founders don't have time to properly nurture uh an investor like they would a sales lead so building tools around you know top of funnel in terms of your investor relationships is where we're going to be spending a lot of time on our product i would say very much of our focus to date has been around that customer success like how do i retain and engage my investors and then figuring out uh from here like all right how do i activate them and then at the top of the funnel like how do i find new investors and nurture them got it mike by the way is it did this come out of scott's program in indy high alpha yes so we were a company that was um started prior to high alpha so i started uh visible with with two partners christian anderson and and uh mike fitzgerald who then joined at high alpha and so we were kind of like the prototype or mvp for what for what high alpha is today that's really interesting so that program i know a bunch of the investors in that program and they always say amazing things about it um would you agree i mean is that a great kind of channel to go through if you're a new entrepreneur yeah i can't say enough great things about uh high alpha their team the partners there they're truly kind of pro entrepreneur uh so they're always you know thinking with the entrepreneur first and foremost and they really do accelerate your time to market uh seeing some of these businesses launched now you know you have a full resource of engineers designers marketers uh investors right and so you're seeing companies launch in you know weeks um so it's pretty cool to see what they've built and and i'm a huge fan and and can't say enough good things about uh the team there that's great talk to me about how aggressive you're being right now in terms of customer acquisition costs you know 150 bucks a month are you spending 12 months of acv to get the customer or less yeah that's something we're honestly figuring out right now so our growth to date has has more or less been organic so either through organic search through customer referrals investor referrals so we're starting to spend a little bit in terms of paid marketing and we want to keep that number less than 12 months but we actually don't right now our budget to give you an example was like 400 bucks last month so we're starting to ramp that spend up to 2000 and figuring out where where that is but we just don't have great data in terms of what paid's going to get us so far yeah yeah so maybe maximum though and a channel you'd spend up to maybe 1800 bucks or 12 months of acv to get that customer in the first place yeah you can do that if you've got confidence in your churn data and lifetime value obviously um yeah that's great any plans to raise additional capital in the near future definitely um am i allowed to disclose that or not i don't know but we definitely have plans to raise capital in the future so yeah i mean by the way i think most founders would say of course we want to raise in the future what i'm more interested in is how you think about raising right like like if you do raise how much will you would you want to raise in terms of planning for runway and things like that yeah uh that's a good question you know my my skew is is how can we maximize a dollar and and not have to over delude ourselves or raise too much capital you know a million to two nothing uh crazy but uh just knowing how we've oriented the business we can get a lot out of a lot of every dollar that's that's put in yeah in order to avoid dilution would you ever consider venture debt yeah i i you know we're probably open to all different types of financing vehicles for for the business yeah i did um did did the folks at high off i know those are really smart guys and gals there did they have any kind of um uh uh thoughts on venture debt i know it's becoming pretty hot now yeah i uh i don't know i can't speak for them on that and and something i haven't spoken with them recently so i don't want to speak for them in terms of like if you know if they yeah no no no no just did you learn anything about venture debt from them is really what i'm asking um i'm not we we ourselves uh previously have taken out uh just sas recurring revenue loan um so we've used uh lighter capital oh yeah so uh we use them to finance business i mean that was uh incredibly easy as well and worked really well so can't say enough good things about you know working with that team too was it fairly quick in terms of when you started engaging with them doing they actually put money in your account yeah it was we did a podcast with them it was like 15 days from the start uh to the end and it was cool we did it we did a podcast in series with them because we essentially just turned over our visible profile to the lighter capital team and they had everything they needed and uh we did it you know from start to wire it was like 15 days that's amazing all right uh mike let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book favorite business book uh hard things about hard things that's probably what everyone says but i love that book number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now there's not um that's okay actually there is there is there is his name is max yoder he's a great friend of mine uh a company in indianapolis also out of high alpha called lessonly and what he's doing is absolutely incredible check him out yeah i know that he was on the show back three months ago so folks can go check that one out he's been on the show yeah yeah i've i've had a lot of people from indiana it's actually something's happening there on the water there's a there's a groundswell happening it is yes yeah uh number three what billing tool do you use building tools stripe okay only stripe do you lay anything on top of it for analytics like chart mobile charger find anything like that uh chart mogul and they're a partner of our so we have a direct integration with chart mobile in our in our application too so our customers can pull in their chart mobile data and then use that to report it back to investors and match it up with other data sources oh great okay number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night eight and what's your situation married single kids married no kids no kids all right how old are you uh 30. 30. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um it's gonna be a grind guys it's a grind coming from visible vc helps you get more accurate updates up to your investors quickly and more efficiently founded in 2014 spun out of kind of an investment firm now one about 1.1 million bucks raised serving about 600 customers paying about 150 bucks per month so just past a million bucks in terms of run rate growing about 200 year-over-year healthy economics less than 2.5 percent revenue churn per year just now experimenting with paid spend obviously won't go over 12-month payback period team of five in chicago and other remote locations mike thanks for taking us to the top thanks have a good one