How WildJar CEO James Oneill grew WildJar to $5.4M revenue and 304 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is James O'Neill he's the co-founder and CEO of wild jar it's his first startup 100 bootstrapped launched in 2016 and he's a passionate and driven with an appreciation for ipas and apis I love that James ready tickets the top yep Ready thanks for having me all right what is wild jar what are people paying you for so we're a cold tracking an analytics platform so um when customers search online um everything's very measurable through digital analytics um but when the customer picks up the phone and calls there's a disconnect between what they've done online and that offline journey and conversation so we help businesses understand which digital marketing channels Drive inbound phone leads what happens on the calls and the conversations and then integrate that core data into whatever technology stack you're using so crms analytics tools you name it will be there so in December 2020 when we chatted you mentioned that the average customer is paying about a thousand dollars per month is that still the average um yeah it's actually it's actually pretty much bang on so um we've we've gone through a few changes with with how we've approached the market um we we started as a product LED platform and um we we shifted to to hiring some people um and sales development teams and tried to go down that sales development Outreach um way but um it didn't really work for us so we've shifted back to Pure products inbound strategy and um yeah I mean it's the best model for us uh sticking to let's let's talk more about in a second but first let's let's get the output right of great inbound how many customers do you have now today uh 300 and well as of last month billing it was 304 304 he knows the number exactly okay I love that and can we take the 304 times a thousand bucks a month you're doing about 300 000 bucks a month in Revenue yeah so we we just did 310 so yeah that's awesome man uh all bootstrapped right you own 100 with your co-founder yeah 100 yeah that's amazing do you create an option pool for employees still just to get them some upside or no yeah um so not from a like an exit Point um we've definitely talked about it there's nothing in in writing but we've had those conversations internally um but we do a um every month we have a five percent of gross profit as a share so um that goes to employers every month okay tell me how that works so on 310 000 of top line revenue how much you take to the bottom line then how do you split that up usually yeah so gross profit um I think last month was about twelve thousand so in terms of five percent so far that 12 000 split between the team um as commission so we don't pay commission to um I mean we've only got one sales what James sorry is it five percent of twelve thousand no it said twelve thousand to five percent of our gross oh I see I see got it got it got it so so if we take 12 000 times times 20 right you guys did like oh my gosh you guys are very profitable you're like 240k of like profit gross profit last year five percent sorry last month five percent is 12 Grand yeah exactly yeah and then how do you decide how to who on the team to give what portion of that 12 Grand yeah so and so we we said it pretty early so we're fortunate that we haven't grown too many people to complicate it yet um but say at the moment so we share it differently so sales gets more um because that's more the the growth sign because there's no individual commission on sales um so that's how we set it from the beginning um it's worked really well because it also means people who come into the business can also share immediately um but it also means what the main reason why we started it that way wasn't more from a sales point because I was the only person doing sales but it was more of a support and Technical and implementation side where the quicker they get things done as well they know that if you know if they help customers faster you know close support tickets faster they also share in that in that Revenue that comes on because we're a very sticky product and and we are a it's a growing product so the more numbers and minutes our clients use the higher their profit and revenue to the business so 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 evaluation 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 evaluations inside of your founder 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 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 around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path 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 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 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 all right let's jump back into the interview so how many folks are on the team full-time today uh we're at six so we went from yeah from five to ten and then um so there's three new sales and like a customer success um and we've we've brought it back to six yeah I mean you're doing 50 000 in Revenue per employee per month which is just like exceptional world class four four to five times what your BC back competitors are doing yeah yeah I know it's exciting when you put it down in numbers that's why I like doing this because you get to really go into the numbers and look at it and you know it it's exciting I mean we love it so it's you know we wouldn't change it for sure let me ask you guys as co-founders you still have another 200 000 of profit you're making every month how do you decide how to allocate that Capital you paid out to yourselves as dividends you keep it in a business you go buy other smaller companies what do you do with it um so I mean we have been looking to acquire um that's definitely been on the road map and um we we've we've identified a few businesses um and the I mean it's pretty easy at the moment too so we're looking at possibly doing a bit of a debt raised there to do it but at the same time it's um we we have shared the profit as well um so we've taken it in different times um to help each other out and um yeah so we've done that too so it's it's only a bit sort of been more recently that we've decided to do that um because there's no point just keeping it in the business we've invested in another startup so we did we did help fund that um there's another sort of Charity business that we've put money into so okay okay so you're in a variety of things that makes a lot of sense um this is great now talking about the acquisition stuff right so when you look at companies go acquire considering your stage what are you looking for um similar businesses um there's our competitors a lot of them have been around the market for a really long time and and that's where we're winning a lot of our businesses from competitors who haven't evolved um and they're still their platforms and products are still um they haven't haven't moved forward and they're still still on Old systems um some of them haven't even moved to say like AWS and Cloud base and so we know that we can go in um migrate their platform to our platform maybe not everybody and not do it seamlessly but we know because we might we're winning so many businesses from them that we can do it um pretty easily...