How WildJar Reached $310K MRR with 6 Employees and 122% Net Dollar Retention (Interview with CEO James O'Neill)

Introduction and What WildJar Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is James O'Neil. He's the co founder and CEO of wildjar. It's his first startup, a 100% bootstrapped, launched in 2016, and he's passionate and driven with an appreciation for IPAs and APIs. I love that. James, you ready to take us to the top?

James O'Neill

00:14>> Yep. Ready. Thanks for having me.

Nathan Latka

00:16Alright. What is wildjar? What are people paying you for?

James O'Neill

00:19>> So we're a call tracking and analytics platform. So when customers search online, everything's very measurable through digital analytics. 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 call data into whatever technology stack you're using. So CRMs, analytics tools,

00:54>> you name it, will be there. So

Average Customer Value and Go-to-Market Shift

Nathan Latka

00:56In December 2020 when we chatted, you mentioned that the average customer is paying about a thousand dollars per month. Is that still the average?

James O'Neill

01:03>> Yeah. It's actually it's actually pretty much bang on. So we've we've gone through a few changes with with how we've approached the market. We we started as a product led platform and we we shifted to to hiring some people in sales development teams and tried to go down that sales development outreach way, but it didn't really work for us. So we've shifted back to pure products inbound strategy. And, yeah, I mean, it's the best model for

01:35>> us sticking to that.

Nathan Latka

01:36So let's let's talk more about inbound in a second, but first, let's let's skip the output, right, of great inbound. How many customers do have now today?

Current Customer Count: 304

James O'Neill

01:43>> 300 and well, as of last month, billing, it was 304.

Monthly Revenue: $310K

Nathan Latka

01:47304. He knows the number exactly. Okay. I love that. And can we take the three zero four times a thousand bucks a month? You're doing about $300,000 a month in revenue?

James O'Neill

01:54>> Yeah. So we we just did 310 k.

Fully Bootstrapped, 100% Co-Founder Owned

Nathan Latka

01:56So yeah. That's awesome, man. All bootstrapped. Right? You own a 100% with your co founder?

James O'Neill

02:01>> Yeah. A 100%.

Employee Profit Sharing Model

Nathan Latka

02:02Yeah. That's amazing. Do you create an option pool for employees still just to get them some upside or no?

James O'Neill

02:07>> Yeah. So not from a like an exit point. We've definitely talked about it. There's nothing in in writing, but we've had those conversations internally. But we do a every month, we have a 5% of gross profit as a as a share. So that goes to employees every month.

Nathan Latka

02:26Okay. Tell me how that works. So on 310,000 of top line revenue, how much do take to the bottom line and then how do you split that up usually?

James O'Neill

02:33>> Yeah. So gross profit, I think last month was about 12,000. So in terms of five percent. So five that 12,000 split between the team as commission. So we don't pay commission to I mean, we only got one sales.

Nathan Latka

02:49Well, James, sorry. Is it 5% of 12,000?

James O'Neill

02:53>> No. So 12,000 is the 5% of our gross.

Nathan Latka

02:57Oh, 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 did like 240 k of grow like profit gross profit last year. 5% or sorry, last month. 5% is $12 k.

James O'Neill

03:11>> Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

03:12Yeah. And then how do you decide how to who on the team to give what portion of that $12 k?

James O'Neill

03:16>> Yeah. So and so we we set it pretty early. So we're fortunate that we haven't grown too many people to complicate it yet. But so at the moment so we share it differently. So sales gets more because that's more the the gross on because there's no individual commission on sales. Yep. So that's how we set it from the beginning. It's worked really well because it also means people who come into the business can also share immediately.

03:45>> But it also means and the the main reason why we started 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

04:09>> very sticky product and and we are a it's it's a growing product. So the more numbers and minutes our clients use, the the higher their profit and and revenue to the business. So

Nathan Latka

04:21Oh, 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

04:44your 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

05:08get 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

05:30not 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, 1,200,000 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

05:56going 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

Team Size and Revenue Per Employee

Nathan Latka

06:18if 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

06:44the interview. So how many folks are on the team full time today?

James O'Neill

06:48>> We're at six.

Nathan Latka

06:49So we went

James O'Neill

06:50>> from from five to 10. And then so it was three new sales and like a custom success. And we've we've brought it back to six. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

06:59I 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 VC backed competitors are doing.

James O'Neill

07:10>> Yeah. Yeah. I know. It's exciting when you put it down in numbers. This is why I like doing this because you get to really go into the numbers and look at it and, you know, it's and it's exciting. I mean, we love it. So it's you know, we wouldn't change it for sure.

How Co-Founders Allocate Profits

Nathan Latka

07:22Let 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? Do you pay it out to yourselves as dividends? Do you keep it in the business? Do you go buy other smaller companies? What do you do with it?

James O'Neill

07:33>> So, I mean, we have been looking to acquire. That's definitely been on the roadmap. And we've we've we've identified a few businesses and

07:45>> mean, debt's pretty easy at the moment too. So we're looking at possibly doing a bit of a debt raise there to do it. But at the same time,

07:54>> have shared profit as well. So we've taken it in different times to help each other out. Yeah, And so we've done that too. So it's certainly been more recently that we've decided to do that because there's no point just keeping it in the business. We've invested in another startup. So we did help fund that. There's another sort of charity business that we put money into. So we've Okay. Through that. Okay.

Acquisition Strategy and Target Companies

Nathan Latka

08:19So you're in a variety of things. That makes a lot of sense. This is great. Now talk to me about the acquisition stuff. Right? So when you look at companies to go acquire, considering your stage, what are you looking for?

James O'Neill

08:27>> Similar businesses.

08:30>> There's our competitors have a lot of them have been around in market for a really long time, and and that's where we're winning a lot of our business is from competitors who haven't evolved. And they're still their platforms and products are still

08:44>> they haven't haven't moved forward and they're still still on old systems. Some of them haven't even moved to say, like, AWS and cloud based. And so we know that we can go in, migrate their platform to our platform. Maybe not everybody and and not do it seamlessly, but we know because we might we're winning so many businesses from them that we can do it pretty easily and also

Nathan Latka

09:07Do you go buy an extension where you'd kill their code base, transition their customers from that other billing system onto yours and paying for your tech stack, your code base, your product?

James O'Neill

09:16>> Yeah. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. That's kinda what we're looking at. And then and then also other complimentary. I mean, SMS has been has been there's this huge remarket for it again, you know, through ecommerce and the like. And because we are technically carrier, we we we started to do a lot more SMS. So we we bundled in sort of SMS products off the back of voice products. So if if a call goes into a business and

09:42>> they miss a call, we'll immediately SMS the customer and reengage with them. And and it's just more revenue that is adding onto it. So looking at other SMS providers and then we can also just cut that cost back because they're usually paying somebody like us to deliver the SMS. So we to buy that to to acquire them that way. So

SMS Bundling and Product Expansion

Nathan Latka

10:04What about the flip side of this? If someone came to you guys and offered you guys 40,000,000 all cash upfront to sell the business, do you sell?

Would They Sell the Business?

James O'Neill

10:11>> I mean, look, when when we built the business, we we didn't we we kind of thought five years because that's I mean, you say five years, but we were genuinely like, you know, five years. We're not salespeople. And I think that's what we realised trying to hire salespeople. We're very much product and we're very passionate about what we do, but we're not very good at training salespeople. So if somebody did come to us, it would have

10:35>> to be a good fit where, you know, they can implement a sales strategy, put us into those sort of tools, then we'll do that. To give you an idea that in market right now, there are competitors, you know, US ones to look at winding up a few of platforms like us to do something similar.

Nathan Latka

10:53Is it like sales ops of the world or

James O'Neill

10:56>> More so like like if you look at The US, like Invoca and DialogTech, they've done that. There's In The UK, there's Infinity and ResponseTap have combined. And they're not really combining to say remove It's just more just to bring revenue together. And so there's a few others who are trying to do it. But it's interesting you said sort of sales, like, because none of those businesses do what we do. And we do everything before the call

11:29>> actually comes into the business. That's where our IP sits and that's what we're really good at. All those other businesses is around like what we're doing now is having the conversation and bringing analytics in the conversation, which is really, really important. But in buying cycle through a website, people have been searching for three months or a month. And then as soon as they call, it goes into the contact center and they have that information, but they

11:54>> don't know what the journey has been like before. So we're integrating into like a Dialpad and the Talkdesks and those cloud based contact centers to enrich their data so that when we send it to that agent, we say this customer has come through a Google paid ad. They started their journey x months ago. You know, they've called three times. So then when I have a conversation, it's more meaningful as well.

Nathan Latka

12:18Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, that also they if you end up doing that really well, they're all gonna wanna buy you. Right? So that's great leverage for you. Talk to me about churn. Right? So what's gross churn? What's net dollar retention?

Churn and Net Dollar Retention

James O'Neill

12:29>> So churn so like a logo churn. So because we went through that sales, we have churned more than what we we we traditionally did. I don't have a number, but our net dollar retention has definitely gone up. So, when I worked it out, it was like 22. So, I think 122%.

Nathan Latka

12:48Okay.

James O'Neill

12:49>> So, it's quite It's

Nathan Latka

12:50still quite That's great.

James O'Neill

12:52>> Yeah. And it is good. It's- We actually know it can be better. And the reason why it's not is we've changed our onboarding a little bit, too. So,

13:05>> we we offer we don't say free because, you know, we we we like to entice them to say that they will stay. So we waive the first month for two months invoices to onboard them with an idea that they would obviously stay on. And by doing that, obviously, there's that that cost incurred on that side. But, you know, it's it's it's quite a competitive market at the moment. So it's it's been good for us to onboard

13:30>> clients easier that way.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Lessons

Nathan Latka

13:31Well, James, again, congrats on the growth. It's impressive to watch you guys boot strapped. We're out of time. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one favorite book.

James O'Neill

13:39>> I I don't read enough, but we did traction recently. So that was quite good. So Gino Wickman, I think it was. So that was quite good for us. I think we'll stick to it. So I'll go with that.

Nathan Latka

13:52Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

James O'Neill

14:00>> Not really at the moment.

Nathan Latka

14:01That's okay.

14:02Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides wildjar?

James O'Neill

14:07>> Slack. 100%. We we do everything with Slack still. I think I said that last time and yeah. It's amazing. So

Nathan Latka

14:14Number number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

James O'Neill

14:18>> Well, I just had another baby. So I I wasn't sleeping much at all. It's about three or four, but back to about six. So six is single.

Nathan Latka

14:26Yeah. So nice. So so you had two kids last time. Three kids now, married, what? You're 37 now?

Bootstrapping Philosophy and Closing Thoughts

James O'Neill

14:31>> Yes. 37 two days ago. So I was flying I flew from Singapore to to Scotland, I had like a forty five hour birthday. So just kept on going, which is quite good.

Nathan Latka

14:42Man. Well, happy late birthday. I'm sorry you're stuck at airports, but, man, that's wild. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

James O'Neill

14:51>> I mean, we're doing it now about bootstrapping. So not thinking about the bigger picture. And I and I know you've been pushing it a lot, but it's it's true. I mean, you don't have to be the biggest business in the world. And, you know, it's something that, you know, we just wanna aspire to be a really, really good profitable business. So yeah. If we did this earlier, I would have loved to have started doing it earlier.

15:11>> So yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:12Guys, there you have it. James at wildjar playing aggressively in the call tracking, complementation space. They're now working with, call it, 304 customers paying on average $1,000 a month, doing 300,000 $310,000 a month in revenue, profiting almost to gross profit, 240, which is amazing. Profit sharing plan with the team, they split up 12 k of that 240 k, which is fantastic. Good incentive there. They're doing all that revenue, 3,700,000 run rate today with just six employees. Incredible

15:36revenue per employee. Beautiful example of Bootstrap Founder doing it right. And all the way, by the way, growing faster than some of their VC backed competitors. They were at 150 k of MRR just two years ago. So doubling over the past twenty four months. Really impressive, James. Thanks for taking us to top.

James O'Neill

15:48>> Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

15:52One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at one p. M. 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

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