How Wishpond CEO Ali Tajsekandar grew Wishpond to $15.9M revenue and 2.5K customers in 2024.

hello go on my desk today is a lead on Sikandar he is the founder and CEO of a company called wishpond if you're not familiar with wishpond they play obviously in the social media marketing space we'll dive into the story right now Ollie are you ready to take it to the top yeah let's do it all right tell us about the company what are you doing how do you make money yeah so basically what wishbone is is a marketing automation platform and it's focused on helping businesses of all sizes run successful marketing campaigns so when we talk about marketing campaigns we don't want to just focus on one part of it it takes but you know it takes a lot of different things to make a successful so we help them on provide with providing them with tools for capturing Loup leads with landing pages contests pop-ups and so forth and then giving them tools for tracking to better know who these leads are and what they've done and you know who are the best ones to convert and then also giving the marketing automation workflows to warm up those leads send them you know nurture drip campaigns and so forth to be able to close them so it's basically vertically focused on running successful marketing campaigns now your Burbidge on this is change cuz back in 2011 2012 you're very much in the Wildfire vitru buddy media space two questions for you one why on earth did you not sell in 2012 when everyone else was exiting in the market was hot as hell and why the pivot well actually that wasn't the first time we pivoted we've pivoted a few times the first time was we started as a local product search engine so has nothing to do with what we do right now and the whole genesis of it was we wanted to help local retailers specifically small business businesses locally to be able to get leads online so the way to do that was you would come on our website or the mobile app and you would search for local you know products from local businesses let's say a pair of sunglasses and then we would tell you which retailer has an in-store near you and for what price and who has it you know with the inventory that version of the business didn't work well for many reasons including attribution and you know data quality in what years were was this this this was back in 2010 2009 2010 so early on but through that we started realizing okay our our vision is still the same helping businesses be able to make sense of online and getting leads but that version wasn't gonna work so why don't we start focusing on building awareness and engagement for them on social media with social media contest and so forth then as we started doing that in getting you know success with it we didn't want to stop there because we realized no one wakes up in the morning saying oh I wish I could run another contest instead business owners and marketing professionals wake up every morning saying geez how do I achieve my KPIs how do I grow the business how do I get more leads how do I get more sales and that is fundamentally different from just contests so we wanted to have landing pages for that we wanted to have pop-ups for catching leads out of your website but also we realized that online marketing world is getting really sophisticated and wasn't enough just to get leads you needed to do something with them you need to be more sophisticated know who the best ones are and warm them up and convert them so that's how which one over time developed into being the full suite so take me back go to 2012 I mean I'm sure these guys you know I'm sure Salesforce before they acquired buddy media I'm sure Oracle before they did the deal with with TRO and involve er I'm sure all these guys did due diligence and you came across their plates why not sell in 2012 I honestly don't think we were really ready for it I think we were still not mature enough for that okay and and from my point of view also that means that it was premature to sell because we weren't really there so we would have to sell and we're nowhere though and like how do you set whatever that where benchmark is where in terms of product maturity in terms of revenue a lot of those things so we were still developing in those ways what's the only asking what size were you back then like a million ten nine an hour I don't have the number like entire range or range is fine back then I don't remember what what I can tell you is what we are around right now okay we're basically in the if I want to give you a range it would be around you know somewhere between six and ten million okay no obviously back you were smaller than that back then right you've grown okay good trending in the right direction so take me back how can I help me understand where your brain was that when you started the company back in 2009 like was this something where you just left corporate you had to make it work where you had a bunch in savings where was your head so I was fortunate enough to have an investor from the beginning I worked at couple of startups before when I was still going to you know high school and you know University and one of the founders in one of those starters was impressed enough with me to say when you later on and start your own business or want to have your own idea come to me first for investment and I did that I would say six or seven times and every time he said no and finally with the idea which bond the local search version of it he said sure let's get it started and I got enough money to be able to much or it was at the beginning it was very little it was like eighty thousand dollars just enough for me who had just got married and was finishing my MBA to sustain my life that was it it grew quite a bit we ended up raising around three million dollars from him that's that's the whole investment right now yeah Wow okay yeah yeah we've been fortunate enough that way and yeah so basically that's how we started fortunately I don't have to put my own money back then you didn't have they didn't have any money to put in and what do you add today now in terms of total customers paying for the platform there's around 2,500 paying customers right now okay yeah so we're a team of 50 people zero or one five five zero and where you based in Vancouver everybody yep that's great okay 15 Vancouver 2500 paying customers and on 5505 zero yeah sorry fifty five zero what do these folks pay on average like if someone's listening right now I want to start with which fund what's the average kind of price what are they paying on average there's two different ways you can use wish bond so one is do-it-yourself one is done for you so if you want to use the do-it-yourself platform average starting price is around hundred dollars per month so it's actually very very cost effective if you want us to do it at least to get you started on the right path and you know there's a service element to that then that goes up and you know it could be five hundred two thousand dollars oh my god so this is not a pure when you say you're doing between six month and 10 9 and ARR that's not all true or crime revenue that has professional services built in even the professional services has it basically recurring SMR are how much to the services so professional services would be for getting you started then after that you just continue paying monthly for the services and then we'll try you to continue on your own yeah so give me an example like what's one might pay up front to get set up one time so it could be around you know fifteen hundred dollars something like that or a thousand dollars to get you started and then after that you can continue and then sometimes the monthly packages after that could be more expensive just because you want to be fair so blind support or and be able to go back to that Account Manager for your questions okay but the one-time fee like upfront do you include that and that when you tell me to six to ten number no and actually the other thing is in terms of our revenue I would say seventy to eighty percent of it is pure SAS software so the service actually doesn't amount to much well that's what I was getting at so sixty to seventy percent let's say on the high end of ten million so you know six million to seven million of your annual revenue is pure SAS recurring the product people paying between a hundred and maybe 200 300 bucks a month that's the rest it's kind of icing on the cake professional services starting fees that's right got it okay and just to be clear on this low end of that right if you've got six million in ARR divided by twelve that's about five hundred grand a month if I divide twenty five hundred customers into that that means they're paying each about two bucks a month on average sounds about sounds yeah okay obviously with a SAS company and maybe this is why you have professional services Cherno always critical so many times the setup fee will decrease churn what are you guys looking at right now in terms of annual logo term well we track it on the monthly so it's around a little bit shy of two percent monthly so that's actually pretty solid it's great especially for you know business like ours that you know campaigns a lot of times are seasonal or event based and what we've recently focused on quite a bit is improving our onboarding and customer success and we've seen that really help yeah yeah so like of the cohort of people that pay you is set up fee how low does your turn get on those el mejor um you know I know not out of my head it's lower when we're when we're involved on customer success or account management the churn definitely goes down yeah but I don't have the number do you have a very predictable system set up to drive expansion revenue year-over-year and if so have you hidden net negative revenue churn yet we haven't hit a net negative churn yet that would be great to have I know we're not there yet got it what are you like what is expansion right now like from year one to year two on average would you say in terms of like one of our subscribers how much more they're gonna pay us next year yeah I would say average they would start you know second year it goes you know another 25% something around that and what are they typically buying more of is it more seats more campaigns more leads more features what is it so our SAS subscription is primarily segmented based on number of leads you have so as they start getting more least obviously we'll have to upgrade to to continue getting benefit of the system that makes sense tell me about growth so acquisition like what do you spend to acquire customer on average that's an interesting question we spend very little very very very little on ads next to nothing really less than 10 grand a month yeah yeah I mean and what we spend is mostly retargeting for people who've actually come to us already but what we do really well first of all we have an outbound sales team as well so it's not going on 50 how many of the 50 team members admin sales team right now is total five people okay Str is an Aes bike so if you do a fully weighted tak like include marketing and sales salaries / new customers per month like what you spending per customer force so I can separate them for the self-serve most of it is coming inbound by people finding us through our blog or coming to our website on our blog we get around 200 to 300,000 visitors a month and we have around 300,000 subscribers to our blog as well so there's a lot of traffic that's coming that way and those basically there's no CAC is you know it's just a Content that we write and there's a salary no butts have a person to write the content that's right that's right yeah but but most of that is already you know they're the ongoing cost is very very little on the sales side of it when it's outbound I would say cost of winning and account is around $500 and then the average long-term value of those deals is north of 5,000 dollars yeah just because of what your retention is right because of retention and also we usually end up actually being able to get them on higher plans yes so you're recovering most of your your acquisition cost what in like three or four months if they paid 200 bucks a month and you spend 500 that's right interesting so why not be more aggressive there that's the plan so where do you do you know how to spend more money to be more aggressive yeah for sure so we haven't with ads we haven't been able to we haven't had much success in saying okay if we spend a lot more money on ads we're gonna get a lot more accounts and that's actually profitable and Casson I can LTE are gonna match long term I think is going to match with sales we've been able to do that quite effectively basically the plan right now and maybe I'm sharing too much is by end of the year nail some of those numbers and then next year we can actually start going a lot more aggressively so admin sales is where we can definitely invest more and the more we invest the more we're gonna get very predictively you at this point yeah what were you just so we can understand growth taking back a year in this December of 2016 in terms of AR then like 3 4 5 million so we grew by around 25 to 30 percent versus last year and our plan for next year is 50 percent okay so what I can't do all that math in my head that quickly so what is that yeah we were like at 4 or 5 million in ARR in December last year yeah something like that so do you like it let's fast-forward 45 or 50 days it's the holiday party at wishpond right do you think you'll break like the million dollar run right by the end of the year we'll be close that's a good stretch school it's close but it's a little uncomfortable yeah it will be all right good stuff let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what is your favorite business book my favorite business book obviously changes from time to time recently I've been a big fan of predictable revenue by Aaron Ross I really enjoyed that really helped us number two is there a CEO your faul you're studying currently my favorite see yours Warren Buffett I really like how independent thinker he is but generally I don't follow CEOs that closely I think I follow a lot of thinkers and try to model individual parts of each one so for example one of the books that I'm reading and finishing now is the long walk to freedom the biography on Nelson Mandela so on that one I learned about bravery and things like that I muddled that part from him and then so forth speaking of Warren and how he likes to buy companies if someone came to you let's say Marc Benioff at Salesforce and offered you let's say 30 million so like 3 or 4 X AOR do you sell the company I think that's pretty low but we'll start talking what multiple do you think is like a good multiple these days honestly it depends on your growth curve right so I think if we execute the way we're planning 50% for next year or 50 200 percent next year then the multiples can be six to ten got it makes good sense number three besides your own what's your favorite online tool beside wishpond my favorite online tool would be either Optimizely or rubra I don't know if you use blue proximately everyone so I guess I'll go with rubra all right number three in number four how many hours of sleep to get every night right now I try to get eight hours okay and which in the early days I didn't know and what's the situation married single you have kids married with a 15 month old so that's that's why I say I try to yeah sorry Pam 30 35 35 last question take us back 15 years what he was your 20 year old self no I think my 20 year old self I would say hang in there you're doing okay just keep at it - my 28 or 29 year old when I started a wishbone I would say code less and sell more I think I think I was a quarter way too long there you guys are Raleigh code less sell more quality technical co-founders listening he launched a wish pond does something totally different back in 2009 pivoted many many times they raised three million dollars have a team of 50 people based up in Vancouver helping their 2500 customers generate leads and manage those leads online with their marketing suite and by the end of 2016 last year they're doing about five million bucks an air are very close to breaking seven and a half eight million bucks in air are by the end of 2017 aiming for 50 to 60 maybe even 70 percent growth year over year Ali thank you so much for taking us to the top thank you very much