How Workboard CEO Deidre Paknad grew Workboard to $88.9M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is daydream uh he's the CEO and co-founder of work board has dedicated it has decades of experience leading enterprise and startup teams and is passionate about helping other leaders engage their teams and great achievement she started to lead several companies has twice been recognized by the Smithsonian Institute for innovation and has 16 patents stay-dry' are you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely all right what is work board well what are you doing how do you make money workforce a software company that helps other organizations align measure and achieve their strategic priorities more quickly more effectively okay so you're selling these kind of HR managers internal team purposes actually not to HR managers right and if you think about an enterprise whether that's a growth company or whether that's a huge enterprise like a Microsoft or IBM the person with the strategic priorities is leading a business unit right we need to grow this much we need to enter these markets we need to drive this top-line growth in this bottom-line margin and profit right and that's not the head of HR that's a head of the business and that's who we're trying to help drive acceleration for interesting okay very good but all b2b SAS absolutely okay and I want to get I want across on a timeline and get more your story before we do that they'll give me a general sense here oh I don't go in every customer cohort but on average what's a customer pay you per month for this would you say should we think we do annual contract rate sort of thing but they're a CV per customer is and it's it's about 125 K we've got really large enterprise like a Sony Samsung Microsoft right Deutsche Telekom and we've got a bunch of growth companies couple hundred people like Trend kite influitive and others so from in the middle of that zone is about 125 kHz v that's great and put all this on a timeline for us when did you launch we actually launched a company about four years ago and we took a and we haven't used a ton of money to get here right and so it was perfect the product for I think of it as the individual contributors right the people who execute it on so strategic priorities and make sure they loved it they got power they got value and then stack on top of that enable the managers especially first time second time managers who aren't really awesome at it to connect the strategic priorities to the work their team doing and then elevate that to strategic priorities going up seven eight nine layers in the organization so we we walked up for two years on products people love to use and then dashboards and alignment executives really really need to have and they put those together right and so we kind of got into revenue generation in 2016 and we've been growing at a pretty healthy clip since 2016 in the revenue okay and so obviously there are two years their pre revenue where you're obviously funding you know development code etc I guess you raised early on how much have you raised to date yes so we raised about twelve million I started the company from inside IBM and excuse me which bought my last company and how many was not that company was PSS systems I was a turnaround CEO there and I let it for seven years and three turnarounds are fun two-year wartime easy congratulations actually he was through two recessions it's so not easy yeah I started in 2003 but come David 60 million bucks and had nothing to go to market way pre-revenue I so pre-revenue oh my gosh yeah yeah had yeah anyway and this is in 2003 right the heart of a depression one or recession one's gonna get up and over that and it end up was an exit that was no down round no recap got to value on on that capital we're able to get everyone their money back out yes I was wow that's incredibly flawed down to come and hold her no you didn't it didn't get that far down the cap table we got a little down yeah well we waste one more round before excess and and we had pretty good pretty good run that's impressive much bigger run inside IBM grew the same business a whole lot more like 10x more but in the running of that business I I encountered this problem we solved in deep pain right which when I left to start this company I was able to go back to my investors in the last company and say hey you guys I got an idea that's we were able to raise a pretty big seed round in 2014 it's like 2.7 five and that took us a couple years right he gave us the time to get product right you know and not rush the let's add salespeople right and then find out we don't have the product right yep or the funnel or the metrics or the SDR to account executive ratios or anything like that right yes that's right very good so over the past I guess two years since you've been post revenue what I've been able to grow your customer base you how many customers today so we have about 50 enterprise customers which I think of it as that kind of scale we just talked about and we're growing revenue three three and a half X a year so we're really kind of a good role we just raise another round a series a fourth quarter of last year I'm building out the management team deepening the sales team and so on so we're we're adding if you will the the capacity to grow at a faster rate now that's great now I mean if I take 50 enterprise folks at the level you just told me 125 you know thousand a CV that would put you at about five hundred twenty grand a month right now on revenue is that about accurate I mean I just want give you credit where credit's do if you're three Xing Yi over here that means just a year ago you were doing about 175 grand a month yes no weird it's been a steep curve anything we had huge growth before I raised the series a and so it was on like shoestring we had fifty percent of our revenues coming from our installed base and we were yeah we were struggling to be honest to as you might say to eat Wesley kill right to deliver what we took down and and it was a hard stretch we even got to a point where Herbie buck we were spending in sales and marketing we're generating almost five in revenue and was that what year last year right so for most of 2017 that was a ratio and that was because our customers were expanding really rapidly right we were the lan and expand play was working where the expansion would happen within the first quarter right and then around what pricing sorry to cut you off around what pricing axes number of seats additional features would you upsell seats right so in our case it's we're gonna start with this part of the business unit and get everybody aligned and then we're gonna add this part of the business unit part of the business unit so it's really users seats right do it so that expansion it was a ton of our growth and a lot of our efficiency right and really helped us figure out two things are important like what do people buy in the first instance and then how do they get happy and a half year over time right we had a really thin team to go make that happen and so when we raise money it could add to the team it was like oops we can kind of breathe now for like two weeks well one in $1 I mean so big so I heard you say is your dollar based CAC was basically 20 cents you spend 20 cents to get a dollar of new ARR for all last year are you now these channels when they're highly profitable the question is diminishing returns over time can you keep spending money in the channel so I've been able to hold that ratio we we're actually not trying to hold quite that aggressive a ratio right well so we really want to spend a buck an urn - yeah that's still pretty good yeah that's still I think an aggressive thing so the the channel the opportunity for work board right is you think about who needs to be aligned on the strategic priorities of a company and executing against them well everybody who works here mm-hmm right if you're not contributing the strategic priorities but get off payroll yeah maybe the whole team and for us it's the whole business unit it's the whole company right and so are the total addressable market for us is enormous yep right and so the so yes there is sort of infinite opportunity like where you think about a sales force it can monetize and solve problems for users and sales and marketing and in services yeah but not for dev and not for finance and not for legal and not for service rate for texts up in our case it's a big footprint so deepening our existing customer base going farther and wider and deeper into those large enterprises and acquiring new customers is is a long run lastly you told me you're driving expansion in the first couple months extrapolate over the first year if your first year a CV is 125 what's your typical first year expansion so the first year the average a CV is sort of where we end up at the end of that first year right so our first site might be for here's a typical infamous clear 50 K first deal in July 200 K ad in September okay got it so that would be four hundred percent kind of expansion in the account I imagine you have net revenue retention then way over 100 percent yes maybe over 250 or 300 percent it probably comes out somewhere like 140 yeah right and it's yeah probably comes that around some 140 some of our large enterprise customers layoffs as many people and that's gonna ask you the other the other layer to that net revenue retention...