How Wunderkind CEO Bill Ingram grew Wunderkind to $204.7M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ryan urban he's the co-founder and he's the ceo and founder of wonderkind he's been had an obsession with undeniable performance and underwriting leadership the company has been named one of the best places to work by both cranes new york and is ranked the number one fastest growing software company by the inc 500 ryan you ready to take the top let's go let's go nathan what's up all right so previously bounce x and now wonderkind next generation's marketing tell me a little bit i see the new hairdo do you still have a black toenails or no oh i've uh uh we got freaking everything so uh now we gotta now we got a little batman follow me we've got a little viking stuff going on got a little spiderman too i love it two weeks you got to go fresh so this means this means you're not going on an ipo roadshow anytime in the next three months right you know what i would like um you know what the world's come a long way so i actually was on a uh we did do a uh kind of a pre-ipo like a crossover fun process and i really wanted to kind of introduce what wunderkind does to a lot of the public company investors and because at some point it could be next year it could be early 23 whenever whenever whenever we feel it's appropriate yeah we're we're probably going to be a public company at some point it's something we're we're looking forward to uh but yeah like you know what like you can have your you can have your nails painted and do that and you're not judged anymore and it's it's awesome it's uh it's a great part of conversation i uh i kept the sides uh i don't have designs on the sides but this halloween so now now we've kind of uh completed that process and now it's time to have a little fun there too so but everyone's uh pretty open it's the world's way more inclusive than it was three years ago so focus you heard it here first you can have your black toenails and your ipo too also i'm kind of like i'm i love it wait so what was the name of the thing that you said you did where you sort of just put feelers out there let people know who you were it's called a what a it's not a no it's like we went three i know it's a strategic finance process so some companies need to fundraise to like companies that uh lose a lot of money for us it's like we we're doing great we're um we're probably by the time we say maybe even a thousand people will probably be 800 people soon this has been a great year for us our best year ever uh and i'm like i'm calling from the i'm down in the world trade center right now uh you're gonna love it yes look at this yeah this is on the 75th floor right now i'm in a blue rose room you can check it out and you negotiated a killer deal on this office space i believe right uh we we did well we had some when we came here we were playing this out about four years ago we've been here about three years now and this is this is the most beautiful space i think in the world and it's uh and they they really wanted an anchor uh technology uh tenant that's that's on the way up and we came in the whole building i really came alive so this is like like people are we're we're coming in it's just really good energy so it's it's awesome and maybe we'll talk about that how we're kind of leading leading away at some of the flexible and office stuff after but yeah the things are going great i'd love to talk more about that in a second yeah so when you say fastest growing ever i mean how would you guys grow out of revenue over the past 12 months yeah um i it's it's it's i'd say i'll i'll take a step back last year was just our best year in delivering improving the value of product service so like the revenue growth comes like when you want to grow revenue wise that that comes after your product service get really good and and for us like we sell revenue so a lot of software companies sell like like time savings and efficiency we our software delivers revenue by improved experience and we uh we improved the regular offering so much of our identity technology like we got that really up to a different level we recognized nearly 50 percent of of people it's awesome uh we uh we delivered an enterprise text platform last year and that boom uh where someone used our full series we can we can increase the business by by 20 and that's like a real number it's like within a year like we can increase almost any business within 20 percent so it's uh pretty cool and generally we're doing where if someone has like a course we were in six months we're averaging 10 increase and we do that by scaling their personalization so then here yeah then you get some big growth world um yeah i think like revenue wise we'll probably run we have big scale so uh we don't like publicize our exact numbers i know you you you did some inferring but uh yeah it's gonna be about a fifty percent wherever your growth uh fifty percent growth here for us and that's uh that's on a big base and that's without like without deploying like a ton of strategic financing so we're not the company that's raising 200 million dollar rounds and like hiring a million like 300 foreign sales people and playing stuff we're earning it but almost all of like now it's like a half our customers come by word of mouth for bid for enterprise software company that's very rare it's almost half of one working people work here come also by referrals so our clients referring us and our wunderkinds our employees our wonderkids referring other people here so that's like those are the important numbers we like so we're at the 44 club we're like looking at the 5050 club and eventually like it's just all of our clients will be referred by the clients and and all of our all of our wonderkids will be referred by the one again so it's uh it's really nice and honestly like we our product service and our leadership team and our rev is we could be a public coming right now it's like i want to get a feel like to be a public company you we you of course you want predictability in revenue i want predictability on shipping value on operating velocity so um and we have good operating velocity but i want that innovation velocity i want predicted by the innovation velocity and for me i want to be shipping like three to five percent in in in revenue a quarter and uh we're we're getting close to that so it's uh it's like we we're now we have offices in new york indianapolis i have a hundred people 110 people in indianapolis now and it's awesome it's like having some geographic diversity it's not only get like different kind of people it's like it's it's really nice you get access to different talent and people the great office you people come to company you know what success is like it's just good energy it's good good blood and london's really building out i'm opening office in i'm expanding austin now i'm opening office in paris and um paris early next year um i'm going to ukraine in a few weeks and we have some people there we're going to do something nice there probably quebec city probably miami we were just on the phone the mayor miami a couple weeks ago so uh there's a new mayor in new york now and like we really want to really recruit a lot of technology comes new york and we want to be the ambassador that's like hey come come new york it's it's a cool place so it's uh it's just an energizing time it's i've this is your night for us like we've known each other for like five or six years you knew when we were like doing like 20 million revenue uh so it's uh i remember those days you hosted a great poker event a couple years ago which i met a lot of cool people out that was a ton of fun but um and you guys are growing i mean you know you probably don't like to talk about numbers but you did put out publicly and on february 26 last year saying the company broke 100 million bucks in annual revenue and that's when you rebranded the wonder kind so if you're a brand new brand yep you what up brandon up branded okay you're you're rebranding the rebrand so it's up there there are rebrands a rebrand is like when an up brand's like really take your heritage and and everything you are and where you're going and and bounce across it's fine i get it i get it it's a much better name it's a much better name and it matches your interview but but point being is early feb february last year you guys broke 100 million bucks in annual revenue if you're growing 50 year-over-year still that's a massive base i mean that puts you over 150 million bucks now in revenue is that right annualized um you you could you can you confirm that so private company but we're we're we're we're definitely uh we definitely i don't but ryan i don't want to infer so you just said you were going to go 50 years of you on a big base and you publicized the base a year ago so i only i don't want to infer here yeah so um it's uh you're you're in the ballpark so okay and what is the revenue so let's talk about the product right because you built a great product you're doing multi-channel multi-channel marketing for three core areas tell us about those areas yeah i i mean i wouldn't call multi-channel marketing we have two customers there there are one customer brands and we works on the best friends in the...