How Ycharts CEO Sean Brown grew Ycharts to $36.9M revenue and 4K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is shawn brown he's building wide charts which is a rapidly growing web-based financial data platform that helps investors make smarter decisions customers gain affordable access to comprehensive data powerful visualization visualization and advanced analytics the company is the one-stop shop for north american equity mutual fund etf and market data analysis all right shawn you ready to take us to the top i am so are you x trader or what how'd you get into this a long history in the financial services space starting from being a software developer out of school for financial services and then uh continuing on through running a few startups in the space interesting okay so walk me through who your customers are is it mainly kind of ets mutual funds or do you get into like the vc private equity kind of stuff too so think of us like a swiss army knife for investment research and that swiss army knife is perfect for wealth advisors and retail investors so me and you and those who might manage the money of very wealthy me and use and how would they how would they use y charts to do that okay so a lot of different tools uh one of the ones is in our name charts so great visualization to derive insights communicate insights great ways to screen securities down to a few that you're interested in awesome ways to quickly do deep dive research on whatever might be of interest to you and you know a lot of ways to keep your breasts on markets dashboards news etc all public publicly traded companies publicly traded mutual funds etfs and um stocks okay so just because your data set is all pulling from private uh public companies yeah we are we are a tools company we take the best data in the market uh give it a personality through some great tools and then have some amazing customer support um but we are not a data company i'm talking about like there's a lot of companies that will do this kind of thing for private especially private sas companies you're not private you're only doing public markets we're doing public markets okay correct very good all right and then help me understand when people pay for this thing on average what are they paying per month anywhere between 1200 uh per year to 4 800 per year okay between 12 and 4 800 and what are the difference in those price points uh usually the the high end price point is for those that might currently be using a bloomberg terminal probably an institutional investor it's all the bells and whistles uh available all the data every capability at the low end is more tailored towards students or retail investors and it's has what we think is the perfect features for them but it is short of what you'd get as a professional interesting okay and then um uh put this on a timeline for me when you launch it 2009 the company came into being i've actually been on board uh for two and a half years okay so what happened two years ago where you were they needed a ceo to come in sean what happened two years ago when they needed a ceo to come in um it was a stage where they they needed somebody to take the company to the next level um the founder is still a board member a good friend of mine and um helps in a in a great visionary capacity so it was more of a blending at the perfect time an inflection point for the company did you come in with a vc round like you an eir somewhere or no i didn't okay so is the company bootstrap today no the company has raised uh 14.5 million um over three rounds and the last time we took on any money was 2015. okay that means you're raising right now or you're selling which one is it neither we're uh we're cash flow positive and um you know are quickly moving to the 10 million ar threshold we just crossed about uh we finished 2018 a little bit north of 8 million in arr so we are self-funded and what'd you do last month last month will you use somewhere north of 700 k in mrr okay and what where were you exactly a year ago uh exactly a year ago we were 35 below that and i okay so that's about call it 570 something like that yep okay good so healthy growth and then how many customers are you working with today four thousand um a little bit more of half of them are professionals the rest are either retail or a smattering of other types of customers interesting okay so where's most growth coming from expanding old cohorts or adding new logos all together really good question uh it's a balance of the two uh probably 75 percent of the growth is new logos uh 25 is from expanding the footprint and we either expand the footprint by um selling them into higher tiers or we've so tickled a few people in an institution that we're able to take on larger number of seats at an institution interesting and what's i mean which turn look like obviously in his ass coming that's critical uh churn right now is about 15 annually coming down from a few years ago we were in the high 30s how have you made it to like this sticky um you know my secret to sticky is be focused um don't try to be all things to all people if you really know that user persona and you understand their workflows really well you can put great features and great services in your offering and compel them to stay with you interesting okay so 15 annual revenue turn or logo churn 15 annual mmrr churn okay revenue churn and then on that same cohort what's it what's expansion on that same base uh expansion is you know i'll have to get back down then i don't have it on top of my head i'd say we're probably doing on average uh 10 to 12 percent okay increase by so you're just below 100 net revenue retention yeah we're uh gee in january we were probably at um the equivalent of less than one percent uh net churn yeah that's not bad at all that's not bad very cool i'd like to i'd like to get uh better than that but we're on a trajectory towards that yeah how do you draw i mean you so here's a nice thing you're setting up a customer base that have plenty of budget um so it's just a question of like what products do you invent to then upsell against um the price point is actually fairly cheap i thought you were going to say something way higher like a hundred thousand dollar acv averages i mean if you were gonna build a hundred thousand dollar product for this same cohort what would you build uh the cohort we sell to wouldn't buy really it doesn't know what product the the neat opportunity we'd have though i presume you have heard of the bloomberg terminal and and factsets etc they're gonna they're gonna be charging you 20 to 25k per seat per year we think we've got 90 of the functionality for a fifth of the price um and so what would i do if if we went up market to people who had hundred thousand dollar budgets um a couple bells and whistles around fulfillment and ties into a couple of their uh erp systems but largely the same capabilities interesting okay and then how aggressive are you being in terms of fully weighted cac to get a new you know call it four thousand dollar per year account um you know we our our um our cac you know our payback period is about eight months okay that's great and our retention you know once for for our average customer um life cycle is about 58 months so the long and short is once we have engaged with the customer there's a real good chance they're going to stick around with us and a real good chance they're going to stick around a long time yep no that's great an eight month payback period is obviously healthy and then what's the flush out the team for me today how many people 46 all based where in chicago uh two-thirds in chicago uh most of the rest are in new york city and then uh just a couple home office people in a few other locations very interesting and do you have an inside sales team at this price point or is it too cheap to give a commission on the sales price point we are we are inside sales okay um we are a mix between outbound and inbound where your typical sdr capability which is uh assess the the prospects and then pass it on to an account executive who will work through a demo a free trial and then potentially a close yeah who and who are you competing with most closely besides bloomberg terminal uh you know a lot of 800 pound book gorillas at one end of the spectrum bloomberg factset s p cap iq and a few others at the low end of the range there's yahoo finance google finance and some free solutions on the market we try to bring the up market down by saying you can get almost all the capabilities on a mobile web easy gui approach for a fraction of the price the down market we're saying you get what you pay for it's it's fun and easy to use but thin capabilities um how about you spend a few dollars and increase your investment returns yep very good makes a lot of sense man let's uh wrap up your sean with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book just got done reading a book that i love called badass yeah by um a woman named kathy sierra i don't know if you're familiar with it's awesome number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um hate to be trite but i love uh reid hasting and jeff bezos in terms of disrupting a market that uh has been done one way and rethinking it i love the fact with netflix that they're they're building a culture that's pretty unique too number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company um...