How Chaser Hit $120K in Total Funding and 100 Companies on Its Free MVP in 2023 (Interview with CEO Josh Martow)

Introduction and Chaser Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Try. Chaseforme.com helps you send out to dos on Slack. They've got a 100 companies signed up so far sending to do lists again out to their audience. He's measuring retention over the past sixteen weeks coming in at 43% using some of his favorite tools like Segment and Mixpanel. The question is now, can they grow that user base from a 100 to a thousand, to 10,000 to more? Funding the company with a $100,000 pre seed round at

00:21a 7,000,000 cap last year, then did a $20,000 round this year at a slightly higher cap to buy some extra runway for full time today. Two co founders, we'll see what they do next. Hey folks, my guest today is Josh Martow. Before founding Chaser, he got an MBA from Berkeley and was employee number one at Thriver Technologies, which did a Series B, 165 employees and broke 60,000,000 in revenue. He built the and led the sales product

00:45engineering growth and digital marketing and business intelligence practices at the organization, holding three different director roles throughout his tenure that led him to identify the need for a tool like chaser at try.chaseforme.com/slack. Josh, you ready to take us to the

Josh Martow

01:00>> top? Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

01:02All right. Well, I guess first thing it sounds like you're on a rocket ship at Thriver. How many years were you there?

Josh Martow

01:08>> Five years.

Nathan Latka

01:09Okay. So your one year cliff for your vest was completed,

Josh Martow

01:13>> Yeah. And the bonus top up round that came a year later.

Nathan Latka

01:17Why? I mean, if you were killing it, which it sounds like you were, why didn't they try and keep you with an additional option grant?

Josh Martow

01:24>> The issue was that our revenue tanked 97% when COVID hit. We were a catering, a corporate catering company, kind like Uber Eats for getting food to the office. And as you can imagine, not a lot of people go into the office after COVID was hitting, certainly not eating altogether. Our slogan was gather around, but at that point, you might as well change it to stay away.

Josh's Background at Thriver Technologies

Nathan Latka

01:44That's so funny or or zoom around or something. Exactly. So so what is chaser? Maybe tell tell us what you guys do through the eyes of how a customer is using you today.

Josh Martow

01:54>> Totally. Yeah. So projects management software is widely broken right now, and that's because most teams don't care enough to adapt their workflow around it. You know, you don't wake up in the morning and say, I'm gonna go look up what I have on Asana today. And then at night, go and mark everything you did that day, and then the next morning, do it over and over again with whatever project management where your team's using. And, you

02:15>> know, there's a 172,000,000 people working in desk jobs who have to use project management software. A lot of them have to use it, but two of three are not satisfied with their tooling. And so we're trying to solve that problem. Chaser is the only project management software that only one user needs to use. And the way it works is you can delegate tasks to anybody on Chaser. Even if they're not a user, they don't need to

What Chaser Does and How It Works

Josh Martow

02:38>> know what Chaser is, frankly. Chaser will send them the task through Slack or email, and they'll be able to see, like, okay. I've been assigned this thing. I can click here to mark it complete, or I can click here to push back the deadline. And Chaser will collect progress updates from them, send reminders until it's complete, and you'll be able to, at all times, track on your Chaser dashboard where the progress where the status of this,

03:00>> task is. And you can rest easy knowing Chase is gonna follow-up with them to make sure that it happens. You don't have to, handle that burden anymore, and you never had to onboard them because, again, they don't have to be a Chaser user for this to work with them.

Nathan Latka

03:12And are you still testing the MVP, or do you have paying customers already today?

MVP Status and Free Beta Users

Josh Martow

03:16>> We have a working MVP. It's on Slack. That, that link you mentioned before, try.chaseforme.com forward / slack is where you can get the MVP 100 for free. We are we're not charging people today, but we have a whole bunch of companies. We've had a 100 companies, start using us, and a ton of them have been using us for many months now and keep coming back. And they're telling us it's, changing the way they work.

Nathan Latka

03:42Beta users can lie to you and tell you anything you wanna hear. How do you actually look at the performance metrics? How they're actually using your app, the click flow through your app? What what is the traction metric you're focused on every day?

Retention Metrics and How They Are Measured

Josh Martow

03:52>> Yeah. We use Mixpanel to track our customer behavior. Love that product. Anybody is looking for a behavior tracking tool. And the main thing we're looking at is retention. I mean, you know, not reinventing the wheel here. And what I can tell you is that for sixteen weeks of using our MVP, we still have 43% retention. And, again, this is this is an MVP. It has been bare bones. We've now actually just yesterday released a major update.

Nathan Latka

04:21Josh, how do you define though an active user? Because that's how you get to retention. Right? Does that does retained mean they sent at least one task per day or per week where they just logged in? I mean, what does that actually mean?

Josh Martow

04:30>> Sent one task per week. Yeah. No, great question.

Nathan Latka

04:33Okay. Yeah. Okay. So over the past of a 100% of the companies that signed up for the past sixteen weeks, last week, 43% of them. So about 43 of them sent at least one new task out.

Josh Martow

04:45>> Yes. Yeah. I well, it we're only the 43% is of the ones who've been with us for sixteen weeks. Not all of the 100

Nathan Latka

04:53who've Oh, I see.

Josh Martow

04:54>> Used it have been with us for sixteen weeks. So there's a little bit of caveating to that, but that's the gist of what I'm saying.

Nathan Latka

05:00Oh, 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

05:24your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what 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 get

05:48a 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 not

06:10built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder 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 going

06:36out right now and you're raising your seed round. Well, 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. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you

06:58wanna 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 the interview.

07:25How do you know that the the task being sent out is the dopamine hit that's gonna get someone excited to pay for chaser? In my head, my gut reaction, you know more than me, though, would be the dopamine is actually when the task come back is completed.

Josh Martow

07:40>> It's a really it's a really good point. We are starting to implement tracking for making sure the tasks are actually being followed through. But we're taking a bit of a shortcut and we're saying, look, if people are sending tasks and after sixteen weeks, they're still sending tasks, they're getting value from it. It's doing what they need it to do. We're gonna dive deeper into that to further make sure where the problems are happening, etcetera, because you

08:04>> bring the good point, but you're not gonna keep coming back and keep sending tasks through this if it's not actually helping you at all.

Nathan Latka

08:09Do do you know how many tasks got sent out over the past thirty days?

Josh Martow

08:14>> Off the top, it's it's a bit of a vanity metric that we don't track too much. So but it it's in the hundreds.

Nathan Latka

08:20Hundreds. Okay.

Josh Martow

08:21>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:22Do you know how many kind of came back complete? You know, a 100 or 50 or

Josh Martow

08:27>> I I I'm embarrassed to say that's just not something we have dove into too much. Yeah. We've been we've been focused on on

Nathan Latka

08:33I'm curious. You know, I use HubSpot. I send out tasks all the time to my sales team that I never hear back I still keep sending the tasks out though, even though I what I really want though is for the thing to be done. And that's like the hit. You know what I mean?

Josh Martow

08:45>> Totally. Yeah. No. That's the that's the tricky thing. And, you know, HubSpot can help, because you have those, salespeople on it, and they're all users who actively engage with it. Sounds like they might need to engage more, but, I mean, it's a tale as old as time, salespeople not, you know, using their CRM properly. Yep. But where we come in is when you don't have the salespeople, you don't have your operations people, you don't have your

09:07>> product, your engineers, etcetera, all on the same platform. Chaser comes in as it can send and delegate tasks to anybody whether or not they're engaged with any platform.

Nathan Latka

09:16Mhmm. Mhmm. And then just to be clear, you're you're not in any way affiliated with with usechaser.com. Right? No. Okay. Different different. Okay. Different company. Yeah. I just, I was curious. Just I wanna make sure folk, my eyes get messed up. So if you wanna try you, go to try.chaseforme.com/slack. Yep. How are you getting customers today?

Josh Martow

09:39>> We are getting through two avenues. We're approved on the Slack app directory. So that's actually maybe even an easier way to find us is just go on the Slack app directory and search for Chaser, rather than that kind of mouthful URL I'm giving you. And the other way is we have been implementing a just digital marketing funnel, using Meta Ads, and we're tinkering with it today. That's where a lot of our users have come from, and

10:05>> we're just figuring out the messaging that connects the best.

Nathan Latka

10:07How much did you spend over the past thirty days on meta ads?

Josh Martow

10:12>> About $2.

Nathan Latka

10:13Okay. Where do get that money from? You're just testing with your own money or you got an angel or what?

Funding: $120K Raised from VC and Angels

Josh Martow

10:17>> So we raised a $120,000 so far. Okay. A 100 from a VC and 20 from a pair of angels.

Nathan Latka

10:25When was that

10:26>> last year?

Josh Martow

10:28>> 100 was a year and a half ago, and the 20 was the last six six months ago maybe, Okay.

Nathan Latka

10:36And I guess the 100 you raised last year, you know, most folks are selling, you know, 20% in a pre seed round. Were you sort of in that same range?

Valuation Cap and SAFE Structure

Josh Martow

10:44>> No. We we did that on a 7 mil evaluation cap.

Nathan Latka

10:49Oh, okay.

Josh Martow

10:50>> So of course, it's, you know, it's a it's a safe. So it the exact equity hasn't been determined yet, but it

10:59>> percent. 11.5%.

Nathan Latka

11:01The 50 you got from business school friends this year, did you let them sit on the same terms as the angel that wrote that a $100,000 check last year?

Josh Martow

11:10>> No, the terms changed a bit because it had been a year and a half at that point. And just to clip, it was 20 ks.

Nathan Latka

11:1520 ks. So what did you have to do to, you increased the valuation cap a little bit or what?

Josh Martow

11:21>> Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

Nathan Latka

11:24that's a good way to do it. All right. If you're gonna raise money, make sure you're raising a dollar on a billion dollar cap. That's a good way to mitigate dilution, right?

Josh Martow

11:31>> Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

11:33All right. Very cool. Okay. So that's, so you're using that money to go towards testing. What about a team today? How many folks are full time?

Team Size and Co-Founder Equity Split

Josh Martow

11:42>> Four. Okay. Myself, my cofounder, who are not paid, we're roughing it out. And I just moved to San Francisco, so that is tough, to be living without salary. And then we have two, developers.

11:57>> Yeah. Okay. They're on contracts, but they're working full time hours.

Nathan Latka

12:01Yeah. Yeah. How did you it's always a tough conversation with a co founder. Right? The the big equity conversation. Right? So do you guys just say, screw it. We're going fifty fifty or do you really debate this out?

Josh Martow

12:11>> We discussed it, but we both were very happy with fifty fifty. We've worked together before. He was actually the head of engineering at Thriver Technologies while I was head of product there at the at that time. And we're actually now bringing on our head of marketing from Thriver as well who's joining, but he's joining part time. So I didn't include him enough for I was talking about before.

Nathan Latka

12:31Very cool. Very cool. So what's the next big I mean, is the plan here gonna be go get a million tasks being sent out per week and then launch a $5 a month paywall? Or are you gonna try and maybe go enterprise early and get a paywall going quick?

Growth Strategy: Product-Led vs. Enterprise

Josh Martow

12:46>> It's the former. Yeah. We're we're really focused on growth.

12:51>> We are yeah. We're confident that we can make this into a very valuable business people willing to pay for. We just don't wanna get distracted from making the product really sticky and really valuable to our users.

Nathan Latka

13:03Mhmm. Very good. That all makes sense. Did you talk to me about some of the things you learned at Thriver in terms of software products that you used? And you said, I want make sure when I launched my own software company, don't make those mistakes.

Josh Martow

13:16>> So are you talking about product development or?

Nathan Latka

13:19Any, actually any takeaways? I mean, you, you were sold a lot of SaaS products in your roles at Thriver. I'm sure there are things you liked and disliked about different vendors.

Josh Martow

13:28>> Oh, I see. Terms of which software we procured for Thrive.

Nathan Latka

13:31Just in general, you can learn about how to build a great software company because you were the buyer of software companies at Thriver. So I'm just saying based off your own experience, what did you learn about what you want to do when you build your own company versus what you want to avoid?

Josh Martow

13:44>> I mean, I certainly loved being able to use products before, having to make commitments to it. You know, that's it's not, like, the most insightful response, and that's certainly not surprising to anybody. But, you know, the the product led growth is just really appealing to me as a consumer. Of course, it's very appealing to the customer to the vendor as well because they don't have to deal with having salespeople on salary, etcetera.

14:14>> And I just I guess the big takeaway for me was I loved it as a vendor as a as a customer, sorry, because it meant I didn't have to also deal with salespeople. I could just quickly get onboarded and use the product and then see if it worked for me and then make a decision and move on. Versus there were some products where I I was, you know, working with a few different potential vendors to figure

14:35>> out which one we wanted, and I would have to do three, four, five different demos with three, four, five different salespeople just book up my week with product demos and make a decision. And that just took so much time. And if there was one that offered self serve that I was able to use and it actually worked, I think I always went with that one. So, yeah, I'm trying to be like that for sure.

Nathan Latka

14:55Talk to me about sort of distribution arbitrage in the Slack app app exchange. You know, one of the big hits that Slack gets is that there is no methodology for ranking apps in sort of a democratic way. In other words, there's no reviews sort from high review to low. It just is sort of, it feels almost random at times or who's buddy buddy, most buddy buddy with the Slack app crew. How do you optimize the chaser

15:16listing to get more installs from Slack app directory?

Josh Martow

15:20>> I hope one of your viewers can answer that question and email me the answer to it, because I am not sure. I wondered that quite a lot. I regret that there aren't reviews. I wish that there was or ratings rather. Well, both, I suppose.

15:35>> But my understanding is they watch how well how consistently people engage with your platform, what your retention is like. They're able to, you know, see retention from a different lens, but just usage and who uninstalls it, which is, you know, churn. So the better your metrics looked from them from their end, sorry, would indicate where you end up. That's as far as I can, you know, guess.

Slack App Directory Distribution

Nathan Latka

16:01Mhmm. Yeah. I guess it's just hard. Right? Because if someone wants to discover Chaser through that, like either you have to work really hard to get direct traffic to the link you gave us, With meta ads or you get free organic exposure in the app director because you have so many installs. The problem is when I click on categories and I go to productivity and then I sort by popularity, which is the default sorting, you know,

16:19it's drive, Google Calendar, Trello, blah, blah, blah, Zapier. These are hard for you to like beat as a startup. And so it's like, what's the arbitrage? Like, do you go partner with the Trello app exchange instead because there's less competition, for example?

Josh Martow

16:33>> Yeah. It's a it's a tough question to answer. We're we're trying to figure that out every day. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

16:41What's your I mean, do you have a thesis here yet or no, you're still you truly are still developing it?

Josh Martow

16:46>> I mean, our thesis today is we're trying to get as many people as we can to use it. We're trying to make it as good as possible, and we hope that through these results, we're gonna get higher on the list. Mhmm. You know, the apps that are in there, you know, you you say Trello, for example, or Drive, like, Slack app, it's that it's great. And I, you know, I I use the Drive Slack app personally.

17:11>> It's not their, like, core focus. It's not, like, Trello's actual, like, interface. It's their interface is mostly on the website, but the the app is just pinging a channel every time somebody moves something. I think we can provide way more value in that we can you can assign things

Nathan Latka

17:27Well, I don't disagree

17:28>> with that. I

17:29I don't disagree with any of that. I I agree with all of that. What I'm saying is, like, if nobody knows about you because you can't arbitrage the top 15 spots in the in the AppExchange, then it doesn't matter. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

Josh Martow

17:39>> Totally. What I think, though, is we can beat Trello in the App Store, and that's because yeah. I've used the Trello app. It it isn't sticky. It doesn't it's just pinging a channel whenever somebody, you know, put moves a a a card across the the Trello board. Mhmm. It it only it only really stayed on my, in my experience, we only really used it for a few weeks, and I realized this is just kinda bugging us,

18:03>> and then turned it off. It's not something you're engaging with all the time. With Chaser, our users engage with us every single day. And I hope that that's something Slack is able to pick up on and will realize, oh, wow. This is adding way more value, and we'll catch their eye at some point and can get featured. Maybe they can manually put us on the list. Don't really know how they make those decisions. But one way

18:25>> one way or another, I hope that we can prove to Slack that we're adding way more value than these just little extensions of other products versus us being, you know, a very, very functional product that lives fully within Slack.

Nathan Latka

18:37I mean, look. It's the unwritten language. Right? Trello promotes the Slack app inside of trello.com and drives, you know, the ecosystem exchange. And so I think it's, I don't know, I just think I've never seen a startup be able to sort of crack this list. You know, you're coming from a purely a product purity perspective. And usually that is just sort of a, it sounds really great, but in terms of operationalizing, it's really, really difficult. I'm

19:00certainly rooting for you. I hope it happens. I just haven't seen it work in the past.

Guerrilla Marketing and Meta Ads

Josh Martow

19:03>> That's fair. If we have to get our traffic off of the directory through our own means, through our own, you know, guerilla marketing, through the ads, etcetera, then we'll have to do it. Yeah. If we can get the free traffic from the Slack app directory, that's a bonus.

Nathan Latka

19:16Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just it's very expensive, right? If you have to keep paying that ads, right? To get the insights, it's very expensive. But I think if you, obviously if you can use creativity to win, you always want to do that instead of money.

Josh Martow

19:26>> A 100%.

Nathan Latka

19:27All right, Josh, this is exciting. I can't, I hope can't wait to talk to you in a year and see where you guys grow. But in the meantime, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book?

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Josh Martow

19:37>> The Shoe Dog, The Slant Number

Nathan Latka

19:40two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Josh Martow

19:45>> Is there a CEO that I'm following? I mean, I I hate to say Elon Musk, but it is him. And I wish that I spent less time following all of his antics because

19:55I know what he's doing,

19:56>> but I hate what he's doing on the side.

Nathan Latka

19:58Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a platform?

Josh Martow

20:03>> Segment. This really saved me a lot of time, not in my current job, but in previous jobs.

Nathan Latka

20:08Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Josh Martow

20:12>> Seven and a half.

Nathan Latka

20:13Okay, that's good.

20:14>> And situation, married, single kids? I

Josh Martow

20:17>> am living with my girlfriend.

Nathan Latka

20:19That's great. Okay, no kiddos. And how old are you?

Josh Martow

20:23>> 31.

Nathan Latka

20:24Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Josh Martow

20:26>> I wish that I knew how much fun tech is because when I was 20, I was still focused on medical school.

Nathan Latka

20:34Guys, there you have it. Try. Chaseformeer.com helps you send out to dos on Slack. They've got a 100 companies signed up so far sending to do lists again out to their audience. He's measuring retention over the past sixteen weeks coming in at 43% using some of his favorite tools like Segment and Mixpanel. The question is now, can they grow that user base from a 100 to a thousand, a 10,000 to more? Funding the company with a

20:56$100,000 pre seed round at a 7,000,000 cap last year, then did a $20,000 round this year at a slightly higher cap to buy some extra runway for full time today. Two co founders, we'll see what they do next. Josh, thanks for taking us to the top.

Closing Summary

Josh Martow

21:08>> Thank you so much. This was a blast.

Nathan Latka

21:10One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM 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 Thursday 1PM

21:36Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

21:58fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up

22:20for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

22:39got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.