How Teamera Spun Out of a Freelancer-Powered Agency to Launch Its Self-Serve Platform (Interview with CEO Rae Hames)

Host Intro: Teamera Origin Story

Nathan Latka

00:00She launched Work Sandy, an agency and grew to $5,500,000 of revenue, launched again in 2017, but she was a fiftyfifty partner and I wasn't always quite sure who was really driving the thing. What she was excited about was an internal tool this agency had built to manage freelancers. They hired an outsourced dev shop. They spent $809,100 grand building it. We're actually selling it internally for a bit and raising it. You know, I wanna spin this bad

00:21boy out. So she negotiated with her partner at the agency, spun it out. Tamara.com is now her company. She's running with two cofounders, and Tamara is also still on the cap table, but they're about to launch their pricing. This is effectively the tool that has enabled them at the agency to have only 18 full time employees, but still manage all their freelancers in one spot, really high margins, great profile there. She's launching now today, hoping to

Guest Introduction: Rae Hames and Teamera

Nathan Latka

00:41turn on pricing here in the next couple of months. We'll follow-up closely. Hey folks, my guest today is Rae Hames, she's an industry veteran, worked as an agency operator, brand site leader and freelancer herself. She's now building a pool called teamera.co, which helps you solve operational challenges of managing freelancers. Rae, you ready to take us to top?

Rae Hames

00:59>> Let's do it.

Market Opportunity: Rise of Freelance Talent

Nathan Latka

01:00Alright. I I am convinced that we are within five years of somebody taking company public with a billion in revenue, like, or at a billion valuation because they manage freelancers and part time talent so well. Tell me what you're seeing in the market.

Rae Hames

01:12>> Yeah, you know, I think that there's, first of all, there's a massive rise of freelance talent just across the board. My experience, as you mentioned, is squarely in the advertising space. You know, you see every creative and marketer out there taking freelance roles, leaving the agency space and being hesitant to go brand side for a lot of reasons. And the freelance life just appeals to a lot of people. And I think that we're seeing that grow

01:35>> more and more. And there's so many freelance marketplaces out there. There's so many tools out there that manage piecemeal solutions of managing freelancers, managing the experience of being freelancers. But what we are trying to solve for is the experience of building true freelance teams. So, you know, when the within the agency space, it takes a village. And as brands are bringing in more and more marketing work in house, they have to think about not only how

02:04>> do I find one good freelancer, where am I gonna find them? Is it somebody from my Rolodex that I worked with three years ago? Do I need to go digging on a freelance marketplace to find new talent? But when you're trying to build an entire team that's, you know, flexible project based, there's a lot of operational complexities around finding the talent in the first place, then certainly managing those contracts and managing that team to success.

What Teamera's Platform Actually Does

Nathan Latka

02:23Like, if I click if I click book a demo on your site and you were on a demo and you show me your UI, like, you gonna basically like, do I post a job on teamera and then you're aggregating from Fiverr and Upwork and freelancer.com and all the sites and you're showing me, you know, candidates to hire and manage in your platform? Like, what's the software actually do?

Rae Hames

02:38>> So what it is designed to do is to help brands manage their own pool of freelancers. This is really built from the insight that every single creative director I've ever worked with has their own Rolodex of freelancers that they're literally calling up on a phone every time they have a new role saying, are you available? What's your schedule like? Can I book you in? And that's a really time consuming process. And there's some brands, you know,

03:00>> that have made it maybe a little more down the line in terms of sophistication, but ultimately most people I know are still operating in freelance spreadsheets. Yeah. Who do they know? Who do they wanna bring in? And this helps brands who are bringing on, say five to even up to 50 freelancers at a time, bring the right people into the fold. And so what the actual UI looks like, is that, to answer your question, is that

03:26>> they're uploading their own talent data. We're sending invites to those folks to build their profiles, and then we're able to manage those contacts and relationships and, know, obviously keeping those profiles active is something that every talent marketplace struggles with, and I've got a lot of background on that. But ultimately helping brands keep tabs on their favorite freelancers. And then, you know, if and when there's gaps to fill, we can help fill those roles through, we've got,

03:52>> you know, a growing list of talent network partnerships that they can tap into and post a role where those folks can then see, oh, I'm really interested in that, and they'll end up on a talent list within our system. All the way down to partner recruiting efforts where we can help in find individually hard to find roles.

Nathan Latka

04:08And so, Rae, just to be

04:09clear too, you're just getting off the radar.

04:11Are you guys pre revenue or

04:12>> are you

04:12in the pre market?

Pre-Revenue Launch: Company Announced Yesterday

Rae Hames

04:13>> We're pre revenue. Yeah. We are we're we just launched yesterday. We announced our company launch yesterday. But we

Nathan Latka

04:21How long have you been working on it up till launch day yesterday?

Spinning Out of Work Sandy Agency

Rae Hames

04:24>> So, we're spinning out of a former consultancy that I had started, back in 2017. And there's, a long history here of the technology that we've built in house within that consultancy to help, to help ourselves. And then now what we're doing with teamera is that we're taking that kind of core nugget of technology that we built and building it into a true self serve tool set for brands to manage freelance teams themselves.

Nathan Latka

04:47Oh, 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

05:10your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it 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

05:35get a 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

05:57not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders 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

06:22going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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. All We're right, gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but

06:44if you wanna 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

07:10the interview.

How the Spin-Out Negotiation Worked

Nathan Latka

07:12I don't wanna skip over that part the story because one of some of the most successful SaaS companies, they do this exactly the same thing. They spin out of an agency. So tell me brass tacks how you actually did it. You know, a lot of people, they don't know what the cap tip will show, but I hope the spin out because you spent agency dollars to build the internal version. So who owns the code base? Your

07:27partners at the agency own part of the SaaS company. How do you deal with this?

Founderpath Ad Break

Rae Hames

07:30>> Yeah. And it was, you know, it was, one, coming from a point of we have we had a successful consultancy business. It's generating solid revenue. It's grown year over year.

Nathan Latka

07:41And- More than 4 or $56,000,000 revenue?

Rae Hames

07:45>> We did 5,000,000 last year in revenue, you know, it's pretty sizable and we've got a small core team running the business. So, know, felt really good about that. And like I said, we had started to build, we'd started to build some of this core technology for ourselves to help just make our jobs easier in managing freelance teams on behalf of our customers. And we looked at ourselves, you know, late last year and said, we've got two

08:07>> different business models in play here, you know, do we wanna be a SaaS company or do we wanna be a services company? And, you know, the kind of adage that guided a lot of the decisions is like, if

Nathan Latka

08:17you I have have to point this out there real quick because people listening won't know this. I just I mean, I'm on Work Sandy. That's the agency name's profile. There's 18 full time employees listed. The fact that you guys have 5,500,000 revenue with 18 full time tells me you have a well oiled freelancer machine running that are not listed as full time talent on LinkedIn. So it's very effective. I mean, imagine your margins are much higher

08:36than other agencies because you know how to use freelancers.

Rae Hames

08:39>> I mean, it's a successful model and the goal of that business is to help brands build their in house capability, their in house marketing capabilities. So it's one part strategic consulting, it's one part recruiting, and it's one part freelance team management on behalf of those customers.

Nathan Latka

08:53Mhmm. Mhmm. That's very impressive. Okay. So did you have a partner? Like, were you a 100% owner of Work Sandy?

Cap Table Structure and Co-Founders

Rae Hames

08:59>> No. So I had a co founder at Work Sandy. We had started the business together in 2017. And as I was saying, we got to the end of last year and looked at ourselves and said, we've got two different business models in play. We've got a successful business here, but we know that there's an opportunity to grow the SaaS side of the business. And I've always been really interested in scalable technology. Like, you know, I've been

09:19>> in the Bay Area for thirteen years. You don't spend that much time there without And, trying something

09:26>> you know, we made the decision that I was going to take the tech side and spin that out. And he The trade off is that for the IP, Sandy and my co founder have a little bit of equity on the cap table with teamera. Oh, see. And, you know, and in exchange, I left the cap table of Sandy, with a little bit of an exit clause that if that business ever gets acquired or sold, then I

09:46>> get to see a little piece of that pie.

Nathan Latka

09:48But I see. So you gave it the index basically, your concentration of equity on the spin out. Got a little equity in the agency because of that, and they still but you both each still have a little upside in each other's venture, the studio and the agent and the SaaS tool.

Rae Hames

10:01>> Yeah, exactly. It felt really across the board fair, felt like it acknowledges who's running the day to day business of each of those companies. You know?

Nathan Latka

10:09You own the majority

10:10of teamera today. You own more than 60%.

Rae as CEO and Largest Shareholder

Rae Hames

10:13>> No, don't. I have two other co founders, two other primary co founders with teamera. Okay. Both of which came over from Work Sandy. And I'm I'm the CEO, primary shareholder. And then, like I said, I've got two other co founders who have a significant chunk on the cap table. Then we've got

Nathan Latka

10:29You're the largest individual shareholder on Tamara's cap table today?

Rae Hames

10:33>> Correct.

Nathan Latka

10:34Correct. So it's very clear who's leading it. Now, was that part of the negotiation? Like, I imagine you took the most talented people from the agency and I imagine your partners at the agency said, wait, don't take these other two people. Like, we need them. I mean, was that part of the negotiation?

Rae Hames

10:46>> You know, it was really about who on our team had been focused on the tech side. I think that as as Sandy evolved over a handful of years, like, it was really clear that there was folks who were running the consulting side of the work, working with clients hands on, really guiding client priorities, which is really important. And then a team of us that was really more behind the scenes, building tools to help that team. So

11:08>> it actually felt like a pretty clean and logical division of the team at that point. But I do know, personally speaking, this is kind of like a bit that may, the other early founders may find helpful is like, I was a fiftyfifty owner in Sandy and sometimes that created confusion, honestly, about like who's doing what and who's the most vested, who has the most vested interest here. And I

11:31think

11:31>> that for me going into teamera, I needed to know.

Nathan Latka

11:37You can be. The day,

Rae Hames

11:38>> At the end mean, at the end of the day, it's my fault if we screw up, you know? And that responsibility is on my shoulders.

Agency Funding the MVP: Just Under $1M

Nathan Latka

11:46Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, was there any cash transaction here? Did the agency put 200 ks to twoera to get it going?

Rae Hames

11:53>> No. So the agency had spent, you know, along the way, we had had a part time development team building building our toolset that the agency was using, like I said, behind the scenes. But we ultimately looked at that as part of the IP transfer deal.

Nathan Latka

12:08How much was it though? We're talking like $10, a $100, a million from the, you know, build

Rae Hames

12:12>> a lot. Yeah. I mean, like, just shy of a million, just shy of a million.

Nathan Latka

12:15Oh, okay. Okay.

12:16>> Yeah.

12:16Okay. So you could argue the agency sort of funded the MVP of which that's why the agency is now has a little chunk of equity on Tamara's cap table.

Rae Hames

12:26>> Yeah. And to be and to be fair, you know, we were making some revenue from that technology within the agency. So, you know, we considered ourselves text enabled services. We're charging a subscription fee to our customers, you know, and so it wasn't all a sunk cost.

Nathan Latka

12:41Yep. Yep. Okay. This makes tons of sense. This is great. So how long did that whole negotiation take, by the way? Was that easy and clean or took months and months and months?

Three-Month Negotiation Timeline

Rae Hames

12:49>> You know, it's been about three months. It's June now. So it's been about three months end to end kind of from making the decision that we were going to fully spin out to negotiating the terms and getting it done. So yeah, awesome.

Nathan Latka

13:06That's awesome. All right, what's the plan to start driving customers? I see when I click book a demo on your site, you say first cohort opens July 1.

Go-to-Market Plan: Lead Magnets and First Cohort

Rae Hames

13:11>> Yes, yes. Well, there's two, there's a couple of things that are happening. Obviously, we just didn't announce our launch yesterday, so this is really where like rubber meets the road.

13:21>> Truly, and this is about kind of fundamental bootstraps, like I think it's really up to us to find our first handful of customers, because the type of customers that we were servicing in our past agency were enterprise scale customers, they needed a consultancy to help, you know, drive some amount of strategy of their in housing path. And with this new venture, we're looking at customers who are willing and able to kind of self serve their way

13:43>> into building an in house team. And so I think that that's gonna look like the smaller end of midsize brands. Yeah. So, it's just a new, there's just some new focus on finding our new customer base, right, and understanding truly what they need and what they react to. But the first two pieces that we'll be launching over the course of the next few weeks are our guide to in housing. So, you know, it's a couple of

14:04>> lead magnets, right? Is functionally what we're talking about, where we're launching a guide to in housing that will help brands understand the path of identifying which roles to bring in house from traditional agencies, where it makes sense to hire flexible support versus full time support, and some operational knowledge and know how that we've built along the way, doing this for several brands in our past lives, all with the intention of helping people understand like there's a

14:28>> lot of value in the technology that we've created to help check those boxes faster. And beyond that, we're also building out, it's a little bit more sophisticated, but it's a in housing calculator. So, if you think about the average ad agency markup, like a healthy ad agency is running the three X markup, which like hardly anybody's getting away with these days, but any agency that's still in business is running at least a 50% markup on hours.

14:51>> And so, if you think about that, even if you've got a team of 10 people over the course of the year, that's a significant chunk of change that companies could be saving and reinvesting in more strategic ways. And so that's what we can help them. We can help them identify that cost and we can help them justify what kind of cost savings we're gonna be able to provide for them with these self serve tools.

Nathan Latka

15:12Yep. Yep. That all makes loads of sense. Well, I'm excited to watch, how it does over the next couple months. I'll be watching closely. Hope to have you back on in a year and get an update. In

Rae Hames

15:20meantime Yeah.

15:20>> I would love that.

Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

15:21Time. So let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Rae Hames

15:24>> I read a lot. And so I don't know if I have a favorite. I just finished Stolen Focus, which is which is a fascinating read. So I would put that just on my most my most recent read list.

Nathan Latka

15:37Number two, is there a CEO or a founder you're studying?

Rae Hames

15:41>> Again, like I look up to a lot of different role models. I think Melanie Perkins at Canva is an amazing female founder, like really love following her story. I also use Canva religiously, which might answer your next question.

Nathan Latka

15:54Yes, so is it Canva? Paper tool?

Rae Hames

15:56>> I love Canva, yeah. I'm a really visual communicator and so I found it really easy to use and really helpful in communicating to our team about, you know, everything from marketing to product.

Nathan Latka

16:06That's great. And how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Rae Hames

16:09>> I'm a big sleeper, eight, a solid eight.

Nathan Latka

16:12I love that. Alright. And situation, married, single, kids?

Rae Hames

16:15>> I'm married, married, no kids, small dog.

Nathan Latka

16:18Small dog. Fair enough. And can I ask how old you are, Rae?

Rae Hames

16:21>> I'm 36.

Nathan Latka

16:22Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Rae Hames

16:25>> 20 feels like so, such a baby. I would just say chill out, you know, like I've always been a real type A driver and I think that I, yeah, I could probably have enjoyed my twenties a little bit more than I actually did. So looking back, I would say have a little bit more fun, chill out and loosen up.

Nathan Latka

16:44Folks, you met Rae today. She launched Work Sandy, an agency and grew to $5,500,000 of revenue, launched again in 2017, but she was a fifty fifty partner. I wasn't always quite sure who was really driving the thing. What she was excited about was an internal tool this agency had built to manage freelancers. They hired an outsourced dev shop. They spent $809,100 grand building it. We're actually selling it internally for a bit and raised it. You know,

17:06I wanna spin this bad boy out. So she negotiated with her partner at the agency, spun it out. Tamara.com is now her company. She's running with two cofounders, and Tamara is also still on the cap table, but they're about to launch pricing. Their And this is effectively the tool that has enabled them at the agency to have only 18 full time employees, but still manage all their freelancers in one spot, really high margins, great profile there.

17:25She's launching now today, hoping to turn on pricing here in the next couple of months. We'll follow-up closely. Rae, thanks for taking us to the top.

Closing Recap and Outro

Rae Hames

17:31>> Thanks so much for having me. Take care.

Nathan Latka

17:33One 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 one

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