How to Survive Cash Death and Grow 600% in 2yrs

please welcome to the stage Jill alouche

hello hello good morning my name is Gil I'm the founder and CEO of metadata it's been a while since I've been a stage in the next 20 minutes I'm going to tell you a few a few cool things the first one is how I almost died how metulator really almost crashed about 45 days from death and then how we got to where we are today so three parts of this story but I'm going to focus on the first two first these

are kind of the meat of the story the first one is how we hit product Market fit and had 45 days left then how we got over that near that experience invested a lot in growth how it actually worked out and get got us to where we are today but got us to where we are today without forgetting that that PTSD throughout this presentation I'm going to walk through chronologically where we

are so it starts in in the beginning of 2020. we just hit product Market fit it looks good it looks good you know it's two million dollar in ARR for me that was a dream we only launched in the middle in the middle of 2019. so in about a year we got to 2 million error that was amazing we were super happy what you don't see is that our cash was running out

how many of you were in this situation when you have a couple months three months of cash left raise your hand awesome I mean a good company I couldn't [ __ ] sleep at night every night I went to sleep sweating I have still we have a lot more money in the bank now I still get daily cash balances because I still need to know that we have plenty of cash in the bank still I swear to God so during that time I was losing sleep

and I thought my baby that I worked on for about three and a half years back then is going to crash and die

so we we made a few very drastic very drastic moves uh and I'll talk to you about what else was happening throughout that time because we got some offers some VC offers some M A offers from sharks who saw us bleeding but this is what we did to get out of it so if you're in this position where you're 45 60 days away from from cash from cash death I recommend that you take a big breath

and realize that you still have control over your business because cash is something that you can get if you can make defensive moves and offensive moves you can totally get out of it I I totally had to convince myself it's possible and after about a month month and a half of actions we got out of it so a few things that I did or we did to get out of it first one I went back to the board and said hey the goal I came up with in the beginning of the year forget about it it's not going to happen and I negotiated about two-thirds of

that goal and they agreed the second one was a painful one that each and every one of you probably went through which is layoffs we we reduced our Workforce by about a third and of course some of those were low performance Etc but many of them were amazing people that we really had to lay off because we just couldn't pay for it and a few cool things happened I actually had one employee who emailed me I think he slacked me and told me I really want to stay here he's an amazing company I'm I'm staying here for free

and it worked for free for about six months until we got back on track and then we paid him a lot of money and now he's a director somewhere uh amazing amazing person this kind of [ __ ] happens when you're in adversity and everyone's kind of tight together another thing is that all of us took a 20 cut everyone of course including myself every VP every employee in the company took a 20 cut we paid all of those people back that that six months cut compounded plus Equity additional

bonus Equity after we got back back on track but but in that time when we really needed cash it was there we also did something cool that I couldn't believe was happening which is all the AES who are very cash you know kind of cash operated they converted 50 to 100 of their commissions into options into common options that got them a lot more invested in the business and got us about a million dollar cash back into

business we also did something that you might find some sketchy but truly that's the only way for us to survive we stopped paying anything that is not essential for example what is essential 800 per month rent because we had to work from somewhere Cloud we had to pay uh digital ocean something American Express not essential got a phone call every day sir are you gonna pay your debt no I'm not going to date dollar of my debt my

credit score went down to 500 that's okay I still have a business I also took every possible loan on Earth everyone I didn't have founder path back then unfortunately but each every possible loan you can you can imagine government loan government loan number two credit card Amex Wells Fargo accounts receivable revolving credit every possible debt you can take I took so that we have a month two months more payroll now during that time I want to say one

thing I got a term sheet a four million dollar term sheet from a green entrepreneur a shark who saw that we're struggling that term certified took it my company wouldn't be around anymore that that would convert all of the preferred to Common it wouldn't make B like I would still be in a good place he kept my my equities so and so forth but that would mean that all of my early investors who go to trash um and I didn't take it I didn't take it because there is one big concept that I want to if there is one thing I want you

to remember from this from this talk we'll talk about it in a second we also did a small hack when we opened up a convertible note to the existing investors and friends we opened a C note we said a million dollar because we need about eight to to 12 months of Runway and we started bringing people in we had some customers investing I'll never forget when I had one of my feed investors in the worst time of the company I mean this is not a good time for the company he invested 50k from his own family trust that took me from

depression to very power like it was a small move that someone did they just got all the confidence in me and and I'll never forget that those are the kind of moments that we could see who are your friends now there are some offensive movie talk you can't just be you know if you're defensing all the time you can't really win so we made all those defensive moves so that we buy ourselves time but what are we going to do with that time so we hired a team that were all former customers and all already sold metadata

in their company as a partner so they all knew the pitch they all believed in the product they all worked together before amazing we also spiffed we gave an additional incentive for salespeople to get upfront payment you get the cash ahead of time by the runway customer gets a discount and the AE gets additional money this is essentially similar to doing accounts receivable debt but instead of giving the debtor that money you get it

I also picked up the phone and called every customer in the book we didn't have that many back then I think it was like 35 customers but I called every customer and asked them how we can help this was like recession time you know a little [ __ ] show asked them if I can help them with Services free data anything they needed and guess what I learned that the piece of our product not the entire thing but the piece of our product was recession-proof that was a piece of product called metamash that we actually launched separately and we only learned that because we realized the customers were telling us I will

still pay for this piece because I need it for today's dates and then I had a very interesting conversation with my marketing person which I'll talk about in a second where I cut this budget by two-thirds and I told him actually no hires and you still have to make to meet the the same goals and he figured out what I'm gonna do I told him whatever you're gonna do don't do what you were planning on doing before you have to completely experiment differently figure out what to do not the same thing

if there is one concept that I think everyone should remember this is something that I go with every day and I try to talk about all the time and I hear my employees talk about it in in company talks is to never make decisions out of fear when you're scared shitless take a breather if you're still scared and go for a walk go for a run do some push-ups do some psychedelics smoke a joint I don't care what you do but definitely do not make a decision from that mindset because it's always going to be a bad

decision so never make a decision out of fear ever this is something this is our Mantra it's metadata it's something I really strongly believe in now this is the conversation I had with Jason Jason is a former customer he joined metadata I was like oh my God this [ __ ] amazing product I want to join I was like awesome we're just about to raise round a none of that [ __ ] happened he joined in I told him you have I think it was like 40K budget a month you have two hires then I told them actually none of that is true I'm

sorry and he was just like what the [ __ ] I'm gonna he came from uh he had a 50 people theme before he joined so he was not accustomed to this kind of conversation but guess what I did with it this is how it looked like so 35 demos is the best I could do as a marketer as you can see I'm not the best marketer but he he was able to take that curveball and exceed the goal with a third of the budget these are true these are true numbers he was able to experiment over and over and over and over until he found an Arbitrage

opportunity an Arbitrage experiment it's called conversational ads which I'm going to show you in a second the next slide and that got us bottom of the funnel demo request not leads not interest not lead syndication this is our ad telling people you want to buy our product bring the person our ideal customer profile on the line and in return we'll give you a gift card very simple worked like magic still works like magic last

month 600 demos from this campaign this is how it looks like it's not complicated you can set it up in half an hour I would love for you to set it up with metadata but I have a feeling that none of you wants to spend three thousand dollars a month on metadata so you can just do it in the channel in LinkedIn not complicated this will get you leads if you want this hack we have a full blog post the full Playbook to do it in the channel just shoot me an email after this and I'll send you the link

another nice hack International employees I see a lot of international people here you could hear I don't have a Boston accent or an Austin accent this is from Israel and so I can tell you International employees are a [ __ ] hack they're amazing why because they're very hungry you give them an opportunity that doesn't exist in their local environment you heard about this guy who makes five thousand dollars it's like a king that's our people I have this This Woman This badass woman in my company she reached out to me when she went to apply to a customer success boss a

customer she's a boss customer success manager she is a from Venezuela moved on her own to Mexico City she told me hey I want to work for a company she made 30 grand the first first year she's making 120 a year and a half later these are the kind of people now she's she closed about a minute and a half of Revenue I should also mention so million percent worth it to bring in international employees some good things some good bad things good things Hustlers and owners you're going to get people who are going to be very hungry

going to work really really really hard better economics you don't you know it's contractors so none of the benefits and and complications they also have a culture Clash which is good and bad they wake up the rest of the company if you only have North America employees in your culture it is half the story it's amazing but it's only half the story The World Is Bigger so if you bring those people from other countries they bring in the hustle and

culture and hunger that doesn't exist in a place of comfort so highly recommend bringing those people absolutely worth it and you have to figure out the the time zones and that's something you can do that's one of the cons you have to figure out our company is 100 120 people 60 people are international we're full remote and it works the next hack is people who worked together before this is kind of the opposite of the last one this is instead of bringing diverse from everywhere you actually bring the

same group that already worked together before proven itself so we brought five AES undo each other they already know how to work with one another they ramped each other up they were super knowledgeable and all of them crushed the numbers they their ramp up time was insane I think in about a month and a half we were able to get all of them ramped up

so this is where we almost died but as you can see in June we were at about 100 Grand and we made it we didn't die I remember at some point I think there was like 17 000 in the bank account again my heart was pounding but we got over it and we we went up from there this is the exact scenario of where we were so two things happened we made the first round of cuts and all those drastic measures I talked to you about we those with those measures and with Revenue going up thanks to Jason the

demos and the AES we were able to raise seriously a minute after that cute TechCrunch announcement of series a I went back to the team and said hey guess what another round of cuts a lot of curses but you know what people trust the leadership and so we did another round of efficiencies and after that we went back to our series investors to tell them about the cuts and they said [ __ ] that's amazing here is three million dollar more because you guys are so efficient so we raised another three million uh in

in by the way twice evaluation and that got us on a smooth sailing I would call it a path to profitability we actually were masters of Our Own Destiny and that's something I will not give up at this point I don't want to go back to 17 000 in my bank account and so that was kind of the path we were on we were closing Revenue we had at any point of time based on our cash projections more than two million in the bank account having that money I don't

know about you for me gives me peace of mind I can go and speak to an investor like a normal person I'm not going there like frazzled like please give me some money I'm about to die no it's like hey how's it going company's doing great I don't need your money and then you can actually have a proper conversation with an investor so this is where we were you know demos crushing it legitimately these are the numbers this is like 550 per per quarter again last month we generate five to six

hundred demo requests inbound Dem requests from our ideal customer profile from our named accounts this is from some of those hacks I was mentioning before so we're here now so we're at the five million dollar we ended the Year we're doing good we have plenty of money in the bank and now we're like okay now what okay we definitely have the muscle of of survival what are we going to do with this so we moved to a different stage call it rival back in that day I I was

reading this this book by uh tahi from Storm Ventures from survival to thrival and this is the definition I really wanted to be there because I was in the survival mode PTs did every day this is instead a better State this is when you want to invest in growth you have to forget about the previous stage that you were in don't forget the muscle but forget about the previous stage for a second don't worry all the time about being defensive and go into offensive mode so this is what we did

first of all where where did we end up we ended that year at almost 12 million trying to be accurate almost 12 million in AR so two and a half roughly two and a half X growth how did we do it one we actually invested heavily in sales and marketing I went back to Jason all of your budget back all of your hires back AES let's hire more we did a lot of growth a lot of investment into the future two we actually went back to the

team every time we did great in April in July and I think in September we went and increased the goal three times so the goal initially was nine the end goal was 12.2 we did like 97 of that goal like we were able to to achieve almost all of the third bigger goal which was beautiful always pushing yourself a little bit further especially when you're growing I remember hearing from Outreach CEO many Medina that in the middle of the year they doubled they are our goal I learned from that applied it it worked it doesn't always work FYI

this this year didn't work but but that year it did work one thing that it it affected is myself I became a much humbler more transparent CEO every time we have all hands meeting since 2020 I show my company how much money we have how much runway we have uh the growth The Good Bad and the Ugly they know everything they're with me so they know everything and they always I always get a phone

call about how transparent we are and how it helps people really understand where they stand all those beautiful metrics about our growth so you know we grew our ASP grew uh you know the velocity grew and this is where we found ourselves about a year ago this is where we were this is pre-series B we had almost 9 million in the bank we were only burning 200k so you can see we have years and years of

Runway we got our fourth patent and this is where we had I had the best conversation with VC I used to hate pitching to visit not anymore when you're in a good place conversational devices are awesome so we had money in the bank suddenly we're getting term sheets and this is the kind of conversation we can say look I don't need the money because we're on the patch of profitability we may not grow 3x we may grow one and a half X but nevertheless we don't need the money and we don't need the money banks give you a lot of money and also VCS

so this was a good part uh technology was differentiated we were growing big time and not everything is good to this date so this date not everything is good we're not yet everything checked if we were probably would be in different place we're still fixing retention and we're still freaking trying to fix the the category creation but this was a state in which we're able to raise a 40 million dollar series b in a very healthy way I was able to turn down many term sheets because I had a confidence that my company is doing well

regardless of that race and as a small gift to the attendees of this uh of this session if you just put f500 you click on that link you get the exact deck that we used for rating our series B that's it with that I finished my session [Music]