The $100M SaaS Playbook: 9 Case Studies on Traffic, Leads and Sales

How did a 25 year old build this software profit and loss statement? Why is this SaaS company launching a price for with this profit and loss? And how did this company use AI back in 2019 to add $7,000,000 of revenue? You're gonna learn it all in the next sixty minutes here on YouTube. Over a 100 founders joined us live when we recorded this a couple days ago on Tuesday, September 17. Now, you're watching this today and

you want the full slide deck, all you've gotta do is leave a comment below and click the like button. If we get a 100 comments and over a thousand likes before midnight on Thursday, we'll release all 93 slides via a Google Slides link in the description below. But for now, let's jump into the content. We have a great program today. If you're not curious now, I don't know what to do. I have just like dropped all

the curiosity bombs. I don't know what the hell else to do. If you're not in, you're out. Right? You you can leave, free up a spot for somebody else. But guys, we have 90 slides to get through today. Here's all the data in one shot. That is what it looks like. Right? That is what it looks like. So this is where we're breaking down today. The $100,000,000 playbook. Folks, it's all about three things. Traffic, leads, and

sales. Traffic, leads, and sales. How do you get a million website hits? How do we get a thousand leads? How do we add $10,000,000 in new revenue? And if you guys know my style, you know I'm just curating. I'm just bringing these tactics together. I'm bringing them together. Now over 3,000 podcast interviews, right, that I've recorded one on one since 2015, I see the same 33 growth tactics popping up every time. Here they are. This is

it. I am of the opinion that there are only 33 ways to grow your SaaS company, and here they are. Now the trick is not just knowing what they are. Right? It's not just knowing what they are. It's also understanding the order of operations. Right? What should come first? What should come second? What should come third? So here's how we're going to frame these. Fast growth tactics on the left, slower growth tactics on the right, low

cost ones up top, expensive ones on the bottom. You with me? This is the framework. Let's plot them. Here they are. Right? The different colors represent a role on your team. A role on your team. Purple is probably your BD person. Orange is your content person. Green... Right. Yellow is your paid media. Green's your outbound. And the question we all should be asking ourselves is how do you move through this graph? Because you can't do everything

at once. How many of you were at SAS Open? Raise your hand. Who was at SAS Open? Adam was. Look at that. A lot of guys came to the live event last week, two weeks ago. You can't possibly implement all those tactics immediately. You've got to pick and choose the order. Here's how the order works. Follow me. If you're just launching, you want fast and cheap. Right? You need immediate results and you have no money to

spend. Fast and cheap upper left. Once you grow past a million ARR, you've earned the right to test in the upper right tactics, one to 3,000,000. Right? These are still cheap things to test, but they take a longer time to pan out, a longer time to return. No one should be testing things below the line, right, unless you're over $3,000,000 of revenue because they're expensive and slower and cash is king as a startup. So once you

break 3,000,000, you can test bottom left. Once you break five, you can test bottom right. This is our framework today. Right? This is our framework today. Here are the nine case studies I promised you. Three for traffic, three for leads, three for sales. I want you guys to scan these three buckets real quick. We're gonna spend five minutes on each of these through the webinar. Five minutes on each. It's gonna be very fast. And out of

curiosity, I want you guys to type traffic, leads, or sales in the chat. Which one are you most interested in learning? And while you do that, some quick chat etiquette. Moving forward moving forward, no promotions. Don't post your own links to your own website. If I give you a prompt, feel free to engage, but no self promotion will boot you here in studio. Alright. I'm seeing a lot of traffic, a lot of sales, a lot of...

I'm seeing everything. Traffic sales leads. Traffic sales leads. Let's jump in. Before we get started with traffic, my question to you is how many of you guys... I always like to know this. I always like to know. I wanna meet my new people. I wanna meet my new people. Right? How many of you guys... Is this your first webinar? Right? Or have you joined a training before? While we do that, Adam, Flexer, unmute yourself really quick.

Seen a lot of our content. You spoke at SaaS Open. Mhmm. Why'd you speak at SaaS Open? And how would you describe the way we present information?

Oh, it's great to be there because it's, you know, you get real time feedback, really short, really fast, twenty minute presentations, very data driven, lots of graphic artifacts, not a lot of just boring bullets and, you know, hand waving. So it's really good to get real insights, and you see evidence behind it all. And at twenty minutes, it just pops. There's none of those conferences where you're, like, snoozing, snoozing. It's too fast. So high energy time. And I'm a high energy guy.

So Let's go. And, guys, Adam Adam, can share what you bootstrap to? Are you comfortable?

Sure. About, what are we, $1,212,500,000 ARR?

Guys, give it up for this. Get 12,000,000 bootstrap. Are you kidding me? Let's go. Let's go, Adam. We're thrilled you're here. And apologies for my in house studio team. The... I couldn't hear you because I had muted my computer. Duh. It's kinda like you gotta plug in the hair dryer before it works. Alright. Now I can hear you, Adam. Alright. I'm gonna end the poll and I'm gonna share the results with you so you guys can

see. This is kinda cool. 48% of you are new. Right? And 52% of you are coming back again, which is great. So let's jump in. Let's jump in. Section one, all about traffic. Alright? All about traffic. I wanna first focus on Ritus Loris Omnisend. Here's his revenue graph.

Now guys, we're moving quick. If you minimize or turn away, you're going to miss something. Here's his revenue graph. Let's go to the next slide. How did he do it? This. He did this in 2019. He put a worksheet together and said, as a bootstrapper, I can't afford to drown myself in Google Ads. We don't have the budget. How do we win, right, with creativity and genius and no money? And he started taking SEO seriously in

2019. This is the worksheet he runs that you should screenshot right now and copy or send to your SEO team. Drop it in your marketing channel on Slack. Screenshot it. It's a one page worksheet you should replicate. Before they put out content, they say, who already ranks for the content? What's the keyword we wanna go win? And guys, here is what is important. If we win that board game, what's the upside? And it's right here where

my mouse is. That's the traffic he's competing for. You might be shocked at how small it is. Right? How can you compete for such a small amount of traffic? Well, when you start layering these things over and over, it starts to add up very quickly. So he took SEO seriously starting in 2019 and look at the growth. This is a screenshot of his back end traffic. Zero traffic back in 2017, 2018. SEO is a long term

game, but look at it compound over time. Right? Now 300, 200, 300 organic views per month, right, to the website. And 3,000,000 of ARR grew to 50,000,000 of ARR. $5.00 of ARR. Guys, out of curiosity, just raise your hand if you're already investing in SEO. Out of curiosity, raise your mind because I can see you. I can see you. I can see you. Okay. Sort of a mix. Sort of a mix. I'm gonna give you permission

to spam the chat here for a second because we like learning together. It cannot be your own tool, but your favorite SEO tool. Drop a link in the chat right now. Celebrate somebody else. Your favorite SEO tool. Drop in the chat. Celebrate somebody else. That's what we're about. Celebrate somebody else. Alright. There you guys go. Bunch of great tools to check out. Let's move forward. The future of search is artificial intelligence and chat GPT. And what

I mean by that is if you're looking to buy an email marketing tool, you're gonna open up Gemini on Google or you're on your phone or whatever on Google search. You're gonna say, what's the best email marketing tool? And you guys see here I'm gonna get you one call for here. That's gonna pop open, and it's gonna say, well, HubSpot and Bravo. Right? HubSpot and Bravo. And here are some other ones, Omnisend, GetResponse, etcetera. Now you might be wondering, how do you get up here? Right? How do you get up here?

Kevin, help us out in the chat. Some folks are wanting to get the slide deck and grab it, but they need that Luma link, right, to go grab it. They have to purchase it on Luma, and then we'll DM them direct the full slide deck. But how do get in this AI chat GPT up here? Well, first off, you've got to do the SEO playbook. Right? Has already done an Omnisend. You get the backlinks. After the backlinks, you go to content machine. You follow the worksheet. You start ranking for these keywords. Right? And this, again, I'm not going to say anything on this slide, but this is the future.

If you agree with this, that this is the future of search and search traffic, right, shake your head yes. I'm all in on this. I mean, I am all freaking in. I'm all in. This is it. If you're not doing this, you won't have a SaaS company in three years. You just won't. Or at least you're not gonna be getting any traffic from Google. Alright. So that's the importance of investing in SEO. I'm not gonna explain

this slide, just screenshot it. This is Omnisend's team today. I got him to share his actual org chart. Notice the SEO team reports up to the VP of growth, and the content team also reports up to the VP of growth. Those were the first two pillars. All the other light green pods came after that. And follow the order of the bullet you see here on the left. It starts off with in house SEO and backlinks. Then

it's copywriters and more content. And only after backlinks and content do you then start putting together a cadence for new content and, well, most of us forget, updating old historical content that already does well. Right? That's the three tier playbook here for bootstrapping your way that big. That was section one out of nine. That's the style. All data, all worksheets, all the time. Let's jump into story number two. Who's heard of Oodo? Oodo. Just hands up.

Have you heard of Oodo? O d o o. Kind of a funny name. Who's heard of them? Not as many hands going up as I would have thought. Guys, look at their revenue growth. Here it is.

That's the revenue growth.

Fabian launched this company when he was 25 years old. 25 years old. Right? I'm gonna zoom in a little bit here, and I'm gonna take you through the journey right across the bottom. How did he get started? Guys, here was his first website, 2009. Look at this.

Does that look anything like SaaS to you? What does that look like? Now, Elise, Simani, did I say that right? You're smiling. What does that look like to you? Unmute yourself. Are you looking or you're laughing at your cat or something? It's cool. Now she's like, what's going on?

No. No. I'm laughing at the... I don't know what it looks like, honestly. It looks like an x p window for me.

It doesn't look

like that at all.

Yeah. It looks like a website you tried to load that, like, didn't load properly. Right? That's what it sort of looks like. What he had and what he did in 2009, he said, I want to make everything free. Any business application, I wanna make it free. So he launched Open ERP, enterprise relationship management. Open, like open source for free. This was the first website. Now he grew in 2012. This is a screenshot of his GitHub account.

Open source is just like how Us marketers build a Slack community. It's what engineers do. Right? They build an open source community. Same thing just on on the tech side. Look at Fabian down here. He's committed 5,966 times. And the peak number of engineers committing was back in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen when it peaked at 400 or 500 commits per day. Now guys, true or false? Everyone writing code for UDO was a full time employee of

UDO. True or false in the chat? True or false in the chat? All the engineers writing code for UDO was a paid employee for UDO. Man, okay. See, you guys are freaking smart. I got nobody. I got nobody on that. It's exactly right. Open source. Right? The idea is everyone's contributing code. But here's the big problem. How do you launch a paywall on that without pissing off the community? That's the magic. That's the hard move if

you're going to start with open source. So how did he do it? Well, again, look at where he is guys. He's stuck at sub 5,000,000 of revenue for almost ten years, two thousand six to 2016. He launched the SaaS layer in 2015 with these applications. This was the website in 2015. I was watching this closely and I said, I've gotta get Fabian on my podcast. I had him on in 2019 and this is what he looked like then.

We are in MRR. We are $2,600,000 per month or 65% per year.

And so how many customers do you have today?

11,000. Okay. 11,000.

11,000,000 would be a lot.

We

we actually have four millions of users because we do have a lot of free users because of the open source nature of do.

So that's what I want to call out to you guys. This is a tactic to get going launching with community. In this case, it was a dev community. Right? They had 4,000,000 users and only converted 11,000 to paid. What's the conversion rate? Who can do the math? 4,000,000 users, 11,000 paid. It's point 28%. Is that a good or bad free to paid conversion rate? Point 28%. Good or bad? Come on. You guys know this. Good or

bad? Free to paid. Guys, it's terrible. It's terrible. It's terrible. A good a good PLG motion free to paid motion, you should be somewhere in the four to 6% range. Right? You wanna be in the four to 6% range. But Fabian's not a marketer. He's an engineer. So give him a little bit of credit. Okay? You can convert point 25% of 11,000,000 and still build a great business and that's what he've done. Now he came on

the podcast back at 2,600,000 of ARR. He's now 20 times the size of that. I want to do a little self promotion and just say, if you listen to my podcast, you literally have an unfair advantage because you're seeing these stars before they're stars, and you're learning for them. And I don't let them off the hook on the podcast without sharing all their data. Right? You literally have an unfair advantage. Make sure you listen to the

podcast. Just search Latka podcast on iTunes. That was Fabian 2019. Let's fast forward. This is a quiz for you guys. Top row and bottom row. One of them is Udoo's numbers. One of them is Shopify's numbers. I want you to type top or bottom in the chat. Which one is Udoo's numbers? Top or bottom?

Top or bottom? Which one's Udoo's numbers?

You'll notice a couple things. The bottom has more online websites, a million. But on almost every other metric, the top row is winning. Are live online websites a leading or lagging indicator? Right? If you use a software tool, you get engaged and you eventually launch your website, it's a lagging indicator. Right? That's the success metric. Udoo is the top row folks. They are dominating Shopify in terms of leading indicators. 12 times the user base, Six

times integrated applications. 10 times the number of partners. Who's going to have more revenue ten years from now? My bet is UDO. You heard it here first. My bet is UDO. Right? Because we're looking at leading indicators. They built a free version of Shopify. Here's their pricing page for shop Vimber Shopify. There it is. Look at what the left side says. Look at what the right side says.

Right? This is the definition, right, of free and undercutting your competitors. Now, why isn't he been able to undercut his competitors, right, and and offer a Shopify competitor for free? Well guys, look at his p and l. Here it is. I want you to look under the gross margin line. Can anyone point out something strange about the expense structure? What expense on here is really low that shouldn't be that low as a percent of revenue?

Look at everything under the gross margin line. Alright. So look at these down here. What is lower than your own company?

You guys are nailing it. You're nailing it in the chat. He pays his engineering team in 2023, pay them $20,000,000 against $320,000,000 of revenue. 6% of revenue on r and d. What are you guys spending on your engineering team? Do the math in your head. What's your monthly recurring revenue, and what's your total tech spend? Developers, engineers. It's probably closer to 30, 40, 50. Some of you guys are probably pushing 80, 90, even above a 100%

if you're investing in growth. How has he done this? How has he done it? How has he kept his costs low to enable himself to compete with Shopify for free? You guys already answered the question. Open source. You nailed in the chat. He has all these engineers writing code for him for free. And he's also committing code back to the community, is why it keeps working. This is the definition of what Warren Buffett would call a

moat. This is the definition of game theory. This is getting out of, you know, you know, consultants on LinkedIn telling you to focus on x, y, and g, actually looking at what creates an advantage for you. This is how a 25 year old launched a $400,000,000 AR company and I think will be bigger bigger than Shopify in ten years. So the question is this, can you reward a community to do work for you? It's a cheat

code to massive growth and huge profits. Alright. Let's move forward. Section three of part one. One tactic go from 720 k to 8,000,000 of ARR. Here is Aircall's revenue growth. Aircall.

Let's pause real quick. I know we're going fast. Zero to 10, 10 being you already learned something. Type in the chat. How are we feeling? Marybeth, you're my girl. How are feeling, Marybeth? Feeling good? Alright. Who's new? Are the new people going, okay, I'm learning who this Nathan guy is. This is a fun community. A lot of data. We're having fun. Alright. Good. What did Aircall do? What are they doing? Let's look. Here's what they did

in 2015 to 2016. Now look, remember where the revenue was. Let me go back real quick. 2015 to 2016, they're stuck at $23,000,000 of revenue back here, 2015, 2016. Many of you guys are at this stage right now. Pay careful attention to this. What did they do in 2015, 2016? This is what they did. That's the answer.

That's it. Their whole team. All they focus on every week was this. Do this once per week and we've won the week. You do that for fifty two weeks straight, you know what happens? Fast forward a couple years and this is the traffic you're getting from all those integrations you launched. Zoom sent them 13,200 clicks last month. Salesforce sent them 6,000 clicks last month.

Multiply that times a 100 integrations. Makes sense. Right? Who is using... Adam, don't know if you're doing this a ton. I know you're playing deep in the in the Salesforce ecosystem. But guys, who's using... Adam, are you using sort of integrations as part of your growth strategy?

Me? Yeah. Yeah. We're... Yeah. We're using AWS Marketplace, the ISV Accelerate program, which gets you access to other partners on their ecosystem, but also gets them to actually promote you and write blogs and write SEO content that links back to you from AWS, which has a very, very high domain rating. So So, guys. Yeah.

This is the screenshot. If you wanna copy Adam, wanna copy Aircall, here it is. These are some ideas for you. If you're not sure where to integrate, try one of these 14 app exchanges. Right? Depending on what your SaaS does. Right? This is a good screenshot. Get your team thinking, what can you integrate with to use other people's traffic to drive growth? Let's move forward. Guys, here's the summary for section one. I'm going to pause while you read it. I'm going to be on the slide for ten seconds and we're moving into section two of three. This is the summary on section one, which is all about getting traffic.

Open source, SEO, integrations. Boom, boom, boom. Right? That's the summary. That's the summary. I want to customize I want to customize the next couple of slides around you guys. Give me some guidance. Give me some guidance. What is your ARR today? And guys, for some reason, I can't... The launch button is like grayed out on here.

Yeah. Oh, stop sharing on the other one. Oh, there we go. Here we go. ARR today. Guys, give me some guidance. Where you at? Where you at? We'll customize the next couple of slides. I'm gonna talk to somebody I haven't talked to before. Let me talk to, let me talk to Dave Saunders. Dave, unmute yourself. We haven't met before. What are you working on? What are building?

Dave's like, crap. I gotta find the unmute button. Where is it?

Where is it?

We're building a b to b marketplace for marine industry boats.

Oh, wow. Interesting. Post revenue or pre revenue?

We're pre revenue, but we've got a really great funnel just just waiting to get fired up as soon as we launch our beta product.

Love that. Naranjan, Kencham, you said you're $95,000,000 of revenue on Mute Yourself. What are you building?

Yes. What are you building? Was that a typo?

No. It's a product.

What's the Ron

John, what's the website?

Website? Our company website or...

Your company website. You said you're doing $95,000,000 code.ai.

Code.ai.

Type it in the chat. Okay. We love a lot of revenue. That's a big revenue number. Always like to talk to those people. That's a big revenue number. What can we learn? All right. I'm going give you guys five more seconds to customize the rest of the slides here by telling me revenue today. Three, two, one. I'm going to end the poll. Share the results. There you guys. Here you have it. So you can see who

else you're live with today. I think we've got about 100, 150 founders live. I can't see the attendee counter. But if you guys look at the attendee counter, what are we at? Because then you can multiply by these percentages, right, and get to sort of a number. Right? So 15% of you are doing more than 4,000,000 of ARR. A bunch of you guys, 31%, are between up to 4,000,000 of revenue. The majority of you guys, 78%

of you, are CEOs or founders. CEOs or founders. Good group. We got a good group. Let me stop sharing that and move forward. I'll customize these next couple slides. Let's go to section number two. We're going to spend ten minutes on section two. Buckle up. Here we go. Leads. How to get 10,000 leads? We're going to start with binder. Here's the revenue growth. I'm gonna move quick guys because we're running short on time. Here's the revenue

growth. Here's how they launched. 2012, agency model. Guys, there is a cheat code to launching SaaS. Launch an agency. That's the closest I can get to giving you a silver bullet. Launch your freaking agency. Here it was in 2012. Chris Hall launched it, 36 years old. Look at his revenue growth in 2018, sort of stuck at 20,000,000, then he pops. What happens? Again, if you listen to my podcast, you have an unfair advantage. Chris came on my show before he popped in 2018. Here's what he said.

Close to 30 k US dollars a year, and then there's the the larger customers that that are upwards from 100 up to... We're getting close to the million mark.

Yeah. Started

end with 2013 where we were incorporated there. It was a spin off of Label A, a development agency I started in 2008.

So I want you guys to just... Something he said. I'm gonna go back to this slide. At $20,000,000 of ARR in this interview. And he said he's already got customers that are approaching paying 1,000,000 per year per customer. Right? That should be a signal to all of you. If you're trying to go from 5 to 10 to 20,000,000 ARR, you've got to start thinking about how to drive larger customer contracts. What can you upsell? How do

you sell more products, more seats, more usage? But Chris' story, again, launched as an agency. And then on his 40 birthday, he got a $300,000,000 check personally. Talk about a secondary. Here was the news. Right? We love this for founders. When they figure out how to actually get the cash out of the business and personally grow their net worth, this is a great one for everyone, early employees in the team through that majority recap. Now look,

I want you guys to look at this little quiz. Do these agencies look familiar to you? Do you guys recognize any any of these four?

Here's the answer. They all turned into multibillion dollar companies. Binder, Loom, Hootsuite, ClickUp. They all started as agencies. That is a cheat code to launching a SaaS. Right? That is a cheat code to launching a SaaS. So that is the story of Binder. Chris Hall has now exited through that secondary. Bob Hickey now leading the business. Again, great story there. Let's jump into section number two. This is all about founder brand. Now, I've never done this

before, but I'm showing you my revenue from getlatka.com on my screen right now. Right? That's the revenue from getlatka.com, which is a SaaS tool. And I love having a SaaS tool while I'm building Founderpath. It helps me empathize with everyone who's found, you know, a founder of a SaaS company. Right? And that empathy is a major advantage. So let's look at something. Here's a screen, a screenshot of my email marketing. Right? The last email we sent. Would you guys like a list with 50,000 leads on it where every time

you sent an email you got 14, 1,420 clicks? What about this? How would it feel to get on cable like this whenever you wanted by texting the production team, skipping the expensive PR agency, and going direct yourself? How do you do that? What about this? How would it feel to be a Wall Street Journal bestseller? How would it feel to sell 30,000 copies of your book, hit number one on Amazon? How would it feel to

beat Brene Brown and Dave Ramsey and James Clear and come in number three as a Wall Street Journal bestseller? How would you feel if you hit these things? What would it mean for your software company?

What if you launched a magazine named after yourself and sold $2,500,000 worth of that magazine while Forbes and other magazines, their print editions are going out of business. What would that mean for your software company? What about that podcast you guys launched a year ago and forgot about?

You're laughing. I see you. I see you. Those of you who launched the podcast, you did three episodes, you said to hell with this. Right? What if you could get a million downloads on that b to b podcast to grow your SaaS? How would you feel if your podcast back end look like this with 12,000,000 downloads? How do you do that? Guys, this is the power of Founder brand. All those things I just showed you are

things I actually did, and here they are plotted on the revenue graph. Here they are plotted on the revenue graph. The podcast twenty twenty, right, hits 10,000,000 downloads. The book, Washington Bestseller. Cable, magazine launch, growth, 0 to $100,000 a month in revenue. Right? This is what that looks like. Now, because out of curiosity, type yes in the chat if you're nervous about launching and focusing and building your own personal brand because you're nervous what the world

will think about you. You can be honest, type yes. Type yes in the chat. Who's a little nervous about that? Some people are, some people aren't. I'm just curious what you guys are thinking. Yes, no, yes, no. Alright. I'm I'm watching the chat. Mark Douglas, no. No. Said Jim Dougherty. Okay. Fair enough. Now, guys, all of this influence and brand built and was refocused around 2022 to Founderpath. That's the beauty of building a Founderbrand. It stays

with you for life, and you can target it to anything you want. Now how powerful was that influence? It enabled us to do this.

Right? It enabled us to do this. Myself and the team at Founderpath raising a $145,000,000 fund as a 31 year old. You cannot do that, right, without investing, right, in brand, in storytelling, and what I call founder market fit. Right? No Harvard, no connected parents was an architecture dropout. Right? CEO branding is important. And now at Founderpath, you know, my first software company sold too much equity. Founderpath is a debt fund that invests 1,000,000

to 4,000,000 per SaaS company. And you can see some of the deals we've recently done. Scott at Contact Monkey, 1,000,000. Mobile Monkey, Larry, $5.72. CyberSmart, 1,400,000. We've deployed over a $160,000,000 to founders looking to grow from a million of ARR to 10,000,000 of ARR without giving up equity. But you want some cash to hire engineers and drive some growth. So my question to you before I show you how you can build your own founder brand, right,

is the following is the following. Are you guys looking for some extra capital right now? This isn't you saying you're weak and oh my god, need capital to survive. It's just saying, could you use some extra capital? Right? Yes or no? I just launched a poll on your screen. I'm hoping you guys can see it. I'm not seeing any results come in. I'm nervous if people... Can you guys see this? Thumbs up. Do you see a poll? Oh, there we go. Now it's loading.

How many of you are looking for capital right now? I'll let you know a secret. We're sitting on about $60,000,000 of dry powder at Founderpath. We would love to deploy 20,000,000 of that in the next fifteen days. So I'm gonna be reaching out personally to any of you that are north of a million bucks of revenue. That's select yes in this poll right now. Right? In this poll right now. If you're looking for capital, let us

know yes or no. And then tell us what terms you care about. Do you want an interest only period? Do you want no warrants? Do you want no personal guarantee? I'll give you three more seconds on this. Two, one, zero. We're gonna end this poll. Alright. We're gonna go back and we're gonna go back into the content. So when I tell people you should build a founder brand, here's what they tell me. Nathan, my investors will

accuse me of not being focused. They'll say, but Nathan, my team won't like all the focus being on me as the founder. They'll say, but Nathan, people on social media will think I have a big ego. Come on. It's truth Tuesday. Raise your hand if you ever felt one of these. Come on. Raise your hand. Come on. Raise it high. It's true. This happens, folks. It happens. Be honest. This is what happens. You say, but Nathan,

here's the thing. Founder market fit is the fastest way to revenue. If the founder doesn't understand the problem they're solving, you can never get to product market fit. Founder market fit is more important than product market fit. And the way you define founder market fit is you have to tell the founding story. Right? Because then it shows what you believe in at your core, the genes, the DNA, and people buy off emotion. Right? They buy off

a story that they align with. That is why I think all of you should be building a founder brand. That is my pitch to you. Now look, guys, I freaking print off statues of myself. You see on the left there, I put them up at conferences. You think I don't get accused of having a big ego? Literally I print versions of myself that are nine foot tall and put them at the freaking conference. Right? So listen,

if anyone challenges you and says your ego is too big, just say, well, Nathan's a bigger loser. You know, go look at his stuff. He's a bigger loser. You know? Here's what I say. You know, how do you get in Times Square, your fit... You know, your thing, your book, you know, on a on a 150 foot street in Millennium Square at Nasdaq? Here's what I say, guys. If you don't promote yourself, who is? Who is?

Who's gonna promote yourself? You gotta do it. Right? You gotta do it. So guys, here's my model. This is the model. If you guys have kids or you're just starting off, I would encourage you to screen each other and show them. We all... This is the secret to life and wealth and happiness and all that stuff. I'm not gonna be a Tony Robbins guru here, but we all start in the bottom left. We graduate college and

we start doing things and we get paid per task. Today, it's easy to do that. List yourself on Fiverr or Upwork. You get paid per task. Eventually, we freaking hate that because we're creative and we wanna replace ourselves. We hire part time labor to replace ourselves. Then we hire full time labor to replace ourselves. And then you start looking like Adam Sandman and you're generating profits like crazy. What do you do? You stop trading time for

money and you start building things that you can build once and sell forever. You write code. You do services. You write code. What else do you do? You build a media business. What is... What have I done? Code for me was my first company, Heyo. My second company to GetLatka, now my third company Founderpath. Lot of code. Media, the book, the podcast, the magazine. My argument I'm trying to make to you guys today is the order

is usually what you see on my screen. Services, code, media. This needs to be the infinite loop. Those arrows need to be the infinite loop. Media should come before code in my opinion. And to grow both of them, which is what we're doing now to build Founderpath, all the users of your software should constantly be reminded of your media brand, conferences, podcast, embedded links to recordings, resource pages, templates. Right? And all of your media brand should

constantly be reminded about your code, your software. And this creates an incredible feedback loop. Right? This is build one cell forever. And after you do that, we as founders do a secondary whatever. You make money. You start making your money work for you. And you start investing in debt. Right? You get a return. You give someone a loan. You give whatever. Right? You get from public markets, b d... You invest in the BDCs. And you also

write angel checks. You invest equity. This is my opinion, guys. I know it's simple. You guys can call me crazy. It's a secret to life. Time for money, build one, sell forever, make your money work for you. Right? And the key thing about this middle section here is that a book is equal to a podcast, which is equal to a magazine, which is equal to code. All of them, you do once and sell forever. But we

only read about the big code stories. We only read about the code. But that's an engineer writing lines of code. Well, what's a writer writing lines in a book? It's the same thing. So don't don't don't ignore the media side. It's just as much leverage as your code base. You guys can tell me if I'm full of shit. Type shit in the chat if you think I'm full of shit. Please don't. Type shit in the chat if you think I'm full of shit. Please don't. Alright?

Alright. Buddha meat. I mean, Buddha meat off the pod... Off the show. No more meat. He said shit. Buddha. Gone. Done. Next slide. So guys, here's the deal. As your revenue grows, I pay very careful attention to all of my metrics, right? All of my metrics. So you guys can see here the growth here. This is powered by Founderpath Analytics all into the growth. Now I also track my cash flows, customer ARPU expansion, cohort retention. I'd

like you guys to tell me yes or no in the chat. Would you like to see my August monthly recurring revenue report and my cash report, again from August last month? If you type yes, we'll spend six minutes on this before jumping in to section three of the webinar and wrapping up. Yes, no. Okay. I'm seeing yeses. I'm seeing yeses. This is good. Alright. Let me jump in. Let me log in here. Let me log in.

So you guys are now looking live. This is live. I'm in Founderpath Analytics. Okay? Now what you see here is I'm going to scroll in to this founder brand story I was just telling you guys about, book launch, podcast back here. I want to hover over this month, April. Now what you guys see in April, that green bar is new MRR, dollars 40,000 of new MRR. But there was 23 ks of churn. And there was five

ks of contraction. But growth was still happening. One thing I like to do is turn off starting MRR and actually just look at the new versus contracted. You obviously always want the green to be bigger than the red because that's how you know you're growing. A lot of people turn on starting MRR and goes, oh, I'm growing no matter what. But when you hide it, the real story is revealed. Are you making more than what you're

churning or adding more than you're churning? And the nice thing about this is let's say we want to go dive into January, February, March's data. Right? March's data. I can go down here to March. Let's go all the way back to '21. And do you guys see here how my how my mouse... How it underlines here? Can you see that? I don't know if it's big enough.

I've used a lot of tools out there. Like, obviously, use Stripe. But why doesn't Stripe have your bank data so you can see CAC? Or we use QuickBooks or Xero, but that doesn't have your subscription data. So how do you know if you're spending money in the right places or not? Like, How do you get all these things in one place? Well, let's click here and see the $29 of new MRR in March. And look at

this. It goes to build a beautiful filtered segment of those customers in that filter. I can sort from high to low, see the biggest customers I lost or gained. I can edit the filter and say, hey, where the amount contains x or the start date is after y. So this is a beautiful filtering and segmentation platform here, which we use over and over again to grow the business. Now if I go back, we also want to

look at the customer story. Now again, I'll get to this decline in a second. But the hint is I redirected a lot of my founder brand right around here to Founderpath. Literally stopped focusing on GetLatka. We'll get to that in a second. But let's say we want to dive deeper on customer count. Again, you can kill off the retained and you start to see, woah, it's really hard to add enough customers to make up for the

red losses. This is the definition of quick ratio. If you're not adding more than you're losing every month, you're stuck in a cycle. And so you can see that nicely in Founderpath analytics or, again, dive down here into each customer cohort and go look at that. But this is the magic graph. You know, when we deploy a 160,000,000 at Founderpath, this is one of the first graphs we look at right here. How many of you guys

have a version of this? How many of you guys have a version of this down here? The waterfall, the cohort table down here. This is really bad. Like, Brad, you raised your antidote. We're gonna hear from him in a second. This is really bad. I mean, while we're churning 50% of our users from month one to month two. That's not a SaaS business, dude. I mean, that is a terrible SaaS business. We're not retaining any customers.

You want these to be green for many, many cohorts. So you don't want these lines dipping so low so quick. You want them to be still at like 60%, 80% a year, two years out. And ideally start to go back up again because that means you're expanding. The important thing here though is we can go in and look at all this analysis real time. And now I'll go to my cache from August. Now I'll go to

my cache from August. I've never done this before. But I'm just going to lay it all out there. This is my own personal data, so I'm allowed to share it. But this is cash. Right? Now, obviously, you see a big green here because in this account, I kept a couple million bucks personally, right, before I reinvested in some other things like Founderpath. But let's dive into sort of GetLatka cash account today. Let's zoom in here. And

what you see let's go look at July of this month. If I scroll down, what you'll see in July of this month is 61 k cash starting. We collected 32. We spent 58. There was burn, then cash ending. Again, notice this underline here. I love this. I used to have to log into QuickBooks, do an export. It would take me forever to sort and filter. I can just click the spend here. And look, you're going to

see everything I spent money on in July at GetLatka. And you can sort from high to low. You can say, let me add a filter where the description contains Google to see all your ads. Right? And save that as a segment back into your CAC, etcetera. So I don't want to spend more time on this, but I will tell you we are very, very, very excited. A lot of people think a Founderpath is just some, you

know, a fund where you can get debt. But guys, I can tell you we have over 10,000 founders using Founderpath. Over 5,000 have a live connected account of some kind, Stripe, a bank. And it's because they're using all these free, well, they're currently free reporting tools. Now, again, you start to see revenue decline in 2022 because I redirected a lot that Founderbrand over to Founderpath, which is growing very, very nicely. Right? A 160,000,000 deployed. Was that

useful? Yes or no? Seeing some of the cohorts, the data. You guys are doing a lot of this. Right? I think a lot of you guys are probably doing this in Excel or some other tool. Right? Hopefully. That is Founderpath Analytics. Guys, Founderpath Analytics is a thousand data points in one browser window.

That's what it is. We used to have to download reports and have QuickBooks and our Chase account open and Stripe account and, you know, 7,000 other things or wait for our finance to come back to you. Founderpath analytics is a thousand data points finally in one spot. Starting with visuals, you're proud to screenshot, drilling down into Excel ready tables, and lastly, raw data that you can segment and cohort cohort your heart out on. Alright. If you

guys want to use this, we already have the payments ready. It's... We're going to charge $2,500 per month on this. Here's the pricing page. And I'm going to show you how to skip this paywall and get it for free on the webinar right now. That's how we roll. Right. So we're going to launch this paywall here shortly. You're seeing this first. Sign up today to avoid the paywall, and here's the link. Kevin from our team is gonna drop it in the chat. All you have to do is click that link,

sign up. It's free. If you use that link, it's free. You won't hit the paywall. And once you do that, type done in the chat. Now you can't type done quickly because that takes a second to sign up. So I I know if you're lying. You can't type done in the chat yet. Right? I'll give you guys a second to sign up. And while you're doing that, I'm gonna foreshadow what we're about to talk about. We're

going go into miracles growth from zero to a $160,000,000 of of revenue. And then we're going to jump into the last section of our webinar focused on sales. How did this business go to $650,000,000 of ARR and they're competing with Twilio? What artificial intelligence playbook did Content Square use to go over a $100,000,000 of ARR? And how did Brevo compete in the email marketing space to spend a dollar to get $2 of ARR? A great return

on investment. Right? A great return on investment. Now, those of you that already have a Founderpath account, right, or you're signing up right now, once you log in, what you want to do is go to your home page. Right? Go to your home page. Go to your home page, which is right here. And to get your charts populated, you just want to click connect right here. Connect subscription billing. Or go down here to integrations and pick

your integration and connect it. Your charts will then automatically generate. You'll then automatically generate. Right. Type done in the chat. Were you guys able to get that done? Any quick reactions on that? We are trying to figure out if we should spend a lot more engineering time, money, and resources building out Founderpath analytics. We know BearMetrix and ChartMobilers, others in the space. Is this a big opportunity? Should we do this or not? Yes or no. Should

we do it? You can tell us do it in the chat. Our engineers are on the webinar right now watching. Should we do it? Type do it in the chat. We're we're debating. We're debating. But it's a powerful report. It's a powerful report. Alright. Let's move forward. We're now going into section three of part two of the webinar, and we're gonna wrap up on the last section. Here's miracle. Right? 0 to a $160,000,000 of revenue. How

did they do it? This is their business model. Now there are marketplace guys that makes all that money on their SaaS tool. But look at this headline number of 8,000,000,000. What does that mean?

They sit on 8,000,000,000 of GMV. Raise your hand if you know what GMV is. GMV, GMV, who's thinking about the Okay. I see hands going up. Yeah, I see hands going up. We call this SaaS plus. These are the most valuable companies right now in the world. It's SaaS as your core plus. Miracle is SaaS plus payments. Kanwar just said it in the chat. If they take 1% of the 8,000,000,000 they sit on, that's another $180,000,000

of revenue. Right? A lot of revenue. So SaaS plus hardware, SaaS plus marketplace, SaaS plus media, SaaS plus freemium like Loom. These are six SaaS plus business models you should screenshot and study later. If you don't have the plus done, think about it. What is the plus that you can add? Alright. What is the plus that you can add? So that's miracle. This wraps up section two. We talked about how to get leads. How did Binder

use their agency to 20,000,000 revenue, now a 130,000,000 revenue, and a $30,000,000 secondary? I showed you Founderbrand and my view on the world in terms of using Founder influence to grow your software. And lastly, we talked about that SaaS plus business model. Guys, are two thirds of the way through the webinar. Marybeth Ryan, unmute yourself. How are we feeling? We're two thirds of the way through. How do you feel?

I'm feeling great. It's always a fire hose of information, and my pen and my notepad are going like crazy.

Hold it up. Hold it up. Hold up the pen and the notepad to camera. Let's see these notes.

Oh. Look at

Mary Beth. There we go. Oh, there's a social security number on there. No. Just kidding. Just kidding. We love that. Marybeth, thanks for being here. Guys, if you're enjoying the show so far, block off next month. So it's on your calendar. Kevin's gonna drop this in the chat on our team. It's LU dot MA forward slash FP2. FP2. Takes two seconds. Just click it. It'll add it right to your counter so you don't forget if you're

enjoying the content today. Alright. Let's wrap up with section three. Section three. Section three is all about sales. We're talking about we're gonna talk about bird.com, formerly MessageBird, Content Square, and the email marketing tool Brevo. Let's look at Bird's revenue growth. Here it is.

Look at the growth. That's the revenue growth. I'm not gonna say it. If you minimize the screen, gotta pop it open. That's the growth. Right? Zero to boom. I mean, that is incredible growth. Now the next question is how did Robert do it? How do you do it? Well, let's zoom in a little bit. Let's zoom in here. Make sure you get my tricep, you know, nice and flexed. I'm shiny. You know, this is great. I'm

having fun with the studio team. Sorry, guys. You guys gotta come hang out in studio by the way. You will see on the Luma page, if you wanna come hang out in studio, we have a whole area for you guys to come visit in studio, see the whole behind the scenes with a lot of fun. Alright. But here's Bird's revenue growth. Here's what they launched as in 2014. Just read the website headline.

That was the launch. Here's their net revenue retention from their series a pitch deck when they raised 60,000,000 of revenue in 2017. That's net dollar retention. Pretty good, right guys? I mean, your head. If you know, you know, right? If you know, you know. It's a pretty darn good net revenue retention, right?

Here is their P and L. I'm gonna give you guys ten seconds to study this. This is their profit and loss. Where do you get this, by the way? What other CEO coaching every month do you get real p and l's from software companies? You don't. Here it is. Here's the p and l.

Bird.com, Tim. Bird.com. Here's the p and l. You guys notice anything here? It's the opposite question from earlier. Look at the expenses here. What is really freaking high? What is like really high? It's like shockingly high.

Yep, Anton, you nailed it. If you're sending you know, Bird is to help you send text messages and emails, well, they pay a crap ton to the network, almost 100% of revenue to the network, which is why it's shocking. How do they go from how do they erase this cost structure? Well, here's what they did. They acquired someone that actually built the rails, SparkPost, one of the CPaaS tools, Communication Platform as a Service. They bought SparkPost

right, after their $600,000,000 round series c, right, to become an omnichannel provider. They they took out that huge chunk of their cost structure. And in 2023, this was their EBITDA. Talk about a turnaround. Right? I mean, Angela Sutton crazy, '83... $87,000,000 of ARR. I mean, of EBITDA. EBITDA. That's EBITDA. Bottom line, folks. Bottom line. Right? And now they're saying we're giving up all that revenue. We're dropping our prices to try and beat Twilio. I mean, this

is like Europe versus The USA, Bird versus Twilio. Who's gonna win the CPaaS market? Who's everybody gonna use ten years from now? I don't know the answer. Right? We'll see who wins. But the point is they vertically integrated to kill their cost structure to generate profits, then gave up the profits to generate a price war to grow market share. Now part of that means they got to keep cutting costs. They laid off 90 people in 2024,

March earlier this year. Right? Right? They gotta keep up with that price war. How they keep their cost structure low? They branded it as AIs replacing jobs, but, like, who knows? Who... I mean, maybe it... May... Who knows? Right? I think it's... They gotta keep their cost so they can be with Twilio. But here's your price war checklist. If you've got a competitor you're trying to beat on price, this is what you're thinking about. This is what you're thinking about. Price war checklist.

Alright. Now, in order we looked at a lot of P and L so far. Right? A lot of folks are trying to figure out what artificial intelligence tools should I be using today to grow my software business. And there's a lot of AI in the finance world right now. Right? A lot of AI in the finance world. How many of you guys are actively testing new AI driven tools to try and get more productivity inside your

businesses. Type AI in the chat. Who's thinking about it? AI in the chat. A lot. What are the top tools? Well, I said, do we have... Who do we get this data from? Cladara. Because people and a lot of brands... Brad, you're live. Can you share how many brands use Cladara to manage their spend today?

More than a thousand.

More than a thousand software companies use Clotara to manage their vendors. So, Brad, you sit on a crap ton of spend. Your dataset is huge. Thank you for joining. I said, please tell me, what do you see everyone starting to actually pay for? Who are they actually using? You put up a great post about it, which Kevin is gonna put in the chat. You guys can get direct access to this. It's totally free. Just bookmark the post. Kevin will drop the link in the chat. But Brad, what are you seeing on the spend side right now for these AI tools?

Yeah. Great question. So just to give everyone a view, we're seeing more than 50,000 software purchases or renewals every month. So this is the... Probably the largest structured set of data in the world, which giving up... Giving us a real time view. What I love to see is companies are getting behind AI. So 4% now, 4%, and that's double what it was at the start of the year. 4% of people's software spend is going into AI

tools. So if you're not investing in AI, you are being left behind. Mhmm. Having said that, you probably want to pick up your... Pick up the phone or pick up Slack, talk to your finance team because finance teams are being left behind.

Mhmm.

Right? So, only 0.2% of what finance teams are spending on SaaS is going towards AI. And what I wanna talk to you about today are the five tools that we see that the most innovative companies, the fastest growing companies are adopting in their finance team that's helping AI... Helping them use AI to grow faster and waste less time on...

So, Brad, give us give us just... Because we're short on time, give us the top one. What's the one AI tool that you see everyone signing up for? They're testing on their finance teams. And guys, this is your chance to spam the comments. Don't promote your own tool. Promote somebody else's. Name the AI tool you're testing right now. And in the same comment in Zoom, tell me what part of your business you're using in marketing, sales, HR, whatever, any AI tool you're testing. Brad, what are you seeing?

Yeah. So we're coming into budgeting season. The thing you've got to be checking out right now is a tool called LivePlan. LivePlan will generate those business plans for you. It's the fastest growing tool on... For finance teams powered by AI on the Cladara platform right now.

Wild. Wild, wild, wild. Alright. This is great. And guys, just a quick shout out to Cladara. Again, they have great content on their blog. Type Cladara in the chat. If you guys have heard of Cladara, you're already a user, or you just bookmarked this AI tool they put together. Type Cladara in the chat. We're thinking about doing more with Brad. So the more of you guys that like that kind of spend data content, the more of type Cladara in the chat, the more likely we'll get them engaged in future webinars. Again, he's got a very unique dataset. Brad, if people wanna learn more about you, where can they find some of your thought leadership?

Yeah. Follow me on on LinkedIn or just go to kledara.com. We post it all on our blog. Everything is is free, and you can get it right away.

Alright, guys. We've got two companies left to learn from. Let's jump into Content Square. Jonathan Cherokee. Here's his revenue growth. Here it is. I'm not gonna read it to you, but there it is. That's the revenue growth. Contentsquare.com. How did he do it? Well, let's dive in to the timeline. Right? Timeline based learning. 26 year old Cherokee launched as a consulting business. This was the website in 2012. That was the website in 2012. Anton, you're always

ahead of me. Anton must have the slide deck. He has the freaking slide deck. He sure does. Guys, here's his P and L. You're just going to have to read this very quickly because we're running very short on time. Here's the P and L, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. Net sales up there across the top 6,000,000, 9,000,000, etcetera, right, in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. Right? By that time, he was still selling a lot of services. Look at

their website. It featured services still. Right? Even at even at $1,011,000,000 bucks of ARR, it's still featured services. So it's total baloney when people tell you don't do services if you're building SaaS. And he was ahead of the curve in 2019 launched AI. Right? Launched artificial intelligence inside of his business to help brands, especially retailers, understand what images were converting. What were the highest ROI channels on their website? Where do they need to improve? And he

hit his first million dollar per year customer. Right? Now the key with this enterprise motion is enterprises will not buy from you without SOC two. Guys, raise your hand if you know what SOC two is. Raise your hand high. SOC two. Who... Okay. A lot of people. Right? SOC two is really tricky. I tried to get SOC two done at Founderpath, and I asked a bunch of brokers, and they said 80 k. Adam, Sam, and unmute yourself. Do you remember what you paid for your SOC two?

We have a vendor that helps us out with it. We pay about $22,000 a year using Secure Frame.

That is amazing. Right? So I asked brokers. They gave me $80,000 quotes. You know, I said, okay. Let me do this. I fired the broker because it was taking weeks of my time. These questions are very specific on security. Only the founder, only you guys can really answer. I don't have time to spend on it. The TLDR is we figured out a way to get it done. Here's our full SOC two report. It's nine... It's 69

pages. And anytime someone comes to Founderpath and says, is your data secure? We send them this. So they see, right, all all the things we do to protect our data. Right? It grows their confidence and they're way more likely than, right, to pay you these big enterprise plans, connect their data streams, etcetera. If you're ever going to build a $10,000,000 AR company, you're gonna have to get SOC two done. Right? You're gonna have to get SOC two done. And we're really excited to be partnered with a group called Securly. Karyl, are you are you here? Unmute yourself.

Yeah. Here I am. How's it going?

There he is. Alright. So so how do you compare? We see some people mentioning Vanta, Andrada, and brokers in the chat. How do you compare in terms of cost and speed to get SOC two done?

So, you know, like, the important thing is all these tools are amazing. Secure Frame, Drada, Vanta, they are all helping you consolidate all that information that's needed for the auditor and get you to pass the audit faster. So that's... You know, those are great tools and we love them.

Mhmm. How do you differentiate though? If someone signs up to you securely like you see Devin here, he heard about you guys on one of our webinars signed up and looks like had it live two days ago.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, don't, we're not a tool for compliance per se. What we do is we do the penetration testing. And so we have a bunch of it being an automated penetration testing part. And then another part, which is very much required is the manual pen testing. And so all of that gets consolidated in our platform. So very much like you were talking before, a SaaS plus platform, that's where we are. So

we have the SaaS platform where we consolidate automated scans plus the manual pen testing so that you have the right evidence for SOC two, ISO compliance, etcetera.

So guys, here's the story. Here's the next slide. If you guys wanna eventually land a $100,000 per year customer, you've gotta use a tool like Securly, right, to prove that your data is secure and the enterprises can trust you. So here's the deal. We'll put a link in the chat right now to Securly. I said, Coriel, we'll have you on the show. You've got to give our audience a huge discount. So if you use this link,

you save a thousand bucks. The process is click the link in the chat. And guys, it's a very, very simple sign up. You go to link, you only put in your email. All you gotta do is put in your email. You'll go into Securly and you'll be flagged for a thousand dollars savings if you choose to move forward with Securly. Once you guys do that, type done in the chat. Cariel, any other instructions they should know about? Rishi already said done.

Just one important point there. It's that we're integrated with Vanta. So if you're using Vanta or Drata or Secure Frame, we're working on integrations with all of them as well. But the Vanta integration, it's already out. And basically you can send your pentest report and proof of remediation directly to Vanta from Securly.

Right. Guys, this link won't work when the webinar ends. I want you guys to save this money if you ever wanna have sort of these big enterprise accounts. Type done like Rishi in the chat once you click that link. Again, Kevin from our team just put in the chat. While we do that, Adam, really quick, you guys, you went through this. You can sort of tell people if I'm full of crap or not. I mean, did you have customers that are wanting to pay you $30.50, $100 per year saying, Adam, at Inflector, please send me your SOC two before we pay?

Oh, yeah. And then we're like, oh oh, crap. What are gonna do? We don't have a SOC two. So then it becomes this quick fire drill. And for a while, could use maybe AWS's, but then people got smart and realized as a vendor, you have to have it. It doesn't matter what cloud platform you use.

Mhmm. Guys, out of curiosity, just type we have it in the chat. If you've already done pen testing, SOC two, you know, GDPR. If you already have it, type we have it in the chat. Out of curiosity, just so you guys can see. Right? Other people doing it. Brad done it. Adam's got it. Michael's got it. Right? This is critical to growing a 10,000,000, $1,520,000,000 dollar AR business. Krishna's got it. Right? So that's what it looks

like to sign up and move forward. Again, we we love Securly and what they brought to the market. Alright. Let's move forward here. Again, Content Square launches AI. They get their first million dollar per year customer. And guys, this is how they're driving growth today. This is their product suite, sorry, in 2021. Look at the usage metrics across the top. The point I'm trying to make here is a lot of us were never gonna get to

a million dollar customer because we're not maximizing pricing. We only sell number of seats. Content Square selling seats, feature upgrades, that's two axes, and a third axis is the usage. Right? If you have this many page views, it's this price, etcetera. You want all three axes if you're ever gonna get up to $1,020.50, $100,000,000 of revenue. Right? And you don't necessarily wanna market AI. A lot of companies are saying, oh, yeah, we're AI. Market... Use the

AI to drive the usage which will then drive the usage based revenue. That's a much healthier way to actually grow real revenue on the back of AI in your tool. And this is what their product suite looks like today, right, in 2024. Again, all of these give Content Square users more productivity, drives more usage, drives more revenue. Right? Drives more revenue. So that's how... That's the ContentSquare story. Alright. That is the ContentSquare story. Now, guys, if

you're watching this and saying, man, I'd love to get this full recording. There's a lot of data. You can click the link in the chat that subscribes you to our YouTube. It's totally free. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this, but Kevin will drop it in there. You click the button, subscribe to YouTube. When we release it in a couple days, you'll see the full webinar replay. Alright. So that'll be dropped in the

chat here by Kevin, hopefully, here in a minute. Or if Kevin had to jump, maybe we won't... There it is. Kevin, try and get that so it's an actual URL. Put it in a browser window and copy it so it's clickable. Alright, guys. Let's wrap up with the last company today, Bravo. Here's the revenue graph. Here's the revenue graph. Now if you guys don't recognize Brevo, you might recognize Sendinblue. You guys remember Sendinblue? They rebranded. Same

company. Right? So Sendinblue email marketing tool, now Brevo. Right? That's the revenue growth. Now how do they do it? Let's zoom in here. Here's what they did between 2019 and 2023. How many of you guys feel like you are too early to think about buying other competitors? Raise your hand. Raise your hand high. You feel like you're too... I'm looking at the big screen behind me. Raise your hand high. Keep it up. Keep it up. Keep

it up. William, Jay. Yeah. A lot of us feel this way. A lot of us feel this way. They were doing this between... Starting in 2019, their first deal. They bought newsletter to go in 2019. What was their revenue in 2019? Let's go back. Alright. It's about $89,000,000. Right? $89,000,000. Right? First revenue. And they've executed a strategy very nicely as they've scaled. What I'm gonna show you are companies that are at $3.04, 5,000,000 that have acquired

other companies and how they've done it with very little cash up front. Let me first show you six ways to find cheap acquisitions. Here they are. I'm not going to read them all. You can screenshot it. This is six ways to find cheap acquisitions for you to buy. When I say cheap, guys, mean, like, spend a thousand bucks. I'm talking cheap. Like cheap cheap. Like Nathan cheap. Right? Nathan cheap is like, you know, don't Uber from

JFK to Downtown New York. Take the take the Lear, which is $14 to Jamaica Station, then go from Jamaica Station to Penn Station, then Penn Station $2 metro to Fidei to get to the conference. Right? Say $14 versus a

150.

Yeah. That's Nathan cheap. Okay? That's another level of cheap. Right? So how do you get this done? Guys, look at this screen really quick. This is a deal that I did, my first acquisition. And look at, what did I pay for it? Can you read this right here? My mouse is. What did I pay for it?

Right? You guys are going, what the heck? Those of you that have this screen, you're going, what? Am I reading that right? Yeah. Negative 15. I was paid 15 k to take over a Chrome extension. The question is why? How do I negotiate that? Now what was the asset I bought? Can you read this, where my analysis? This Chrome extension had 250,000 users. That's an email list. I can email them. I was paid 15 k to

take over a 250,000 person email list. What on earth? I'm not teaching it on all time. Flip to page two twenty one in my book and you'll see the full strategy across five pages, but it's possible. Here's another example. Lemlist acquired Taplyo for $3,000,000. They emailed their user base and said, what other tools do you use? They just looked at the answers and went out and bought a company. Email your list. Email your users. Ask them

what else they use. That's a great way to build an M and A strategy. That's what that's what Lemlist did with Taplio. Here's another example, Blackthorn. They looked at the Salesforce app exchange. They said, what's a company with a lot of reviews but a free tool? Let's go buy that for cheap. Those are the deal terms on the right. We're seven minutes over. I don't wanna waste... Like, take more of your time. I respect it, guys. So we're gonna wrap up in three minutes. K? But here are the deal terms on that acquisition.

So here's the summary slide on section three. Right? Ask your users what other tools they use, aggressively acquire, and vertically integrate like Bird did when they bought SparkPost to launch a price war. Right? Don't market artificial intelligence. Use AI in your product to make your users more productive to drive usage based revenue. And again, cheap AR at Bravo because they bought companies for very cheap on the order of spend a dollar to get $2 of ARR.

Right? That m and a strategy worked very nicely for them. So guys, in summary, as we wrap up, fifty nine minutes ago, I told you we talked about traffic, leads, and sales. I told you we'd go through nine case studies. I told you you'd see profit and loss statements. You got my email marketing. You've got my text. I told you to feel like a backyard barbecue. Now it's your time to tell me if we delivered or not. If we delivered, tell me the chat delivered. Do you feel it? Joseph Meyer, unmute yourself. How did we do? You learned something? How did we do, guys?

You guys did rock and roll. I mean, I was at your New York event. Unbelievable. This is spectacular. Bravo.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. And guys, we would love to see you on the next webinar. We'd love to see you on the next webinar. It's, in the chat. We'll drop it in there one more time. There it is. Right. There it is. Let me go. Everyone in the meeting, luma forward slash two. It'll be October 29. The recording will go on YouTube. But again, if you guys are looking for capital, check out founderpath.com and test

our new product, Founderpath Analytics, before we start charging for it. Guys, my name is Nathan Latka joining you here on September 17 from Austin, Texas. Thank you for all the familiar faces. Gina Kimble, Filthy, David Hillis, Angela Sutton, Mary Beth. You guys are amazing. Go add some revenue. Close some customers. I love you guys. You take care. See you. Bye bye.