Pivot City! How we pivoted 6 times

“we looked at all the leads that were coming in and we saw most of them were from higher ed and non-profit at the time we had no go to market and I thought go to market was like this baloney term but it's a real thing for sales and marketing teams to really focus on so what we did was that we flipped it over and we ended up focusing on higher ed and non-profit so with Salesforce I asked hey you know what are your metrics on higher ed and nonprofit you can see some of them are quite small but a lot of them are quite big so we”

“because there's a lot of things that I hate doing in the business I really don't like selling and marketing and accounting and uh Cs and I I don't really like doing any of these things so I I really like doing product and Engineering so what I did is I changed our org around and I have just two people that report to me which is going to be a third once we find our CTO so if you know someone we're hiring but it's just going to be our CEO our director of product and our CTO and the reason I wanted to do this is because I don't”

“wanted to integrate us to say hey we're on Salesforce but they weren't going to bring us anything so we didn't do them a lot of events applications they they have there's so many things you can do with events they all want to integrate none of them wanted to bring us business so we ended up not doing any of those and then a lot of people they all want to have contracts and conversations and Technical Integrations and it never became anything so the original thesis was to make a payment app on the Salesforce app exchange that could integrate with stripe at the time no one integrated with stripe now just everybody knows stripe but we said hey”

“whatsoever then you know that you found your price and that's sort of what we did um what we what just to give you some examples our payments app is now two and a half times more expensive but the biggest customer we had for the longest time was 100K a year we recently sold one that's a million a year for a really really big deployment doing uh mobile payments uh our Events app is now four times more expensive but our average error was about 12K for the longest time uh it's now up around 45k because we”

“Porter sells off did some LinkedIn post about having a line that was making six to seven million ARR a year and that's that's like a lot of people's businesses I was our business for a long time and he just killed it saying I wanted to focus on this other thing I was doing really really well so we've killed a whole bunch of stuff that was at 80k 100K 150k ARR to focus on where stuff really mattered and now it's really working uh you have to try stuff I never would have bought the um taxi company if I hadn't bought pci-fi because it was”

“Your TAM is not everyone Don’t be afraid to let go Multi-Product too soon Product-Market Fit I’m going to show you FINDING FOCUS KILL FOCUS”

“2017, Hotel Lobby What Competition Killed Too big an app to build at the time (pre-acquisition) Simple eCommerce on Salesforce Far too much work, would need to be our company’s only focus Killed Accounting, native to Salesforce Airtable and Notion do some of this, would need to be company’s focus, solving a problem people didn’t have Partial-merged Declarative Portal Merged Form builder Here’s what we didoverfour years Merged into our Payments app for web-based invoice payments”

“Deal Terms $3.25M, a 6x multiple on $550K ARR $1.2M Down payment $2M over 24 months, paid quarterly Funded via debt, no dilution High Level Reasons Surveyed customers wanted SMS Buy instead of build, no integration work I reached out to Clint The revenue helped NRR Why I bought Textey”

“Pricing Don’t be afraid to raise your prices Payments: 2.5x more expensive. Events: 4x more expensive. We’ve had 930 prices in three years. Founders undervalue their products. “It only took me four months to make.” Fear of losing a deal, so I discounted. Keep raising prices. Video Here. Madhavan Ramanujam. Madhavan Ramanujam”

“Key Takeaways A decision is better than no decision. Kill weak product lines. Try stuff! Buy a company, hike pricing, try at least one partnership to learn Listen to your customers Sell the journey”