Proposify

“We were losing deals because we didn't have single sign-on. And, you know, every, you'd go into JIRA, and you'd find this ticket a mile long with all these comments of, like, why it's so hard, and we can't do it, and there's too much technical debt. And he jus…”

“And then in twenty-twenty-three we, you know, we went from burning millions to actually being profitable. Mind you, not by very much. About 58 K in profit.”

“My VP of product quit, my VP of marketing quit. I didn't replace them. I just got in and started running product and marketing again just like in the early days.”

“January 22 is when I had to cut a quarter of our staff and announce that”

“Actually in twenty-twenty-one, I brought on a COO and CFO, Kathy who's, who's really amazing, and she kind of looked at what we were doing. We had this, you know, huge burn rate. She looked at the growth, and she's like, you're running off a cliff. Like, you'r…”

“At one point, we were actually burning 400 K a month, which, you know, depends on your size, right? That might not seem a lot if you're a hundred million ARR, but if you're under ten million, that's a lot of money to be burning.”

“We went from, you know, being able to sell at most a 3000 dollar a year ACV contract, up to now where we have a couple in the six figure range, but average would be more 10, 20, 30 K deals.”

“The customers who bought Proposify to send beautiful proposals and get faster sign-off, that messaging didn't really resonate with the mid-market, because they're like, we have cool PowerPoint decks, like, we know how to send proposals. What they really wanted…”

“We hired enough people that we were eventually around, you know, a hundred people or so, and for, you know, at the time, I think only a five or six million dollar business.”

“Around 2018, my co-founder and I first close our first round of actual, you know, major investment capital. We take we take a million each in secondaries, you know, put three million on the balance sheet.”

“The SaaS market kind of crashed in twenty-twenty-two. Investors and acquirers started getting nervous, and suddenly I had this, you know, what was this big list of potential acquirers all pull out, not get a single LOI from anyone.”

“Our rate of growth had been declining year after year, and when the SaaS market changed around twenty-twenty-two is when we actually started to decline for the first time really since we found product market fit”

“No, no, those are more for us, those are more partner potential. So so we they would typically like when you're a proposal can consist of multiple parts and multiple documents and typically like there would be some intro about your companies and financials, ho…”

“We don't really have anyone dedicated to SEO, but our marketing team sort of factors SEO work into all the work that they're doing. It's about a 12, 12 person marketing team.”

“Like we want to get to the point where we're doubling ARR total, you know, in a year's time. So I think when that happens, let's say one or two years out, we'd probably be in a better position to look at acquisition offers today.”

“I'd say we're, depending on the month, we're around the breakeven mark. Some months we're cashflow positive. You know, other, other times we essentially have the same amount in the bank that we did when we raised the money.”

“And then talking about, again, growth and aggressiveness moving forward, I would argue you guys have been pretty darn capital efficient with about, you know, call it a one to one ratio of equity raised to ARR that you've been able to generate.”

“So essentially the whole company is aligned around this higher touch segment. We don't, you know, we don't break out engineering teams or product teams to say, well, you guys go after the low segment and you go after the high one. Everybody is building for the…”

“That healthy segment Is it only makes up 20% of our total ARR, but it's actually two percent of our logos. So we're finding, yeah, it's I mean, the logo churn on it is under one percent a month. The net MRR churn is -2.3%. The LTV is 85 K.”

“So if you look at the AR and MRR from that high-tech group, that grew to 98% in twenty-twenty, whereas the self-serve segment grew about 7.2%.”

“What it looks like now moving into 20, 21 is like, As opposed to resetting the commissions and the quotas every month, it's more of looking at annual targets and then accelerators once they surpass the sort of baseline target for the year. So essentially every…”

“We had raised the first time we had raised the round. We kind of did the classic mistake where you know, you go and hire a VP of sales with big company experience. They go and hire, you know, 10, 20 reps very quickly. Without much of our go to market or our po…”

“So we ended the year at 564,000 in MRR USD. So we saw a 20% growth in, in 2020.”

“CBGF came to the table with essentially a proposition that would enable them to be bought out a hundred percent, get, get out completely and put put about Geez, I almost forget now, three million on the balance sheet.”

“I think for us, we feel like VC money will change a bit of the culture. It has to. So, where we're profitable, and we're still growing, I think we want to just keep, keep doing it organically for now, and not try to jump on the VC train.”

“And this year it'll be like 1.5 million.”

“Last year's revenue was about 551,000 dollars.”

“Churn right now, I mean, net MRR churn is just about two percent. Customer churn is under five, so it's about 4.5%.”

“The lifetime value on average is about a thousand dollars and obviously that changes, you know, based on what tier you're on. So that's why we have salespeople following up with like the hundred dollar, 250 dollar a month plans because the lifetime value there…”

“We only really spend, I mean, I say only, maybe that's a lot for some people, but we spend about 10,000 a month on, on paid marketing and put a lot more work into the organic stuff.”

“When we look at how many people are signing up for trials, we're getting about between a hundred and a 150 new signups a day. We tend to close about two or 300 of those.”

“That's actually a bit of an SEO hack too. That really helped us in the early days because people would search like BidSketch alternative or, you know you know, basically just people are searching for comparisons and we were the only ones who were writing pages…”

“Panda doc is a kind of a general purpose document management system. They do signatures and you can, you know, have contracts and that kind of thing. But for us, we were kind of like laser focused on mainly the digital agency space and giving them the design t…”

“We were under one K MRR for quite a long time. How long? From about April 2013, we didn't really hit it until about September of 20 14, was when we started to see, you know, everything increase.”

“Oh yeah. We're close to one a 150 K MRR.”

“We're getting close to about 3200.”

“The average customer pays about 40, 50 dollars a month, but we have prices ranging from 25 dollars a month all the way up to about 250 dollars a month.”