RJMetrics

“We basically were working out of my attic for the first four, almost five years of running this business.”

“So we typically see customers stick around for multiple years. If you extrapolate out our churn rate, the predicted lifespan of a customer is somewhere in the three to four year range. And that is The biggest source of churn for us, honestly, is because we sel…”

“It's not like hundreds because there is an implementation process but we try to get about 20 companies having their data connected on a per week basis and those convert into trials at a pretty high percentage.”

“It would basically be between one and two is our ARR over CAC ratio, which is that kind of SAS magic number. So, you know, if our bounds of what we get out of a customer is 10 to a hundred grand a year, you know, the all in sales process broken out within thos…”

“About twenty two million dollars we raised in total.”

“Over the course of about four years, we went from zero dollars to one million dollars in revenue. It was a slow, long grind to get there, but we were operating with a million bucks in revenue with only eight employees or so and kicking off cash profitably.”

“It's about a fifty-fifty split between inbound and outbound.”

“We've got just under 400 customers and it's a software as a service sale. So our prices you know, they tend to be you know, on an annual basis, kind of in the tens of thousands of dollars range. And, you know, we've been growing pretty pretty consistently at t…”

“These days, it's a fifty million dollar check, hundred million dollar check, you know, multi hundred million dollar leverage by us. This is not a venture capital firm that invests in startups. Or companies that have not made it to a very mature growth equity f…”

“Looker just got bought for two, 2.6 billion. And the consensus was basically like we fucked up. Yeah. They won hands down with that number.”

“This literally happened to me when we were selling RJ to Magento because we had other potential buyers and all the buyers wanted to see our full customer list before they gave us a term sheet.”

“Yeah, we didn't put any new net new capital into the business. When it got acquired, I think the team was in the thirties. And from a like magnitude standpoint, it was almost the same size that RJ metrics was when we sold it. So in 28 months, we drew stitch up…”

“That was 2008 the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, we launched that company.”

“Redshift and later Google BigQuery and companies like Snowflake innovated on this model, and basically, if you think about that data warehouse as being, like, in the middle of the stack of what RJ Metrics was, it broke our stack right in half, because No one w…”

“RJ was almost like where your data went to die. Like, we pulled data in from all these systems, and we analyzed it, but the outputs of our system didn't really go anywhere. You just kind of came to RJ and consumed what RJ created. In the modern SaaS economy, t…”

“What we really did was not die when we were too early, and be there when the market actually drifted into the window for what we had built, and just as quickly, while we were in a hiring frenzy, and while we were focusing so much on sustaining the demand that …”

“So, we get in this world where it goes from, like, too good to be true to too hard to handle, and that reminded me of, you know, twenty-twenty-one to twenty-twenty-three for most of these companies, right? Forget about raising cash. A lot of these strategies t…”

“You've got at least three companies here that raised at least a hundred million dollars to do precisely what we were doing.”

“Let's attempt to bootstrap this thing, and that's precisely what we did for the first several years of the business. We were kind of the tortoise in the tortoise of the hare story, right? Like, we had some market pool, but we kind of were early to the market, …”

“And in 20 months, we got to as many paying customers as it took us eight years to get at RJ Metrics. With almost no salespeople. It was a PLG, ecosystem-led motion.”

“We ended up needing to lay off a bunch of people in our go-to-market team Because we had an SDR team where the economics were just incredible, and it made perfect sense in 20 11 and 20 12. And in 2015, everything just went upside down and underwater. And we re…”

“We just saw our TAM get completely crushed at RJ Metrics, because on one side, all this money is pouring in to companies that are doing exactly what we are doing, which is making it really, really hard to scale in an economically efficient way, but on the othe…”

“How ultimately I think a series of decisions led to us missing out on what was probably a two to three billion dollar market opportunity.”