Insight
Funded Founders Should Take Reasonable Salaries to Avoid Product-Harming Stress
“Because I think, especially when you raise money, you need to be reasonably comfortable. You know, you can't work on a product and hustle if you're worrying about how to pay your mortgage.”
Disclosure
Proposify Bloated to 100 Employees on Just $5M to $6M Revenue
“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.”
Insight
Mid-Market Proposal Software Buyers Prioritize Control and Management Over Aesthetics
“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…”
Disclosure
Proposify Burned $400,000 Per Month While Generating Under $10M in ARR
“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.”
Disclosure
Kyle Racki Left Departed VP Roles Unfilled, Resuming Product and Marketing
“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.”
Disclosure
Racki: Proposify prematurely hired 10 to 20 sales reps before downsizing
“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…”
Disclosure
Racki: Proposify focuses all product and engineering teams on enterprise accounts
“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…”
Opinion
Proposify Differentiates From PandaDoc by Specifically Targeting Digital Agencies
“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…”
Disclosure
Proposify Will Avoid Raising Venture Capital to Preserve Its Profitable Culture
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Proposify Revenue Declined in 2022 For First Time Since Finding PMF
“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”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Proposify Received Zero LOIs During 2022 M&A Process After Buyers Retracted
“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.”
Disclosure
Founders Took $1M Each in Secondaries During Proposify's $3M 2018 Round
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Proposify Increased Average ACV From $3K to Between $10K and $30K
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Proposify Was Nine Months From Insolvency in 2021 Before Pivoting
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Proposify Laid Off 25% of Its Workforce in January 2022
“January 22 is when I had to cut a quarter of our staff and announce that”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Proposify Reached $58,000 in Profit in 2023 After Burning Millions
“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.”
Disclosure
Proposify Lost Deals Lacking SSO Until a Developer Solved It Quickly
“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…”
Disclosure
Racki: CBGF bought out early Proposify investors and added $3M
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Racki: Proposify ended 2020 at $564k MRR with 20% growth
“So we ended the year at 564,000 in MRR USD. So we saw a 20% growth in, in 2020.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Racki: Proposify's high-touch segment grew 98% in 2020 versus 7.2% self-serve
“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%.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Racki: Proposify enterprise tier generates 20% of ARR with negative net churn
“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.”
Disclosure
Racki: Proposify operates near breakeven and preserves cash reserves
“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.”
Disclosure
Racki: Proposify aims to double ARR before considering acquisition offers
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Proposify Approaching 3,200 Paying Customers
“We're getting close to about 3200.”
