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Ryan Allis

Founder and CEO, SaasRise · 0 appearances on the record.

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founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@ryanallis ↗LinkedIn ↗saasrise.com ↗

Ryan Allis co-founded email marketing software provider iContact in 2003, serving as CEO until its $169 million acquisition by Vocus in 2012. He currently serves as the founder and CEO of SaasRise and authored the book Zero to One Million.

15statements → 11claims → 0claims resolved → —average certainty → —average debate potential → 2said about them ↓

7 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

11 assertions · 2 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ryan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
iContact raised $40M from JMI Equity, including $15M in secondary sales
“We went to a mid-market growth equity firm out of Baltimore called JMI Equity. Worked with Jitson Ha over there and Brad Wallison, and we raised a forty million dollar round of capital with the help of an investment bank, Allen & Company. Fifteen million of th…”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 12:13 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Everything Ryan Allis said on Top Founders that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
iContact scraped Constant Contact newsletters to acquire its first 500 customers
“We subscribed to about a 100,000 of their customers' newsletters, and then as soon as we got them, we'd send a reply back offering them half off. That got us our first 500 customers.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 5:57 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Marc Benioff offered $95M for iContact before walking away in 2009
“In 2009, Marc Benioff reached out to us and he said, I wanna buy your company. We're gonna buy, pay you ninety-five million. I said, that sounds good, let's do it. He strung us along for a few months finally ended up buying ExactTarget a few years later. Walke…”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 11:34 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Insight
Software startups rarely need more than 1x ARR in equity capital
“Unless you're building a rocket ship company, or a hardware company, or a defense manufacturing company, you don't need more than one extra ARR in, in equity capital in order to scale. And certainly not before you figure out what your unit economics are.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 4:36 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bill Gates Sr.'s law firm sent iContact a cease-and-desist in 2003
“We did the same thing with Microsoft List Builder back in 2003 when they were around, and what we got was a cease and desist letter from Bill Gates' dad's law firm.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 6:13 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Insight
Bundling shared account managers let iContact increase monthly pricing 20x
“If we just add a shared account manager, we can take the same product and sell it for 20 times the price. So instead of selling it for 50 dollars a month, we sold it for a thousand dollars a month, and you got a shared account manager and a couple extra featur…”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 14:16 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Disclosure
Ryan Allis Made About $15M Post-Tax From iContact's $169M Exit
“I ended up making about fifteen million dollars after taxes but that's good.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 17:00 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
iContact took zero outside capital until reaching $1M ARR
“We didn't take any outside capital. We lived in the office for the first year. We took no salaries for the first three years and just accrued them. And then once we got to a million, then we raised capital.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 1:55 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
iContact's $500 CAC and $1,800 LTV enabled a $40M fundraise
“That we were an annuity cash flow stream engine that was trading 500 dollars up front for 1800 dollars over three and a half years, and that math allowed us to go to the investors, raise about forty million dollars over the course of the next five years, and s…”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 4:08 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Disclosure
iContact spent $2M monthly to acquire 4,000 customers at $500 CAC
“We were spending two million dollars a month in sales and marketing by the time we got acquired. In early 2012, that 2000 dollars a month in sales and marketing was going to acquire 4000 new customers each month, about a 500 dollar customer acquisition cost, a…”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 9:39 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Supported
iContact raised $40M from JMI Equity, including $15M in secondary sales
“We went to a mid-market growth equity firm out of Baltimore called JMI Equity. Worked with Jitson Ha over there and Brad Wallison, and we raised a forty million dollar round of capital with the help of an investment bank, Allen & Company. Fifteen million of th…”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 12:13 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
iContact generated $20M ARR from 1,400 enterprise customers
“So we had 68,000 SMB customers, 1400 enterprise customers. Now, if you do the math, it's about thirty million in SMB revenue, twenty million in mid-market or enterprise revenue.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 15:16 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Supported
iContact sold to Vocus for $169M in February 2012
“And we ended up selling in February of 2012 for one hundred sixty nine million dollars to Vocus, which is now owned by Cision.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 16:37 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Supported
Vocus acquired iContact for 3.5x ARR in 2012
“We sold for three and a half times our ARR.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 17:11 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
iContact operated at $56 ARPA and 3.3% monthly churn
“We figured out that our average revenue per account, I call it ARPA instead of ARPU because, you know, multiple accounts, some accounts have multiple users, was 56 per account. 3.3% churn, which is normal for SMB.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 6:54 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?
Assertion Supported
Harvard Business School admitted Ryan Allis without an undergraduate degree
“This is me getting an MBA from Harvard Business School. They let me in without a college degree, which is pretty awesome, and ended up finishing up there.”
Ryan Allis Apr 18, 2024 ▶ 17:32 27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit?

The other half of the tape: Ryan Allis's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on Top Founders. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 1Adam Robinson 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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011201620172018201920202021202220232024episodes it came up in
000.50.511201620172018201920202021202220232024episodesmentions per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode

Played on the show (1)

Episodes where a recording of Ryan Allis was played rather than Ryan taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.

EpisodeDateOn tapeWhat it is
27 year old Founder exited for $169m at $50m ARR. How much cash did he take home at exit? Apr 18, 2024 17m aired address
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