# From $0 to $10M ARR: The Tactics We Used to Scale Teachable – Ankur Nagpal – MicroConf Growth 2018

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0UNKsFmT0g
Duration: 41 min
Language: English
Words: 7772
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/i0UNKsFmT0g

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[0:00] [Music] [Applause] [Music] sup guys are y'all doing it are you ready to talk real nerdy about some SAS analytics hey can I hear an mor mor alright let's do this so the teachable journey from zero to ten million dollars in annual recurring revenue so have you guys ever seen this graphic maybe first came up when hacker news or something but it talks about the startup cycle being super wavy you have the peak a peak of exuberance the slope of reality and all of that but for those of you who have a SAS business reality is sadly a lot more boring this was our graph it was super super slow if you

[0:55] look at it at the end of the first year we were in business one year and we had a total of $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue thankfully it got a lot faster a lot better but today I want to do two things I want to start by outlining our journey and giving you a snapshot of what it took for us to get there we turned four on Friday or Saturday so basically it's taking us four years I'm going to break down what we did and while I'll share some tactics I want to primarily share the inner workings of how we ran our growth team and our

[1:28] growth process because that's something we only started doing after year one and it made such a difference that now when I work with any early-stage company it's something at try and reinforced as much as possible so let's start with a snapshot right our four year journey here won $10,000 in MRRR but your two onwards things started picking up we added a hundred fifty thousand a year to net mr2 89 year three 387 year for your five who knows we'll see where it where things go and this is what our company looks like right now at ten million dollars in recurring revenue so we don't make a lot of money of every pay paying

[2:05] customer we average $67 a paying customer a month which means it took us 12,000 paying customers to hit this milestone we were able to do it with a team of 64 full-time everyone is based in New York City we're all working on the same office the way it breaks down is we have foreign product 15 in engineering 16 in marketing 21 in customer operations which is customer care support community team that serves our customers and 7 in gentleman administrative which is finance recruiting and that to place me somewhere so I'm in there somewhere but that's what it took 64 people for us to get there and when we got there this was

[2:45] 70 percent of our total revenue recurring revenue is only a part of our revenue we also make a little bit when people sell courses through our platforms we monetize transaction fees and credit card fees and a little bit on the back end from stripe paying us back so our total revenue lemonade is about 14 million 10 million is a RR and you know while the snapshot is interesting what I really want to spend time doing now is telling you how we architected growth on the back end and the whole thing started at our year 1 mark when we had $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue and we hired a new who then became a

[3:22] head of growth and a lot of this model built was something he instituted wanted to give him a shout out versus I know a lot of people come here and take credit for other people to work he built this model and the reasons behind this model that we created that I'm going to share with you in a second was one we decided you know a year had passed it was about time we made growth our core company value we felt good that we had product market fit we felt good about a lot of things but growth was never something we were conscious about we just thought we'd build a good

[3:55] product serve our customers really well do like write blog posts do like cute marketing things and if we grow great if we don't you know we'll girl kind of for the rape he wanted to but that change when he brought on this model with this model we decided to start by setting a monthly growth target every single month and then work backwards and figure out how to do it the other goal behind this model is we wanted to leave as little to chance as possible of course there's risk you're not going to hit it where we wanted to try and account where every single dollar of revenue was

[4:30] going to come from and trust me a lot of times we got it completely wrong but we still had an assumption that we thought this was going to do this and it did that so we could work backwards of it and the third thing we did and at the time it seemed obvious but I reckon a lot of companies I realized they don't do it quite as much is we were very ok strong-arming or growth we were very ok doing things that seemed kind of dumb because they were not repeatable and they'd only help us hit next month's growth but we applied that systemically month over month over month so there's

[5:01] the motivations behind this model I'll walk you through how it worked this is actually not a simplified version of the model this is the whole model it's really really simple but it would start by ok I'll walk you an example of what the number said in August 2015 this was I want to say about 15 to 16 months into starting the company or end of July mr r was $25,000 a month one month at the time we wanted to grow 30% monthly which makes me very nostalgic we can't go anywhere near those rates at this point we 3% last month but you know back in the day

[5:37] 30% month-on-month revenue growth was our value and then it was the case of plugging in really really simple math to figure out what that meant so you know we added up starting mr we found what the NMR r was at the time we had disgustingly high revenue churned it was 12% we subtracted that out and kind of running the simple calculation we simplified all our marketing / growth activities of the month - one simple thing like all of marketing all of growth basically distilled down to how can we find ten thousand eight hundred and forty three dollars in order to have a successful August and we did this

[6:19] every single month you know two weeks before the start of the month we knew what was the number of we needed the hit of new monthly recurring revenue in order to consider the month successful right like every this that simplicity alone you know gave us a very very clarifying lens when we sat down at the growths team when we sat down as a marketing team when we sat down as a company in terms of what we needed to do okay cool good start right now where does this come from we then try to estimate where we stood if we did nothing extra so at the time and again

[6:57] these are like the assumptions but there's a lot of noise in this data because we're a small business at the time then we were doing about $100 a day in organic upgrades roughly again very spiky so we could expect while the 31 days in August so 3,100 NMR are from the organic upgrades we also ran workshops to our audience every single Thursday at the time were based on when you signed up you got an invite to watch a webinar got a demo of the product we made you some kind of one-time offer to buy the software then and we gave you extra training all of that and that pretty

[7:31] reliably you know got us a thousand dollars of so NMR every month and at the time I remember we had an Enterprise sale and we had an enterprise plan at the time it was $1,000 we had an enterprise sale were reasonably sure of closing so these line items will look different for your business but I encourage you to you know kind of plot this out if I do nothing today what do you think next month's revenue growth will look like and based on this invariably you always ended up with a number that was no annual we wanted in this case was eight thousand dollars and then the next step is okay there's

[8:08] twenty eight hundred dollars we need to find and every month for we did this for about two and a half years we had a revenue number we had to find and by the end it got disgusting but again we had to find a hundred thousand it was really hard the hub $2,800 had to be found and again this stuff seems simple but literally every one of the cool things we did on growth came out of us sitting in a room with the necessity of trying to hit this number we would look at this number and that's when we'd be like well can we do this wait no that's done

[8:39] that's not gonna do anything but this number was the necessity that drove all of our growth and marketing invention and based on how this number grew us our strategies have to change but early on the number was small enough that we could do really really easy you know not scalable things to hit it but the repeated application of this created a really really nice trendline so we'll walk you through some examples of you know what the revenue to hit number was and how that inform tactics but using this is a framework for informing tactics we found to be so much more useful than flying completely blind and

[9:17] just you know doing stuff and hoping so in this case in August for instance I'll talk about in a second what we did is let's add in a few influence or promotions where instead of just doing workshops to our list we'll partner with someone like a Pat Flynn or a Noah Kagan or someone that's influential in the the common online entrepreneurs space we do a joint presentation with them we tell people how they could create courses to add a passive income stream or whatever and we estimated we could do three of throws in August and account for a thousand dollars in new mr are from each

[9:50] of them so either way at the end of every month we basically added Lion line items that were guesses but it was good enough that we felt comfortable that we theoretically can hit our growth numbers we missed it probably half the time but we still went into the month having a shot in hell of actually hitting these numbers so again all our new channels all our strategies all our tactics were driven by the necessity of having to hit these numbers so I'll walk you through like real examples what happened at every stage early on the numbers were small there was you know $500 to $1,000 a month at that point like that was me

[10:30] that was my job I could tweet it at people I would like cold email everyone I you know asked people for recommendations as a sales person I could do enough one-on-one direct sales even at a $99 price point to make up 500 to a thousand dollars of revenue pretty reliably and again like all of these things you value all in these phases for months and then it's a whole new phase phase to 1,000 to 2,000 dollars a month in revenue that is when we realized one on one are not going to work anymore can we do one on many sales and that's what led to the creation of our at the time not

[11:06] weekly workshop we created a workshop maybe once a month sometimes twice a month driven again by the necessity of the numbers we needed to hit where we invited our entire audience to come watch a demo we show them features we you know sometimes featured our customers we got them excited about the idea of creating courses and then had a sales pitch at the end so now instead of me selling one person at a time I'm selling five people at a time seven people at a time and this made up the difference again you know for a little bit phase three now we need three to five thousand dollars a month that's

[11:38] when we decided ok how do we take this like ad hoc activity and a lot of times what we found is the next level up in growth is taking some kind of ad hoc activity you're doing as a one-off and making it systemic so for us it was taking our one-off ad hoc webinar like coming at it from marketing automation angle creating a funnel based on when people signed up they got invited to different webinars hosting it on Thursday at 2 p.m. every single week which then created a very very reliable spike on Thursdays at 3:15 p.m. every week that we could then start modeling out and and just monitoring the health

[12:16] of that funnel - we could always track how many webinar registrants we're tracking for and if it's looking like we're not going to hit our numbers we can then try and find ways of driving more traffic to the registration page so for instance you know it'd be week three of the month we're like we're not tracking where we need to be how about we you know how about we instead try add homepage exit intent pop-up that invites people to the webinar see if we can spike the number of webinar registrations to make the math work out and again these tactics are I mean these are not new tactics everyone that's the

[12:48] same thing I think what helped us was just how systemic we were about this and how our mindset was you know let's be growth minded let us look at the numbers and was accordingly adjust our strategies to make sure we're always ahead of the curve so phase four that's when we decided joint ventures and partnerships became kind of the next part of our playbook because we hit a wall where we could not drive enough webinar registrants even to our weekly Thursday webinars that we had to bring in outside partners and run bigger promotions with them these are the things that worked there's a lot of things in between that never worked like

[13:25] were like okay it's everything webinar once a week what if you did it twice a week we found that to be net negative but at every stage the necessity of having to discover this revenue was the motivation was the fuel behind all of our big growth innovations and all of our big growth strategies and it's something encouraged everyone who has a SAS business to do by being really really growth minded and looking at the math of what you need it to accomplish so this helped us find some of our coolest channels some of the channels that I think you know other companies have not done quite as much things that

[14:04] I think are unique to us I'm gonna share a couple of those but just to kind of you know be like all that glitters isn't gold like you're basically literally the highlight reel there were a lot of really ideas that never work this is the highlight reel this is the good stuff this is all the things that actually worked we had a lot of failures on route I remember when we tried pitching customers with the pre-design website where we basically at the time we didn't think of it that way but we just stole all their content put it on teachable made it look really nice and I

[14:34] remember we pitched Seth Godin on this where we kind of stole his material from his iTunes podcast stole a lot of high-resolution images of him and sent him a really nice landing page being like hey Seth how nice would it be to be on teachable and got an email back saying his team sent us a takedown notice for egregiously pirating and impersonating so all that all this stuff doesn't work I also tried writing a bot as an engineer and let me try writing a Bop that's going to that's gonna scrape you to me find all the courses on udemy get the course ID find social profiles of people teaching on udemy use

[15:14] some super shady API to cross link it with an email address and send an invite for my personal Gmail to use us and what this bot did is this bot did the right thing it did it correctly but the first person that created a course on udemy turns out was the founder of you to me so it's sent the founder of for you to me an email saying hey why don't you try moving your udemy course silicon fedora at the time thankfully Gurgaon who's the founder was about as nice as you could be but we had a lot of harebrained ideas to like try and you know hit these

[15:49] growth targets but in the process we found some really good stuff we ended up inviting so at one point and at this point everyone does this but about two and a half years ago we hit a point where we had to start adding tens of thousands of new monthly recurring revenue on certain months just to make our goal to add up and that's when we decided instead of there was not enough time to do enough joint venture webinars or whatever to make the whole thing work so we thought why not invite like seven to nine really smart people host a week-long online event give them all the

[16:29] platform right make sure the content is really high-quality almost creating an online conference but not only would we promote it we'd have all seven to nine people promoting the same thing at the same time and now two and a half years later everyone does it at the time as a software company no one was trying this and at the end of this event we would basically tell people if they bought a year of teachable all seventy nine people speaking in this event would give you some premium piece of content it was an insanely good offer it was something that the novelty factor was really high at the time but this entire strategy we

[17:03] didn't know what a summit was the time this entire strategy was developed just because the numbers we have to hit for starting to look stupid and we had to do something dramatic to give this whole thing a shot in hell and we did this we had our first summit you know two and a half years ago and the very first time we did it we acquired $25,000 in new monthly recurring revenue from effectively this new kind of promote that you know we had no idea would even work or not eventually these summits scaled and at this point we're actually not going to do them and I can talk

[17:35] about that later because it's become super scammy and oil industry is terrible but eventually this could drive up to fifty thousand dollars in new mr are every time you held one of these events moreover people were paying annually so we're generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash during these events by the end we're getting up to forty thousand people to sign up for them and even the people that didn't buy it created a lot of goodwill and this is one of the big pivot points that made this whole business work and the only reason that the only reason we found this was driven again by the necessity

[18:13] of you know man we have stupid high numbers to hit how in the world are we gonna be able to do that so this is an example of something we found purely based on the growth model who are operating with another example we change the price of our basic plan which is our starter plan from twenty nine dollars to thirty nine dollars since we'd made the plan much stronger normally when you do that in SAS your average LTVs and stuff will slowly trend up over time because initially obviously we grandfathered everyone in so it's not like we're gonna produce a spike that was going to help us hit this month's

[18:51] growth targets based on this pricing change but again back to the model we had to add a lot of revenue that month so we started spending a bunch of time being like how can we use this price increase which will help us in the long term how can we use it to drive short-term revenue so we can hit this month's goal and what we did at the time which I think we're gonna do again because there's positives and negatives but I think the positives outweigh the negatives is we gave we told people about the price increase but we gave them one full week to get it to the old

[19:23] price and told them if they got it to the old price they'd be able to stay on it forever until they downgrade if they turn they have to come back at the new price but just by doing that we you know we got the double benefit of eventually higher LTVs because the basic at a higher level but it drove us that drove us a lot of brand-new customers that wanted to that had the form of like I'm gonna miss out on the $29 price and I can keep it the rest time and again that necessity of man we have these growth goals to hit we got to do

[19:56] something help drive over 20,000 dollars in new mr are for the duration of this campaign so again some of these tactics may apply to you some of these tactics may not apply to you but I think this overall framework when applied at your business will lead to better decisions so yeah the takeaway this necessity led to some of the discovery of our best growth strategies the corollary to that is it also helped us avoid projects that sounded great in theory but when we kind of ran a simple sanity check of okay how much how do you think this fits in to this month's marketing activities or

[20:33] whatever we ended up discarding and that's a somewhat controversial opinion I know Patrick yesterday from stripe was talking about how he was comfortable doing activities that don't have a clearly defined ROI for the first three years of our business that's not us that might that is us today because now we're at a point where things are not quite as existential we can have fun at the time things will existential at the time you know we worried either gonna make it or not and we didn't have time for things with an undefined ROI so this framework also you know how to sanity check a lot of stuff and probably helped us avoid

[21:08] things that would have been really fun but not driven a lot of growth at the same time internally it there were certain at certain points you're looking at yourself being like man this whole thing is a house of cards that's gonna come tumbling down any given month because we did a lot of things that are one-off on systemic non-repeatable but by virtue of somehow managing to pull it together for 24 months from the outside it looks systemic it looked repeatable and at the end of the day people look at your overall growth and look at your overall curve they don't know that the only reason you had August growth goals

[21:47] is because you lied to Pat for saying he'd be at a conference and when he said he was there you flew there and you signed him up they don't know that they just look at the graph and it works and this growth was so important for everything it built it built momentum and morale internally I think we hired amazing people and I think we retained pretty much all the amazing people in a way that I'd love to say they've they just loved us and what about in any ways but the growth helped everyone likes the idea of you know being a part of a winning team and growth is what gives

[22:19] people the idea of being on a winning team again it helped us raise capital and frankly really really really good terms and the reason why is our investors again they just looked at the growth numbers they didn't look at how it was happening they didn't look at what where it was coming from they thought we're business with traction so you know we raised money and finally growth to gets other growth the bigger you get the more customers you have the more the leverage in your product the more people talk about you the more you have a mini brand so this kind of you know repeated application of continually

[22:51] like striving hit monthly goals helped us achieve all of this and the part I like the most is it took a lot of the risk and uncertainty out of the equation again we missed these goals and targets half the time but we always knew exactly why we came out for instance if that happened we know the reason we missed is you know organic upgrades did what we thought we did the what weekly webinars a little bit better but we did not close the enterprise sale and the joint venture webinars turned out to be a miss and then we can look at our model revise it and with time theoretically do better

[23:27] at this cool so this is part one and part one is I would say the journey that we had from your two to about a year three but the mistake we made along the way and I'll talk about in a second is we made the mistake thinking this would work forever and spoil it at about $500,000 and mor this whole thing comes crashing down it comes completely crashing out because you get left with numbers like this like separating aside like yeah like you know you it's toughest out like in a year from now we're gonna try and find one hundred to two hundred thousand dollars in revenue

[24:05] and all of the one-off stuff like yes I think we're really good and we were able to find one-off activities and events that produced anywhere from you know up to $50,000 swings but at that scale we need a hundred thousand dollars a month even a fifty thousand dollar summit is was not enough to really hit the mark if your marketing team is gonna take two and a half months to put together a summit that hits less than half of what you need in a given month this model of kind of optimizing towards the local maximum starts breaking down and that's a mistake we made and it's

[24:40] one of the reasons though it's in the last six months we've probably not executed as well as we could have and it's a hole we're trying to dig ourselves out of now and I'm gonna share you know what if how I think we're gonna do it but as grateful as we are to this strongarm method of doing it and I recommend everyone does it to a certain point there will come a point for us it was about five hundred thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue different point for everyone where it again goes back to the basics it goes back to really just two things matter at that

[25:09] stage which is how good your product is and how much better can you make your product and how well are you serving your customers and I know people say this is important at every stage but had we not done any if the strongarm stuff we wouldn't be where we are today but at this point the advantages when we start doing this we have a lot of paying customers so making our product better means the viral coefficient is much greater because we right now instead of serving 80 customers better we're serving 10,000 customers better and people find out much faster and we truly start unlocking leverage where if we start making you

[25:45] know 5% more revenue from every individual customer that's very very meaningful in a way we're in early days getting more customers would be meaningful so right now right now we're trying to basically come up with a new growth framework we're in between this but we've decided any new growth strategy we propose has to move one of these three metrics it has to either help us add more customers per day it has to or it can decrease our churn rate or increase our average revenue per customer and the reason for these three metrics is these three metrics scale obviously at a much much greater rate where it's no longer a

[26:25] factor of how big you are they can scale at 10 million mr so our focus now is repeatable growth squared and you know strong-arming growth and it's all about leverage I made the point before about how now you have more customers so when you have more customers the leverage and everything you do is greater but the other thing that's at least true for us and maybe true for you is we understand our business a hell of a lot better now we're slowing us in now and I think the chances of us knowing what to do here now are far greater than two years ago what we're still learning so much about

[27:00] what we were doing so now walk you through some of the growth strategies that have worked in this realm really quickly on some of this stuff is it's not going to be like a tactical Wow because it's kind of very core but just reiterating you know how it all comes back down to product and customers and the things that have worked for us so once you've done the last year is we've over hired for customer care we basically were at a point where we grew really fast we had only three people actually answering tickets supporting close to 5,000 people at the time and things were just not not good and we

[27:39] made a very conscious decision let's actually you know we our assumption with our churn rate is positively correlated with how well we're serving customers our brand depends on how well we're serving customers we are not Google we need customer care our product is not so good that you know people can just use it and not have to talk to people so we made the very conscious decision let us actually over hire for customer again let us take the risk that we have too many people sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for an email to come in and that move you know that move has gone on to valid itself tremendously

[28:12] in the last year we were able we used to take almost eight hours to get back to customers we're now taking under an hour our customer satisfaction see SAP was as low as 85 now it's you know again in the low to mid 90s and moreover you know just by being able to do more things like invest in community and proactively talk to customers we think this reduced our churn again you know there's no way of knowing a causative versus the correlative relationship but we believe this helped us lower churn which in turn has changed the rate at which we grow it's a really crazy map that actually did and also I'm

[28:50] Josh this on bear metrics revenue calculator you can try this later the difference between 5% and 6% month-on-month churned at $500,000 in mr are looking at the amount of near Marable were adding compounded out over two years at two years that's a difference of 1.5 and 1.6 million dollars in ARR that tastes for a lot of people there's only 5% of 6% churn on a large base compounded it is not play on the calculator you'll learn some crazy things about what you can and can't afford to spend money on if you believe it will have a meaningful impact on your journal cool second strategy it worked

[29:27] we materially improve our check out product which got more for existing customers to actually use the check out part of our product and since we monetize check out we make a little bit of money on the back end we were able to meaningfully increase revenue per customer but literally just being like okay fine what parts for a product drive revenue what parts of our product you know could be used by more people do you already have we don't need to find more people just of the people we have how can we drive revenue and if you have any parts of your product that are revenue generating think about whether it makes

[29:59] sense to reinvest in them we basically moved from a kind of ugly to pay check out to a I think pretty beautiful one-page check out that has everything on the same page social proof and all of that and over a period of a couple of months after launching it we went from 250,000 dollars a day in core sales to $400,000 a day in court sales and since we make a percentage of that that's not free money we earned it but like we earned it in a way the systemic that's repeatable and that doesn't entail continually needing to acquire new customers to keep hitting revenue growth numbers the third

[30:37] strategy that we employed and I know there's been a rhetoric that everyone has if I charge more money to our core money this is similar but not quite is with three plans we had a 29 then $39 plan which their basic plan we had a professional plan at $99 and we had a high-volume plan at 299 dollars and for a long time our basic plan was the most popular plan we had but we made a strategic effort to make the 99 dollar plan let the kind of know the no-brainer one the one that's in the middle the one that you're just getting so much better value we dropped all transaction fees at

[31:15] $99 and we had 5% rands actually to $99 but more than that like that's the one with all the features the two $99 plan in a lot of ways became the plan that's there for positioning we took all the best stuff there put in the 99 bucks and just made that our de facto plan and we were able to successfully make that the plan of choice where more people picked that than the other one and I wrap average revenue per paying customer we implemented this jump from $40 a customer to over $60 a customer today at 67 this effect has continued to compound over time but just by doing that we were

[31:50] able to meaningfully change our revenue per customer in a very very dramatic way where you know again we don't have to acquire more customers or conversion rates did not change at all and in fact this effect was so significant if you were to go back to the graph I showed you up front you can tell when we made the pricing change because that slope the slope at which we grew changed based on when we made that change so you know and again just to set timelines here this was something we did well before 500,000 mro it was not something reactive and we're spending a lot of

[32:26] time now thinking about you know like when things work as well like this like we're spending a lot of time now it's thinking about what we can do of create this effect again without you know alienating customers but the that graph and I won't take a second have you like truly internalized and absorb that graph that graph is the visual representation of how effective a good pricing change can be that slope that just changes the rate at which you grow from now till forever but anyway man the story don't be us do this sooner do this sooner we spent six months after 85,000 Mr to actually go

[33:07] back to the systemic things we spent too long you know our last summit and in retrospect is something we probably should not have done and right now as the growth team as a company as a marketing team we've told our investors we're taking a couple of months off growth to rework our systems rework our processes rework on the things that we think will take us to the next level again it's a cliche but what brings you here will not necessarily take you to the next level and that's something we're struggling with now but you know I think we're starting to come out of it and we expect may to be a first really

[33:38] good month in a while but internally here's how we're doing it we now divide growth through the two categories strong on growth which is the summits the campaign's all the marketing one-off stuff and evergreen growth and evergreen growth has to move one of these three metrics and again this model works for us because paid is not a huge driver if you have AB large enough market size that you can reliably drive new leads through paid you have a whole different playbook available to you we did not so if paid is not a huge driver you really need to grow your organic customers added per day or reduce your turn rate

[34:13] or increase average revenue per customer and we started measuring internally a scalability ratio every month which is because again our transition is not a it's not a complete transition there's a lot of stuff we used to do that still works but we're trying to look at a ratio of what is the revenue acquired from evergreen methods to strong-arm methods and all hybrid goal every month is to try and grow this ratio as well with time when this work the idea it's brand new ask me next year we'll see how this whole this whole thing comes but you know - two quick takeaways on a reiterate and then you know that I'm

[34:48] done but again first day going to the Internet is early on strong on the out of here droves you can take this probably further than you think 500,000 mr is still a really really big number I see a lot of people doing this right but starting to stop do it too soon like you can probably continue to be very growth oriented do things that seem unsustainable but just do them every single month till they're a habit and doing that for a while is you know something I strongly urge you all to do and part two is eventually you can still do that but the thing we wish we did is

[35:24] we wish we started measuring a scalability ratio or some kind of analog of how much was strong-arming up front so you can see that trending with time and accordingly start taking pre-emptive pre-emptive actions cool thanks guys that's all I have and I can take some questions [Applause] all right we have time for a couple of questions hey so this seems to kind of go against the advice of just focusing in on one thing and really doing that well so how do you how do you sort of reconcile that where it seems like you guys are being incredibly kind of innovative and imaginative and how you're going about going about finding

[36:16] that revenue but how do you balance that against just like focusing in on one thing cuz it's one thing that we work with that's a question I think the reality is we never found one thing that worked well enough to keep our growth going in an ideal world and that's why I wish we figured out paid acquisition or I wish we both the sale to engine that worked which are both things we never accomplished because those things scaled I wish we have the luxury of doing that honestly it's much better if your channel is large enough that you can continue to do that and keep writing

[36:45] that our goals just reach the point where there's no one channel large enough where we could continue to focus on that to still keep hitting the numbers we wanted to hit so for us it was purely driven out of necessity I think it's if you can make paid acquisition if you can make something like that work or if you can create kind of a Content engine that's again larger market size producing enough leads and you can keep doing that and still keep growing that that's better that's just a luxury that we sadly did not have but I do think like the risk we're trying a lot of things is you lose focus and I

[37:22] still think we were aided by the fact that we still had this model to focus on we still we're focusing on one thing in terms of how do we hit this model even if the resulting activities were sometimes scattered yeah you did a great job explaining this sense of like sorry right here yeah did a great job explaining the sense of like scale with the revenue with you when we went through each of the phases like phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 as you are strong are mainly growth go up but can you give a sense of how many people you had dedicate or how many resource you had

[37:53] dedicated to the problem at each of those phases like when it was just the target was a thousand versus the target was five thousand dollars per month yeah absolutely I feel it's a great question um so right now all of this stuff and I can put it up and I wrote the market theme is set up right now this lives within the growth and marketing team it's a team I ran personally for a while and then you know the last two years Andras run it and this team is very cross-functional it includes includes a Content team includes paid acquisition we even have a small engineering and

[38:23] design team embedded within the marketing team so a lot of these experiments if were creating summit landing pages and all of this stuff can live within the team and at every stage you know we're 16 now my guess is through most of that stage one we were almost never smaller than four we started off with four people advantage of being venture backed and through most of the period described we were anywhere between four to eight people slowly trending upwards now we have you know sixteen but yeah that's how many and it was always cross-functional so we had we had content we had acquisition we had you know traditional marketing we had

[38:58] all of that stuff living within the same kind of team cool we have time for one more question thanks for coming to talk so we have a product and we are thinking about pursuing more aggressive growth strategies because they don't really do anything honestly but we're like alright we should like optimize our onboarding and try to like get our products so it's not leaking out turn on the other end and really nail that down and and then we're like alright we're gonna do that and then we're going to pursue growth and I think I might know where your answer is but like yeah I just thought emotion

[39:35] still sucks like there's so many things I look at our product I'm going oh man there's so many things and if we waited till we felt really good about everything we would have never done it like you're always going to find I mean do any wrong like you want to find some semblance of product market fit like if you have no one who continues to use your product here later focus on that but once you have some kind of product market fit like when it comes to leaky funnel stuff like our email automation like it's still leaky like there's still so many things I can look at our

[40:02] business for years in and I would just not use it as an excuse to not push on growth like I think it's really easy to feel not ready but you're never going to feel quite ready enough and again rallying the entire company or the team around these numbers I think helps bring a sense of clarity where at a certain point fixing your automation your leaky bucket is something you do because you feel the pain of how hard it is to grow without doing that thanks again al gore thanks guys [Applause]

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