Escape Velocity

Escape Velocity is “the lowest velocity which a body must have in order to escape the gravitational attraction of a particular planet or other object.“

For years, it was about launching MVPs, finding focus, product-market fit, getting to $1M ARR, then getting to 5, then 10…but it never felt like we were taking off. We were never firing on all cylinders, where every department had their game together, where our apps were exciting, where our partners could feel the excitement around us, that our brand in the Salesforce ecosystem was even recognizable…until now.

I can’t tell you when it happened as there wasn’t a singular moment, but over the past few months, partners are trusting us with their bigger customers, bigger customers are seeing the value of our product suite (I think?), the scale we’re supporting is increasing out of proportion from a historically linear scale, and it’s all actually working.

It wasn’t too long ago that paying $2,000 a month for a small WeWork space in NYC was a stretch, to jump forward to where we’re at now.

Let’s look at the data to see what happened…

The graph doesn’t quite show it but a few big changes occurred.

1. We started in August 2015. The data and graph looked so horribly small, I left them out. But it took us three years to get to $300K ARR, around the end of 2018.
2. August 2019: We hired Cesar Devoto who got us into shape, with Joe St Germain. They introduced an actual sales process. Turns out I’m only okay at sales. People who can sell really are great at it.
3. June 2021: Stuart Croft got our act together, across all Revenue facets. He built a Marketing team with a purpose and vision, a Rev Ops team, a BD team, a Sales team, and an Alliances team. But this didn’t change things overnight for us, it started happening four months later with consistent, quarter over quarter growth. The same thing happened with our outbound sales, it took us nine months for it all to start working.

Some things just take time.

Our Average ARR per Customer continues to climb as larger customers put their faith in us. Our pricing has gone up a bit from a few years ago but nothing drastic, it’s just a natural build of larger deployments.?

There are outliers in both directions with our wide range of organization sizes.

The early jump from 61 to 97 was when our Events app started taking off after we figured out how to sell it. It also jumped around 150 customers when I bought Textey and PCIFY, but the graph smoothed it out as we weaved in their data. That was about 16 months ago.

Our Burn Multiple spiked then came back down as we went through a high staff growth period via debt from Capchase, Level Equity, and RF Partners, as well as buying two companies. Break-even by the end of the year is coming rapidly.

Our Gross Margin took a nosedive from investing in our go-to-market and staffing up the team far ahead of revenue. This will start climbing dramatically now, with the goal of hitting 75% by the end of 2023.

We aim to be break-even at $20M ARR later this year. Note the steep downward curve (you can’t miss it) as we took on debt to accelerate hiring. This is what debt is supposed to be used for and is expected.

We changed our product focus a few years back to decrease go-to-market and development focuses down to a core two, Payments and Events. This was likely the main reason for us to start to build revenue. Turns out, customers don’t pay much for time-consuming integrations or a Donations app!

Hope this was interesting. If you'd like to see any more metrics from our company across any department, let me know! [email protected]

-Chris