Secrets for Scaling

For this episode, we spoke with Marc Biles, Founder and CEO of Ratio. Ratio is a software company dedicated to inventing smart products that help make people’s lives better and easier. They’ve made four customer-facing products: an AI tool, an underwear subscription club, a financial price comparison website, and the software that powers the comparison for other financial websites. A quick company overview:

- Founder experience: 13.5 years

- Team size: 19 team members

- Traction: 18 million consumers matched with a product in one year; inclusive and estimated revenue $11.4M for this fiscal year with approx. 60% growth YoY.

- Company founded: March 2011. Started trading in May 2013 (4 years old)

Ratio certainly has an interesting scaling story with a team spread across such a diverse set of products. In the interview, Marc shares how they stay focused, how their culture has evolved for the better, how he aligns the team around the company’s goals, and more.

In this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we chatted with Peter Reinhardt, Co-Founder and CEO of Segment. Segment is a SaaS company helping thousands of companies collect and leverage their customer data. Here’s a quick company overview:

- Founder experience: 6 years

- Team size: 130 team members

- Traction: 4,000 customers

- Stage: Series B

- Company founded: 2012 (5 years old)

Having dropped out of college his junior year to start Segment, then scaling the company to 130 team members in five years, Peter has learned several tough lessons in his founder’s journey. He candidly shares his lessons in management, goal-setting, and values in the episode!

For this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we talked with Mark Chung, Co-Founder and CEO of Verdigris. Verdigris is an IoT (internet of things) company that has developed a sensor network helping commercial buildings manage their electrical equipment.

Their mission is to sustain and enrich human life through responsive energy intelligence. Their focus is on using information extracted from smart buildings to create a more intelligent approach to how we consume energy.

Here’s a quick company overview:

- Founder experience: 5 years

- Team size: 24 people

- Traction: 50 customers (from individual hotels to multinational corporations)

- Company founded: Nov. 2011 (5 years old)

- Business model: SaaS and hardware subscription

Verdigris takes a unique approach to their company structure. They have six functional teams, each with an elected representative who work together to make decisions for the company. They’ve also learned when to focus on building a culture of innovation vs. an operational culture. Learn more in the full episode!

For this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we spoke with Lawrence Hester, Cofounder and CEO of FareHarbor, an online booking platform for tours and activities.

Here’s a quick company overview:

- Founder experience: 4 years

- Team size: 135+ team members

- Customers / Revenue: 3,500+ clients and $3 billion in total ticket sales in 2017, $50MM+ in revenue

- Company founded: 2013 (4 years old)

It’s safe to say that FareHarbor has seen considerable success over the past four years, but it hasn’t always been easy. The FareHarbor team has put in the hours and gone above and beyond to get the company where it is today. This speaks volumes for the culture they’ve built from day one, which has been recognized by Huffington Post, Entrepreneur Magazine, and more. Hear how they’ve built the business and scaled their culture in the full episode!

For this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we spoke with Sharon Savariego, Co-Founder and CEO of Mobilize - a software enabling companies to organize and communicate with their external network. Founded in 2014, Mobilize is now a team of 30 with over 150 customers and a Series A under its belt. To get there, they’ve taken a thoughtful and unique approach to finding their first customers and growing their team. The result is a company focused on sustainable momentum. Learn more about their story and tactics in the full episode!

For this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we chatted with Perry Oostdam, Co-Founder and CEO of Recruitee - a SaaS product making it easier to hire a team and grow your business. Founded in August 2015, Recruitee now has over 2,000 SME customers using the software with a team of 15 and growing.

Perry met his co-founder Paul on a site specifically for finding co-founders. They started out with a gaming company called GeoRun but they found themselves more interested in their side project, which was a better fit for their team’s passions and skills. Hear their full story!

In this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we talked with Nick Franklin, Founder and CEO of ChartMogul, a product offering SaaS and subscription reporting, analytics, and metrics. Founded in 2014, ChartMogul now has a team of 21 people with 900 customers and six-figures in monthly recurring revenue.

Like so many of the most-loved companies, ChartMogul was built to solve a problem. Hear their full story and lessons learned on Nick’s solo-founder growth journey in the full episode.

Founded in 2012, Price Intelligently now has 30 employees and has consistently doubled or more than doubled revenue each year, reaching over $5 million in 2016. They found success by building empathy for their customers and their team through collecting qualitative and quantitative data. Learn about their growth journey, insights into effective pricing strategies for SaaS businesses, how to hire, and more in this episode of Secrets for Scaling!

For this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we spoke with John O’Nolan, the founder of Ghost. Ghost is a fully open source, hackable platform for building and running an online publication. The Ghost story is unique to most S4S episodes in that it’s not backed by venture capital, or even bootstrapped. Ghost is a nonprofit organization, which launched from a Kickstarter campaign that raised over £200,000 (8x its goal of £25k) in 2013.

Today, they see $720,000 ARR (annual recurring revenue) for their managed hosted service with 10 full-time employees, in addition to hundreds of part-time open-source contributors and volunteers. They grew from 10 million to 100 million requests for people reading online publications on the Ghost platform in two years, indicating success for their customers as well.

For this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we spoke with Larry Kim, Founder & CEO of Wordstream, the leading industry provider of search marketing management software and services. Wordstream sees a compound yearly revenue growth rate and has more than doubled revenue every year on average since 2011. They earned $30 million in revenue in 2016 alone!