Jeff Cotton

So the point about I was the CFO, I was the chief legal person, I was the marketing, I was everything pretty much except for product and engineering to get the product where we ultimately needed it so that we could grow it again.

The other thing is with a company that had raised $28 million, got to $5 million in ARR, and had basically gone flat, we were not in a position to go rebuild a significant demand chain engine.

And once again, you've heard me talk about this word a lot.

So one of the other things I felt was really critical is we needed an extremely efficient CAC model, an extremely efficient revenue generation model.

And so we pivoted the go-to-market 100% towards a channel partner-based model, which in our business made a lot of sense.

Because we had a lot of natural partnerships because we were an integration platform built into our ecosystem.

All right.

This was another metric that I personally started to obsess about, which is burn as a percentage of revenue.

As we pointed out here, the sort of dashed line is where you're at negative 100 percent, meaning you are you are burning your entire revenue.

And then your entire revenue again.

So two extra revenue is how much you're burning a month.

And as you can see, once again, before I joined, we were well above that.

And we ultimately sort of got it into this range where we were sort of break even.

Right.

Most startups are burning cash.

Right.

That's not a bad thing necessarily.

But it is if you don't have all of these reliable demand generation engines, et cetera, so that you're getting your revenue.

ultimately where you want to go so this to me was a really key metric to understand and obsess about and get it as close to zero as you can even though you're a startup

And what helped us turn that around was getting deal sizes up.