SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1445 Enterprise Teams Use Her to Scale Employee Engagement, $3.5m ARR, $10m Raised
09 Jul 2019
Chapter 1: What is Susan Hunt Stevens' background and expertise?
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Launched WeSpire back in 2010, raised 10 million bucks to build this platform that helps with employee engagement, employee giving back to employees, bettering the world, honestly. They're currently at about 35 really enterprise customers. These are big teams, 10,000, 20, 50, 100,000. person teams using them.
They've just passed about a three point five million dollar run rate, doubling year over year from both expansion and new customer additions. Economics are healthy. One hundred twenty five percent net revenue retention annually, and that's about six percent gross revenue churn under that number. Fifty thousand bucks to acquire a hundred thousand dollar customer payback is healthy under six months.
Twenty people between Boston and other remote locations building up this bad boy. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines.
We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes.
I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Susan Hunt-Stevens. She's the founder and CEO of a company called WeSpire. She's a recognized expert in the use of social and game mechanics to drive positive behavior change. and was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015.
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Chapter 2: How does WeSpire enhance employee engagement?
So they're running this program for every employee. There's a fee for every employee. If they're running it for a subset of employees, it's based on the number of employees. So very straightforward. Very good. And I'm sure this varies a ton and I don't want to go down to every customer cohort, but on average, what's the company paying you per year, would you say?
So on average on a per employee basis, it would be about $12 per employee per year. Higher if you're a smaller company per employee, lower if you're a larger company per employee. Yeah, sorry. What I was more interested in is like generally what are the team sizes that are using? Are this like a startup or like a 10,000? Very large companies. So we've got about 35 companies.
They're almost all in the Fortune 500. They collectively have about 1.5 million employees around the world. So yeah.
um you get a sense it's it's tens of thousands and in many cases hundreds of thousands of employees yeah so just to be clear those those contracts when you're landing these accounts obviously you're not getting all 1.5 million employees immediately i don't unless you're a genius and a wizard which maybe you are but that would be a whole new model but generally speaking yeah generally speaking when you're landing these these logos first year acv i mean are we talking like 100 grand 500 grand 100 grand's fair okay so that's typically the pilot size
That's about a good way to say it. And what's that test cohort look like? How many employees is that covering typically? Around 10,000 employees. Around 10,000. Okay. Fair enough. Good. So you're able from a kind of cohort. We, you mentioned, I don't know if, can you mention somebody, can we mention the customer, the customer in Austin?
Our website, there's some customers who have been fabulous enough to provide testimonials. So it's customers like Caesars entertainment, MGM resorts, Unilever, um, you know, and, uh, Cox enterprises and others who are using us. We have lots of bigger clients who we can't reference publicly, but, um,
it's what's been really cool to see over the last five years is it really has been, there's not a sector that we haven't worked with at this point. So we have healthcare clients, we have automotive, financial services, consumer products, tech, biotech, really a wide swath. And what they have in common is that they have recognized kind of two things. One is that
Being a force for good in this world is actually really good for business. So these kinds of programs that have an environmental, a social, or a health impact also are helping them attract employees, retain employees, or helping employee performance. And then the programs themselves, like a sustainability program, has a really hard ROI in energy, waste, water, and fuel savings.
And so what they're realizing is that there's this very strong connection between
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Chapter 3: What is the revenue model of WeSpire?
What does that mean? We're doing a convertible note right now, basically, that will become part of a formal B round when we go and raise a B round. OK, so typically when I hear about this, it's typically like a bridge round to your series B. You want to buy a little more time to be able to grow into a valuation that you really want to get your series B term sheet out. Is that that right?
OK, very good. And when you say convertible note, I mean, are you doing this? Is this like venture debt or no? It's a convertible note, like a safe note. It's convertible note. It is a convertible note. OK, very good. All right. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? Good to great. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
Elon Musk. Can't help but watch. Yeah, number three. I've always loved him and I'm cheering for him. And I really, really hope that we're all driving electric cars here in the future. So I'm cheering for him. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? Salesforce. Number four, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night? 6.5, according to my Fitbit.
That's pretty good. And what's your situation? Married, single kiddos? Married, a 14-year-old, 11-year-old, and just rescued a puppy. Oh, wow. We'll call it two and a half. Responsible for that sleep number going down. That's funny. And Susan, do you mind me asking about how old you are? No problem. I am 48 years old. 48. That's great. And last question.
What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew? Oh, my goodness. I, you know, candidly, I think I wish my 20-year-old self knew that it gets better every single decade. Guys, it doesn't get worse. It doesn't get worse every decade. It only gets better.
Coming from Susan, launched WeSpire back in 2010, raised 10 million bucks to build this platform that helps with employee engagement, employee giving back to employees, bettering the world, honestly. They're currently at about 35 really enterprise customers. These are big teams, 10,000, 20, you know, 50, 100,000 person teams using them.
They've just passed about a $3.5 million run rate, doubling year over year from both expansion and new customer additions. Economics are healthy, 125% net revenue retention annually, and that's about 6% gross revenue churn under that number. 50,000 bucks to acquire a $100,000 customer. Payback is healthy under six months.
20 people between Boston and other remote locations building up this bad boy. Susan, thank you for taking us to the top. Thank you. Bye bye.
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