SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1581 How This FinTech CEO Hit $10M ARR With No Expansion Revenue
22 Nov 2019
Chapter 1: What inspired Andrew to launch FundApps?
Launched his company FundApps after doing kind of an on-prem version of it and realizing people wanted the milk, not the cow. Today, they're serving 45 clients managing, again, big portfolios, hundreds of millions in assets under management across many, many different countries. Breaking and getting really close to about a $10 million run rate.
That's up for about $5 million in ARR just a year ago. So healthy growth. And I love this. All bootstrapped with this team of about 46 people in UK and other remote locations. 100%. net revenue retention, not really an upsell machine or expansion machine at this point, really just focus on adding new customer logos. He thinks there's about 2,000 customers out there. Hello, everyone.
My guest today is Andrew White. He's the founder and CEO of FundApps, a regtech company which provides compliance monitoring services to investment managers.
Chapter 2: How did FundApps achieve a $10 million ARR without expansion revenue?
FundApps currently services three of the world's 10 largest hedge funds and monitors over $6 trillion USD of assets every day. FundApps was founded in a spare bedroom above a pub and has never taken a penny of fundraising. funding. Andrew, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, indeed. How are you doing? I am doing well. Okay. I love that you're bootstrapped.
For those that have not heard of you, what are you doing? How do you make money?
A very simple idea. So we, rather than people that manage your money doing compliance for themselves, we They send us the data and we will do compliance for them. So we provide the infrastructure, we provide the technology, but more importantly, we provide the regulatory expertise.
So we have a team of legal and compliance people that understand the rules and regulations across the globe, making it easy for fund managers, hedge funds to be compliant with regulations in 95 countries.
Okay. And is this, I mean, is this an agency or a SaaS platform?
This is an absolute SaaS platform. So we contract with the fund managers. It's a yearly SaaS agreement. Very simple, very normal.
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Chapter 3: What is the business model of FundApps?
And what would you say? I'm sure you have a lot of cohorts of customers, but I'm going to force you into an average here. I mean, what would you say the average ACV is on one of these customers?
So we started about $100,000 upwards.
Got it. Okay, great. Okay, good. That's helpful to understand. And then help me understand the backstory here. So when did you launch the company? What year?
Launched in 2010, so just had our eighth birthday. Very simple, normal background that I did this before and in a previous lifetime, kind of thought I could do it better, use the cloud, make it fast, whereas my previous company was very much an on-premise play, let's make a cloud. provide this as a service. Nobody wants, you know, people want a glass of milk, they don't want a cow.
So it was very much about providing the service rather than the infrastructure.
Yep, on-prem to cloud is obviously a healthy trend. What's the team size today? How many people?
We are currently 46 people globally, 42 in the UK, 4 in the US.
Okay, so UK and kind of remote locations, 46. And how many customers have you scaled to today, bootstrapped?
We currently, I think our latest total as of yesterday was 45 clients globally.
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Chapter 4: How does FundApps ensure compliance for its clients?
Okay, and is there any kind of customer success team focused on driving expansion revenue and onboarding?
Correct. So we only have three services currently, but are increasing hopefully soon to be four or five. But for us, yes, we do have a client success team very much about getting our large banks who are not used to the cloud, not used to SaaS. For some of our clients, it's their first SaaS experience. For one of our clients, very first cloud experience.
So trying to get them comfortable with everything, increasing usage, all that kind of stuff. So yeah.
Andrew, let's dive into that. I want to dive into pricing here, especially in the reg tech space. If someone signs up on a $100,000 contract for you in year one, based off the process you run them through, what do they usually expand to by the end of year two, would you say?
So that's a good question. So we're unusual like that. Basically, our fee is everything. It's the entire shooting match for one service. So we don't typically have an upsell or isn't the silver, gold, platinum service levels that you might have in your typical Zendesk. So for us, it literally is. It will be an uptick every year based on CPI cost increases, but generally no.
What does that mean? Is that cost per integration?
No, no. A consumer price index, a retail price index, whatever you want to call inflation. Okay. So for our, for us, once we've sold a client, it's very much, uh, pretty much the same level of as we sell them another service.
So why would someone sign up at a hundred grand a year versus a million a year? What's the difference?
Oh, so we have, that's a very good question. That's the big differentiator. So for us, It has very much to do with the complexity of a client.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of customer success in FundApps' growth?
Okay, interesting. So of the, I imagine then you probably have, I mean, of the people you've got, the 46 people, how many of them are sales-oriented? Seven. Okay, interesting. And how many of them are like... Yeah, that's pretty low. How many of them are kind of like marketing and onboarding?
Well, they're two different teams. Marketing for us is two, onboarding is about six.
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So how do you measure the success of the onboarding team if it's not expansion revenue? I assume it's usage metrics, but what usage metrics?
Yeah, we're kind of an old-school business in that respect. I mean, once the customer is using the system and resigning, then it's a successful customer. I mean, we obviously use metrics like Net Promoter Score. You know, we do conferences. You know, it's signing up to things. But generally, regtech is a very boring area in the respect of it does a job.
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Chapter 6: How does FundApps define expansion revenue?
It's a small space reg tech. So if people have a problem, they'll generally find out about us. So we're not having to chase contacts.
But you've got about 10 people across your sales people, plus two or three on your marketing team, plus kind of customer success and onboarding. Those obviously go into fully weighted CAC. So again, sample scenario, they're about to close $100,000 contract. Are you willing to spend kind of 20 grand fully weighted to get that contract or 100 grand or what?
No, it'd be a lot less than that.
Less than 20 grand. Okay, so your payback period is what, less than three months? Good question. Probably, yeah. Okay, not something you track.
That's not metrics we measure. It's been an interesting kind of experiment with marketing and sales.
I'm surprised, by the way, you don't measure that. A bootstrapped company, I mean, you do everything you can to pull as much cash forward, but you've got a sales team, so you're paying commissions.
Yeah, paying commissions, but as I said, most 90% of sales have been inbound over the last few years.
You still pay commission on inbound leads, right? True. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm going to make this up. I don't want you to disclose this, but let's say you're paying 10% commissions on a $100,000 contract, fully weighted CAC. There's 10 grand. You pay the commission all up front, right?
uh yes yeah yeah interesting um very cool where's um so where's future growth going to come from adding new logos or adding new product lines and and again you had two people you know cross-sell are gonna do more cross-selling yeah uh both i would think that the next few years are very much still new logos uh as of this year we've kind of really invested in the product team trying to expand on our services general kind of
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