SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
RunBolt.com: $800k Revenue, Construction Scheduling Tool
26 May 2020
Chapter 1: What is RunBolt and how did it originate?
Bolt Software, helping residential construction folks with scheduling. Spun out of another company now today doing about, call it $65,000, $70,000 a month in revenue, growing nicely year over year. They are bootstrapped. They burn between $5,000 and $10,000 per month.
They cover that burn with a credit line that they've set up and negotiated, serving 50 customers, founded first line of code 2012, spun out 2016, first sales 2017, scaling nicely. Nathan Latka here, guys. And if you're enjoying the podcast, remember there's a premium version with even more. You get early access to episodes. So you would have heard this almost four weeks ago.
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He's building a company called BoltSoftware.com.
Chapter 2: What challenges did RunBolt face before generating revenue?
He's a construction SaaS founder, loves Texas, his family, and Mavs basketball. Sam, you ready to take us to the top? All right, so what is Bolt Software and who are you selling to?
Well, my name's Sam Knight. You can call me Sam Bolt.
I'm okay if you want to call me Sam.
Sorry, Sam Knight. You're good, you're good. So Bolt Software, we're a construction software, but we're super niche. We do scheduling, it's how we get our foot in the door, but we also do project management and estimating. for the residential home building market, specifically those trades that are in that industry, the electricians, plumbers, masonry companies, so on and so forth.
And what got you into this? Did you have a software background first or construction background first?
No, construction background first. I painted houses to kind of pay my way through three unsuccessful semesters at Texas A&M. And then met my co-founder, who has a background in the construction business as well, and just kind of
entrepreneur and a company out of it so what year was that uh we started um january of 2016 is when we officially started okay and so you were painting before that 2016 you and define officially started like that was the first line of code or your first sale or what no that's when we started selling what we thought was the minimum viable product which was we quickly found out was not but that's when we officially started selling and marketing our product out to when did you write the first line of code um 2012 was when it first started being written
Wow. Okay. So how were you guys paying yourselves for four years pre-revenue?
We weren't. It was just an internal product that my co-founder Josh was using at his dad's company. They have a background in construction. And so they took about four or five years to start building up kind of a proof of concept at their business before we actually then spun it off. We started getting some interest as a short answer around the industry in it.
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Chapter 3: How did RunBolt secure its first customers?
Well, that would make me want to protect it even more. That if it was it was if I had a if I had this coffee mug that helped me grow my company really well and some and my and my son came to me with this other hot shot college guy who was painting out and said, hey, you know, dad, I want to spend it out. I'm going, well, shit, this coffee mug has driven me like three X revenue growth.
I really don't want to spend it out unless you give me 60 percent of the company that you guys spend it out. Then I'll let you spend it out.
Yeah, no, they have they have.
the majority of the equity so they there well there we go see now it's all coming together this is all making sense okay so so josh's father and and you know by nature the father's company owns a majority of the company you and josh they'll have enough equity where you're incentivized to build this on your own take your own crack at it have you guys bootstrapped the company uh or have you raised from traditional sources
bootstrapped okay great okay so bootstrapped and and um walk me through how you're pricing this thing so on average what are these folks paying you to use the tech yeah so we have a huge variety in our customer base up to a user with i think 600 plus users our smallest user i think has two so we really start at about a minimum about 500 a month regardless of if you want to use all five users so
You know, we kind of start at like a $100 a month for five users minimum, and then we'll tear down. And we don't really, we haven't really formalized like, hey, here's our publicly available enterprise level pricing. But we're pretty open about it during the sales process, as long as we have a good buyer on the line, as far as, hey, we have a teared down approach starting at about five users.
Okay, so how many customers are you serving today?
50 customers.
Okay, about 50 customers. And where are you at in terms of revenue?
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