I’ve started advising a few SAAs founders and making a few super duper small angel investments.
One thing I’m noticing is that founders suck at consistent, organized monthly updates.
I’m guilty as well, so don’t worry.
But I HIGHLY recommend changing that ASAP.
Shoutout to the folks at Buffer, and Tettra, who share theirs publicly on twitter. Also a great example you can steal from Tettra here: https://tettra.co/templates/operations/investor-letter/
After years of crappy, BS email updates, I changed it all up.
I adopted a format based off Buffer’s. I turned it into a shared google doc that my Board members have access to.
It hits on the key metrics form the business that we all care about, and helps draw the line consistently so everyone can quickly and accurately get a sense of what is happening in the business.
Yes, this can be scary. It puts pressure on consistent impact EVERY DAY for the team and founder. This is a good thing. You absolutely can do something TODAY that moves the needle.
It sucks when I share out the update and MoM growth looks low, or churn looks high, or whatever your demon is. But its actually easier to spot challenges, and easier to communicate effectively internally and at the investor level when it’s all out on the table.
So with the shared google sheet, my investor email becomes super simple. I send an email with a few bullets on what happened that month, MoM growth rate, net MRR gain and link out to the shared dashboard.
that email may also include some other softer updates around platform usage, fun deals we closed, or partnership news.
And possibly 1 single ask.
Here’s the rough format of my shared doc, which I’ve dubbed the board dashboard.
On the left I have the highest level metrics that matter in SAAS.

And then expanding out, month by month numbers for each, with some light graphs to help tell the story:

And as the founder, adding a consistent format to this process has actually taken the stress and time out of my monthly update, both internally for the company, as well as externally for investors.
It’s also pretty damn cool to see how far we’ve come since it’s all in one spot.
Then if you layer in a direct sales team, it’s worth running a similar playbook. When we added sales at privy, we added a second tab to the shared doc, with just sales specific KPIs.
It looks like this:

And also includes some light charting to more easily, at a glance, tell the story.

Lastly, here’s an example of one of my investor update emails, that links out:

Then, once my update to investors is done, I change gears and focus on a more simplified version I share with the management team, and then a recorded audio version I share out to the entire company, and post in the wiki. That looks something like this:

Ok cool. So what are you waiting for. The earlier you get in this habit, the more it will simplify your communication about company progress or challenges, and the more it will keep you as the founder focused on what you should be spending time on within the business.
Achievement unlocked. Feels good to take a step back. $0 to $8M ARR in 4 years
The last few months, we’ve seen Wistia and Buffer buy out their investors, we’ve seen a ton of new financing vehicles open up form folks like indie.vc, lighter and saas capital, and even recurring MRR debt from more traditional banks. We’ve also read the Forbes coverage of Mailchimp building a multi-billion dollar business with zero outside financing.
All amazing stories.
For customer focused, revenue generating SAAS companies that are scaling, financing options are plentiful.
The journey here at Privy has been a long, windy road.
And the last 3 years we’ve seen 100% revenue growth year over year.
It’s been fun, challenging, rewarding, and confusing, really.
In some respects, having cashflow positive months and low burn has been everything you could dream of. It has personally let me focus on serving customers and recruiting A+ people.
I don’t think of it this way, but many people who know our full story have said we’re one of the scrappiest, grittiest companies they’ve ever seen. Thanks to Mike Volpe for that one. Cool.
But that doesn’t mean our aspirations are small. The scrappier we got, the more we continually had to decide on “this or that” when we’re confident both will move the needle.
That has created a culture of focus on the customer, and spending on what matters, that I never want to lose.
But the direct to consumer industry is exploding.
The Shopify ecosystem is exploding.
And Privy has made a name for itself being one of the fastest growing tech companies in the ecosystem.
Today we have a much clearer vision of the opportunity in front of us. And we wanted resources and help to get there. Basically we want to invest in this business the way it deserves to be invested in.
As a founder, it’s hard to know which path to take. It would have been easy for me personally to continue as is, or take the MRR lines, remain hunkered down and steadily increase revenue. The thought of not having a board certainly sounded good, too.
But I’m also a pretty self aware person. I’ve never seen this next phase of growth.
I want to challenge myself to grow as a leader. I want to surround myself with a Board I know and trust that can help me level up as a founder and CEO. One that has experience with product development, scale-ups and the challenges of building lasting companies.
It’s not to say I couldn’t achieve these without a series A, but I know myself and learning style, and felt this was the right decision for me and the company.
So I’m excited that after years of working with Accomplice, and a year working with Sam Clemens, we’re bringing Sam onto our board alongside this $4.25 Million series A.
No doubt Sam will push me to be better and grow. And I’ll need to work even harder to keep our scrappy, customer focused culture as the team grows.
For many founders these days the conversation seems black or white. Either you’re building that bootstrapped, profitable company, or you’re on the alphabet soup of venture.
I hope to keep the best elements of both as we enter this next phase of growth.
Dec 2015: 10,000 SMBS using Privy, $22K MRR
Dec 2016: 80,000 SMBs using Privy, $65K MRR
Dec 2017: 220,000 SMBs using Privy, $185K MRR


When you take a step back, the last two and half years have been completely insane. A rag tag team of 5 had successfully pivoted the business after some failed M&A and only $1K remaining in our company bank account. Since the pivot in 2015, we have consistently been the fastest growing app within shopify, weebly and other ecosystems.

When I say rag tag, I mean that as a complement. Here’s the skeleton crew post pivot:

Growing 300% YoY is no small feat in SAAS, especially without a sales and marketing team, and without doing paid marketing.
As I had time to reflect, I’m realizing the equation was quite simple.
1. Add value to your users, immediately. How long does it take for a new user to get to their AHA moment?
2. Support users like they matter, even free ones. People laugh when I say this, but I personally spent two years handling all live chats with our customers (until we reached about 40 tickets a day). Why? Because before we pivoted, I was cold calling, cold emailing and doing anything I could to try to talk to customers. Now they were coming and talking to me. What better way to learn their needs than for the founder to talk to customers all day long.
3. Listen to users, then build what they want. For 2 years, we balanced our own roadmap with building out tons of feature requests from our users. We found we didn’t need a product manager when we had so many users telling us their needs and wants. When there was recurring requests for similar features, we built it.
4. We made it easy to try, and easy to buy through a freemium model. Rather than forcing sales conversations, or forcing credit card on registration, we focused on adding value first. Then when users need premium features we made it easy to upgrade, and defaulted to a monthly commitment, not annual.
When I look at each and every week, or each day, rather, this is literally all we did for 2.5 years. Get in, talk to customers, ship features, and review the numbers from the week. Was it monotonous at times? Yes. And there were definitely days where it was super hard to pull back and look at the business on a monthly, and quarterly basis. But when you’re religous about your day to day, the 30K view of the business will be great when you take that step back.
And over this 2 year period, we found that because of the freemium model, and the great support we were offering free users, word of mouth spread like wildfire.
This equation is so simple, so obvious, yet we still have days where we lose sight of what we need to be doing. The last few years have been my reminder that if we focus on adding value to our users, offer great support, and build our roadmap to solve their problems, then we’ll continue on this trajectory.
Note: this is a gross oversimplification of our pivot process and the emotions and self doubt that hit me during that period (perhaps a post for another time). And, we couldn’t have achieved this without an incredible team, fantastic product and commitment to our customers.

And now, things are humming and the rag tag skeleton crew is growing. Come join us!

At Growth Camp, a new initiative by Mike Volpe: http://www.mikevolpe.com/growth-camp
Since we suffered a failed M&A deal, and pivoted, I’ve been hiding under a rock. Some of you probably thought Privy folded. Others don’t even know what Privy is. Regardless, I’m excited to share our growth story, and levers for success.
See you there: http://www.mikevolpe.com/growth-camp
Startups are tough. I love this chart from Paul Graham:

I have found on so many occasions, that we’re at the bottom of this trough. At a recent event at Wentworth, I spoke to students working on their own companies. One of them followed up after I shared this chart, and asked me how I motivate topush forward when recognizing we’re at the bottom of a trough of sorrow. Here is how I responded:
It’s hard to say. I’ve had so many bottoms. Each at different stages of the company trajectory. Depending on the stage, my inspiration to forge ahead has come from a different place.
Before my first customer: How the fuck could I get someone to say yes to use this product, and be the first. I had customer validation of pain, but was struggling to get someone to raise their hand and be the first customer. This was tough. Different than later challenges. I had friends, family and former colleagues thinking “Ben, is this really a project you should be spending time on?” - and they were right - if i couldn’t get one customer. I tried to simplify things a bit. Within the target customer base, was there any “friendly’s” I could approach where I somehow had a warmer connection, who might be willing to take that chance. Took a while but finally found it. If I had cycled through even warm intro conversations and couldn’t get one volunteer customer, I might not have moved forward on Privy at all. Hard to believe, but that was a major hurdle.
When we had handfuls of customers: with a working product in hand, and my first case study, it wasn’t too difficult to get to 10-20 customers. It was then really difficult to replicate the sales process in a meaningful, scaleable way. I was really down, and, again, considered shutting down the company, or really re-thinking our approach. In this “trough” I really relied on the results some of these few customers were seeing after using the product. A handful of these customers were seeing TREMENDOUS success. They LOVED it. If these guys loved it, and they weren’t BSing me, and the results backed up their passion, there had to be a path forward. Jason Lemkin, the founder of docusign said once that if you can get to 10 paying customers, you can get to 100. He’s right. And it made me believe that we could get to 100+, but our sales and marketing approach was 100% off. But in this phase it was my unbiased recognition that the 10-20 customers I had were seeing remarkable results. That recognition powered me forward at a time where we only had $1,000 left in our company account :)
Scaling to thousands of customers: Even as we cross the 20,000 customer mark, I still have troughs. These are different, scaling related challenges. Now it’s a combination of user feedback and user adoption that motivate me every day. If we can get to 20,000 customers, why can’t we get to 100,000?
Only time will tell but hopefully this helps you think about pressing forward in the early stages of your business.
Just a few treasures found at Grandma’s house. What a moment this must have been. The Boston globe and Brockton enterprise covers when Armstrong landed on the moon. August 10,1969.
Lots of friends have been asking for our recommendations for things to do, etc on kauai. Here’s a recap:
Where to stay?
After exploring the entire island, I highly recommend staying on the north shore if your trip is during the summer. We stayed in Princeville and found that aside from a few trips to Kapaa and Waimea, everything we wanted to do was in and around the north shore and Hanalei bay.
Rent a car.
Part of the joy of kauai is how user friendly it is to explore every beach there and do tons of hiking. I saw a handful of unreliable buses but pretty much no cabs. Parking on the island is plentiful. Driving is by far the easiest way to get around.
Beaches.
In the summer, the best beaches are found along the north shore. We found a few gems that you should not miss: hideaways, secret beach, queens bath, kalahana, tunnels, and anini beach. Anini ended up being our favorite (drive past the main entrance another mile to the private houses, park along side of st).
The water is turquoise and most have soft white sand. Almost all of the above have reefs and fish and turtles as soon as you get chest deep. Bring your goggles and snorkel gear for plenty of snorkeling.
The beaches along the east coast have incredibly high surf in the summer. We checked out a few in Kapaa but there was no way we’d get in with those waves.

Rope Swing.
Just south of Princeville there’s a really pretty rope swing and zen garden. Most books will tell you to access the rope swing through the Waikoa Loop trail behind the mini golf course. There’s an easier more direct way to get there that spares you a 5 mile hike. Simply turn off the highway at the big sign for “common ground”. No need to park at the mini golf course. After turning at the common ground sign drive as far as you can on that road until you actually enter the common ground land (you’ll see another sign and gate). Drive and park at the restaurant, then walk along the river past the restaurant. As the river turns left, hug it, and you’ll find a beautiful stone damn zen garden and rope swing that is a ton of fun.

The Kalalau trail.
This is known as the most popular hike in all of hawaii and hugs the Napali Coast line. Parking is plentiful as you approach Kee beach. Just be sure to bring snacks, lunch and more water than you’d expect.You start with 2 miles along the coast line with stunning views, after 2 miles you arrive at a secluded stunning beach. This was the most beautiful beach on the trip. From here you could turn back or keep going another 2 miles inland to a ridiculous waterfall and swim underneath the fall. If you end up doing the waterfall thats an 8 mile hike round trip which took us 10 hours if you include chilling on the beach and swimming in the waterfall so just be sure to bring tons of water and snacks for lunch. This hike was one of the highlights of the trip.

Waimea Canyon and the Na Pali Boat experience.
On the west side of the island you can drive up to the waimea canyon - gorgeous too. And there’s a small boat adventure called na pali experience that leaves from right there for a tour of the coast line. So fun and tons of dolphins, turtles and best snorkeling on the island.


Restaurants on Kauai.
The views and restaurants from the St Regis hotel in Princeville are incredible. Some of the best sushi I’ve ever had in my life. Pono market in kapaa - get the poke bowl or fried chicken bowl. Bubbas teriyaki burger. Common ground for sunday brunch (organic farm to table - best culinary experience of my life), Tahiti Nui for hawaian pizza and mai tais and tons of live hula music (we went there 3x). Pats tacos in hanalei bay is ridonculous. I heard barracuda is great too but we never made it there.
Try every piece of fruit you see. It’s some of the best you’ll ever have.

Grandma Rose. An incredible woman. Inspiring in so many ways.
Hey Gang - below you’ll find the link to access the decks we used in class as well as the assignment for the module.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yov5osd6qukfvzg/AAB35LnzU3NndniIXzuy3g4Ba?dl=0
So incredibly proud of my wife and what she’s building. Check out Little Beats, her early childhood music and movement program in Newton, MA.
It’s fun when partners help you build momentum because they love your product and what it does for their clients. Thx to the folks at Mailchimp and Constant Contact for featuring us.

This spring I had the pleasure of becoming an adjunct professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology. I was teaching “Principles of Marketing”, essentially a 101 class that walks through Value, Branding, Insights, etc.
It was fun and challenging as you might expect. But what stood out most was how unbelievably different and connected the classroom environment has become.
Keep in mind the last time I was in a classroom setting was at Cornell in the Spring of 2008. At the time, I can confidently say that I didn’t have Wifi on my laptop and had to go to the computer lab when on campus, and distinctly remember having a flip phone at the time.
As I sit here in class as my students take their last exam of the year, a semesters worth of observations are culminating.
1. In-class connectivity.
Each classroom is equipped with wifi. Nearly every student comes to class with a laptop, and has it open all class. Undoubtedly, every single student has their smart phone on the desk.
Are they listening to anything I’m saying, or retaining anything from these boring slides? Probably not.
2. Calculators.
I’ll never forget what happened when we had our first in-class quiz. The quiz had questions that required some light weight math. “Calculate the profit margin and ROI on these ads”. Stuff like that. One or two students pulled out their TI-83s and all the rest pulled out their phones. Shame on me for not thinking ahead on this but wow.
Save your $100. Forget the calculator. Just use your smart phone. But please do me a favor only be on your phone when you’re making calculations.
3. The inevitability of “cheating” in a connected world.
Given every student has a smart phone and all simple definitions and concepts are readily available at your finger tips, how can professors really identify cheating these days. If a student walks out in the middle of an exam to go to the restroom, do they have their smart phone in their pocket?
In my mind, we’re moving to a world where every exam might as well be open note and exams should focus on demonstrating a students application of subject matter, not how well they can memorize definitions.
The world has changed so much since I graduated, yet the class room has not. Time for a major shakeup. Know of any awesome companies tackling this problem? Let me know.
At Privy we recently unveiled new functionality that lets us close the loop for retail marketers driving in-store visits or online checkouts, or both. We call these “brick and click” marketers. This is incredibly powerful stuff. Check it out here.