Grow.com

Rob had already built and sold a software company, and the problem that shaped his next venture came from that first business. He struggled to pull data from Salesforce, QuickBooks, and his own database into spreadsheets to update company metrics. The team only refreshed them once a month, and they were always stale. He called several BI providers. Some were insanely expensive and complex to manage, while others were too simple and showed things like tweets and Facebook likes instead of what actually drove the company. He saw a gap for a product that was simple to use yet highly customizable.

Rob started the concept in January 2014 and hired a technical co-founder in February. Together with five engineers, they spent nine months building before launch, which came at the very end of 2014. Rob gave the co-founder less than 20% of the business, and he described himself as the driving force. The company was built around unlimited users, because Rob did not want to charge per seat. He wanted anyone in marketing, sales, or elsewhere to connect their apps, pull data, and build reports. Pricing was based on the metrics tracked or reports built.

The early product was rough. Revenue in 2014 was about $80, and 2015 brought perhaps $150K to $200K. Rob described a "trough of sorrow" in finding product-market fit, with customers repeatedly telling him the product was not there yet.

The early pricing was self-serve at $29 to $49 per month. Rob later concluded that this price point made it very hard to build something large, and that BI customers needed help getting started. The company moved to higher-priced plans with an average of about $600 per month and a 12-month commitment. Customers pay monthly, and a 30-day trial lets them cancel if the product does not deliver. In the trial period, 76% of customers in the last 90 days renewed. Usage was strong, with 92% of customers logging in at least monthly and about half logging in daily.

The biggest lever was a high-touch onboarding team that helped customers get immediate value. That required a price high enough to justify an hour of an employee's time on a call. The company scaled its sales team and marketing significantly. Its fully weighted customer acquisition cost was about $3,500 against a first-year contract value of $7,200, which implied a payback period of about six months. Rob acknowledged that this was much higher than a few months earlier, but said the company was ramping.

Rob also said that the pricing decisions and self-serve origins of competitors such as Dashboard made it hard to build something large at low price points. He stated that the company passed on a deal with them.

By the interview, Grow.com had about 600 customers, roughly $330K in monthly recurring revenue, and a team of about 70 in Provo, Utah, up from 12 at the start of the year. The company had raised about $12 to $13 million in total, including a $9 million Series A closed in July. The host summarized the story as one where the company is not yet profitable but is building revenue and a larger team on a clear, customer-driven model.