Lighthouse PE

Lighthouse PE emerged from a practical business problem. Andrew Steele's predecessor agency, Automaticin Ave in Phoenix, kept getting the same question from clients: "How do we get customers to come back more often?" The answer required proprietary technology—a platform combining real-time location data (geofencing, beacons) with customer behavioral data to create hyper-personalized engagement at scale. COVID accelerated the urgency. When people stopped moving around and foot traffic collapsed, every local business desperately needed to re-engage their customer base. The agency built the tech internally, but by late 2019, the leadership made a strategic call: spin this out as its own SaaS company.

Andrew Steele joined as CEO in fall 2019, taking over a clean handoff from the agency. The team consisted of 5 full-time people: 3 developers, 1 inside sales rep (poached from the agency), and Andrew. Development costs were subsidized by the parent agency while they bootstrapped the SaaS. The platform worked deceptively simply: businesses didn't pay for Lighthouse itself—they paid based on their mobile app install base. A Mom-and-Pop beauty bar with 10,000 app users paid around $200/month at entry level; a regional franchise with hundreds of thousands of installs paid significantly more. "Everything we do from an engagement perspective is through their mobile apps," Andrew explained. "Consumers never see Lighthouse. We're projecting the brand of our customers."

The first customers came directly from the agency's existing client relationships. By the time of this interview, Lighthouse had 10 brands on the platform, generating approximately 10K MRR (about $1,000 per customer on average). The 80-100K total install base across these customers showed real traction. However, Andrew wasn't relying on past relationships alone. The go-to-market strategy had two swim lanes: direct outbound sales to brands, plus partnership deals with loyalty platforms and vertical app companies. Early quota: 2-4 demos per week, with the inside sales hire targeting 3-4 new customers monthly (roughly $4K incremental MRR). Three verticals were being hunted aggressively: travel/hospitality (casinos, hotels, DMOs), fitness/wellness (Mind Body, Booker), and fast-casual/QSR restaurants.

Outbound proved effective early, generating consistent pipeline. The agency's marketing support provided leverage that pure startups rarely have. However, the unit economics story was still unfolding. At $10K MRR with $30K total monthly burn, the company needed $20K monthly subsidy from the agency—not sustainable long-term. The team recognized they needed to hit specific growth milestones to transition to profitability or fundraising. Q1 goal: $250K ARR (which they were tracking at ~$83K at time of interview). Q2-Q3: hit $1M ARR, then raise a $1M Series A at a 6-8x pre-money valuation (realistic for the Phoenix market, lower than coastal tech hubs).

Lighthouse was at a critical inflection point. They'd validated product-market fit within their initial verticals and had a repeatable sales motion generating 3-4 net new customers monthly. The clean cap table (agency, team, and future investors) meant no dilution drag. Andrew's background in healthcare SaaS and experience at companies acquired by Comcast, Motorola, and Microsoft provided seasoned leadership. The challenge was acceleration: converting from a steady-state $10K MRR into the $80-100K MRR needed to justify Series A conversations. Partnerships with loyalty platforms and regional app ecosystems offered leverage beyond direct sales. If they executed the quarterly targets, Lighthouse could demonstrate the growth story VCs wanted to see without a large raise required upfront.