Presley

Yves Nellison had a varied entrepreneurial journey before landing on Presley. He started young building websites, then launched a web firm that grew to 10 people. After a failed startup called "Track My People," he joined a large agency as Head of Sales and grew it from 5 to 80 people. But he felt something was missing—a tool that solved the real problems PR professionals and corporate communications teams faced.

Presley officially launched in 2010, but Nellison doesn't count those early years seriously. "The first years were just like a hobby project," he explains. "People didn't take it seriously." The real turning point came in 2014 when he started charging clients. He joined as a co-founder about two months into the project but essentially rebuilt the entire product, earning a 43% stake alongside his 50/50 partner. The platform combined three functions into one: a CMS-style newsroom (like WordPress or Medium), a PR/outreach CRM, and email orchestration tools—letting brands publish content and automatically sequence outreach to journalists, bloggers, employees, and partners.

The path to customers wasn't through traditional bootstrapper channels. Presley went after enterprise clients like IKEA from the start, using direct sales. This required a longer CAC (around $7,000 fully weighted initially), but it was worth it because enterprise customers paid premium prices. The early pricing was modest—$400 per license per month—but newer customers pay $800–$900 per month, with some enterprise deals reaching $10k+ annually.

The key to Presley's success was keeping churn exceptionally low. Logo churn sat at 1.2% monthly, but revenue churn was even better at 0.94%—nearly flat. This happened because customers found immense value in the combined product: importing contact lists into the CRM and publishing newsrooms created stickiness. Nellison focused obsessively on payback ratio rather than chasing inflated LTV numbers. New customers broke even in 4–6 months (vs. 12–14 months for the older base), and the machine was becoming net-negative on churn. He also stayed bootstrap-focused, refusing to raise capital and instead reinvesting profits into hiring and product improvements.

By 2017, Presley had crossed $1.6M ARR—more than doubling from the ~$900k run rate at the end of 2016. That's triple growth in three years (2013: $15k, 2014: $150k, 2015: $400k, 2016: $900k). The team grew to 15 people, fully remote but headquartered in Brussels. With 300+ paying customers and improving unit economics, Nellison was clear-eyed: "We're not done yet. We're just getting started." When asked if he'd sell at 4x ARR, he flatly refused.