RJ Metrics

Robert Moore's entrepreneurial journey began in 2004 when he was a college student studying computer science and statistics. During the online poker boom—when Chris Moneymaker had won the World Series of Poker and the movie Rounders was hot—Moore saw an opportunity. He built interactive software that helped poker players calculate their odds of winning hands in real-time. "A lot of people at my college who were really big into poker were spending hours and hours trying to memorize these probability tables," Moore explained. His software became their "cheat guide on the probability and statistics of the game at their fingertips while they were playing."

Moore's poker software was deceptively simple but powerful: users input their cards, the community cards, and table information, and the software returned ESPN-style probability statistics. Rather than trying to play poker professionally with his tool, Moore discovered a market opportunity. "A lot of my friends found out that I had built this thing. They all of a sudden also wanted to be using it," he said. He gave it away free initially, gathering feedback before monetizing. When Google AdWords opened up to small advertisers around 2005, keywords like "how to win at poker" were available for just 10 cents per click. Moore built a one-page landing page with screenshots and a $30 price tag.

Moore's early customer acquisition was almost entirely paid search. "Between 2004 and 2006, how much did you make personally from the tool?" the interviewer asked. "Yeah, it was almost 100 grand. It was a pretty steady flow of I'd go to bed at night and I wake up in the morning and there'd be another half dozen or so of these things that had sold online," Moore recalled. The model was one-time payment software, not subscription—a model he would never replicate at RJ Metrics.

After graduating in 2006, Moore landed at Insight Venture Partners, a New York-based VC firm. For two years, he called roughly 100 CEOs per week—reaching out to 100-200 people weekly through LinkedIn, databases, and job sites. He helped lead several deals, including a successful early investment in Football Fanatics (later Fanatics). But as the 2008 financial crisis hit, Moore quit Insight on a Monday. "On Tuesday, Lehman Brothers collapsed," he said.

With his co-founder, Moore launched RJ Metrics from his attic, bootstrapping profitably for nearly five years. The duo realized that while companies had more data than ever, they lacked tools to make sense of it. Rather than chasing venture funding in the post-crisis environment, Moore doubled down on content marketing—"white papers, webinars, microsites, our blog is super active, all that good stuff." This inbound strategy generated leads at a high conversion rate. By 2012, about four years in, RJ Metrics hit $1M in revenue with only 8 employees, generating profitable cash.

As the company matured, Moore evolved the playbook. In the last 18 months post-Series B (which closed in September 2014 at $16.5M), RJ Metrics spun up an outbound sales team—about six account development reps paired with account executives. The company maintained a 1-2x ARR/CAC ratio, aiming to break even on customer acquisition within 6-12 months. With customer lifetime in the 3-4 year range and ARR per customer ranging from $10K-$100K depending on usage, the math worked.

By the time of this interview (roughly 2015), RJ Metrics had nearly 400 paying customers and approximately 100 employees. Moore credited the attic-era profitability phase with building a culture and business discipline that persisted even after raising capital. He emphasized that the biggest source of churn wasn't dissatisfaction but structural churn—when customer companies ceased to exist. The company was on pace for $4.8M+ in annual revenue at minimum, with a balanced acquisition strategy of 50% inbound (content) and 50% outbound (sales team). Moore reflected that his willingness to take risks without fear had been crucial: "The more that I have acted without fear, the better the results have been."