We Love Numbers
Finn Kelly and his wife Sarah spent six years in the wealth management and advisory space, managing hundreds of millions for high-net-worth individuals on business exits and tax structuring. They sold that firm in 2015 for between $1-5 million, but realized a massive gap in the market: entrepreneurs had no trusted source for understanding their own financial numbers.
Launching in March 2015 with "proof of concept," We Love Numbers combined smart bookkeeping with financial advisory services. The tech stack was intentionally lean—they built on Xero, the cloud-based accounting platform they saw as best-in-class. Finn positioned it as "software plus service," not a pure service business, because "everyone else is trying to compete in service-based businesses and they just don't work." The pricing ranged from $395 to $1,695 monthly, with an average customer paying just over $1,000.
Word-of-mouth became their primary growth engine. Within the first year, referrals increased "through the moon," and when they launched a new website asking the membership base for testimonials, they got a 50% response rate. By March 2016—one year in—they had grown to 50 paying customers generating $50,000 MRR.
Early on, churn spiked to 10% per month because they accepted customers who didn't fit their ideal profile. Finn implemented a rigorous internal application process to ensure fit, focusing only on three target markets: food & beverage, post-PMF tech companies, and innovative professional services. This specificity reduced churn and improved lifetime value projections to $40,000 per customer (at 2% target churn). Their target CAC was $1,000, making the unit economics highly attractive for a SaaS raise.
With $50K MRR and a team of 10 spread across Australia, Philippines, America, and South Africa, We Love Numbers was burning ~$20K monthly and preparing to raise $750K on a $6M pre-money valuation. Finn was seeking strategic angel investors—entrepreneurs from EO, YEC, YPO—rather than VC money, positioning the raise as a way to fund the first two years of marketing and team growth to dominate the emerging "entrepreneurial accounting" category.
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