This 1st-time founder raised $4M, kept the team to 5 people—& just raised a $28M Series A. | Parker Gilbert, Co-Founder of Numeric

Parker quit his job as VP Finance at a late-stage startup in mid 2021. He raised $4M out of the gate because, well, it was 2021. But he didn't ramp up sales, he didn't hire 15 developers. He kept the team to 5 people for the first year.

He worked with a dozen design partners until the value prop was perfect. He even refused to let customers pay upfront in annual contracts. He wanted monthly payments to light a fire for him and his team.

This month, just 3 years after quitting his job, he closed a $28M Series A.

Here's exactly how he did it.

Why you should listen:

• Why the early stages are all about customer value and delight.
• Why you need to focus on product-market fit before growth.
• Why you need to solve a top-of-mind problem and deliver clear ROI to take off.
• How to transition from build mode to sales mode. 
• Why monthly contracts can provide valuable feedback loops for early-stage startups.

Keywords
Numeric, startup, product-market fit, funding, accounting, customer engagement, sales strategy, ROI, growth, Series A

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:07) Coming Up with the Idea
(00:06:13) Research, Taking the Leap & Pre-Seed Funding
(00:11:48) Keeping the Team Small
(00:16:55) Why Annual Payments Don't Work Early On
(00:22:10) The Challenges in Going into Market
(00:26:53) Measuring ROI
(00:33:26) Series A
(00:35:05) Finding Product Market Fit
(00:36:11) One Piece of Advice

Chapters

• 1:07 Coming Up with the Idea
• 6:13 Research, Taking the Leap & Pre-Seed Funding
• 11:48 Keeping the Team Small
• 16:55 Why Annual Payments Don't Work Early On
• 26:53 Measuring ROI
• 33:26 Series A
• 35:05 Finding Product Market Fit
• 36:11 One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00)
 So listen man, I was reading that you just raised a $28 million Series A from Menlo Ventures, it’s a massive Series A, and I was reading your story and I'm like, hey, so this guy, as far as can tell, is a first time founder, started this like three and a half years ago. just a few months before, you raised like a $6 million seed round, seems like you raised like four million out of the gate in ‘21, so I was like, I gotta get this guy on and just figure out like, what is he doing right? Cause I'm sure there's a lot of people that would love to be in your shoes, so again, thanks for jumping on.
 
 Welcome to the product market fit show brought to you by Mistral, a sixth stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.

Parker, welcome to the show. 

Parker Gilbert (0:47)

Thanks, Pablo. Yeah, I appreciate it. You know, and I'm excited to chat. I think there's plenty of things we've done really well. And then we've made a whole pile of mistakes too. 

Pablo Srugo (0:58)

Maybe just so we get really specific, like people that are outside, like the accounting world, take Brex, which everybody will know about. Like who in Brex does what with Numeric? 

Parker Gilbert (1:07)

So the corporate accounting team and then some folks in the financing will use Numeric. It really starts on kind of an ongoing continuous basis, which is America is designed to pull in their underlying financial data and then start flagging things in kind of an observability type way where maybe there are issues. You're missing certain metadata fields. You need things to be coded to certain departments or locations or vendors. Flagging if there's sort of things that are kind of discrepancies and anomalies. All the way then into tracking, okay, well, what is everything that we need to now do at the end of the period to close the books? There's all sorts of adjustments, all sorts of reconciliations. The sign-offs are important because there is a control level and an element of making sure that everything's tracked and organized. And then we'll get into kind of the synthesis of that information. Okay, now that we've kind of completed all of the work to make sure that, you know, for October, all the financial records are in place, they're all correct, they all look good. Then we'll start to actually use tools and use a lot of AI to help teams describe, okay, what changed? Why did it change? What are the drivers? How do we then disseminate that kind of into the org, you know, whether it's internally or externally? So our sweet spot is sort of the ongoing accounting into taking that data and then using it for various business purposes. 

Pablo Srugo (2:18)

And how did you kind of come up with this in the first place? 

Parker Gilbert (2:20)

Yeah, so I had kind of an interesting road getting into this space. I joined a startup which is an amazing business, Hearth, which was founded by Anthony Goan and Joe Lonsdale. I joined as the first finance hire right around the Series A. And I didn't have any finance background whatsoever, so I was a bit of a kind of odd hire. But the philosophy of the company, which I really appreciated and is something we care a lot about here today, like, you know, the goal is to hire people who are, you know, high slope, eager to learn, eager to work their tail off. And I think that's a great approach in many finance roles. It's a lot of this “you can figure it out”, especially if you're willing to go throw yourself at it. so showed up and actually the first week, the first project announced was like, okay, we actually have to go get through a financial audit. We worked in a very regulated space. We had to provide audited financials to a number of state governments. And so I'd never done any accounting, any audit prep work, but was told immediately like, okay, first few months, like that is your full job. Your full job is just like a clean bill of health, you know, no material deficiencies. And then pretty quickly learned that accounting was a mess. You know,  We were so far away from being ready to produce audited financials. And that was an amazing learning process. And I really appreciate the fact that we had some very patient auditors and they'd be in our office every day for months, and I would just spend the time in a conference room with them, trying to stay at most 24 hours ahead of whatever they were working on. And that was such a great way to have a crash course in accounting and really go through the process of understanding, okay, what does it actually look like to make sure that everything that a company owns and how the business operates is actually correct and controlled and ready for a very stringent level of reporting requirements. And so, you know, went through that process, that then turned into hiring out an accounting and finance team, you know, building our first operating models, going through and actually kind of managing an acquisition we made, going through and managing lots of new business lines we were spinning up and just had an awesome experience doing it. And I think, you know, that company and kind of the growth curve that we're on, we're such a sweet spot for people to sell, like startups to sell software into. And so we would kind of get hit up all the time from different vendors and folks starting companies looking to sell into the office of the CFO. And my perspective was at the time was that it felt like there were a lot of people selling products for forecasting, for the sort of more like forward leaning FPNA functions, but there wasn't a whole lot that was really compelling in the accounting space, which was like the last thing I personally wanted to do. It's like, I hated the fact that for- oftentimes half of a month, we would be spending our time just making sure the data is correct and reconciling things and making sure we're ready. 

Pablo Srugo (5:02)

What is that? me an example. What does that look like? Like you say, making sure it's correct, reconciling. That's like what, for example?

Parker Gilbert (5:09)

Yeah, that might be as simple as making sure all the data from your bank account is actually in your accounting system and correctly coded to making sure that revenue recognition for software businesses, you have to typically record the recognized revenue versus your deferred revenue. So oftentimes that looks like piles of spreadsheets, lots of calculations, lots of taking data from one system, manually entering it into another and then still making sure everything actually looks good. And some of the most annoying parts are like, you may think you're finished with something as simple as, you hey, we're going to depreciate our fixed assets. We're going to go sign off on it. But then all of a sudden someone else on your team goes and posts a bill. Everything's out of whack. Now all of a sudden you've just spent a whole bunch of time, you know, sort of on, on work, which is unexpectedly changed where there's issues. You're trying to do all this work as quickly as possible, which tends to be a lot of different workflows. and it gets messy.

Pablo Srugo (6:01)

So you have the idea. It's like you know, the hype time of 2021. My understanding is you raised, you know, solid kind of, think 4 million seed kind of right out of the gate. was that? What was that process like?

Parker Gilbert (6:13)

 So, I mean, I was really fortunate to have, you know, an incredible boss, you know, at the company I was at, Hearth, Anthony, who was really supportive of me wanting to go do this and sort of, you know, go start a company as my next juncture. And so I really love the fact that like way before I left to go do this, We spoke about it, we talked about how do I make sure the experience at Hearth that I'm having is best aligned to go start a business. And then started this kind of on nights and weekends with my two co-founders. So I started this company with two former colleagues of mine and classmates of mine at Duke, Andrew Beale and Anthony Alvarez. And we started kind of tinkering away on this just on nights and weekends and kind of talking to a lot of different controllers and thinking about the space and trying to go sort of assess like,
 Was this a good idea? 

Pablo Srugo (7:01)

How did you do that? I think the first step was me saying, I have this problem. We haven't figured out how to solve this. We're not excited by the solutions on the market. And I think Andrew and Anthony, in many ways, are very skeptical. They were like, OK, well, just because you haven't figured out this problem, maybe later stage companies have. Maybe no one else is like you, and you're just doing something wrong or different. So in many ways, with a healthy level of skepticism, it was like, great, let's go talk to a couple dozen accounting teams. Let's go talk to companies at different stages. Let's go reach out to folks and just do pure research of understanding how have other folks solved these problems? What do they think? And that started just the ball rolling of, okay, well, definitely other people definitely have this problem. Other people are excited about how we're thinking about the problem, even with no designs or anything. If you can have a conversation and get someone excited by a little bit of the vision and the way you're thinking about a problem, you can start to…  you know, understand okay, is this resonating or not?

Pablo Srugo (7:59) 

I think that part is critical. So maybe just to go a little bit deeper on it, how many of those calls did you do? and how did you set up those conversations? You know, how much of it was pitching your vision and how much of it was like truly high level open ended questions about problems they had and about this specifically

Parker Gilbert (8:15)

My instinct is we probably talked with somewhere from 30 to 40 different accounting teams over the course of, you know, two months, something like that. And I think those conversations kind of at first started with like totally just open-ended questions and I think probably over the course of those months started to get more and more practical as we went and as we learned things to then the point being like by the end of it like we actually have Figma screens we have like some prototypes we're actually starting to you know get into the question of like way more detailed questions of does this make sense how do you think about this like what if what if the product looked this way or that way? 

Pablo Srugo (8:53)

For how many months did you and your co-founders work on the side?
 
 

Parker Gilbert (8:57)
 probably like five months roughly. Yeah.

Pablo Srugo (9:01)

 What was kind of the thing that made you, that made you jump in? 

Parker Gilbert (9:04)

I think there were three catalysts. think one, we start, we signed up some customers, built a prototype and they started using the product and then wanting things.and you know, Andrew, my technical co-founder felt the brunt of it. I mean, he was responsible for maintaining a product that people were using and paying for -

Pablo Srugo (9:23)

and had a- had paying customers while you're doing this on the side. Okay.

 Parker Gilbert (9:25)
 Yeah, and they were rightly demanding things, but we all had full-time jobs that we took very seriously. And there's kind of a very natural break point where it was like, we actually can't, we're struggling to do this while we kind of put our best efforts forward in our full-time roles. And then we got really excited. It's one of those things where all of sudden you start to do this and you spend time with these customers and prospective customers. And there's a very natural poll of, man, this is really engaging. This is like, I'm going to sleep thinking about how to make the product a little better. And then I think the third thing was we just felt like the more time we spent in this space, we just felt like the space was more broken than we even realized initially. And so it got us really excited that if you can solve these problems really foundationally, there's a really big important business to build here. And so I think it was kind of that combination of those items, which made us think, man, this would be a really exciting opportunity to go full time on, to go really invest in, and to go hopefully build a career around.
 
 Pablo Srugo (10:25)

How soon after you quit, did you go out and raise that first pre-seed round? 

Parker Gilbert (10:28)

That round actually got raised right after we quit, but before we had actually even, I think in at least mine, if not all of our circumstances, actually left our prior jobs.

Pablo Srugo (10:39)

What was that process? Did that just come to you, or did you run a process for it? 

Parker Gilbert (10:44)

Very quickly after giving notice, an investor gave us a term sheet preemptively to go lead that round. We then took a couple of 

Pablo Srugo (10:54) 

Someone you knew or just kind of met? 

Parker Gilbert (10:56)

Someone who was in our network and someone who we had kind of met after a meeting or two that was not even intended to go to fundraising meetings. Got really excited about the space, got excited about what we did, offered us terms to lead around. We then met with a handful of folks who we had connections with or folks we were excited to go spend time with and then sort of wrapped up a process in a couple days.

 Pablo Srugo (11:20)
 Cool, so now is where we get to like the meat of it, because in a sense you've done, while hard, really the easy part, which is like the research, the pre-seed funding, kind of the setup. Now you've got paying customers. I mean, getting the cross line is hard, but building a product that they truly love that then, you know, spreads is the part where most people kind of get stuck. So walk me through that phase of it. Like how did you set it up now that you're full time and you have resources? What were your main moves that you made? 

Parker Gilbert (11:52)

I do think this totally felt when the hard work really started. The first pieces felt pretty straightforward to then going from the, we have a handful, half a dozen, maybe 10 early customers to, okay, how do you start to really build traction and momentum? And the real intellectually honest perspective is that you have a fit that is valuable and meaningful and the right metrics and instincts and everything looks good. I think from us, from our perspective, we really wanted to focus as much of our efforts entirely around feeling like the customer engagement was exceptional. We wanted folks to really deeply understand why they were using it, what value they were getting out of it. so for the first, probably close to a year of the company, I couldn't give you the exact months, but probably close to a year, it really was a team of four or five, maybe six people max. Where it was, we were just solely focused on having this early cohort of customers, building a product for them, understanding the problems and trying to really deeply get to conviction of like, okay, like we've really found a fit that we're really just excited about and that it feels foundational. And I think there's obviously a balance to get right, but once you start the sales and marketing process, you kind of can't stop it. It's like everything gets harder to change, harder to turn.
 Pablo Srugo (13:15)
 That's what I was going to ask. You raised $4 million. It's a decent amount of money to have a five-person team. It seems like it was by design, but how did you think through that? That's another thing I hear sometimes. The investors want me to move faster or whatever. How did you align everybody on, let's be small and nimble until we've got the thing?
 Parker Gilbert (13:37)
 I think in a very practical way, we were very understanding of the fact we raised more money more quickly than we expected to, know, or necessarily intended to. And so, you know, just because someone gives you the money doesn't mean you should go spend it. And I also think there's a very real perspective. It's like spending money does not move things faster in many circumstances. And so I think, yeah, really focused on the core things that would truly felt like kind of product market fit seeking. And I do think there were lessons in hindsight where looking back, I think there were places we probably could have spent some money to move faster. I actually think that's like, there are places today that I think we made mistakes on the inverse, which is like, where do you be more aggressive? Where do you pull forward certain investments to try and move quicker? And I think we were probably almost too conservative in a couple of circumstances. But I also think that those are things you can come back from versus spending all of your money. It turns out to be very hard to come back from, you know, or even just like building out a sales team, much harder to sort of pivot the business, reorient things. you know, sort of focus on different areas. So there's a balance to find there, right? Which is how do you both invest in the things that you need to go prove as quickly as possible and get ahead of what's coming while also, you know, kind of staying as lean as you possibly can. 

Pablo Srugo (14:51)

What's your number one, like KPI, what are you most worried about, especially during that year? Because this is where I find so many things tend to go wrong. Once you start having customers, it's so hard not to care strictly about growing revenue. If you want to grow revenue, you probably should spend against it, you should land more and then you hire more bodies. And then you kind of, as you said, like it takes its own momentum and you can't really stop it. And if you go in as Trey, it's just really hard to pull back. It seems like you didn't do that. So I'm curious, like what was top of mind for you during that first year that you were obsessing about? 

Parker Gilbert (15:27)

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think we were obsessed with, you know, both quantitative and qualitatively feeling like we are delivering a really significant amount of value to our customers, whether that came through in product metrics around the different work they were completing in the product, the different workflows they were telling us were important. A lot of the metrics we track are around how do we improve folks' time to close, how do we improve their accuracy. So really sort of understanding and kind of coming to a perspective on, what are the metrics that if we're delivering to our clients, we're providing the right level of value and ROI on the money we're asking them to spend with us. And if you don't figure that out, nothing else really matters. And there are lots of circumstances where companies grow revenue like crazy prematurely before they find that type of fit. And that was something that we really did not want to go do. And so that first year was really entirely around having this awesome early cohort of customers. We were really fortunate. had 20, 30 companies working with us, using our product, giving us feedback. And that was hard work. Slack messages from customers telling us like, your product is too slow. You know, I cannot do this thing I need to do. And, you know, we would just be focused every day on making sure we were making the product a little bit better, incrementally improving things, listening to their feedback and, and, and trying to- in as true a sense as possible,- feel real conviction that, you know, we were delivering upon what they expected us.

Pablo Srugo (16:53)

Walk me through that. My assumption had been that you had maybe like five or 10 design partners, but you had more like 20 to 30 customers?
 
 Parker Gilbert (17:00)
 Yeah. Well, I would say like, I mean, while we weren't going and hiring sales reps and sort of hitting the pavement on like selling, we were still also meeting with prospective customers, get it, you know, like, like we were doing work on the margin of going and signing up new businesses, but it wasn't, you know, that would have ranked, you know, fifth on a list of five priorities as opposed to, you know, maybe the second priority or, or even first priority, right? That it might be, you know, in a different cycle of the business. So we were sort of incrementally adding customers here or there, but it was very much in an early cohort of, you know, somewhere between a design partner and a paying customer. Like they were paying, like we didn't sign up anyone who wasn't willing to pay for the software. We did do all monthly subscriptions, which we really liked as an intense culture driving element of the business. Every month it was awesome, even though it was painful to know that our biggest customers could all quit and walk away if they didn't feel like they were seeing what they wanted to see. 

Pablo Srugo (17:56)

So you, you purposely didn't lock them up to like year long contracts or two year contracts
 Parker Gilbert (17:59)
 Yeah, we had plenty of customers who wanted to pay us for a year and we would go back and say, nope, here's what we use to sign up customers today. It is a monthly agreement with this price tag and everyone conforms to that today. And that was a great way to really build a culture, which was just intense. I think everyone, it's very easy to sort of rationalize why you're going to fix a churn problem a year from now and not do anything about it. As much as you'd like to think, you could look at the data, you could look at the metrics and kind of understand, you know, where is there a problem? Where is there great engagement? where is there not? I think the reality is like, people just don't do that. You know, you kick the problem down the road, you go focus on something different. And then all of sudden you get to the end of an annual contract and you act surprised, you know, that like a customer's churning, even though you kind of knew the whole time that they weren't getting out of it. Like they weren't doing with the product what you needed to do to like deliver, deliver the service. So, the inverse is like, if you just keep the month to month contracts the whole time, like every month is a renewal for all of your customers. Like there's no way to avoid, you know, problems or potential issues on, are those customers satisfied or not? You know, that did change. There came a point in time where all of a sudden, you know, I think kind of as you exit some of those basic product market fit questions of like, we actually feel really confident. We understand from our customers, why do they love the product? You know, what do they think they're getting out of it? What does good engagement look like? then all of a sudden you start to shift and say, okay, cool, let's go start signing annual contracts. Let's go start, you know, now there's actually a benefit of getting the cash upfront, of getting the investment of kind of just conforming to a way companies oftentimes just want to buy software and make those investments. But I think in the early days for our business, it was really helpful to not do that. I do think it's important to recognize every product is going to be different too. It's like there's like, we have a very cyclical monthly cadence to our product usage. You know, people use it every month. There are certain times they tend to use it more than less. They use it as they lead up to a close, they use it during a close. So a product has a very natural engagement pattern around this cadence, but there are plenty of products that won't. There are plenty cases like an annual comp review maybe happens once a year. So if your product is designed to go fix that problem, you might not wanna offer monthly contracts because the cycle is actually six months away. So it will depend, I think, as well on just sort of like the nature of the product as to how you think about that feedback loop and what is the tightest feedback loop you can get.
 Pablo Srugo (20:24)
 I think so, but I think what you're talking about is really thinking from first principles in the sense of even when it comes to your pricing, how do you set up pricing to align with whatever your objective is? if you're a later stage and your objective is, you know, a better J curve, better cash collection, whatever, then the upfront payments with cash make total sense. But if your objective is fast iterations and like just finding product market fit and tuning, then actually the forcing function of a customer having to kind of re-decide, let's say, every month, even if it might lead to more churn in the interim, is long-term more helpful because you're just getting so much more insights faster and your entire team is so much more motivated that you end up in a better place down the road. if you're not bootstrapped or whatever and you can do it, it's something you should do. I don't think that most people, most early-stage founders think about pricing that way. It's usually more like, you know, what are others doing right? Or how can I get the most cash and time up for as long as possible? Which again, like that strategy makes sense at some point, but I don't know that it makes sense in the early days. Walk me through this really quickly. Like what, what kind of contracts, like what was your average customer paying at that point? Is it a hundred bucks a month, a thousand a month? Like what, kind of, what's the ballpark?

Parker Gilbert (21:36)

 I’d ballpark it at a  thousand a month, you know, hundreds of dollars a month into  thousands, like just adding on the rough sort of size, but we kept everything really simple, really clean, were all just like, yeah, sort of, you know, hundreds to like maybe a lot of thousands a month.

Pablo Srugo (21:53)

 And then I have to ask, and especially in that first year, I mean, if you look at just like Crunchbase, and this happens to a lot of companies, it just looks like, you know, up to the right, the thing just worked and it was like, right. And I'm curious, especially in that first year, because I assume that was when any challenges like, what were some of the main challenges? Do you have any punch to the face moments where things didn't look as clean, let's say, as you might have hoped? 

Parker Gilbert (22:18)

I think this business and most businesses, a lot of persistence is required. And there are a lot of times that do not feel easy. And I definitely think a big moment for us was making this transition from, all of our priorities are around what do our current customers look like? How is the engagement? How do we feel really good about it? And it was a really natural period of time where all of sudden, just really felt like things were clicking. It felt like we sufficiently developed the product, which takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. It felt like you could see in the metrics, but also even more importantly, just talking with customers. You could see their eyes light up talking about certain features. You could just hear the genuineness of like, oh my God, I love it that I can do this bit of numeric now. I can double click into this account, see the data, manipulate it, do my task, go back to my other work. And you'd see it in like bugs where it's like you'd see a bug get reported that something isn't working. And then like, you'd hear it from 10 customers pretty quickly and you realize like, snap, like they're really using that feature. Like they're really relying on it. Like they're not happy if something isn't working. And so it sort of went through this period where we started to really feel that signal in that hole. But then, you have to build a very different muscle, which is how do you go sell and market the product? you know, a great product does not just sell itself. And so that was definitely like a challenge to then go figure out, okay, well, how do we now go and start to think about marketing and building an engine function? How do we get in front of the right people at the right time? How do we run a really great sales process? I had not candidly sold much of anything prior to this experience and then was our sales rep selling the product and making rookie mistakes and learning as we go about, how do we start to translate what we feel like is really working with our customers into a really healthy sort of revenue growth and sort of sales and marketing effort. I do think that's something that we learned a ton about, but It didn't just work from day one. It required making a lot of mistakes. It required losing deals. required, you know.

Pablo Srugo (24:13)

 What are some of those? Like you remember any specific ones that still kind of haunts you a little bit? Like any big deals missed or any big mistakes that you made or your teammate around kind of that go to market motion?

Parker Gilbert (24:22)

I gotta say, I think I've made like every sales mistake in the books and like, you know, and my goal is obviously was just like try and not make the same mistake twice, but just be learning all the time. And it's the same way we hire for people now on the sales team is what that same mentality, but made every basic mistake. i think, there's one that stood out where we were trying to sell a sort of like pre IPO company and they asked how many people we had on the team at Numeric. And I think I said like six and their accounting team had dozens of people on it. And you could just tell like, you could just tell all the air was sucked out of the room at that point. And it was like, clearly you had sort of stepped up, you'd said something which like, And then immediately get the feedback after the meeting, which is like, yeah, we're not going to work with you. You're too small. We don't think this would be, you guys would be like, the right partner for us today. And there's a lot of those things where it's like, how do you communicate trust, a comfort with working with you? How do you be really transparent about what that looks like? How do you build those sort of relationships? Like selling into the office of the CFO is not necessarily a place where like, it's just riddled with early adopters who want to go work with a five person startup. There's real risk, real compliance, real importance of making sure the product works sufficiently well and has everything they need. And so lot of the learnings were about how do you get people comfortable with you? How do you run a really clean sales cycle? How do you communicate externally what you're hearing and those snippets and the soundbites and the excitement? Yeah, it was hard work. It was hard work. But it was also something where it just felt very clear.  can gyouet better at this every day. These are problems that people have solved. There's a lot of learning you can go do from how other companies have have whether it's hiring sales rep doing reps doing demand Gen, know marketing like there's a lot of there's a lot of lessons you can go take from people and and your goal should just be like learn faster, you know move quicker and kind of get through those sort of painful bits and and that was a lot of fun to then go into the next waves of you know, feeling like you're starting to structure and understand what the sales process looks like and what it takes to get a deal closed and what are the risks about a deal falling apart and they fall apart at every stage. So how do you be more proactive and understanding of what those things look like and how do you then start to train other people so they can sort of manage the process? And just such a privilege to get to go through that experience and start to have enough data points to see what it looks like and understand how you build off of it. 

Pablo Srugo (26:46)

And walk me through the other thing is around product market fit. Like you're talking about signals from the product that it's really working. Like when it comes to ROI,
 What are the key pieces of ROI that you're selling and that you're delivering on? Is it that time to close? Is it something else? 

Parker Gilbert (27:03)

Yeah, I think there's a number of different components about how we measure value. I think the most tangible and simplest one is really around, if you've got 10 people on your accounting team, it's taking you X days to close and we're gonna go cut that down by Y. Let's talk about what value that creates when you walk into what it's costing you to spend your team doing this work. That's a very simple way of backing into it, Quick run.

Pablo Srugo (27:24)

 So let me drill on that because sometimes a lot of people talk about this time saved thing, right? Like if you do my thing, we'll save you 30 minutes. And a lot of times it's the softer kind of ROI. What do you think in your case made it as compelling as it seems to be since you're having that adoption? Is it because it's not just, my people can work on something else, but it's also this time to close, I feel like is an accepted KPI, let's say for the finance team. Is that why you are tying to that? like, I guess, what's your thoughts on that?

Parker Gilbert (27:58)

 I think for companies in a certain size and stage, it's really top of mind. And I think, you you obviously want to find folks where this is a real, you know, burning problem and it really is something they want to go solve. It's, you know, like we will meet with some companies and they're like, this is my KPI for the quarter is go from 10 days to seven days. like, and that is like what I'm getting comped on, measured on, you know. It could be, we want to go public and in order to be public, here's what we have to do. And there really aren't exceptions around what these timelines or standards look like. so there is like a, it is sort of understanding like where's that best fit. A lot of our early customers were much smaller than our customers that we now kind of have today and sort of look at like our best ICP. that's pretty natural, right? You sort of start to feel like, okay, well, these customers that are maybe earlier stage startups, they've got one or two people on their team. Yes, they're using the product, they like the product, but Is their willingness to pay and this pain quite as big? Well, actually, look, this team of 30 accountants has a really big problem. And so definitely you start to explore different sizes -

Pablo Srugo (29:02)

But I'm drilling on this because I find for me at least, this is just from my observations, this is so important is: what is already a top of mind KPI for your ICP? And do you actually address that in a meaningful way? That puts you in a place where in my experience is they can't ignore you. have to because if somebody's like measured on, you know, or their main keep you out for the year is going from two weeks to one week time to close, let's just say, and you come in and you're like, Hey, on average, we decreased our goals by 50%. How can they not take the 15 minute call? And then if you actually have case studies and enough proof points around it, how can they not try it out? It just kind of eases your whole funnel more than it would if you just went and you said, you've got 10 people on your finance team, they spend two hours a week on clothes or whatever it is, their time is worth a hundred bucks an hour, so I saved you $2,000 a month. Is that true in your experience that there's a big difference between them or not so much? 

Parker Gilbert (29:58)

Honestly, I think a lot of the learnings are different. People think about the ROI in both of those camps and it's on you as running the sales process to understand what's going to move the needle for you and how are you thinking about it and how do you make the most compelling pitch against it. I think we'll see both. We'll see some people where there's a real KPI driven mandate by a team, a really compelling event, a really sort of like timely reason. You'll also see others where, yeah, you can completely convince someone this is a good idea by discussing the value of efficiency and of time and of saving the team. And there's all sorts of general sort of challenges that the accounting industry faces as well, where there are fewer accountants in the industry every year and the number of new accountants is going down and they're really in demand. So it's actually, you really need to think about attracting and retaining the best talents, know, kind of to my personal experience. I really do genuinely believe it. was like, you should go automate the most recurring, most mundane problems first because it frees up everyone to go do the really compelling things. So I think we see the range in sales processes in terms of, you know, what's top of mind. But what's really important is like building that relationship and that trust that you're going to be a partner and go solve these problems. And you might not know when the timing is right. I think like it's really hard, you know, outside in to understand when you're looking at a company and a prospect, like is now the right time for them to buy Numeric? Like, I don't know, maybe. And so I've kind of view our role of the sales team as very much like a steward, you know, sort of servant perspective of sales. You know, our job should be show up to a meeting, be useful, provide context about what we do, be very happy to tell people if it's not the right fit, you know, figure out other ways we can be helpful, you know, and just try and be useful and kind of trust the fact that those things will pay off in the long run.
 And that if and when the timing is right for someone to go prioritize this, their next quarter's KPIs, all of a sudden this is now a top priority. They're going to think of us. They're going to be excited to kind of circle back and we're going to have been useful in the process and built that relationship. And there's part of these things that you're never going to be able to always be perfect in terms of timing. So you might as well go make the most of every single engagement and go put your best forward at all times. And genuinely, sales should be useful. You should be providing value. You should be doing things in your marketing, your sales activities that are genuinely making, you know, not just your existing customers, but prospective ones. 

Pablo Srugo (32:20)

So walk me through, maybe just give me a sense of like ramp, like, you know, you spend the first year or so you have maybe 20, 30 customers, 20, 30 K MRR ish. How, how, and that's what like mid 22 or something like that? Like what kind of happens from there? We talking 2X like a 5X like a complete explosion, 10 X. Like what, kind of- What transpires- 

Parker Gilbert (32:41)

I would say it probably took us another then six months or so of hiring up our team and more, doing a lot of testing on the go-to-market, doing a lot of experiments and different ways of understanding how do we go start to build that muscle. And then it really was 2023 where we started to just see during the calendar year of 2023, all the metrics just moving in the way that get us excited, get our investors excited, start to feel like, oh man, you've started to sort of run a business, you've started to see the right signals from how do you generate leads to close deals to see renewals, like all those pieces, you just started to see that a really healthy level of growth. 

Pablo Srugo (32:21) 
 How many customers do you have now?

Parker Gilbert (33:23)

 We have hundreds of companies that use the product today. 

Pablo Srugo (33:26)

Awesome. And then maybe the last question is just like on the series A, I mean, I think the median series A is like 10 million, this is 28. pretty outlier series A. What's the story around there? How did that happen?
 Parker Gilbert (33:39)
 You know, the series A name is kind of hand-wavy, right? In terms of like, what does it actually mean? It's kind of a demarcation of like certain milestones, but it's also sequential. So, you know, we hadn't raised an A, so this round was always going to be kind of an A, even though our milestones and metrics might look very different than a typical sort of company at the series A. You know, like Grok, right? Elon Musk company raised what? Multi-billion dollar series A. you know, there's only so much you can kind of read into it. I think we've been very intentional and thoughtful about how we raise money, who we work from, how we build those relationships and approach it. And I think there are lots of founders and folks who have success with very different strategies. But I do think what is very consistent is people are usually pretty intentional about how do they want to go raise money? How do they want to go do a lot of work upfront? Do they only want to fundraise during a certain period of time? All sorts of strategies can be successful. I think for us, what it was was being very intentional about how do we want to go build those relationships and find great people who are excited about the space, who think similarly about the vision and where we want this business to go, and then are excited to be a part of it and finance the business today and hopefully long into the future. 

Pablo Srugo (34:51) 

But you went and ran a full process to close this round, or was it also inbound?

Parker Gilbert (34:57)

So Menlo Ventures led this round, who was an existing investor on our cap table. So they had invested in the safe that we had raised prior. This was not a round that we ran a process around. 

Pablo Srugo (35:10)

Well, let's end it there I'll close on the two questions I always close on: the first one is When did you feel like you'd found true product market fit?

Parker Gilbert (35:18)

 I think there were I think there were there were a handful of calls with customers where You could just tell the level of excitement around the product was was was higher than it ever been before You know with a new set of features we launched you could just you could just hear the excitement and you're like wow that it feels different that feels different than the excitement or satisfaction that we'd heard prior. And that was a real  demarcation for me, which was like, man, we should go sell this thing. We should go push harder. We figured out something here that's really clicking in a way that is unique and different and is really deeply resonating with customers. So it was less metrics based. It wasn't like a certain milestone. It was much more around the like, in my mind, the of qualitative experience talking with our customers and hearing what's resonating and how genuine it felt.

Pablo Srugo (36:05)

 Perfect. And then last question, like if I remember back to when I started my first startup, it was probably the fastest learning curve I've ever gone through. imagine it was, it's been similar for you. Like if you could go back four years with some piece of advice kind of for your younger self, what might that be?

Parker Gilbert (36:23)

 Yeah, I think a lot of this has been an effort in continuing to be more and more confident in the fact that you can go solve these problems. And in many ways, you should just go focus on the top problem today and get to the next one tomorrow. And I think there's a real beauty to some extent in being short-sighted and just being able to really, really narrow down. so I think my advice to my younger self would just be to do exactly that, to focus on learning quickly and to enjoy the process and to prioritize hiring just the best people and the people you're going to really enjoy working around because this stuff is so hard. You know, what has made this an awesome experience for me personally has been, has been getting the chance to show up to work every day with people who I respect, who I'm learning from myself, who are doing things in the right way and are kind of propelling their careers now and accomplishing new things for themselves. And that's, that's what has made this really rewarding to me. 

Pablo Srugo (37:17)

Parker, it has been a pleasure having you in the show. Thanks for jumping on.

Parker Gilbert (37:20)

Thanks Pablo. I appreciate it. 

Pablo Srugo (37:22)

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