Selling Elevar -- 17 Years in the Making

Elevar, a SaaS company I co-founded in 2017 that serves brands like Vuori, SKIMS, Glossier, Netflix, and thousands more, was acquired by Buxton in Jan 2024. Elevar + Buxton coming together creates an omnichannel powerhouse empowering brands to create exceptional customer journeys and implement true personalized 1:1 marketing strategies…..that all of YOU as consumers will benefit from 😀

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It was 2007. 

I had a friend who was building a “startup” and sharing his story with me. 

His late nights ideating on designs and trying to bring it to life.  

It intrigued me. 

Several months later I woke up in the middle of the night due to a vivid dream. 

It was about my own “startup”. 

It was the best *ucking idea in the world – so I scrambled to write down what I could remember in the middle of the night. 

I sat on it for several months. 

I purchased a giant sketch pad and started designing my vision (if you want to call it that). 

At the time, I was in my mid 20’s, had a full-time job making great money, and enjoyed my life. 

My life at the time essentially consisted of working 9-5, training and playing basketball a few hours/day, and partying on the weekends with friends. 

Occasionally I would binge self-help books in the world of real estate, stock market, and general finance helping me “dream big”.

I didn’t exactly dive head first into my new startup. 

It was a casual no-stress hobby. 

But I’d keep hearing the updates from my friend about their startup. 

They got their first paying customers. 

It was actually a functioning app that I could use.

Now “it” started to get real in my own head. 

I began having major FOMO about not being the headline in Techcrunch or Mashable which was new and hot at the time. 

At this point I had saved up a good amount of money from my commission checks and used that first $20K to hire a small design and development duo to bring my sketches to life as a side-gig.

I brought my sketchpad to their house and got to work ideating and sharing my vision. 

For the early part of my life I would characterize myself as extremely impatient + competitive + petulant with a touch of entitlement. 

This is a deadly combination – in a bad way. 

When deadlines were missed in the design of this new project, or what I was QA’ing was not what I envisioned in my head, I would rage inside and out. 

I wasn’t experienced enough to realize that this was 100% due to me. 

I was new to software. New to business.

I didn’t really know how it works or the concept of scope, timeline, budget. 

I was just plain naive.

But we forged ahead. 

I released early versions and began my own way of marketing.

It was a dual-sided marketplace so I needed to market to find shoppers AND sellers. 

Today the app is best described as “Etsy for indie boutiques and retailers”. 

So I needed local shops to claim their store and populate it with images and products to sell before I could begin marketing to shoppers. 

But danger hit.

“Brad, we’re going to need another $25K to finish building these features and changes you’ve requested.”

WTF

This was a gut punch. 

At the time my base + commission structure split was essentially 40% / 60%, and my commission was only paid annually. 

I was also paying off years of credit card debt racked up from college and post-college, my student loans, and my apt in DC. 

I couldn’t back out and shut the project down yet. 

I was just getting started. 

So what does a dumbass founder do? 

Drain his 401K account. 

I think I had about $40K at the time. 

I drained it, even after my HR and multiple people tried stopping me because it was such a terrible idea due to the major tax penalty I was going to pay. 

I heard them, but took my own path. 

I took it out => paid the $25K => kept the project forging ahead. 

I needed sellers on the marketplace. 

What better way to secure than to go door to door and pitch my product to the business owner. 

I started with Washington, DC local businesses. 

I’d hit the streets every day after work and on the weekends and walk into the stores and pitch. 

Then I went to NYC – the mecca of boutiques. 

In a span of 3 days I literally walked every block of Manhattan and walked in and pitched these stores as well. 

Then I went to New Orleans. 

My now wife went with me on this trip – god bless her soul. 

She’d wait outside as I walked in and out in a matter of 60 seconds getting shot down. 

It was so bad that I asked her to go in and pitch a few stores – she was their demographic. She did slightly better than me. 

This was the ultimate non-scalable initiative to tackle – walking door to door to try and bring on sellers.

My close rate was maybe 5% over thousands of pitches. Actually probably more like 0.5%.

I learned how to take no, gracefully, very quickly though. 

Looking back, this is a skill (and muscle) that has served me well and will continue to serve me for life. 

Fast forward a few years, I had a few wins with the business. 

We had our first flash sale across stores hosted on our platform that went so well our servers crashed. 

We built an amazing personalization engine for our shoppers taking data that would tell us upon signup – their favorite brands, styles, what they were shopping for, etc, and would match to products and boutiques they might be interested in. 

This is where I really started to learn and understand data, analytics, and the intersection with customer marketing.

I had quit my full-time job to go all-in. 

But I was extremely naive and living in the “if I build it, they will come” mentality. 

Not long after, I ran out of money. 

I picked up a caddying job to work in the mornings/weekends so I could continue the 2am daily grinds to keep things going. 

But I hit $0. 

I literally had no money, no savings, no 401K, no confidence, and no product that was worth squat. 

But I had an amazing woman that stuck by my side that kept me going. 

I got a new full-time job, tried whitelabeling my product to a partner to buy it another 1-2 years, but I was mentally done and needed a restart. 

So we decided to move from Washington, DC to Charleston to start fresh in 2011. I officially shut the app down in 2012. 

I was 30.

I went from making ~ $120K/year in my early to mid 20’s to now $45K/year, $0 in savings and $0 in retirement just to get a new start. 

It was at an eCommerce agency where we designed, developed, and optimized websites for brands. 

Back then it was primarily Magento. 

I vowed to never start a business again. 

I matured enough at the time to realize just how difficult and stressful it is. 

I think I was employee 20 at the agency and we ended up scaling to ~ 150 people within a few years. 

eCommerce was booming and the angle we had of pairing design & development with analytics & CRO was innovative at the time. Most agencies did not offer this complete package. 

My goal at the time was to “climb the ladder” vs going really deep on a specific skill set to become an expert individual contributor. 

However as 4-5 years went on I was hitting my head at the top of the ceiling. 

I had nowhere else to go even though I wanted to continue growing professionally.

But I had a vision of what was needed in eCommerce at the time. 

1 week before my 5 year anniversary at the agency I put my notice in. 

It was time. 

I was ready for entrepreneurial redemption. 

And I had built up my 401K again….

Retrospecting on my first startup I took two big learning lessons and applied them to Elevar:

1. I needed a BRAND

2. I needed to MAKE MONEY

While there were so many expensive learning lessons I made from my first business attempt, these were my big 2. I would tell friends I felt like I went through a startup MBA.

I also can’t underscore the vast amount of learning I went through at the agency. 

It was like another MBA in business building. 

I believe Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) talks about this often and I 100% agree: 

The first 2 years employed at a business is just enough time to get your feet under you. 

Years 2-5 are when you can really LEARN. 

And If you stay 5+ years that’s when you’re simply going to outlast the others and move “up the ladder”....assuming you deliver results. 

I still have friends at the agency that I think have been there 12+ years now. Most are “C-something” at this point. 

To me, this is a faster path to climb “up” vs job hopping every few years.

Back to Elevar…

It’s 2024 today and Elevar was officially incorporated in 2017. 

But it’s really a tale of 2 different businesses. 

When we started our tagline was “Automated Insights”. 

We’d ingest data from Google Analytics API => analyze these in real-time through dynamic segments & formulas, and return text-based insights.

We charged $50. 

No free stuff. 

Remember learning lesson # 1? 

Make money. 

I wanted to see if non-friends would actually pay money for this new app. 

I think we ended up with ~ 100 paying accounts. 

But then we started to hit our first few major problems:

1. Scale. The amount of data we were ingesting and analyzing too much.

2. Data integrity. Users did not trust the insights we were providing them. 

So we set off to try and solve both of these problems. 

For scale we partnered with a development agency to help take over the build, infrastructure, and new features. 

For the data integrity – at the time our app was text-only. We had no graphs. So we decided to build graphs and charts into the app so users could see their source-of-truth data…which we hoped would build trust. 

Knowing what I know now I would have approached our early product MVP differently. 

I didn’t understand the concept of building everything in excel (or today, AirTable) first before going the software-only route.

I should have done this. 

I highly recommend thinking very hard about how to make a KISS MVP product before building all-out. 

Fortunately this was a lesson I extracted early in the days of Elevar and we put into our product development process. 

We spend a lot of time prototyping and piloting vs assuming our customers are going to unanimously love 100% of what we release. 

A few key moments stand out to me in the first few years of Elevar:

The $40,000 nightmare. 

One Monday morning I received an email from our Google Cloud rep:

“Hey Brad – we noticed a big spike in usage over the weekend. I hope this is from significant growth. But if it’s not I thought I’d let you know in case this is unexpected.” 

There was a bug deployed EOD Friday that resulted in our Big Query read/writes to go crazy. 

A $40,000 bug. 

At the time we had only a few thousand dollars/month in revenue coming in and were paying $20-30K/month in development services. 

I thought the business was over. 

We had no credit card. No savings. No cash flow. 

I think I broke down crying in silence at the time.

Even though this was a deployment made by a contractor – it was 100% my issue and fault. 

Google had billing threshold alerts available at the time – I just didn’t know they existed so didn’t set them up. 

But – after some lengthy back and forth – we got a reprieve from Google. 

They wiped the charge.

I was granted another life. 

SaaS Academy

When Elevar was < $10K/month in MRR I signed up for monthly coaching that was $2,500/month. 

Crazy to most. 

But I was honest enough with myself that I did not know everything and needed the help to get to where I wanted the business to go. 

My first strategic game plan session with Dan Martell was a game-changer. He got me dialed into our ICP, growth channel, and personal growth that I needed to take in the next 12 months. 

In my eyes I was still a failed entrepreneur so I was extremely humble. 

If he or someone I met that was ahead of me recommended an action – I listened. 

Being around hundreds of SaaS founders over the years and seeing those that achieve big results vs those that don’t – humility is a top trait of those that succeed. 

You can be uber-confident – just be humble and willing to listen and learn. 

The Upwork Nights

While rebuilding our app to try and support scale we had to shut down new software signups. 

So we kept the professional services going which was primarily focused on data analytics, Google Tag Manager work, conversion optimization, and A/B testing. 

For a year I was also working Upwork jobs on Friday nights and weekends just to bring some extra cash in for myself and our early team. 

I didn’t tell anyone except my partner. 

Looking back it was those moments that you read in Instagram quotes these days from John Wooden:

“The true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching.”

No Credit Card

It may sound out of the norm but it wasn’t until Year 6 of business that we started using a credit card. We were debit card / cash only. 

After paying off several years of development services debt, I did not want to fall into the debt trap again.

It forced discipline on myself and our team. 

We’d critique every statement. 

We’d never sign an annual agreement that required annual prepay (it’s amazing how this is such strong leverage – we’d never budge. No one wants to lose business over this term). 

Month to month baby. 

But even with this, we hit financial turbulence in the first few years with expenses far outweighing our revenue.

Remember that replenished 401K I had?

Welp, had to put that to use. 

So I drained it to $0, again to stay alive.

The Covid Years

Going into 2020 we had a few parallel paths going:

1. We were rebuilding our Insights Engine product for scale & trust

2. We had launched our first Shopify App – “Google Tag Manager Suite”

3. Our services were booming and keeping us afloat. We pioneered headless Shopify builds with StriVectin being our first back in 2020. 

I forecasted a significant loss for 2020 as we built up our team, rebuilt our product, and set the stage for growth acceleration in 2021. 

Covid accelerated this revenue loss for us. 

Many customers on our services stopped paying for at least 2-3 months. 

We ended up taking on more debt to the business to continue “going all in”. 

At the time this was the only path. 

Our team was humming and I did not want to miss a paycheck. 

But this did force even more discipline in our direction. 

At the time we had our SaaS app which automated insights analysis, forecasting, etc. 

And we had our standalone Shopify App for GTM & Data Layer. 

We decided to cut 40% of our SaaS product and merge the two products together. 

This was a decision we should have made a year prior. 

We cut the parts of the product that were not being used and no one really wanted. I was too slow to accept this fate.

But, we executed and never really looked back from here. 

While searching for an answer to the “data integrity” problem, we ended up building the Elevar that everyone knows today. 

But it wasn’t easy. 

My personal motto for 2020 and 2021 was that I was committed to waking up every day with a “4” in it. 

4am. 459am. Didn’t matter as long as it was a 4. 

I believed I could outwork our competition and market. 

The Scaling Years

I call 2021-2023 the scaling years. 

We went through tremendous growth. 

We grew to ~ 50 people, ~ 8 figures in ARR, but remained humble and extremely focused on our customers (some “experts” told me to a fault).

These were the years where my personal transformations really started to accelerate.

I went from the grind-all-hours-behind-keyboard to being much more strategic. 

Personal Transformations

There is no destination. 

It sounds cliche, but is true — once you understand there is no final destination and the joy of building a company is in the journey — then you are free. Mentally free. 

Health is wealth. 

I’ve been into fitness since I was a kid. I’ve never gone more than a week without going to the gym except for COVID which transitioned us into garage trainers. 

Even with 2 kids, my wife and I working full-time, we ALWAYS prioritized fitness. Our kids would watch/do it with us. Still do today. Having a supporting family was a huge part of this.

Don’t make excuses about your health.

Who do I need to become?

This was another lesson that resonated with me as I developed. If I was the person that I needed to be to have a $10m business, then I’d already be that person and we’d be at $10m. Kind of freaky, right?

I shed my layers of skin over the years evolving as a person. You can’t be the same person trying to go from 0-1 as you need to be to go 1-5, 5-10, etc. 

Buying back my time.

This was a key hiring strategy for me over the years (thanks, Dan!) – hire to buy back my time, not against an org chart. 

It’s that simple. And that’s how I continue to move my focus to more impactful and higher leverage activities. 

Give Without Expectations

The more you give, the more you receive in return. Another one of those universe things that is just true. Giving isn’t just $$ either. 

My job is to serve my team, not the other way around.

I need to train, nurture, guide, lead, and most importantly help them achieve their own personal goals. 

Without a doubt some of my favorite memories from Elevar so far are hearing my team share:

• They bought their first house

• They paid for their family to go on vacation together

• They are paying off major debt

• They are taking insane vacations

• They had their first kids 

• They’re making amazing home renovations

• They’re on path to “retire” by 40-45

^ This drives just as much as serving our customers. I can’t describe it.

Wrapup (Part 1 of x)

You might be wondering why I’m writing such a long story on my journey…..

…well to begin this is like me shedding my skin of the past. I need to will evolve as a leader as we build Elevar + Buxton into a world class solution solving a 100+ year old problem of 1:1 omni-channel marketing.

I’m paying it forward. 

I know some of you are reading this and might be where I once was.

I would read post-exit stories like these from other founders along my journey.

They were always a source of motivation, education, and acted a bit like a north star to me.

It’s selfish of me not to share and give light to many dark years.

Most of this post is probably a surprise to my own family. 

Do you have ambition in your professional careers?

Just remember you can “win” in different ways:

You can go the Founder route – but be prepared to be 100% all-in for 5-7 years. I was 17 years! 

OR

You can go be a “Founder” inside a company.

With Elevar I’ve tried to develop a company culture where you can be entrepreneurial and “founder-like” inside your own department. Across departments. And grow – spiritually, financially, mentally, skills, etc. We will continue to enable this.

To close, there are thousands of personal transformations and lessons that I’ve gone through but can’t possibly share here at once. 

I’ve been writing daily business learning lessons in an Apple Notes file for years!!

(and yes, I realize my “Scaling Years” section was pretty light on details 🙂 - you’ll need to follow me to get these tips..ran out of time on this one!)

I’ll either share here or on my Instagram (more personal lessons) or LinkedIn (more business lessons).

If you want these long posts — just drop your email in to be notified when I publish my next novel. 

No promises on novel timing though — this isn’t turning into some weird side-hustle, this is just a place for me to express thoughts and give back.

I want to thank everyone who has supported me over the decades – my family, my partner Nate Winkler, my team and the early partners and colleagues who bet on me, friends, customers, partners, competitors, people who doubted me, people who overlooked me or Elevar, and many other haters.

But most importantly – my wife who has stood by my side through all of the stupid decisions a founder makes chasing a dream. Thank you. 

I am truly grateful for the support over the years.

And as Jesse Itzler famously says — you remember those that reached out to you to congratulate, console, or compliment. 

I remember every one of you that has done this for me the last 17 years.

Thank you. 

PS — Now ya'll might be wondering where I'm going!

Well the answer is -- no where!

I'm a significant shareholder in Elevar + Buxton and have unfinished business to deliver to our customers.

Bootstrapping can only get us so far (and it got us a LONG way in ~ 7 years). 

We've crushed it as a team. 

A product. 

A culture. 

A community.

But there comes a time as a leader when you realize you need more horsepower to fulfill your potential. 

So with this mission, backed by PSG, and armed with additional people and resources, we are building a solution that our market has never seen before.

Buckle up!