1577 Why He Sold His $3.1m ARR Company For 3x ARR 2 Months Ago
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Nathan Latka
4.6 • 683 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
Jeff Cope, Founder and CEO of InspectionXpert, has a passion for helping precision manufacturers transform inefficient, paper procedures into efficient, standardized, fully traceable and secure digital processes.
Having made the transition from a manufacturing engineer to mechanical design engineer earlier in his career, Jeff was uniquely placed to quickly grasp the challenges facing precision manufacturers in their day-to-day operations.
Jeff identified a glaring gap in the market for a quality inspection software which would help precision manufacturers eliminate paper in the manufacturing and quality inspection process.
Teaching himself how to code, Jeff wrote the first InspectionXpert programme in 2004 which simplified quality checking processes and ensured a greater accountability over the QA chain.
InspectionXpert was born, and today the company counts the likes of Pratt & Whitney, Kohler, Boeing, Airbus, NASA and Virgin Galactica as part of its 1,000 strong, global client base.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | founded back in 2004 helping precision manufacturers make sure their 2D and 3D balloons and extrapolations match the actual physical products once they're printed currently serving 2,000 customers at about 130 bucks per month. So doing that 3.1 million bucks in ARR today. That's up from about 180 grand per month just a year ago. So healthy growth bootstrap, the company sold it about two months ago for |
| 0:21.2 | 3x or about 3x ARR. So call it somewhere in the 9 millionish range. Churns gone on the right |
| 0:25.8 | direction, 8% revenue turn per year today, team of 20 based in North Carolina. Hello, everyone, |
| 0:31.6 | my guest today is Jeff Cope. He's the founder and CEO of inspection expert and has a passion |
| 0:36.1 | for helping precision manufacturers transform inefficient paper procedures into efficient, standardized, fully traceable, and secure digital processes. |
| 0:43.8 | Jeff, are you ready to take us to the top? |
| 0:45.5 | I am. |
| 0:46.1 | All right. |
| 0:46.6 | So inspection expert. |
| 0:48.1 | Break this down for us. |
| 0:48.9 | For those of us not familiar with precision manufacturing, what do you do and how do you make money? |
| 0:52.7 | So, yeah, so what an inspection expert does is |
| 0:55.3 | it helps you know companies who make very precise parts so think aircraft engines |
| 1:01.0 | cars things that are really precise so a shoe manufacturer if the shoes off by a couple |
| 1:08.6 | millimeters nobody's going to die if the jet engine is off by a thousandth of an inch, you know, the jet engine can explode. |
| 1:16.6 | So people who make, companies who make really precision parts, typically out of metal, sometimes plastic, have to do quality inspections on that. |
| 1:25.6 | Our software enables that and enables them to do it very |
| 1:30.6 | efficiently. So is your revenue model a pure play SaaS company? It is. Oh, very good. Yeah. Okay, |
| 1:37.2 | so give me a general sense. I'm sure you work with a lot of different customers, but on average, |
| 1:40.5 | what's company pay per year for your software? So if I understood the question, you want to know what type of companies we work with? |
| 1:49.6 | Not what type, Jeff, because I'm sure you have a bunch of different cohorts of customers. |
| 1:53.0 | My question is, on average, what's the company pay you per year to access this kind of software? |
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