It's been a decade since Steven Plappert founded FantasyHub.
And in those years, he watched several startups — including his own — fail. He also saw the successes of a small percentage of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that made it to $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Reaching that early stage milestone "has always been something I've wanted to do," Plappert said in a recent interview.
Now he's done it with Forecastr, a SaaS startup with an online platform that allows founders to forecast revenue, predict runway and understand their numbers. The company hit $1 million in ARR last month.
But it didn't happen overnight.
Founded in 2019 by Plappert, CEO, and Logan Burchett, chief operating officer, Forecastr's team spent 2020 building the product and "selling the dream of it," Plappert said, meaning prepaid subscriptions for the product.
Last year, the focus was on growing the team and establishing processes.
"This year is the first year really in my career that I feel like I'm actually playing the role of a CEO," Plappert said, noting that when the company was really small, he was doing roles that belonged to yet-to-be-hired department heads and other individual contributors.
These days, with 23 employees, including nine in Kentucky, Forecastr has analyst and sales teams in addition to developers. Earlier this year, it closed on $1.25 million in an internal fundraising round with its existing investors to make another round of hires, which included Jeff Erickson, director of strategic partnerships, and Eric Shriner, chief technology officer.
Now, it's all about the execution, Plappert said. Since the start of 2022, Forecastr has tripled its revenue and doubled its customer base year-to-date, and he expects the company to reach $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue by the end of the month.
That doesn't mean the company is sitting back and resting on its accomplishments, however.
With the accelerating pace of sales, Plappert said the Forecastr needs product to keep pace. Right now, its platform is helping companies build financial models online, and that's all well and good until companies grow and need more robust solutions. Its current customer base is mostly seed- to Series A-stage companies.
But Plappert has "big picture" vision for the future of Forecastr.
"The financial planning and analysis business function is a function that's historically been run out of Excel," he explained. "It's a function that we believe has much more value in an online integrated web app like Forecastr. And we want to be that default [operating system] — just like QuickBooks is for accounting, just like Carda is for cap tables, just like just like Salesforce is for CRM (customer relationship management) — we want to be that for FP&A (financial planning and analysis). And if we're going to do that — we've got to build a lot of features around the financial model."
I asked Plappert if he had any advice for companies looking to follow in Forecastr's footsteps. Two things came to his mind: prioritizing people and developing objectives and key results (ORKs) or other objective measurement systems.
"If you don't have good people, you're just screwed," he said. "People are at the heart of everything. And it's not just your employees, but also your customers, your investors, your community."
He also mentioned how he learned to find small wins along the way.
"I feel like one of the things that I didn't do a very good job of at FantasyHub that I've done a much better job of this time is just waking up and smelling the roses," he said. "At FantasyHub, it felt like I was thinking about the finish line all the time, and what you realize when you fail a company is that sometimes that finish line doesn't come or isn't what you thought it was gonna be.
"Then if you delay all your gratification to the end, like you may wake up three years later with nothing to show for it. This time I was like, 'You've got to wake up every day. You've got to do your best and you've got to appreciate the moment that you're in.'"
