Namely payroll driver#

We started focusing on that part of the market six years ago, (and) now there’s other companies getting religion around that. “I think it’s probably the last remaining white space left in the HR, payroll, benefits space. And he immediately increased our pricing and got it to a much better place.” Why he’s resisted the temptation to go after bigger contracts So I brought in a VP of sales, Michael Manne, who joined us from Ultimate Software, which is also a payroll company. “I think the number one advice I can give is don’t let your founder set your pricing! We tend to be terrible at pricing because we always are hypercritical of our own product and aren’t always aware of how bad the competitor’s products can be, or at least that they all have issues. Transcript Excerpts Advice for pricing your product There’s no finish line to it, as much as you accomplish, if you’re driven, you’re still going to want to accomplish more, and you’re never done.”įavorite business book: “ Crossing the Chasm”įavorite online tool for building the business: Notes app in his iPhone Noteworthy: He wishes his 20-year-old self knew that “success is a never-ending pursuit. Name: Matt Straz, age 50, married with two teenagers. Get to Know Matt Straz, Founder of Namely So they’re adding a lot of seats to the product, which is helpful.” “I think we’ve kind of curated the first thousand customers that we wanted on the platform and we focused on ones that are companies like ours that are growing. But it’s actually people just adding more seats to the product,” Straz says.

Namely payroll driver#

“We thought that upsells would be a big driver of that and there’s some element to that. Namely is retaining more than 80% of its gross revenue annually, and the company (at the time of this interview) has a revenue churn of around 20% per year.Ī significant lever for driving expansion? Namely grows as its customers grow, too. The company does between $40 million and $50 million in ARR, up from $25 million in December 2016. And I didn’t come from HR … But then of course in more recent years, we’ve hired people with a ton of HR experience.”Īt the time of this interview, his team had more than 400 employees nationally, with a few dozen at its newest office in Austin. “It was essentially a database of employees and an org chart.

“It was a lot of door-to-door, a lot of networking, calling in favors, asking people to take a meeting with the product that was at best, very nascent,” Straz says. At the time of this interview, the company had raised more than $157 million.

He started Namely with zero HR experience, but managed to instill confidence in 13 angel investors who collectively invested $1 million to start Namely. He chose the latter.īefore Namely, Straz started a company that he sold to WPP and another that was acquired by AOL. Straz had worked in advertising in New York for nearly 20 years, and he’d reached the point where he could continue and make a comfortable living or try something new and exciting with less of a safety net.