Drip's Lean Growth

A story about how Rob Walling grew and sold his email service provider company Drip, and its evolution after the acquisition.

"Drip grew to a few million before I sold it in 2016. We were a team of 10 when we sold it. Leadpages bought it - they had raised $38 million in venture capital. It was actually under a parent company called Avenue 81 that owned both Leadpages and Drip.

What's interesting is that pretty soon the Avenue 81 CEO realized the opportunity was Drip - it was a multibillion-dollar opportunity, whereas landing pages were maybe an $80-100 million market. Since they were venture-backed, they needed to get to a billion in valuation, so they actually sold off Leadpages and the company became Drip.

It was similar to what happened with Best Buy and Geek Squad - Best Buy wouldn't exist without Geek Squad because that was all their net profit through the last 15 years. That essentially happened with Drip. They refocused the whole team to 170 employees, and I got to start handpicking people from the Leadpages team to help grow Drip. When I left, there were over 100 people working on it.

The truth is that growth destroys cash. No matter how much we made, I was spending it on AWS bills, Sendgrid, contractors, and employees. The moment we'd grow by $10 in monthly recurring revenue, I'd hire another junior because we were understaffed. That's what led to my decision to either raise an angel round or sell it."