ThankView

JD Beebe

New York City, New York
Co-Founder & CEO, ThankView

ThankView helps schools and organizations create branded, personalized videos for recipients to thank people, raise awareness, promote events, and update stakeholders.

I started my career in advertising, working at large firms including Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, Saatchi and Saatchi, and HUGE. I worked my way to the creative side of the business, working as a copywriter and eventually a Creative Director. Along the way, I started a few silly businesses—I sold fake beards and went on to start a topical Halloween costume company, I sold love notes on Valentines Day from Jon Hamm called Hamm-O-Grams, and I made a website that helped nearly 100 of my past co-workers find new jobs after agency layoffs. In NYC, I joined an agency called Noise, where I was able to see how the business really worked. Using what I learned, I turned a consulting gig into my own creative digital agency, New Antisocial. We had a Manhattan gym client that got us thinking about the boutique fitness space. As a joke, I started a fitness studio called “Beebe’s Buttcamp” after attending a Barry’s Bootcamp class. The joke very much became real and we grew to over 25 classes a week and was named one of the best NYC studios during our run.

During these projects, I got engaged to my now wife. I didn’t want to handwrite the wedding gift thank you notes, so that sparked the idea behind ThankView. Luckily, through all these pursuits, I was able to corral friends into becoming equal partners, and ThankView started with four founders – two childhood friends who had helped run the other businesses and our CTO Jerry Bai who I had met at Noise. We soon pivoted to working with universities and nonprofits as we saw that sharing gratitude was central to their business models. The funds from each prior business funded the subsequent so we remained bootstrapped and self-funded through our eventual sale.

ThankView was founded in 2015 and sold in 2021. Prior to selling, I had met the EverTrue CEO Brent Grinna at conferences. We had become friendly and later partnered, having ThankView data feed into the EverTrue platform. By 2020, ThankView was beginning to entertain an exit as we were still bootstrapped and hadn’t taken a dollar out of the business. Around the same time, Brent was also considering a sale. We constructed a narrative of a future where we were a single org that was very compelling. Instead of officially merging businesses, we simply marketed ourselves as an “exotic” deal where we verticalized ourselves ahead of a sale. We were already represented by Horizon Partners, an “artisanal” advisory group and EverTrue joined forces. We combined our stories and hit the market mid 2021.

We were marketing ourselves for a majority sale to private equity groups. We decided that PE was the right move for us early on because there aren’t many strategic firms in this space, they offered worse terms, and it’s important to have a competitive process to produce good outcomes. We sent our proposal out to 35-40 PE firms, met with nearly 20, chose three finalists and went through deep diligence. The deal structures were all different, some with different earn out clauses and valuations. We ended up choosing Rubicon Technology Partners, who I can’t say enough good things about. They’ve been amazing partners to us and have supported us as we went on to acquire three additional organizations. We set up an Integration Management Office (IMO) to integrate all the companies into a single entity and have spent the subsequent months integrating the teams and working on ways to integrate the tools.

The exit was an absolute success and I would certainly sell again—the only downside to the exit is the inevitable change in culture that comes with growth. As a self-funded company, not only did the founders do well, but every employee made a substantial amount from the sale, which I’m very proud of. Some have been able to parlay that into launching their own startups and I love seeing what cool things people in our alumni network are up to now. Today, I remain at the company as the Head of Product, mentor other entrepreneurs as much as time allows, and have become a modest investor—mostly supporting other founders in the fundraising/advancement space.

With startups, I would say there are a thousand ways to do it and no one way is right. Starting companies with friends hasn’t come without some heartache but ultimately it’s the most fun I’ve ever had and has been life changing. Even our M&A advisors I now consider close friends. For me, being able to self-fund and stay small and hungry for many years lead to the best outcome I could have imagined. If I could do it again with the friends I’ve made along the way, I would 1000%.