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A horizontal adtech company at $10M ARR noticed that its stickiest 30% were all flooring retailers, bought the partner who supplied them, burned the rest of the business down to $3M, rolled up eight flooring software companies, and reached roughly $30M ARR before selling to a private equity rollup.
$10M ARR as horizontal adtech in 2019 → $3M after going all-in on flooring → $12M by 2021 · ~4,000 website customers, ~3,000 CRM customers, ~1,000 ERP customers · websites at ~$1,200/mo average, full website + CRM + ERP platform at ~$3,000/mo · 40% of revenue closed at conferences · flooring cohort held 90% logo retention and 105% net revenue retention against 60% and 80% for everyone else
"51% of the reason people signed up for us was the Broadlume brand and 49% was the product." He unfriended almost everyone on his personal Facebook so he could friend flooring retailers instead, and ended up able to ping 4,000 of them with a single post.
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Todd Saunders was at Google from 2013 to 2015 and met his cofounder there in 2014. They left to build what they describe as a TurboTax for digital advertising, got into Techstars with two non-technical founders and an idea, raised a seed and then an A, and by 2019 were doing about $10M ARR. It could have been profitable; they were spending on growth instead. The problem was the shape of the business. Horizontal adtech meant tens of millions of theoretically addressable advertisers, customers who stayed six to eight months if you were lucky, and a competitor every quarter promising a $1 cost per conversion. Then in 2018 they looked properly at their own customer list for the first time. Roughly 30% of the business was flooring retailers, all of them arriving through one channel partner — a website company called Floor Force. That cohort was at 90% logo retention and 105% net revenue retention. Everyone else was at 60% and 80%. They bought Floor Force, ran two companies badly for a year, and at the end of 2019 shut the adtech business entirely. Revenue fell from $10M to $3M. Three months later COVID arrived, which would have taken adtech to zero and instead sent home improvement spending vertical. Flooring went from $3M to $12M by 2021. A growth equity round from PSG funded seven more acquisitions — website, CRM, ERP, visualisation, payments — plus a private-label flooring brand, and the company reached roughly $30M ARR by 2024 before selling to a private equity rollup.
The first flooring customers were not sold; they were bought.
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Data credibility: Guest interview on the Verticals podcast, November 2025, with English auto-captions. Every number is stated by Todd Saunders about his own company and is self-reported and unaudited: $10M ARR as adtech in 2019, the drop to $3M, $12M by 2021, roughly $30M ARR at exit, about 4,000 website / 3,000 CRM / 1,000 ERP customers, $300 → $1,200 → $3,000 a month pricing, 40% of revenue at conferences, 90% logo retention and 105% NRR in the flooring cohort against 60% and 80% elsewhere, 100 showrooms carrying 1,800 SKUs of private-label product at a 10% transaction take, 20 million consumers a year on the retailer websites, and about $30B of sales represented by those retailers. The market sizing he cites — 10,000 to 25,000 US flooring retailers and $80B a year spent on flooring — is his own figure and we did not verify it. The auto-captions garble the company name throughout, rendering it as Broadboom, Broadloom, Broadland, Broadam and Broad; the business is Broadlume, the flooring vertical SaaS company Saunders founded by pivoting his adtech startup, which the captions call "Ad Hoc". The ERP customer count is transcribed as "a,000", which we have read as 1,000 given the surrounding numbers; treat it as approximate. The name of the private equity buyer is garbled in the captions as "Sinkley" and we have not identified it, so we describe it only as a private equity rollup. Growth rates he gives (100%, then 60%, then 30-50% a year) and the exit-multiple ranges (four to six times ARR for private equity, roughly eight times for software revenue, ten times for venture-priced deals) are his own read on his own deal, not published data. Saunders gives Floor Force's age as "20 years or 10 years at that point" in the same sentence, so we have not fixed a number on it.
The first flooring dollars were $300-a-month websites, sold by Floor Force to retailers who were already paying the adtech side to run their Google spend. That price was a floor rather than a ceiling.
Two loops compounded. The first was content that was deliberately not about the product: webinars on getting a PPP loan, on using ChatGPT, on tricks inside a retailer's own accounts.
The dead stretch ran from 2018 into early 2020 and it was genuinely bad. Through 2018 they operated two companies at once with no strategy and bled money.
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