UENI Revenue: From £180K in 2019 to £4.26M in 2022, per Companies House

UENI’s revenue is on the public record, in pounds. The accounts UENI LTD filed at Companies House show turnover of £180,236 for 2019, £759,954 for 2020, £1,424,195 for 2021 and £4,257,177 for 2022. GetLatka’s profile converts the 2022 figure to about $5.3 million at that year’s average exchange rate, so treat the dollar number as an approximation. The 2023 and 2024 accounts leave out the income statement, as small companies are allowed to, so 2022 is the last year with a filed figure.

None of that was on the tape. When Nathan Latka interviewed co-founder Christine Telyan on February 11, 2019, UENI’s 2018 turnover, later restated in its 2019 accounts, had been £138,242. UENI was building websites for small businesses for free, and by her account it wasn’t yet trying to turn them into paying customers: “we haven’t really been focusing on converting our customer base right now from free to paid,” she said, because for the past six months the focus had been growing the free base. Paid plans existed, at 9.99 to 19.99 a month (she didn’t name a currency), and UENI was at “about the 20,000 mark” for businesses on the platform. Asked about churn among paying accounts, she said: “we’re really focused on growing the free base today. So I don’t have good data to share with you to answer your question.”

This page’s web address puts a revenue figure on UENI that nothing on the tape supports, and it doesn’t match any year in the filed accounts either. Turnover went from about £1.4 million in 2021 to about £4.3 million in 2022. This article uses the filings and doesn’t repeat the figure in the address.

UENI revenue in the filed accounts

UENI LTD, Companies House number 09368082. All amounts are in pounds as filed. The 2022 accounts cover the company alone, and they restate 2021 for the company alone at £1,422,782.

The growth is real, though it started late. Turnover rose about 30% from 2018 to 2019, roughly quadrupled in 2020, rose about 87% in 2021, and about tripled in 2022 when compared on the company-only basis the 2022 accounts use. UENI lost money in every one of those years: £4.27 million in 2018, £5.54 million in 2019, £3.70 million in 2020, £2.83 million in 2021 and £3.98 million in 2022, on the same bases as the turnover above. Those losses are the background to the runway Telyan described on the tape.

The 2019 annual report, which the board approved on October 26, 2020, describes as current practice what Telyan had floated on the tape as a possibility: “We generate revenues from building premium websites that enable businesses to grow even faster and by introducing our customers to a carefully curated selection of 3rd party products that will help their businesses to grow. These include insurance, bank accounts, software loans and point of sale terminals.” An undated “At a Glance” page in the same report counts 537,000 customers, 69 full-time staff and about $30 million raised. That is well past the 150,000 to 200,000 businesses Telyan targeted for the end of 2019, but the report doesn’t say when the count was taken or whether free sites are included.

What the tape shows

For much of the interview Telyan steered away from point-in-time numbers and toward the growth rate. When Latka asked how many customers UENI had, she said growth was “more interesting to talk about.” Latka pushed back (“growth going from a dollar to $10 is 10 x”) and asked twice more before she gave the count: “We’re coming to about the 20,000 mark.” His reply was gentler than his reputation: “I can sense that you feel like that that’s low, but everyone starts at zero.”

The numbers she did give describe a funnel, not revenue. UENI was signing up 200 to 300 businesses a day. It aimed to be adding about 500 a day by the end of March 2019 and to have 150,000 to 200,000 businesses on the platform by the end of the year. All three are her statements of pace and intent in February 2019, and the tape can’t say whether UENI hit them. The 537,000 customers in the 2019 annual report suggest it did, with the caveats noted above.

Two corrections to an earlier version of this article belong here. First, it printed the subscription prices with a dollar sign. Telyan said only “9.99 a month to 19.99 a month” and named no currency, so we’ve dropped the symbol. Second, it quoted her as saying “Right now I’m growing the free base today.” What she said was “we’re really focused on growing the free base today.”

Do it for me, for free

The pitch rests on a gap Telyan described in her first answer: “80% of customers go online to find local businesses, but only 20% of small businesses in Europe and less elsewhere have a proper online presence.” She argued that DIY website builders don’t close that gap, because most businesses that sign up for one “don’t complete the journey. It’s estimated it’s about 10% to 20%.” Both figures are hers, and she didn’t give a source for either on the tape.

So UENI builds the site itself. A business signs up and answers a few questions, and UENI builds a site “responsive and relevant to their business from A to Z,” with professionally written text, and sets up a Google My Business listing. All of that is free. Telyan put UENI between DIY builders and digital agencies: “we’re kind of an agency for the masses.” The paid upgrade added a custom domain, professional email and listings on “about 20 platforms where people are searching.”

Latka pointed out that Wix, Weebly and Squarespace already had free tiers. Telyan’s reply was the most concrete part of the interview. Owners worry about the cost, she said, and “even when it’s free, they don’t have the time or they think that they need technical skills. And even with a do it yourself website builder, they’re not sure what exactly they need to do… As a plumber, do I know what text I need to write so that it’s attractive to customer base and it’s going to be optimized for search.” Latka gave her the point: “I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you on that point.”

From consumer search to a freemium model in 2018

UENI launched “at the very beginning of 2015” as a different business: a consumer search platform “helping end users find the cheapest, nearest, best rated service.” By early 2019 it had been focused on businesses for about a year and a half. Its first business products cost more, including AdWords services and “more complex advertising products,” and Telyan said UENI had “a couple thousand customers on that initial set of plans” before it switched to the basics. The free-website model started in summer 2018.

In February 2019 UENI had customers in the UK, Spain, France, India and the US, and the last three had opened that month. Telyan wouldn’t give a cost per acquisition for any market (“I don’t know that I’m going to share our exact figures”). She said the most UENI would spend to win a free user was three to five pounds, and that it was “often going be very much less than that.” Asked how many free users would eventually pay, she called any figure “right now speculation” and pointed to comparable businesses that convert 5% to 10%.

Latka’s arithmetic, and her answer

Latka ran the plan forward using her own assumptions: 150,000 businesses by year end, 5% of them converting, at $10 a month. That, he said, “would put your paid monthly revenue at like $75,000 a month. So still less than a million bucks there in MRR and ARR, even if everything turns out on 18,000,000 raised.” The math works: 7,500 paying businesses at 10 a month is 75,000 a month, or 900,000 a year. But the currency and the $18 million are Latka’s. Telyan put the amount raised at about £15 million. For comparison, UENI’s filed turnover was £180,236 in 2019. It passed Latka’s “everything turns out” level in 2021, at £1.42 million, and reached £4.26 million in 2022. The accounts don’t split that between subscriptions and the third-party products.

She didn’t dispute his multiplication. She disputed the idea that subscriptions were the business.

These businesses are relying on us as their kind of storefront. So will we run transactions through the platform? Will we, through partnerships, do other kinds of relationships with other businesses and then do a revenue share by offering other products and services to our base? Those are other potential areas to explore.

Christine Telyan, co-founder, UENI, February 2019

She added that the 5% and 10% conversion rates were “kind of just arbitrary numbers.” Latka wasn’t convinced. When she said nobody else offered a fully built, professionally written site for free, he answered: “And I think there’s a reason for that. I don’t think it works. Unless you have big rich people behind you writing you massive checks, I actually don’t think it works.” Her counter was that these businesses had been “completely out of the market in terms of digital.” She said millions of UK micro businesses were still offline and that 50,000 new businesses were being added every month.

Where the £15 million came from

Asked how much UENI had raised, Telyan said: “About £15,000,000.” It didn’t all come from angels. “We bootstrapped at the beginning. My co founder and I put in our own money, and then we’ve had, yeah, three rounds of basically angel financing,” she said, all from “our personal network of angel investors.” The tape doesn’t say how the total splits between the founders’ money and the three angel rounds.

With a team of about 45 people across the UK, the Czech Republic and Ukraine, she put the runway at “probably about a year and a half, two years.” Upsells would start “in earnest” in the middle of 2019. On whether conversion would beat 10%, she told Latka: “Nathan, I’ll report back to you, I promise.”

Churn when the customer closes

The most useful operational detail is that UENI’s attrition mostly had little to do with UENI. Small businesses, she said, “do have a fairly high rate of churn, seven, eight, nine percent per annum,” and she described that as the attrition UENI saw in its own base, meaning businesses closing. People left “either because their business closed or in some cases they’re looking for a more sophisticated solution.” Asked whether paid accounts churned at the same rate, she said she “couldn’t exactly share” the percentage. Latka offered Constant Contact as the warning case (“Constant Contact was 6% monthly”) and converted 7% a year into “like 0.4% monthly.” Seven percent a year is actually closer to 0.6% a month, but his comparison holds either way.

What UENI tracked instead was engagement: whether owners had taken any action on their site in the past 30 days, monthly page views, and customer inquiries, “because those calls, booking requests, that translates into real revenues for the business.” In her words, “it’s a free base, but it’s, it has to be an engaged base.”

The famous five, and a misattributed line

Her favorite business book was Moneyball. The CEO she watched was Jeff Bezos: “He’s the master of the, the small business, fragmented market.” Her favorite tool was the DeepL translator. She usually sleeps seven and a half hours, but at eight months pregnant with her first child she was getting about four. She was 36. Asked what she wished her 20-year-old self had known, she said: “be even more bold than you’re inclined to be.” An earlier version of this article credited her with the shorter “be bolder.” Those words are Latka’s, from his sign-off: “Guys, be bolder coming from Christine.”

After the tape

The filings carry the story to 2022: from £180,236 of turnover in the year Telyan spoke to £4,257,177 three years later, with a loss every year. After that the accounts stop showing turnover. UENI’s GetLatka profile leads with the filed 2022 figure, and citing LinkedIn, it counted 131 employees in October 2024, compared with the 45 Telyan gave on this tape.