Younium Charges About $30,000 a Year, and Crossed 200 Customers

Niclas Lilja built Younium because the best subscription-billing software money could buy was not good enough for the company he was working at. Years later, asked which software tool he had paid the most for over his career, he named the same product: Zuora.

What Younium costs

The average customer pays around $30,000 a year. When Nathan Latka multiplied that by 200 customers to get $6 million, Lilja corrected him upward rather than down.

The $30k per customer is probably 31 or 32. When you multiply with 200, it still becomes something. So I would say around $6,500,000 US dollars, something like that.

Niclas Lilja, founder and CEO, Younium

The spread underneath that average is wide, from small companies to large ones, because Younium does not price on seats. It prices on two proxies for how much work the customer is actually putting through the system: the number of legal entities and an ARR tier.

What the product actually is

Younium is a subscription hub for B2B software companies: quoting, subscription and contract management over the life of a deal, billing, and the finance layer that comes after — revenue recognition, and metrics like ARR and net revenue retention computed from transactions rather than assembled in a spreadsheet.

Architecturally it sits in a specific gap. “We typically sit between a Salesforce and HubSpot and a back end like a NetSuite or QuickBooks,” Lilja said, orchestrating everything from the quote to the moment the numbers have to be right for the board.

Latka’s first guess was expense management, which Lilja corrected: Younium is on the customer-invoicing side, closer to Chargebee or Stripe Billing. Asked how he differentiates from those, his answer was a segment boundary rather than a feature list.

We’re focused only on B2B. So we don’t do any B2C. If you’re doing something very, very standardised — maybe it’s an online $99 a month — they are doing it great, go with that. We’re more into when companies are doing bigger deals, a higher average revenue per deal, more line items, perhaps a bit more custom.

Twenty cold calls in his hometown

Lilja has spent about twenty years in software, starting at Medius, where he worked on supplier invoice management and led the transition from installed licences to cloud and subscription. Part of that job was selecting a billing system — they chose Zuora, still the category leader — and that is where Younium came from. “I figured, okay, this is the best the market has to offer. Maybe we can do something better.”

The company launched in 2017 in Sweden. After roughly five months building a prototype, Lilja got on the phone to about twenty companies in his hometown. He describes the process as “very, very not fancy”.

The job title he asked for was CFO, and the reasoning has held up as the company moved upmarket.

You can sort of get by with a lot of things, but in the end it all falls down into the lap of the CFO and they have to figure out the solution. If you’re in sales, you can do something and then push it downstream. But in the end someone will have to say, okay, these are the correct figures and they are by the book.

Six reps, and a quota they grow into

Younium had close to 60 people, about 20 of them engineers, and six quota-carrying sales reps. Lilja is clear that this is a human sale and expects it to stay one: “for most companies, this is not only an IT project, it’s not only a software, it’s also a change project.”

Quota is set at five times on-target earnings in new ARR. On OTEs of roughly $100,000 to $200,000 — Nordic salaries running about half of American ones, on his own rough estimate — that puts a rep somewhere in the $600,000 to $800,000 range.

His advice on the first two sales hires is the opposite of what most playbooks say, and worth quoting for founders in the same position:

I think we didn’t really put a quota and treated them as a sales rep. It was more like, hey, now we’re going to do this together. It’s overly optimistic thinking that you will have that on day one when you don’t have a brand, you don’t have a solution, you don’t have the customer reference. You have to grow into that quota as well.

The retention answer most founders would dodge

Asked whether the entity-and-ARR pricing model was driving 120 or 130 per cent net revenue retention, Lilja said no.

“Nope, not yet. But we’re definitely aiming to do that.” Above 100 per cent, yes; not in the range Latka named. And rather than leave it there, he made an argument against over-weighting the metric at Younium’s size: “when you’re not super, super big, I think new customer growth is equally, if not more important.” Expansion compounds, but it compounds off a base that still has to be built.

$10 million raised, against $6.5 million of ARR

Younium had raised about $10 million in total at the time of the interview, and Lilja described the discipline behind that as a deliberate ratio: “we’re trying to keep it as sort of a one to one on our own ARR.” Asked whether that meant no equity raise until ARR reached $10 million, he moved the bar down slightly — “at least I think going above like eight” — and made the timing conditional on the market rather than on need.

Growth was running at about 60 per cent on a rolling twelve months, a little higher earlier in the year, with cash-flow break-even targeted for the end of 2024.

Lilja was 45, married with two children aged 10 and 12, getting eight hours of sleep, and recommending First, Break All the Rules. What he wished he had known at twenty: “that people around you don’t care so much about what you do. They are very much obsessed with what they are doing.”

Current figures are on the Younium profile on GetLatka.

Sources — Niclas Lilja interviewed by Nathan Latka, recorded 8 April 2024; the video was published on 11 April 2024. Revenue, customer, headcount, pricing and funding figures are as stated on the tape or from the Younium profile on GetLatka, with dates as recorded; the April 2024 revenue figure is carried as an estimate.