How MiniHotel SaaS CEO Yuval Shtokhamer grew to $2M revenue and 1.4K customers in 2025.

guys mini hotel.io got going in Israel in 2006 2007 father-son team today they're doing a million three in annualized revenue from a million a year ago they've done this all bootstrap they went 100 of the business which they love they just turned on a 6X multiple so call it like a six seven million dollar offer they want to stay focused keep building they're focused on serving these 1400 smaller hotel chains or folks managing vacation rentals uh that each pay 85 dollars per month so very distributed customer base which they love adding 40 new customers per month mainly through four thousand dollars a month in paid ad spend and other sites like captera as they continue to scale hey folks my guest today is yvelle stockhammer he is a ITT and Cloud admin started in many hotels many Hotel SAS with his dad in 2007 as I've been leading the company operation since 2020 it's a Hospitality SAS you can find it at mini Hotel dot IO you've already ready to take us to the top scoring back all right very cool so what what is mini hotel is it pure Place ass yeah it's a pure SAS it's a classic SAS of hospitality businesses mainly low Market okay so when you say more than 1400 hotels uh in 70 countries use you that means 1400 hostels hotels like that you use you to manage it's mainly mainly uh small hotels guest houses vacation rentals hostels guest houses these kinds of businesses a lot of the moments and pubs of the world of hospitality and we have some four and five stars but mostly it's not our expertise our expertise is like the zero to two star hotels mainly uh vacation rentals and um and this is where we Excel you know and you've all what do these companies these hotels pay you on average per month or per year to use the tech currently it's around 35 per month uh when we started uh back in 2007 it was higher you know and the monthly um average price per Hotel dropped since then because we focused more on the low Market as we went you know as we uh um as we evolved you know um more focused because we started an Israel uh mainly in Israel and later on in Argentina and we work with bigger hotels you know like the three stars or um in Israel it was boutiques you know but um as time um passed by we decided to focus more on the low market and more like uh International Global markets you know so we have clients in 70 countries today and how many paying customers total it's uh like on our site it's around um it's it's around 1400 something like that yeah so eval can I take the 1400 times 85 a month dollars you're doing about 120 000 a month in Revenue it's around we are almost 1.3 million um Al USD okay yeah so that cannot be about 120 000 a month in Revenue where were you exactly one year ago so we can calculate growth rate we were about 1 million uh okay it's about 83 000 a year ago and um have you have you guys bootstrapped the business or did you decide to raise Capital oh straps zero dollars since 2007. that's amazing so you and your dad own 100 of the company yeah yeah that's right that's awesome so I guess how a lot of people go oh well you've all he cheated his dad started and like sort of he jumped in what would you say to that you mean about the bootstrap referring to the bootstrap well I count like like you're like how much of the Blood Sweat and Tears did you really put it into it versus just sort of took it over from your dad how would you how do you think I know firstly my dad is still in the business firstly and I'm not I'm not a kid myself you know my father is like 65 and I'm 40 years old so uh when I started I was 24 you know and I really like we started it both of us before that we we were both like uh employees for hire he was a CTO and I was working in the same company we worked with um the larger the bigger hotels in Israel like the four and five stars and um I actually I was working in that company a little bit after him he was working there like two decades you know and it was the CTO over there and I'm an I.T and clouds um expert and I used to code a little bit in high school but my father is the Real Genius he's uh so I mean how do you negotiate Equity with your dad how much Equity do you own version firstly we started the business together but he started in 2006 when he was just making the MVP alone uh so when we launched in 2007 I started partial time and later on I joined into full time but it basically was it were the two of us together you know started business but because he was there like one or two years before me he's like 60 right now and I'm 40 percent which is fair which is where we're not we don't have fights about that we fight about other stuff but like what do you think about I like uh products you know and how to run the company how to hire um you know the daily daily stuff oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews 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private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool 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for 2022. because in 2022 we had a deliberate um uh self-investment of our own funds and we opened up a new office in Serbia you know joining our two other offices we have one office in Israel we have only six people in Israel because it's uh you know it's expensive to hire here you know it's almost like the US you know so how much is it does a senior engineer cost in Israel today it's around like um most senior ones take around uh maybe between 15 and 20 000 per month you know so it's it's stiff it's stiff for us it's stiff my father is an engineer himself but we have other like foreign engineers in Argentina they directly hired because we have three companies we have the the company here in Israel and we have another one in Argentina and another one in Serbia so it's three entities that we have locally and they're all holy on subsidiaries of mini hotel right yeah yeah and all of them are directly hired and managed by us all the employees and it's quite nice because in Serbia and Argentina we can afford ourselves to to hire more how much to the Serbia office cost to build we are talking about like not the people the the hiring of the place itself the office there was a story what did it cost there's a story to it I mean for the office and how how cheap it is basically because so you've all sorry just to be clear you said you weren't profitable in 2022 because you made significant investments in quote opening oh yeah because we hired we hired five people in in the office you know it's all together we invested like around maybe um more than 1000k for us it's it's a lot of money you know of our own Pockets you know one thousand so a million dollars no I I mean uh all year round gold 2022 we had like more than 100K um US dollars of our own money we invested just to open up you know to advertise to hire people to to find the office um so yeah it but right now we have a very nice office over there with five people we have our six people in Israel and we have 14 people in Argentina and these are the ones directly hired you know and we have some more in Argentina that we uh sometimes like they are partial so it's all together 13 employees understood moving forward here so uh what's the plan for the business you know how do you plan to get 1400 more customers um firstly right now since um kovit actually we've done uh quite a pivot because we were firstly working with Legacy uh products and stack you know and during covet we had time uh to Pivot the business and deployed the uh both the strategy and the product and we migrated into Cloud we migrated into cloud and browser since 2020 basically and since 2021 we Market only a new browser product very nice very uh top-notch work and since then specifically we add up around 40 clients per month where do you find them tell me how you get the customer specifically right now we have a this year we have a lot of organic but we have still a lot of paid ads in Google uh ads and in uh Facebook ads how much total on paid ads did you spend in July of this year we spend around the four thousand dollars per month okay for paid just paid ads and I mean that's less than two percent though of your total revenue that's very small yeah yeah we are quite efficient we are quite efficient and we get thousands of leads so um it basically um what's a keyword that you would run this paid out against well film management software Hospitality software PMS because our specific business is called BMS property management system and for example you have open a cloud you know biological in our business you have Cloud beds are you specifically I was gonna say are you supposed like when I do hotel management software captera dominates that spot Cloud beds well we are like I got it if I could just finish my statement here so there's Lifehouse Cloud beds and captera so my question to you is are you specifically targeting only a certain Geo when they search hotel management software on Google yeah right now we cannot Target like all the world although we have clients in 70 countries right now but we are targeting by tiers so we have like a second like tier two for example it can be the emerging markets and um countries like it can be Philippines it can be Hungary Etc and we have like a tier uh this is only for the EU for example EU countries and basically we have IP based pricing so if you get from Tanzania for example or from Morocco or from us or from UK you will get different pricing different uh currency as well you have on Clon capture cloudbeds has 306 reviews hostaway has 635 think preservations has 111 and others have hundreds you guys are at uh I guess 21 right now against your 1400 customers is captera main channel for you do you get a lot of customers from captera yeah we get more clients recently from compthera and definitely we can see their clients in the survey that we have saying they got from capture yeah we don't stay on capturing reviews there you only have 21 reviews if that's working why not go get 100 reviews so you can rank above host away something that we just started working on so it's definitely at work I see how do you ask how do you ask a customer for a radio on captera what's this what's the channel you use email and if so what's the email say no our own guys in the support team uh when they end the call they ask clients especially the ones they're mostly they are happy but the ones that they have a good vibe they ask them maybe you can uh put a good review for us you know and mostly they are happy to do it because the clients are mostly happy where else we're getting customers so we have paid ads 4K month captera where else part of mouth is very strong um and it's getting strong this year specifically we see a lot of numbers and in countries that we never imagined you know people from Philippines and Hungary Czech Republic it's all over um we get good traction right now one big Advantage for us that even our funded competitors don't do is that we are very much localized what are your biggest two competitors Cloud beds um room raccoon meals meals also but we have although we are not funded and we are a small company we have a lot of advantages you know we have uh invoicing for example ready in more than 50 countries so when you make uh like when you're in the reception making the accounts making the invoice for the client it's transmitted to the government yeah it's not just a paper how many uh sorry to cut you offered a short on time other 25 on your team today how many are engineers we have including my dad it's five Engineers okay five engineers and and if someone came to you guys and offered you a 5x multiple all cash up front to acquire the company would you sell we already got we get like one offer per month organically and we declined like a six big small people recently so what was the total what was the total value of that offer at a 6X multiple it was uh it was I can tell you it was around we just talked multiples but uh you know back then we were 1.2 so it was between seven and eight million dollars and was it all cash up front um we didn't negotiate the terms yet I just didn't when you say you declined me there was no letter of intent just a few Zoom meetings and um sometimes mostly we get like after the first meeting we filter out those uh we are not seeking to sell what we do here around people that approach us and if there is a very good multiple for a secondary deal we can hear the amount you know so we are not saying uh no why didn't you widen this group you like them enough said the zoom call but they didn't give you a term sheet why didn't they give you an Loi or term sheets because we declined when they say yes Within 166. we are going right now and we um what do you think you're worth today of all I in my head it's uh at least 15 million uh dollars okay so something like a like a 10 11 x 12x multiple something like that of course we can wait and grow the company because we we love working in our own growing and we had we had 40 clients per month and we have automated tools that help us add up a lot of clients with low CAC and uh quite fast you know what is your cap today a client mostly a posts us around uh three or four hundred dollars to implement because we have automated tools that are helping us Wizards for example that uh the standard audio sometimes you can self-serve himself just to be clear you spend 400 bucks to get an 85 a month customer so you have like a five month payback period per month um it's the same right it's the percent it can be the same for one month or per year but no it's very different if you turn three percent per month and you're turning 36 percent no I'm talking yearly I'm talking here you turn three percent you're churning under 0.5 of your Revenue per month yeah we we don't have a lot of clients living Sorry are you sure are you sure that are you sure that that's accurate you're training we had the round we had the round s per month yeah but China has nothing to do with customers you add churn has to do with your current customer rates and and do any of them deep you know downgrade their revenue or cancel we don't have more than one clients per month leaving us basically well a client doesn't have to leave you to count as churn that can downgrade from a bigger plan to a smaller plan that's still churn so we don't have we don't have big old small plants we just have a plan by the size of the hotel okay so just to be just to be clear I mean these kinds of things go out of business all the time I would imagine just the failure rate on the business ignore your software is much greater than three percent per year how do you have under three I just don't understand I have under three percent per year the product is very sticky but it doesn't matter if the company goes out of business they're not going to pay you no matter how sticky you are I mean how did you make a bunch of these companies went dead during covet when no one was booking hotels I mean the hostels went underwater I was an investor in a hospital I went underwater during oh during profit we had 50 drop in our Revenue but the clients came came through it and uh in 90 plus percent of them stayed basically and we are we have a very sticky product and very very good support team and we are working since 2007 we know we know the business I mean this business is 20 years maybe oh I'm not saying you don't know the business but I don't believe that this that this industry this industry not your company this industry I don't believe that has three percent annual churn uh just like this I think so the Survivor rate is under that just on the the Hostile business overall but maybe I'm wrong I don't know maybe you see something different in your data anyways we're out of time on this one I love what you guys got I love you yeah I mean yeah sorry no about the term if I take a three percent for I don't know 20 1200 clients that we have for example it's like 30 something clients living in you know eval I'm asking about dollar churn oh I see you know I cannot calculate it because I in my head it's my clients it's not by dollars but um I can get back to you about that number but no it's okay it's okay it's 20 or 30 clients per year which is like in clients it's basically less than three percent yeah yeah but if it's your biggest 30 clients the revenue turn could be much higher than we don't we don't have big you know well smaller clients this is the the nice so if someone runs if someone runs a hostel with 800 beds they're gonna pay the same as a hostel with five beds no but most most of our clients then you have bigger and smaller no no no most of our clients don't go over 70 rooms most of our clients are in less than 50 of homes if someone's paying you for 50 homes someone else is paying you for two homes you're gonna charge them both the same rate no but okay then you have bigger clients and smaller clients no but again but most of our clients are less than 70 homes and they are paying between 80 and 180 dollars what's their lar don't name the customer what's your largest customer pay you per month around 400 okay got it okay yeah so you are it's pretty very low cost yeah yeah it's quite gayness that's what I'm trying to say understand right that's how we live we live our business Eternal blood yeah understood yeah all right we're out of time let's wrap up here with the famous five number one your favorite favorite book and what got you hurry won't get you there uh number two is their CEO you're following or studying Brian chesky number three what's your favorite online tool for building a company Google Calendar number four hours of sleep six it's pretty good situation married single kids married to kids that's awesome and you're 40 you said right yeah last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old I would say aim bigger I was too modest then guys many Hotel dot IO got gone in Israel in 2006 2007 father-son team today they're doing a million three and annualized revenue from a million a year ago they've done this all bootstrapped they went 100 of the business which they love they just turned on a 6X multiple so call it like a six seven million dollar offer they want to stay focused keep building they're focused on serving these 1400 smaller hotel chains or folks managing vacation rentals uh that each pay 85 dollars per month so very distributed customer base which they love adding 40 new customers per month mainly through four thousand dollars a month in paid ad spend and other sites like captera as they continue to scale you've all thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much it's been great one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their 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