How MiniHotel SaaS CEO Yuval Shtokhamer grew MiniHotel SaaS 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 I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what 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 out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview how many folks are on the team Stay full time we are we have 25 people hired directly and full time in three offices um and we have like follow five more always like in the partial time so it's almost uh like now 30 employees with us with us together 30 employees many people argue right now or macro condition macroeconomic conditions are not favorable for startups how are you sort of managing to make sure you're sustainable are you profitable today yeah we are like since we started the business we were profitable all years since 2007 till now except 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...