How Abogados Para Tus Deudas CEO Christian Tanase grew to $6.5M revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is christian tanasi he's putting a tool called lawyer for your debts it's playing and you can think of it like rocket lawyer the legal zoom space uh especially overseas but scaling nicely we're excited to have him christian are you ready to take us to the top let's take it to the top you're based on barcelona which is i think your main focus right now talk to us about how you're thinking about expanding the product and start off with what is the product doing what are some of your customers using you for yes so thank you nathan so we are let's say we are we are assass says business uh base we started as a law as an agency we're starting from 2020 and november 2020 we become assessed so we are working in the the niche of personal insolvency and we are working now in spain but we have the technology to adapt to other european countries such as italy romania and also to adapt we could adopt the technology to let latin countries such as brazil mexico mexico and other latin countries when you say you converted to sas in november of 2020 help me understand what companies or customers are paying you how much they're paying per month and what are they getting so we we charge for our service between the medium is 3000k euro and our customers pays our services from between six to ten installments okay so you're making and people are paying three thousand dollars per year on average to use your technology 300 euros 300 euros per month or a year for one temperature let's say three thousand exactly oh we got it three so about 350 united states dollars per month and and what are people i want to make be very clear is this a service or software so when someone's paying you 350 per month what are they getting so the uh our software our our service let's say as we worked earlier as as an agency as a low company but now we are working as a sas because when when our customers enter in our in our technology they have the possibility to upload documents and to complete the survey and based on what they they complete the system generate automatically some some files needed in order to to have this bankrupt the this insolvency proceeding i don't understand what this means when you say when you say why do they need your paperwork to help go through an insolvency procedure are these people who are bankrupt and they're looking for your help to get out of bankruptcy exactly i think in usa you you call it chapter seven i think okay so if i'm a pr and this are these companies going to chapter seven or personal people personally personal people personal people so the obvious question is if i'm personally filing for bankruptcy i don't have 350 dollars laying around to pay you per month to use your software this is a good question because all our all of our our customers ask this but if you let's say we charge 3000k for someone who has depth between 30k and 50k so uh if you if you put it in the balance the the amount that the client pays is less is less than what it's it's a it's a small amount compared off of total amount of the debt and the client could could start like like a new let's say and it's a new opportunity the the law is called second opportunity christian this sounds too good to be true i pay you three thousand dollars and you make thirty thousand dollars of debt magically disappear exactly exactly delay is approved in pain and is working but it hasn't explained to me no one's got no one's going to believe that when they hear it so tell me tell me how it works how do you do it exactly so this uh this this law has let's say um has four parts the the the first part is you need to gather a lot of doc a lot of documents so it means it has a lot of bureaucracy after you gather all of those information you need to to go to a notary and ask for a mediator to mediate with all the creditors when you go to the the mediators you need to propose a debt restructuring plan if the creditors accept the debt restructuring plan we could talk here about let's say discount of the debts between 20 to almost 80 percent of the debt instead of a client to pay instead of paying let's say uh 20k to uh to a creditor he will pay uh with a discount an 18 percent of this count of this or that payment or that depth and at the end if the if the creditors don't accept this this payment plan you need to go to the last step last step that is called in the judge you need to present in the judge everything that you you did before and if you complete all the all the all the terms you will have what is called cancellation of the almost 100 percent these these four steps feel like a lot of steps gather documents try and work with the mediator the mediator doesn't work you didn't propose a debt restructuring plan of the creditors they accept you usually get off with some discount if they still don't accept number four is you go to a judge how many people do you how many people paying customers do you have right now going through this process we have uh right now more than two thousand clients okay two thousand clients who are actively paying 300 euros per month well we have that that are paying we have between uh we have just say almost 700 clients because the the the others already paid and now are in progress to to solve their their debts so 700 times 350 united states dollars per month what is your revenue today last month we made 200 then 210k 210 000 last month okay and so the obvious question i have here is with any sas company your your economics come from recurring revenues sticky customers after you help a customer you know relieve some of this debt they didn't leave you just said it you had 2 000 that have used you and only 700 are still paying why is this product valuable for a customer over the long term how do you get people to keep paying you after the debts restructured after after the debt restructure we we plan to implement an upsells for them we want to to implement we have improv in process to make an application an app like like rocket lawyer to provide them with uh with legal services do you know the application do not pay i don't know i think there is they are in uk i don't know if they are in the us but we will make we having progress to make an app like this to make an upsell but but we are this market of insolvency is a big market so because basically we uh each month we we create we we convert between 19 to 100 new clients nine zero nine zero and 100 let me tell you this is a big market uh in france for example they they had this low er for more than 50 years so uh in france more than 170 000 people per year goes through this law and cancel their names here in spain we are at the beginning when we started in 2017 uh just 150 percent per per month used google to search about this law now we have more than 40 000 people per month searching about this low and the possible market could be uh 120 000 people per year i understand so so talk to me about your engineering team because that's going to determine how fast you can get out a new product to keep customers paying you where you can add them add value to them even after you cancel some of their debt so what's the team size today how many people we we have an an external team of uh let's say six six people uh you said an external team of six people what's that what's the team side the total team size full-time employees they this this partner yeah it has it has a lot of a lot of developers because he we didn't have it here in in-house we have an external so it's a partner i understand that i'm talking about on your on your team question ignore developers on your team how many people are full time uh we have almost 25 people 25 and what's the break what's the breakdown what do they do we have in marketing we have four people we have in in sales department sales representative we have six six uh six people and until the end of this month we will uh put nine people nine people more so we'll be like say 15 people and afterwards we have let's say the the person that are in charge to customer support we call them paralegal they are our customer support if the client doesn't know how to upload the document or how many are there we have their six six okay so you have 25 full time there's four in marketing six in sales six in customer support and even external development you know six people as well exactly how much do you pay that external development team per month between six to ten k six to 10k and are you happy with how fast they're building code yes yes yes how did you find them there's a lot of founders like sitting right now looking for outsourced development teams i'm not pork so you found these guys on upwork and you pay them six to ten thousand dollars per month and they move quickly exactly very quick we had an mvp we had an mvp from let's say i had an idea in january last year and i spoke with them in in march we we start we start in april may april may and in november we have the mvp yup yup that's great so so your first customers on the sas platform were back in november correct exactly exactly in november and help me understand the size of the agency before you had sas so how much revenue is the agency doing before we have says uh we had let me say have almost 35 people 35 so we now are just 24 so 11 people less how much revenue did you do in 2020 that was services revenue in 2020 1.4 million 1.4 million got it and that was all basically all services revenue because you see that at the end of the year exactly exactly and are you still doing any of that agency work are you only focused on the sas stuff now we we have now let's say three three type of of servicing we have uh a phone contract when the clients speak with our sales department and sign the contract but it goes through the sas afterwards and we have uh signing contract in person but is a 10 because we have two offices one in barcelona and one in madrid and we have also um what we we we implemented is that is the the online sign up very good this makes a lot of sense so you built the agency now when did you launch the agency what year in 2017. okay so between 2017 and 2020 you went from nothing to a 1.4 million dollar agency even said i want to build software you launched that late november 2020. we started from 2017 with two with 2k and we got from 2017 and 2020 3.5 million euros the total revenue across all the years very good very very good christian this is a fun story to follow uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um it's um the one that you how is it the name i i don't remember now uh what's it about it's about uh focus on on what you need to to do we'll look it up number the one yes the one that made cash flow number two is there a ceo you're following are studying uh i'm following the ceo of spacex space elon musk number three how many hours uh what's your favorite online tool for building your company it was canva in the beginning number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night between six to eight hours and what's your situation christian married single kids i'm i'm married i don't have children's and my my my spouse my my it's it's the we have the business i have the business with my spouse my my wife she's oh i love that how many how many kids no we don't have kids no no kids okay got it and uh and last question here what's something how are you today 33 33 what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 marketing marketing economics guys there you have it christian helping you uh really in spain and france if you're personally going through a debt scenario he'll help you work out of the debt they have a sas tool to help you do this spun out of an agency that did 1.4 million revenue in 2020 now on a sas basis over 700 customers paying to pay on average 300 per month adding 90 to 100 new clients per month to 210 000 last month 25 people full-time building a project six on their outsourced engineering team christian thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you very much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya