How Academyocean CEO Vladimir Polo grew Academyocean to $1.9M revenue and 78 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is vladimir he is polo he is building a company called academy ocean he's got a background in math and management in terms of education 10 years of management experience and he's passionate about sas again now building academy ocean which is automated onboarding an interactive training platform vlad you ready to take us to the top yes nathan all right hi hi hi good to have you back on so give us an update what's the company do and how many customers are you working with today yeah sure actually it's a fun thing i've watched the previous podcast just before this one and you know you asked me the question when i told you that academy ocean is an academy builder and you asked me that is it something when you hire someone you you put them into an academy and they learn about the business and i said no but you know you kind of predicted it because now we kind of pivoted and now it's also for employee on boarding so we are a sas tool for directive on boarding and training that's great now what's the average customer paying per month now today uh they're paying us 300 per month okay we have 40 of them 40 customers so it's around 12 000 mrr yep now how do you you know that is that's obviously north of what you were doing when you came on last uh but that was about a year and a half ago you're doing three grind a month at that point i mean how do you really get this thing growing like like get up to 40 50 grand a month in revenue uh you know it took us some time since the last year it took us some time to this kind of period because uh we targeted we positioned ourselves as customer boarding tool and even lead generation tool uh after some several conferences and after um several conversations with tech stars uh they really helped us we didn't get to the batch but we got to the final stage and they really helped us to think about this simply and boarding idea and we pivoted uh several months ago and we still growing we do uh believe uh in content like uh we we spend a lot of time in content creation most of it was about customer boarding before now we switched to employee and boarding and huge uh market and very interesting market uh and yeah it's content it's affiliate partnership programs um and it's conferences for us yep okay very good so that makes sense what's the team size today now it's eight people okay you have eight folks good now have you raised additional capital or how much totally in the company today uh you know we are spending 11 000 per months now so we are profitable now it will not last long we will need to uh but for now we are kind of bootstrapping it okay bootstrap now it sounds like you're potentially looking at raising if you did raise about how much would you want to raise we raised even before that last call we raised 100k for 10 but it was several years ago at the beginning and we will raise around three or 4k but not now maybe maybe a half per year what do you mean raising three or four you said three or 4k three or four hundred keys oh got it raising 300 to 400 000. and what would you use that money on uh we need to uh develop uh the product much deeply we need to scale to uh other markets so uh now we have uh even specific uh guy in the marketing who is experimenting with different things not just a regular regular marketing but all all the ideas he can generate we are just investing in the things to test everything for example uh now we are we've made a huge uh research about how big companies like ibm or dropbox how do they onboard employees and this research was published an hour ago on techcrunch so you can even read it uh soon so we just uh make a lot of effort in research and providing very good content to our potential audience and it takes more sources no that's good now are you so so you raise the capital do you have any debt on the books today no okay so if you go out and raise 300 000 what valuation would you target uh i haven't calculated yet i think it will be around uh six million okay so six million free money something like that yeah okay very good um so bubba eight people you said today how many are engineers three of them okay three and any quota carrying sales reps or no uh what do you mean any any people that you pay commission if they close sales for you uh no we have another um motivational system but no commission to our employees and yes we have a referral fee for our partners but they're not our employees and in terms of churn what's gross revenue churn over the past 12 months uh you know i've just looked through the numbers before this podcast and we have two chart customers during the last year so only two of them charged okay so two out of how many you said 40. so you're looking at like 40 yeah you're looking at like five percent five percent yeah now do you have any expansion revenue do you upsell older accounts or no yes we uh some of our customers especially who started with a customer on boarding they came to us and said we want employee and boarded too and they have several academies like one academy for one purpose and another for another purpose plus we also have expertise and we help develop these academies i mean we don't create content for them but we help them to grow it with help them to find vectors on where to how to build so we upsell to them uh but it's not a sas sass features not just money so i'm not completing them in this camera yeah now where are you finding most of these new customers you went from like 15 18 months ago to about 40 today what's your what growth channels are you using uh as i said it was content it was conferences so the same as i said we've only started uh partnerships right now the conference you went to that you got customers from uh suster paris which was in the paris and the web summit in uh newman bath summit web website oh web summit yeah yeah very good what so i mean what are the on web summit how much do you pay to sponsor that uh how much do you pay for the for the badge the booth at web summit the sponsorship uh yeah i don't remember it's around 1000 maybe or 800 something like that to sponsor or to it just to attend as an attendee uh it was a sponsorship booth but the smallest one or one of the smallest i mean not the smallest but not the alpha or not the gross uh and three tickets oh i see okay very good all right vlad let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh you know one of yeah i think the most uh important for me is now ellia goldratt the goal the goal number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh you know i'm studying uh usually i'm studying the person who i'm reading the book uh whose book i'm reading right now and now it's i've written his name it's to and the book is how to get a meeting with anyone it's i'm not sure if he's the ceo of his company because he's more like helser but i really like this one number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um for us uh one of the most uh the tools that we use the most is telegram telegram messenger number four how many hours of sleep to get every night eight hours as it was last year what's your situation married single kids uh married and are expecting the child in a few weeks very well that's very exciting congratulations thank you all right and how old are you i'm 31 31 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um work as hard as you can but don't forget to travel more yep guys there you have it academy ocean now serving 40 customers doing 12 grand a month in revenue up from three grand a month just a year ago only about a hundred thousand dollars raised they are profitable looking to raise 300 grand later in q4 potentially this year five percent uh annual churn so the customers are obviously sticking which is a good sign uh spending again healthy amount to get these customers in the door in the first place 40 of them paying 300 bucks a month vlad thanks for taking us to the top thank you bye