How Actito CEO Benoit De grew to $27M revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is benoit de nier he is uh he studied law fiscal law and it worked as a worked as a researcher in consumer law and then decided to launch an internet company in 2000. he then created a sas marketing automation platform before sas existed in 2001 sold the company uh mediquality to webmd in 2018 and now intends to dominate the world of marketing automation with his current company actido okay ben why are you ready to take us to the top perfect yes all right all right tell us more about the company what's up doing what's the revenue model so actual is a in fact a sas marketing automation platform that we built since uh no more than 10 years um it's in fact one of the predecessors of uh the big ones like exact target and so on and we we offer this platform to mid-market companies mainly so uh companies between um i would say they would pay between 20k and 100 case per year for advanced marketing automation functions okay well so what i mean is is it more is i mean if you looked at an average in terms of what they're paying per month or per year is it closer to 20k it's uh in fact in the middle uh closer to a 40 to 50k okay so maybe 50k per year which would be what it what is that about uh uh six five grand a month something like that uh absolutely yes do they pay annually or up front uh usually they pay uh annually up front and but we have some cases where we have uh tremendous payments but usually it's more an enterprise sas platform so that people tend to prefer to pay once uh at the beginning of the the period okay so fifty thousand bucks a year kind of on average which is about four thousand dollars per month put this on a timeline for us when did you launch the company then when did you launch the company sorry i didn't get your question because we launched the company the first company we launched it in 2000 but we we went into a sas software really about 2002. the fact is that we started in belgium and belgium as you know is a very small country in the middle of europe that means maybe the the worst market to start a sas company but it also helps us focus really on what's uh important for for the user uh without investing in buzz in whistle and so on marketing it as a sas platform in 2008 and from there we we extended our activities to france uh to the benelux and even now in in canada where we have a subsidiary there okay and how many customers have this scaled to over the past call it 15 to 16 years uh we we have about 250 enterprise customers okay and can i multiply that times the 50 000 acv so you're doing about a million dollars a month right now um for the moment we we we have reached uh a global um turnover of about more than 10 million euros per year so we we uh just uh focusing on on this kind of market and we expect now to uh to reach about the double in the two years to come okay so just to be clear you know north of 10 million you said euros yes okay so that would be about you know about 11 and a half million us dollars per per year in terms of run rate absolutely yeah okay good that makes sense and again that comes up about a million dollars a month across 250 uh customers where walk me through growth i mean how did you land these customers what's the growth channel you're using effectively so we have uh at the classical growth i would say yeah just uh by um deploying uh uh sales people uh just uh having uh a cycle where they where they call call again we we reach uh enterprise customers so that means that we have to have someone in the company that will convince uh to convince two to buy all solution or platform rather than uh for instance salesforce or or even oracle or things like that um so that means that it's um uh something that takes quite uh some time between three and six months uh to a search customer but we are now completely transforming of our way of of selling things and we are more in a in a growth phase where we are trying to find other ways to get in contact with the cmos or marketers in companies um essentially because so benoit sorry just because we're short on time breakdown the team to me for me today how many people total the total team is about 100 people know and how many are sales 16 belgium uh 20 in france and then the netherlands and and canada and we have about uh 20 people for sales okay and uh no subsidiaries in the us yet not yet but we are thinking about it yes very good now have you bootstrapped this company or raised capital no in fact we that's a good point for us as as far as we bootstrapped it with we just had a an injection of seed capital at the beginning of the company but then we bought a small company active in medical marketing that we sold like i told you uh to webmd medscape a kcat based funded company so benoit how much did you raise the seat around the for early on the c round was less than 1 million euros 15 years ago so uh it was a modest amount of capital but the idea is that with the sale of the the company uh we did uh we um leveraged the sale to to get uh several millions to a few logs what did you sell the company for uh the the exact price is more than 10 million okay great so then you use that capital to continue driving growth without having to take dilution exactly so who's on the cap table today is it just you and the co-founders we are the three co-founders my brother pierre kenya rose and and i still have a majority stake in in the company and then we have um some shareholders among our employees and these uh the seed capitalists that that are still on our board so are you operating the company considering all the kind of people your team size the money you're putting into sales and marketing are you operating at breakeven right now are you profitable no we since the beginning and until last year we were break even without the problem then we decided no to grow faster because we had a static broad but we decided to go much faster and we've decided to burn some cash the cash we raised through the the sell-off of the media quality company when was that sale though that was like 10 years ago it was it was six months ago oh it was six months ago got it okay so so go go go so you have more than 10 million from that sale so how much cash are you burning out per month are we talking like a million or 100 grand or no it's uh no no we we are more we plan now to burn about uh between one million and uh one million and a half uh this year so we are still quite conservative yeah so just be clear if you're gonna burn your bank is gonna go down by a million dollars this year which means you'll be burning about 90 or about a hundred thousand dollars of capital each month but you can more than cover that from the sale well exactly so we have more than enough cash to fuel our growth for the two or three years to come even uh if we decide uh next year to spend the three millions on on growth yep no that's great um walk me through growth rate so if you're doing about uh 10 million euros today uh in terms of run rate what were you doing a year ago so we we expect in fact the the growth rate um as uh linked to the fact that we we started recently uh in france and we we were uh normally we started in belgium with a quite modest market we went in france and there we have a market that's maybe 10 times what we used to have so benoit before you break down the strategy though tell me what the actual number was over the past 12 months just just uh it was 30 percent less and we are no um we about seven million and now we we plan to have about 30 to 40 percent growth next year okay got it so you were doing about a year ago you were doing about seven million bucks in terms of run rate which was about 583 thousand dollars a month now you're up to about a million dollars a month exactly okay got it and then um and then you said you plan to grow another 30 year over year exactly okay very good that's obviously healthy growth um um most the investments you're making you're gonna burn a million bucks this year is that on sales people marketing growth engineers where are you going to spend it um the the good point is that we have a very good team of engineers that's quite cheap to have because we are located in on a university campus where we are them very easily so it's not much uh in this in this direction that we will spend a lot of cash but more in the marketing and sales teams yep considering the marketing sales ramp you must understand your economics there around customer acquisition fairly well to have confidence burning that capital what's your cac today to get a new 50 000 acv customer so the cost of acquisition of a customer is about between uh 25 and 30k so that means that we we will uh reach the we will repay them uh in less than a year yeah yeah nine months or something like that um very good and then last question on economics churn's critical in any sas company what's your turn today or chun is we we get about a negative churn a very low negative channel if we add the upsell and and and churn uh so we we reached this year about three percent uh a negative churn um and we expect to have better figures uh next year um and when you look at just gross before you add back expansion to getting that negative three percent when you look at just gross churn what's gross revenue churn per year the growth revolution you mean people who cease to to be to be your clients uh during a year no not logo churn revenue churn so lost revenue over 12 months before you add back expansion if i if so this is something that's quite difficult for me to to just figure no if i take uh the the clients we at uh the the the former period and the the the customer we we have still at the end of the period it's maybe seven percent okay so seven seven percent churn but you add back more than you add back ten percent which is how you get to net negative three exactly i see interesting and when people turn why do they churn it's usually uh because the the the company that left us are usually because uh they just quit the business uh we have uh we sold the licenses to uh e-commerce uh companies uh for instance in france and uh there is a lot of churn in these kind of companies like uh uh for instance in the in the games uh uh all or what uh regards uh um toys r us companies like that uh you had a big a lot of churn last year and so that means that we lost some important clients who just quit the business um voila but usually we aim at clients who if i look at the numbers from the past years that tend to be uh with us for a very long period because again it's enterprises that means that if they've chosen us they want to to stay with us for a long time no i get it seven percent annual revenue return is is in a healthy healthy range there so i understand um tell me real quick before we wrap up with the famous five any plans to sell the company uh not for the moment so we clearly our objective is clearly to to continue to grow uh up to uh the 50 million er before to sell anything we are in a very good path for the moment and we continue this way all right benoit let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um i have lots of uh excellent books i've i've read uh um teres um um this excellent book from good to to great okay great good degree number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now absolutely uh clearly elon musk is is on my in my list but so uh in my parts from uh from drift and people like that that i like you very much number three what is your favorite online tool for building the company my favorites on i have lots of tools also i use i would say that something we use for the moment is in vision and envision is a modeling tool for design and it's very very good soft we use about everywhere and of course there are lots of tools also we use from microsoft and i use that to like microsoft but i would say that for me it's uh from it has become the best sass company in the world great envision is great number four how many hours i sleep to get every night um seven holes okay and what's your situation married single kiddos i've have a wonderful woman and two little daughters that are twins and oh wow and how old are you benoit i'm 50. 50. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um that in fact it's uh it's um an extraordinary journey to to uh to launch a company but like someone told uh on on twitter i don't know i don't remember why it's really an emotional um uh mountain you have to climb every day and that's that that's quite odd guys enjoy the journey action agile marketing automation they've just passed 12 million bucks in terms of run rate up from 7 million bucks just a year ago so healthy growth year over year they sold their subsidiary recently six months ago for more than 10 million dollars they're now using that money to grow the company they've been bootstrapped to date basically except a million bucks in seed raised a long time ago so now they're gonna double down on growth grow the team grow sales and marketing 100 people today between belgium france netherlands and canada seven percent annual revenue churn ten percent expansion for net negative three percent uh churn spend thirty thousand bucks to get a fifty thousand dollar acv customer so nine month payback period healthy economics as they look to scale benoit thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much and continued good work