How airfocus by Lucid CEO Malte Scholz grew airfocus by Lucid to $4.2M revenue and 700 customers in 2025.

hello everyone my guest today is malty schultz he is the a product a passionate product entrepreneur with deep knowledge in implementing business ideas and developing sas and mobile tech he's a co-founder today and ceo of air focus helping companies make better product roadmap decisions malty you ready to take it to the top yes absolutely all right tell us about the company what does airfocus do and how do you guys make money sure air focus is essentially a strategy platform for product teams and also everyone who's kind of needs to make decisions um to prioritize what to do next and then essentially uh build more effective roadmaps and um the way we make money we are software as a service so we have subscriptions going on and uh right now we are around 20k mri growing 20 15 to 20 month over month how many customers you have we have 270 customers so on average between um 50 and 900 um okay so got it twenty thousand dollars per month right now across 270 customers so on average they pay cos 75 per month for your software yes that's the average but the spread is pretty pretty uh wide yeah yeah i'm sure right um and then talk to me about growth so if you're doing 20 000 a month today in revenue what were you doing a year ago basically we just started out around 13 14 months ago so we were we're doing probably uh one to two uh k uh mr that's great and we're just starting off how did you find so first off you launched launch year was 2017 or 2018. uh the paid plans we launched in uh april 2018 the company was incorporated a little bit earlier and what channel did you use to get your first 10 customers yeah there was actually a lot of hustling um texting people from my network uh going through facebook and slack groups a lot of things that we don't have what so what kind of facebook groups and slack groups were you searching for yeah sure so there are these communities for product managers um project managers also on linkedin a little bit and so basically went uh through all these groups and uh kind of launched airfo was asked for feedback tried not to be too sally just getting feedback and from these early customers or rather users um we got our first 10 15 paying clients that's great now have you done this bootstrap or did you raise capital so we just raised our seat round around two three weeks ago um and before that we completely bootstrapped the company we had a tech agency uh at the same time and were kind of splitting time 50 50 to kind kind of pay the bills how much how much did you raise uh we raised almost half a million euro that's around 500 to 600 okay and do you know anything yet i mean obviously you're burning capital it sounds like to drive growth how much are you burning per month right now around 30 to 40 000 i always have to calculate the currencies dollars per month does it make you nervous burning that much i mean what that means you have about call it 10 months 11 months of runway uh not really because we're also making uh revenue and we're seeing that we're growing so um i think we can control the burn um very effectively uh but obviously um if we keep spending that money at that rate we have to uh raise another round yep very good uh talk to me about team today how many people uh we're three co-founders um one uh cto christian me and uh valentin he joined a little bit later he's doing most of the performance-based marketing and growth activities and then we have uh another full-time developer on the team a few deaf freelancers and a few freelancers on the marketing side full time today are three four four okay and do you know anything yet about churn what's your monthly churn look like it's between four and five percent uh per month okay so i mean annually that'd be about 48 percent revenue turn annually yes and do you know yet i mean do you have any things that you can upsell your customers to drive expansion revenue or no absolutely so we're seed based pricing so obviously we try to expand the team size and we're offering some sort of uh upsell products that users can book if they need it and that way we're trying to um increase the average revenue per account is there any utility or kind of usage based upsell well obviously the seeds aren't no no no that's not that's not a seat or a feature based upsell ah no no we don't have that okay i mean is it something you're thinking about well we're thinking about pricing all the time because i don't think we have nailed it yet it's it's very complicated um because at this on the one hand we have like small smbs with just five to ten employees and then on the other hand we have like huge corporations that don't mind paying thousands of dollars um and if you want to be attractive to both groups it's really tough for us so um yeah but to be honest we we haven't figured it out um but we're on it we have some plans to to make it work and i mean in terms of acquiring new customers how aggressive are you being in terms of fully weighted cac to get a new cost 75 a month account uh that's a great question uh only now we are equipped to kind of really aggressively spend money on on customers um right now a customer costs us around 300 to 400 euro and with the lifetime value of one five to two thousand k given the numbers that we have right now because we're just on the market for for a little bit more than a year um that gives us i would say enough leeway to um to even spend more yeah five month payback if you assume 25 months of lifetime value that's about 1800 in lifetime value so yeah i know that makes a lot of sense um very good where will you spend that money i mean what channels will you use to keep growing there's only so many facebook and slack groups yeah i mean we don't spend that much money on on facebook groups today most of our traffic comes from captera google ads and then partnerships uh with the app stores of project management tools like jira uh trello and soon asana so cap tap sarah what keywords are you paying for uh we're listed in the project management product management and a little bit they have decision making software so i would say we have optimized this platform uh quite well yet um and now it's it's just about um increasing the spend and obviously this will come at a higher cost per per lead but um as mentioned earlier we we can spend a little bit more yeah no very very good and so if you go out go ahead and sorry no you guys there are new channels that we are now going to experiment with i really like uh quora because um there are a lot of interesting discussions happening around privatization and road mapping and i think um and you you want to be part of these conversations even if it's just a little ad showing up at the right time yep no absolutely very good and so you said you might go out and raise another runner capital here soon if you go raise another round of capital how much do you want to raise and what do you want to get ar2 before you go raise i would say uh our goal for this year um is 50k um let's see uh where we get and i guess that's also a number that's um together with the with the growth rates that's uh attractive to vcs because these will those will be the people that we now need to talk to and um yeah i guess uh between one and two million will give us enough firepower to to then get to the next stage yeah would you ever consider venture debt so you don't have to take delusion uh i haven't considered that i mean do you know what it is yeah i i have some ideas but um i will for sure look deep into it i'm just the reason i'm asking i'm curious if it's a hot thing in germany right now it's barely just starting to take off in the u.s and i just don't know if it's a thing yet in germany it's not yeah and interesting are you built what are you built on top of billing like stripe stripe yeah interesting okay um let's wrap up with a famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh my favorite business book is for sure how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie um i don't know if you've read it but it's i've read it i've read it five times and it's just a all-time classic number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now uh yeah it's hiton cha from um fyi and formerly i think kissmetrics and some other companies number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night uh six to seven and what's your situation married single kids i'm married and i have a one-year-old uh beautiful daughter oh that's exciting and how old are you malte uh i'm 32 32. last question what do you think about it what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh i think i would i should have joined um tech and startups earlier and probably should have avoided my masters in a business administration didn't really add much value guys airfocus.io doing 20 000 a month in revenue across 270 customers paying on average 75 bucks a month again helping people understand and be smarter with the roadmap roadmap prioritization they have raised 550 000 burning about 40 000 per month right now as they look to scale their team of four 48 gross revenue churn annually it's two they're too young to look at expansion yet but spending 350 to get a new customer for five month payback again as they look to scale to six hundred thousand bucks in...