How Amilia CEO Lorenzo Pirri grew Amilia to $33.6M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is francois yet he's the founder and ceo of a company called amelia one of quebec's fastest growing tech companies they provide the first activity-based ecommerce staff solutions for organizations all over north america and he's made it his mission to help his administrators streamline their day-to-day tasks to allow them to focus on growth and prosperity frank while you're ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely okay so it sounds like you're playing in a very hot e-commerce space is that correct absolutely timing cannot be better 10 years ago i started the company with a vision that i needed to bring e-commerce to activity-based organization in my mind it made no sense i can i could not find and buy a swim class at the corner of the street and can get everything shipped to my dar from amazon so i said to myself the market is going to be no different for those stream organization or circuit organization or ymca it's it will they will go through the same thing as retailer went uh um people will expect to buy from those organization like they buy from amazon and that's the bet i made 10 years ago probably that's much more difficult to build an e-commerce platform for those organizations that is uh to do it for traditional e-commerce can you nail me your customers so we have kapolei town in the u.s uh grapevine we're in town in theory and colorado we have it it's a huge mark fragmented market of a very small organization because they're very local so i do have varsity cheerleading club in the u.s so frank frank tell us about that how's the varsity cheerleading club that has no engineers use your no code solution for their for their team well it's very simple it's basically it's a pure sas multitainment platform very easy to use like any other software out there right now you can go online and get a lot of sas notification and you don't need to be a technical person to run it so what we do is that is the similar thing as think think shopify but for inactivity which is much more complex than shopify for what oh and activity activities okay so if you're a a a a cheerleading club so your business is selling a cheerleading class maybe for girls of eight years old level one um and right now the only way you're selling it it's true either you have to show up in person um you show you need to fill in the form at the counter or you do it over the phone and if they're really really sophisticated there might be a form on their their website with with some payment attached to it yeah so we take that that market of activity that is not versatile because it's tend to be very small in in but everybody participates in their community you're probably doing activities it's either participating in sport taking enrichment class uh you're doing a bunch of stuff in your community yeah so i understand the product now francois help me understand how people pay you what does the average customer pay you per month um it's a transactional business model so it's driven by the transaction most of those organizations tend to be a seasoned base so they will have a couple of registration period during a a in the year so the on the there's the platform i split into product one is amelia which is the club the organization the software typically they be paying me 99 per month one percent of every transaction plus uh three percent of credit card so okay most of the money i made is transactional typically i do about i generally about 10 000 a year with a club but it goes through peaks it could be 99 bucks 99 bucks registration period they gave me 3 000 bucks um so it's aligned with their their capacity to pay meaning they collect money and that's where my that i make most of the money i understand and over the past 12 months how much gmv has gone through your platform well unfortunately with the pro with with the uh the the coving it's probably around 200 million but on the run rate of 350 million so it adds vary a lot but we're at this with a run rate of 250 million across a thousand organization and uh just to give you the number of potential organization in the u.s it's half a million there's a half a million of park and rec gcc ymc community center gymnastics chair dance we've built something very generic horizontal generic e-commerce platform so francois sorry just to make sure i understand this you've got a thousand customers that have processed over 350 million dollars of gm or that these that's your run rate but around 300 million this year in 2020 on that just that gmv you take one percent so there's 3.5 million in revenue right there correct absolutely and what was that last year in 2019 well 2019 okay so 2019 we did around 7 million a revenue this year we were on a run rate of 12 but because of cove it will be around eight okay so we're growing historically 30 to 40 percent yeah uh who did what was the gmv though last year so this year you did 300 million what how much last year it's probably two 250 250 million ngmv okay interesting so yeah ver so you really don't make a lot of money on the flat fees you're really making most of your money on the percent subscribe you know 30 of my business is transaction except when i move on the other side of the the second product which is the smartrep product this is for park and rec organization um because they are big uh goffstech they don't like variable and they are capable of paying so that's more traditional subscription side of the business we convert it into a a monthly so let's say the apartment does a million a year we'll say okay that's ten thousand the one percent it's ten thousand plus senator um a thousand bucks a month because you're a large organization that's uh twenty two thousand a year that's uh francois just to be clear so last year in 2019 if you did 250 million dollars in gmv at your one percent take rate that's 2.5 million in revenue there out of your total 7 million in revenue so there's still 4.5 million coming from just the subscription business itself correct and the payment size they're missing the payment side tell me about that so because our world is a very complex payment uh it needs a complex payment traditional e-commerce it's simple it's a credit card i did check out your gun in my will uh there's a lot of installment subscription uh there's even payment later payment at the counter there's a bunch of so we've built a on top of an amelia player india payment platform so it's deeply integrated into the platform uh one third of my revenue comes from payment i see okay so it's about so what it's about 2.5 million from the gmv model 3 million from payments and the rest is pure sas yeah something around that interesting how do you bill for the payments is that business is that a flat rate uh the payment is really transactional also so basically uh a typical customer comes to emilia they buy the platform and they and then we tell them to do a credit card it's 2.85 plus 30 cents and we build them to we we we front everything we have a partner apparently and processor partner in the back where we pay a balcony so it's very very similar to a shopify payment i see interesting we make it very very simple for those organizations to uh become an e-commerce merchant start selling their activity online collect payment and that's that's the that's great now have you done all this bootstrapped or did you raise capital uh it's well there's a bootstrap from my money and my friends so a little over 10 years it's we've we've burned over 12 million canadians over 10 years from me and my friends mostly to build the technology because this is very important we we went at it from a horizontal plane so if you if you look at my market it's highly local okay it's um it's a swim club it's a a a ymca it's a language school so i wanted to be able to serve the community not only a vertical not just do gymnastics or cheerleading or dance i wanted to do generic platforms so along with those 10 years this is what i've demonstrated my ability to have a bunch of different organizations running on my platform and it's feasible because an activity is generic a class is a class yeah principal back in 2010 when you founded the company do you remember how much revenue you did that first year probably a hundred thousand hundred thousand okay how did you get your first customer do you remember we got offers with customers with a couple of um a really big sports center here that we're really looking to uh in montreal in montreal yeah so the first five years or something yeah yeah exactly so the first five year was about um building it and proving it in montreal then we started in in canada and we're in the u.s for the last three years but mostly you've not invested a lot of money in how much sales and invest in the in the technology before your first dollar revenue do you remember not much underwater yeah not much we're able to because of that to start the business slowly but surely yeah it's a it's a it's a forgotten market it's a very slow technology adoption market there's no company funded in that space nobody's going after them so it's a it was possible to build that over 10 years because nobody's going after it funny thing now is that people are realizing there's there's a lot of money there's probably half a trillion dollars spent on actually in the u.s but nobody is taking care of that market so take advantage of that market francois what's your team size look like today how many people 85 and how many engineers 35 30 wow okay how many quota carrying sales reps three three okay interesting how do you set the quota uh...