How Amilia CEO Lorenzo Pirri grew 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 it's kind of new okay it's kind of new so we've got because we've got the a outbound team going after the park and rec organization and we've got an inbound team selling to dance studio and after school program and stuff that it's inbound generated so we're really at that stage now we've proven my product market fit across 20 plus vertical now with our stage okay let's let's let's let's get that market yeah uh so i'll be in the market in 2021 raising significant amount of money to just my metrics are crazy so on the nba side how much do you want how much do you hope to raise next year 20 20 million on what valuation no clue what's your best what's your guess 100 million 100 million plus yeah yeah um just just give you an example on the emilia product lifetime value to cac is around six times on my smartric product well break that down for me real quick what is turn on the amelia turn is less than eight percent yeah and it's a built-in and there's a built-in net dial returning it because my model is transactional my customer every year does more activity they increase their revenue typically an organization when they put in amelia they increase the revenue by 20 yeah okay and on the smartwatch product less than one percent there's no return in my business which is make it very interesting yep yeah well do you have you're able to drive expansion revenue right because you just get them to bill more through you and you make money on the transaction absolutely so it's built in my business model yeah that being said we can extend more revenue but that's where focus is at acquisition yeah what do you spend to get a new customer that pays you ten thousand a year eight thousand bucks okay so eight month payback something or seven month paybacks a minute well you've gotta the ten thousand is is gross because the payment side so think about it i make about 55 to 16 left overall 80 on software 32 percent on growth so think about uh so ten thousand i made some six months six month payback no more a bit longer than that because my well the i look at it after uh after my gross revenue oh i see i see i see okay got it but so what is your payback period how many months would you say on the media side 14 okay on this market side that's great very cool but there's no there's no change it's great well hey listen you're building a great business you're in this what i call the sas plus space multiple business models all working together you're getting the benefits of that let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book oh you catch me me right there i'm not a big reader of business book uh the last one i the the i read is the future is closer than uh than you think it could be seen as a business book or not of course a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um no you see this is kind of weird no problem number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business [Applause] well probably slack because it's the way we connect and have a lot of fun in the company um and francois number four how many hours i sleep to eat every night i'm a good sleeper eight okay and i see very well and what's your situation married single kids uh divorced but almost remarried okay i have two kids two kids of mine and two from my my my my and how are you 53 53 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 that i can be an entrepreneur who's kind of i thought i could be an entrepreneur i used to be a vc and i come from a traditional family where entrepreneurship was not they're all teacher so i went to school did my master in finance became a cfa started to work in a big pension fund become a vc life was good made a bit of money and then something happened with my partners they get rid of me and i said what well i'm not i've seen a lot of entrepreneurs i'm not dumber than them so i'll i'll build something turns out um i like it a lot so people so allah i'd love to decided to be an entrepreneur sooner in my life guys there you have it amelia.com launched in 2010 they help of folks that do events handle things like setting up the pages the websites the billing the processing you name it they help with it they are what i call sas plus they make money on a pure sas business they had 1.5 million over the past 12 months pure sas they have a payments business they did 3 million on and they have a gmv business they process over 350 million dollars of gmv over the past 12 months making about 3.5 million there total revenue this year in 2020 about 8 million bucks up from 7 million last year francois thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much it's really appreciated and i love what you're doing 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 pm 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 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