How Aryel CEO Luca Petri grew Aryel to $1.9M revenue and 250 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is mattia salvi he's the co-founder and ceo of ariel the italian startup that offers a sas ar marketing platform to customers she's been helping companies in our digital transformation innovation activities since 2015. matteo you're ready to take us to the top yeah i'm ready and thanks for this opportunity nathan you bet okay so how are companies using ar in their marketing yeah harriel is a software as a service platform that helps brands and creative agencies to easily launch engaging augmented reality marketing campaigns in the snap without the needs of for coding skills or downloading apps our focus is uh ar marketing and we merge augmented reality with the marketing side with a knockout platform that enable marketers to deliver these type of engaging experiences on the entire customer journey and the platform is built with the vision also to enable them to track data in order to understand uh if this campaign helped them to get a better eye on for example their e-commerce or print media support and on their gamification gamification channel understood so pirates of the caribbean when they're launching if they want to create a snapchat filter with like you know a pirate hat or something they would use you to create that yeah very cool okay help me understand what are these brands paying you on average per month to use the technology uh horial is built has a freemium software as a service model so uh it is it is possible to start with a free plan where you can start to apprecia have a initial approach with augmented reality uh so this uh type of account is a totally uh for hobby and uh for personal users so with a 29 to 29 euros per month is it possible to as to start off with a commercial plan and uh yeah with the different addons that you can buy inside the platform it is possible to boost your account for example with white label custom branding or you can connect your custom domain and for example unlock advanced reports what's the average what's the average customer paying you per month paid customers they have range the average price is uh 150 dollars per month okay interesting very cool give me the back story here when did you launch the business yeah we start on march 2020 2020. okay very cool and um how did you get the first customer do you remember who it was sorry sorry nathan how did you get your first customer uh the first customer uh when we launched on 2020 we started with a landing page in order to validate the market so in this in this scenario our goal was to tell a story to our possible leads where what is iron what is our goal and which is a possible price for this as a service uh so in this uh opportunity we uh gain different leads and we create a small community where you know how did how did i mean everything you've just described anyone can do but how do people get to the landing page yeah on the landing page how do they find it yeah we uh we spend about 1 000 on google and facebook in order to make some lead generation interesting and do you still spend money on ads today yeah of course how much last month did you spend on ads uh ten thousand dollars okay and how many customers like how many free years do you get without spend at the moment we have uh five uh more than five thousand users on uh uh our platform where more than fifty percent is paid today and uh wow that's a huge ratio so five thousand four years but two thousand five hundred are paying at the 15 uh the 5 000 500 5 000 user on the platform and the 15 percent is paid yeah five zero percent no at one five percent one five percent okay got it so you've got you've got about 750 paying customers today yeah and is that right yeah exactly and then at that 150 average price you just told me that means you guys are doing about a hundred and ten thousand dollars a month in revenue it depends because uh we have on we have different type of targets on the customer we have uh for example freelancer and the small medium and smaller web agencies that use a a very starting plan that comes for 150 dollars per month as average price but of course we have also big customers like enterprises or companies that have a a more powerful plan with ariel in order to mate i understand that that's why i was asking the average price that was earlier right so are you saying that you're doing more than a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue or less more more oh you're doing more okay fantastic right more than so what are you guys at right now about 150 160 000 bucks a month uh yeah yeah per month the the average is at 250. oh i see got it got it got it got it so if i take 250 bucks a month times 750 customers that's more like 180 000 bucks a month that's more accurate that's incredible you've gone from nothing you just launched last year to a pretty healthy monthly recurring revenue right did you have any revenue exactly one year ago yeah we will close the to 2020 um the 2021 with 300 000 of revenue okay so you you finished last year with 300 000 in revenue yeah now this year we will finish i guess i don't understand if you're doing 180 000 a month in revenue why would you only do 300 000 total revenue all year this year if you're doing 100 no probably probably that was a a misunderstanding sorry nothing the average price for each user is a one um 180 euros per month our mrr today is a about 220 000 euros per month i see so 25 thousand us dollars but you have seven you have 750 paying customers uh yeah uh because in this paid customer we also consider for example customer that comes from a lifetime deal we run different um lifetime deals those are useless in sas how many how many people are paying monthly sas fees uh at the moment we have about uh um 250. 250 okay that makes much more sense so you're doing you're doing 25 000 a month today in revenue what were you doing exactly one year ago one year ago we'll close the 2020 in winter you know in in december of last year how much revenue december 5 000. okay so you've gone from 5 000 a month to 25 000 a month over the past 12 months that's great growth have you done that all bootstrapped or did you raise capital uh we basically we are a totally bootstrapped uh company we closed a first uh seed round of um 77 thousand dollars in uh november uh sorry how how much seven hundred thousand seven zero zero thousand seven zero zero seven hundred thousand in november and that was your that was your pre-seed round uh the seed round seed round okay and most people are selling you know somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of their business and their seed round were you guys in that range uh sorry not them most people when you raise equity you're selling i mean when you raise capital you're selling equity right most people are selling 10 to 10 to 20 percent yeah we uh we raised totally via uh safe uh so at the moment uh well there's a cap there's a cap usually uh we have a floor of two uh 2.5 million floor and 8 million of a cup what do you mean 2.5 floor because uh safety works as a floor and the cap the floor is the the lower valuation and the cap is uh the higher valuation the our eigenvaluation is eight million today i i sorry i've seen a lot of safes i very rarely see a minimum you'd usually just see a cap of and you're and it looks like your cap was 8 million how does the 2.5 million floor work probably i don't know if this uh financial instrument in italy is a different but you need to specify a a range between the convertible item interesting maybe someone in the audience knows more about that the copy is eight million yeah yeah cap is eight million okay that's great and and so so you're not you said you're bootstrapped you're not bootstrap you've now raised you you're on the venture path now yeah at the moment yeah but uh until september until sorry october 2021 we we was totally bootstrapped and did you said weed you have a co-founder yeah we have uh four co-founder luca and leonardo was the first guys who started this project with me they are a true software engineer g3 just split it did you split the equity equally uh i have a more more equity i have the um free um 34 percent of ariel yep and then there is uh luke and leonardo they have above 28 percent and uh in the next month also vincenzo who is uh our product head of product comes into our lives that is five percent with five okay so 34 to you 28 to luke and lamarro and then five percent of lucenzo yeah and then we have a small uh percentage reserved for uh partners and other guys of the team for employees what is the team today how many people 15 people one in five and yeah how many engineers five engineers okay and any sales reps or no yeah at the moment we have a free sales okay two sales free sales three very cool um talk to me a little bit more about how you're driving growth obviously you're spending money on facebook ads what's it cost you to get a new 150 a month customer the cost of them the cost to get a new customer it's quite uh it's quite different today to measure the customer acquisition cost i can tell you that at the moment on google or cost per lead is about ten dollars per lead okay and you need about six leads because you convert 15 percent to paid so you spend about 60 dollars to get a new paid account something like that yeah yeah interesting very...