How Binderr CEO Zak Rose grew to $70.2K revenue and 6 customers in 2024.

guys binder.com with two r's on the end does five hundred dollars per customer per month today they have six customers so three thousand in monthly recurring Revenue Jacob has invested so far over two million dollars of his own money in the business mainly to pay for the team there's 18 full-time he's burning called 100 000 per month but has a lot of conviction on the vision of what he's trying to build he got that money by the way from his first exit now plowing it into binder which is helping folks that survey you know accountants lawyers csps and Malta uh help them service their customers faster in a more automated fashion they're launching now looking to scale up their customer base scale up the team and obviously scale Revenue we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is Jacob apple he loves building companies had a nice eight figure exit from Bolt and 2023 and is now building his life's work with company called binder b-i-n-d-e-r-rr.com which helps you automate the workflow of csps all right Jacob ready to take us to the top let's do it Nathan real quick what's the Cs Peak is it customer service professional corporate service provider corporate service provider okay I was a little bit off that would usually be like a accountant lawyer yep now before we before we jump into that world automate workflows of accountants and lawyers you mentioned the eight figure exit from Bolt were you a founder of Bolt no I owned the franchise and uh in a few countries down in the Mediterranean and exited that last year what was the what was the URL of that company bolt.com it's a large ride hailing and food delivery company in Europe and so what do you mean you own the you want you weren't necessarily A co-founder but you bought the trademark rights in certain countries or what do you mean by you were the franchise owner yeah we basically had the right to operate that company on in a number of countries so it was it was our own setup it was our own company and we just had so we were piggybacking their technology okay and so when they exited um I mean I think from January and January 11 2022 bolt was validated something like 8.4 billion dollars so I guess to the if I if I ping the founders of Bolt will they know you will they know oh yeah I know Jacob yeah yeah they'll know who I am yes okay so so how how should my audience think about your slice of the 8.4 billion valuation from last year as fairly minimal I would say we I was running three fairly small countries Cyprus Malta and Tunisia and it was actually it was bought themselves that acquired our business back so we had I me and my partners we had the franchise right to operate in a number of countries and I guess at some point when we started making too much money they they wanted to buy the the operations and there was like a predefined buyout clause in the contract we had with them and what is that bio Clause it says something like hey we have the right to buy you out at 1X revenue or something like that yeah I I can't disclose the the exact figures because I think we're still under the the confidentiality of the of of the exit um but yeah there was a predefined buyout uh clause in the in the contract we had with them were you able to grow your three locations to above a million dollars a year in Revenue foreign yes okay and significantly okay more than 10 million I'm not I'm not because we're still like the the whole we are still waiting to get paid for some of the of of that exit uh so I don't know how close I can get to the figures above a million is definitely not saying too much I don't know how much closer I can get than that okay what percent of the deal price was not cash up front it sounds like you're on an earn out right now or something like that are you still waiting on 20 of the deal price but by far the majority was was paid right away and then there was like a percentage allocated to make sure that the the the whole operation that they were taking over was running smoothly oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different 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was a was a fantastic success for us it was never really ours it was we were just a a partner and I really wanted us to to sort of control our own destiny and and build our own thing so as soon as I realized that at some point the ball Journey would come to an end we we started our own thing okay so you start writing code for this in somewhere around 2020 um helped me understand today how was a lawyer or an accountant using your platform to grow their business so we we've only just launched the platform to the the market we spent two years actually building an accounting app to then realize that maybe there was a better opportunity and specifically focusing on this Niche when it comes to corporate service providers so are you pre-revenue today or do you have paying customers we have paying customers today but we're early in our Revenue Journey so when did you get your first paying customer in March March this year okay that's great how did you decide a lot of Founders when they launched and get the first customer they're not quite sure what pricing model to use what did you price your software at we went with uh a model where we felt there was a good opportunity learning from Big players like stripe and other companies that really have become so successful because they became part of the Journey of the customer that they're serving so they would grow their business on a on a basis of a percentage of what was coming through we felt fairly early on these lawyers these accountants were incorporating companies and who are doing corporate filings that we want to be really aligned with their revenue stream so we we charge mostly a transactional cost so every time you go and incorporate a company through binder or you appoint a new director then we charge SC for that transaction while we also charge a small subscription per client that they manage what transactions are associated with the company when they you know for example add a new director are you trying to say you you charge on a utility-based Model where every time they take an action you charge like per that action or is there actual like you're charging a percent of gmv no so imagine if you want to appoint a new director in Nathan's company you would go to your service provider and you would say I would like to appoint this director they would charge you 300 dollars to appoint a new director that service provider would appoint that new director because it's automated through binder and we charge them a percentage of that so we would charge them like thirty dollars to appoint a new director through binder because the whole flow is automated okay so on average what's the customer paying you per month today they're paying us about 500 euros a month okay so this is for like a year or an accountant that that maybe has you know five to ten customers something like that our customers on average have two to three hundred clients that they're serving okay and the reason why we are only at 500 euros on average per customer is that a lot of the features and a lot of our penetration into the service provider is not deep enough so we would expect our average customer to pay us two to three thousand Euros a month when we get deep enough with our penetration but but today as we're still fairly early it's about 500 euros and how many customers are paying today six and how are you finding them are you using a specific growth method no so the the sales part of it is fairly straightforward because in a country like Malta where we operate today there's a list of all a corporate service providers they have it's a regulated entity so you could just go online you find all the the corporate service providers and Malta and you pretty much have their contact details so you're only selling to accounts and lawyers in Malta yeah and is it is it mainly accountants and lawyers or are there other professions you're working with no the um our ideal customers is Corporate service providers but they often like if you look at it globally they are often comprised of accounting lawyers notaries it really depends on what country you're looking at I see talk to me about your founding team did you found this one by yourself or you have co-founders I I started out by myself fairly early on and then I got the then I got two co-founders later in the journey when we pivoted from an accounting app to uh being focused on corporate service providers so did you did you give them 50 each so 25 and then you keep 50 or how did you guys have the equity conversation no since I had I financed most of the business myself from the beginning and as I was also the only founder who worked on it from the beginning it was uh it wasn't exactly like let's split it down the middle and we we all share equally and I I own a larger percentage than Michael so you own more than maybe 70 of the company no list okay so between 15. okay oh but you own about 50 of the company total yes oh I see yes also if you own 50 then they own 25 each no our team owns about 10 uh my co-founders own about 15 and then I have my old Partners from the other business that we exited who also put some of their money into to binder so they also own a piece okay so that's 50 60 75 so they own your old Partners on maybe 20 25 something like that they were your angel investors basically yeah I see I see how much of your own money have you put in the company so far about 2 million does that make you nervous it's a lot of money no I I feel fairly confident in in what we're doing and I don't I always knew that I wanted to to pour whatever money we made from the first Venture into to to the next one so no why is it so expensive to build this I mean two million dollars have you already spent all the two million dollars we spend about two years to begin with developing an accounting app to then pivot for a year and a half to develop this app for corporate service providers and we're spending about a hundred thousand Euros a month it's a theme of 18. mainly Developers so yeah that it that runs up over time so you've already spent two million dollars because of that burn rate you just articulated yeah slightly more two and a half 2.7 um I guess so I mean anyone listening right now might go oh my gosh like I I could never afford to spend 2.7 million dollars like on my startup because maybe they don't have an exit like you so I guess how do you keep yourself sort of honest you have enough play money where you can sort of throw money at problems but how do you make a decision on man this isn't growing as fast as I thought it would we're three years in I gotta shut this down and move on you know how do you gauge success you have to you have to feel very confident in in the in the direction that that you're taking the business and I think that the we didn't it's not like we are inventing uh product where we don't really know if there's a market for it it's kind of like if you can build a better accounting app than zero or QuickBooks you know there's a market for it it's not really a question of whether there's a market and a demand for it it's just a question can you actually build it and then find a way to to to distribute this this product and we've spoken to these corporate service providers all around the world and they are all desperate for the kind of tool that we have built and I know as soon as this product is ready which it is fairly soon so for us it's a very exciting time because we feel like we're right on the cost of being able to deliver this product that we've worked on for so long um that that makes it a bit easier knowing that you're getting such good feedback from the market and you um yeah you feel like you're close and you also feel like there's a lot of support from your from my partners co-founders team and and so forth of course makes it a lot easier well Jacob we're rooting for you on that note though let's wrap up here with the famous five number one your favorite book and recently read a book by the I don't know if he wrote it himself but he is the founder of Hyundai the the car company uh his name is something similar and he's just he's an absolute is definitely a a an inspiration great number two is there a CEO you're following or studying no number three what's anything I try and get as much inspiration as I can from from from any any founder CEO number three is what's your favorite online tool for building binder number four how many hours do you get every night eight hours and which situation married single kids I have a fiance two kids that's great and how old are you and five months how old are you Jacob I am 36. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. foreign [Music] being consistent and having a like a long-term generation so I wish I'd started this journey a bit earlier because it really it compounds these these things that you you're doing so I wish I started a bit earlier and knowing that this emergency would have been good as well probably I think I should know I wish I knew more better today as well guys binder.com with two r's on the end does 500 per customer per month today they have six customers so 3 000 in monthly recurring Revenue Jacob has invested so far over two million dollars of his own money in the business mainly to pay for the team there's 18 full-time he's burning called a hundred thousand dollars per month but has a lot of conviction on the vision of what he's trying to build he got that money by the way from his first exit now plowing it into binder which is helping folks that survey you know accountants lawyers csps and Malta uh help them service their customers faster in a more automated fashion uh they're launching now looking to scale up their customer base scale up the team and obviously scale Revenue we'll see what happens next Jacob thanks for taking us to the top awesome thanks Nathan take care one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every 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