How Bluerabbit CEO Bernardo Letayf grew to $133.2K revenue and 12 customers in 2024.

Blue Rabbit was a gamification platform doing seven thousand bucks a month about two years ago Copa hit them hard they're now doing 200 bucks a month they do have some seasonality where they'll do about you know five six up to ten twenty thirty thousand bucks in Revenue so they haven't shut it down yet but he is working on a side project uh which he'll launch here shortly we'll see what happens hey folks my guest today is Bernardo Latif he's an expert trainer and speaker with over 10 years in the communication industry formerly a teacher and web ux designer he created Blue Rabbit to gamify education the award-winning platform I successfully gamified over 12 000 players in all continents and is currently being used to gamify corporate training programs events and schools Bernardo you ready to take us to the top yeah I'm sure I am all right give me an update when we last spoke you were serving 45 customers how many that was in 2020. how many customers are you working with today and how are they using you well unfortunately we're buried down that path um we lost a lot of business because of the pandemic so from the 45 we had we um I'm pretty sure the wheel somewhere around 12 now because we have a lot more independent individual users but we lost a lot of uh big businesses that were working with us so yeah we're a little does that mean revenue is also down since 20 years down really way down we're we're really under the covers right now well so how do you decide like when you shut this thing down because in 2020 you told me you were doing about seven thousand bucks a month in Revenue right so it's about 80 000 a year if you're way down I mean you're making like 10 20 grand a year why not shut this down and go get a full-time job or something well the the situation I am is standing at right now it's a little complicated because we moved to Florida and now uh I have certain visa restrictions so I cannot get a job right now so I'm still pushing for blue ride for a little while and I was also invited to a different project I'm working on um with some people in Germany so uh right now I'm kind of like doing that and I am taking care full-time of my daughter so it's also it's also another uh really upside of my of my current current status you can see behind you we see that we see the all the yeah the stickers everywhere yeah so so what is mrr today um sorry what's MMR monthly monthly recurring Revenue oh uh it should be I know it sounds uh I really wanted to share this because I've been hearing all the other uh interpreters that they interviewed with you and they have really great numbers but we've been doing not always not always there's all kinds of stories yeah I wanted to share one that a little bit of a struggle here um we're somewhere around uh two hundred dollars a month so it's really really really low but it's keeping us afloat with a little bit of the cost a little bit of keeping up the service around um and um thankfully the last around last month we got three contracts with uh with some of our former clients and we recovered a little bit from the from the very uh slipper slope so we got a little bit of Revenue in the past um a month we got somewhere around uh Bernardo though I mean this is regardless if you get like a couple extra bucks I mean this is the entrepreneur struggle right I mean you got a new kid you're cranking along I mean but you can't like pay rent and buy food on 200 bucks a month absolutely I have the fortune of of a beautiful wife who has been able to support us for a good time uh okay so she has the safer sort of corporate gig that it frees up your time to take the risk on the startup a little bit yes I see is she also in software yeah she works for one of the biggest uh tech companies ah very cool so why not I mean you have the luxury of sort of experimenting here and I believe are you also an engineer do you write code I do write code yes why not pivot why not try something new that's what I'm doing with uh with with this uh people I'm working with in Germany we're pivoting into a different um a different so what do you mean you're working with them are you a co-founder at a new company from with German co-founders or what do you mean working with German people yeah we're working on a new company with this people over there I I really don't want to disclose much because we we both agree that we're not going to disclose a lot about it right now we're still working on our MVP to to release it um but it's kind of like a step before of what you would do with blue rabbit uh as a software it would be a like like on a higher end that reaches out to a different Market to a broader market and it's a lot easier to to sell and build on it but it's also pre-revenue yeah 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 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is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to 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that you that that you could uh move a little bit around there and they're like let's do it so that's what I've been working in the past a few months would you ever sell Blue Rabbit for you know five thousand bucks I don't know that's uh that has been a very big question uh on our end I talked to my uh partners and the the things about the seasonality of the rabbit as you said like selling it for five thousand dollars or something um within the seasonality between September and of March maybe over a little bit February it's gonna resell a lot more and we make a lot more than five thousand dollars in that in that in that period but it's not enough to get us through the entire year it's like you end up making thirty thousand dollars in in that period of time and um so it makes no sense to sell it because it at the same time allows me to sell uh why don't these why don't these customers quit I mean if they love the tool and they're willing to pay your promo why did they churn um well one of those I can tell you it was going to be a very big contract it was going to be somewhere around 200 000 a year and uh they within the the corporation they can utilize the gamification team they had built I mean I'm telling you I helped this company to build a team I even hired what I helped them hire one of the gamification experts that was going to work with them and uh in the end of throughout 20 at the beginning of 2021 they started Distributing the team all the way around and I was like what's happening here so um apparently they had some uh business different business approach and they moved out of it I I even got into an interview to work for the United Nations uh in the training program and we're not sorry we're getting distracted though so you haven't already we had 45 customers though yeah we churned about 30 of them so yeah that's a lot I mean did something break and you couldn't fix the code or what happened nothing like that they just stopped using it because internal decisions they started changing they're maybe having managed uh change in management were those were decisions that were completely off our hands we're like hey but you don't want gonna do it again they're like no we love the tool then why don't continue with it oh yeah we know the budget changed they didn't want to do it I like I don't get it I really couldn't understand what was happening my only the only thing that I could make um give some sort of reason behind it may Captain the covet pandemic hit them hard or something or they started moving budget and gamification has a problem that you really need to engage for a couple of years so that you can actually start looking at really huge numbers before you get a lot of data and sometimes I believe the companies get uh desperate because they don't see all the results immediately as if you have a basis but that's a massive ask or asking people to pay you for four years before they see any value who would agree to that well that's what I had with these big companies and uh some of them but if you know that's a problem if you know it's a problem though why not change it why can't you change your onboarding to deliver a dopamine hit within the first 10 hours we do we we okay so here's you do um have that but it takes let's say three months for the team to build the content that they have to deliver my tool is not the issue the issues that they have to deliver the content that they're going to put inside a tool so when that team does not deliver in time then the two her the tool gets hurt because they say okay fine you do not delivering and then they just take me out of equation because in the end I am not the one that's producing the content for them I mean it sounds like what the value here is the content not the gaming tool so you don't need to pay you for anything uh they need to create the content and um cancel the pivoting well but it sounds like you're pivoting you said pivoting it was just a more robust Blue Rabbit but what is that the problem here is you can't convince people to build content what's this new project going to fix that right it's actually because um it's actually not a bigger more robust Blue Rabbit it's a different step it's a step that you take before that it makes it simpler for the for the companies to develop their content and it simplifies the entire process of gamifying their products or services so it just it just takes a lot of the uh time it takes to produce your learning uh development or your um training content that you want to deliver to your people and it becomes more like a step manager and how did you negotiate the deal with this new partner I mean do you say I want 80 of the new company because I've already built Blue Rabbit for five years or how do you negotiate that no we're we're going 50 50 and this is uh he pulled me and he says I won you as my CTO and I want you 50 50. I want all of you because I know that you know more or less about the uh how the the business works and I don't know any of the tech side of it so um I want to build it like that I have clients that are already willing for to pay for this so let's let's work together so he brought the idea and I'm working with him to deliver it interesting and did you have you raised in a capital Blue Rabbit do you have any investors um yeah that's another part of the equation you know how you learn how to to make good decisions yeah so uh one of the worst decisions I made was the investor that I decided to take in um because he ended up crashing and losing everything and he's uh it was it it even got personal so it was a very bad uh choice of an investment how much did you raise we raised 25 000 and then he he ended up not even delivering all of it he just wanted to put part of it then he wanted to see Revenue before and then he took money out of it and was like so it ended up being a very bad choice and then trying to get other investors after that was uh was my why why go raise 25 Grand I mean they tell you this all the time the small checks are the most annoying right you want go raise a million or nothing you know what I mean so why I mean you must have how did you were there warning signs that this was going to be a problem early on no actually the the um there were not exactly any for what I had as an I mean maybe I was very naive and very inexperienced but when he came up to me he said I had just won the award for the outstanding gamification software and they were like rushing towards me and I was like fine let's do it let's let's push into it and he was very eager to it he brought the money he brought the mistake he would keep push on the third thing and about six months later everything started crashing and I tell you it gets a little personal and and I can tell you a lot of things around him have fallen apart so um I I don't know um I I do can tell you I didn't see it coming probably it was my mistake for not being aware of the only other signs and I agree with you the smaller checks are the are the most annoying you should go for the bigger box because that way you're gonna get better contracts better structure and you're gonna make sure that you're not going to deal um you know smaller parties and people are going to be nitpicking everything out of you yeah yeah okay that makes sense so you're going to bootstrap this new idea yeah yeah and uh but we also have um uh my new partner also has a different uh paths for investment he has uh I think it's two other uh businesses that are are a good he he already has hired people he has some more of a structure and he has a lot more experience than I do in business so I I'm trusting that side a little bit on it yeah well I'm certainly rooting for you we'll see what happens ever in the meantime here let's wrap up with the famous five uh number one what's your favorite Business book look uh um oh my God I have the name oh I always forget I can't rework it's my favorite business work number two is there a CEO you're following or studying not at all number three what's your favorite online tool for building Blue Rabbit uh codeigniter number uh four how many hours of sleep do you get every night five and what's your situation married single kids married with one two-year-old daughter yes we do know that and how old are you I am 39 almost 40 in about 12 months very cool last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um trust your gut and ask for more money guys super honest interview Blue Rabbit was a gamification platform doing seven thousand bucks a month about two years ago Copa hit him hard they're now doing 200 bucks a month they do have some seasonality where they'll do about you know five six up to ten twenty thirty thousand bucks in revenues they haven't shut it down yet but he is working on a side project uh which he'll launch here shortly we'll see what happens next Bernardo thanks for taking us to the top thank you Nate one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it 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hello everyone my guest today is Bernardo Latif he is a high school teacher or it was where were eight years and he's an entrepreneur in web design for fifteen and gamification expert for eight years three as an international expert today he's focus on his company blue rabbit bernardo are you ready to take it to the top yes yeah very good okay so tell us about the company what are you doing how do you make money okay so what we do is that we developed a platform called blue rabbit and we salute to schools so that they can gain five classes or the whole school to get all together so we can actually track what players are interested and motivated to to do okay and it is a pure plumbing software as a service model these schools are paying monthly recurring fees basically it's a software itself it's uh you can you get a WordPress version or you can get an appended version you install with it and you work with it it's not a software a service is just a plane cloud software it's probably simpler so they're paying like a one-time fee for a license or something no they pay a monthly fee okay so it is a peer it is a software as a service model well yeah okay yeah okay I mean are you seeing healthy economics what are your tell me about your trend well this year we just managed to get we started up 2017 we managed to get something around ten thousand dollars but we're looking forward to our work hundred thousand uh by the end of this year okay so just to be clear at the end of we're at the right at the beginning of 2017 you were doing ten thousand dollars a month in revenue no idea by the beginning of seventeen we were doing nothing by the end of it we made only ten thousand dollars okay so what a small are you what do you at today what did you do last month around dollars okay around three thousand dollars and how are you how are you how are you scaling this up I mean how are you finding new customers to sign up we're having an online campaign and we're also having we have sales sales people going to schools selling the software directly okay how many people are on your team today that's seven people right now okay and how are you paying them if you're only making three grand a month oh it's based on Committee for salesmen these basin commission and we get some funding from capitalists one month ago how much everyone shares one month ago up how much have you raised five thousand ok 21,000 was that that was just a convertible note that was what what kind of financing was that was a convertible note or an equity round it took a liquid erode yakked and 50 we gave away 15% from four to five thousand okay so so that's a valuation of what some are on a home for $2,000 Yeah right yeah yes yeah okay so okay got it so this is summarize you have seven people on your team they're all commission based you're doing three grand a month in revenue right now at the beginning you just launched this about a year ago so it's all grow have this point you raise 25,000 bucks priced around you about 15% of the company how many customers are you serving today right now we have two pink schools four thousand four thousand reser users and we're looking forward to 150,000 growth due to a project we opened with it's called the engaging project with the Erasmus Foundation in the in Europe so we're looking forward to 150,000 growth in the next couple what does that mean hundred thousand worth of course of what growth of 50,000 registered players in the platform okay but registered players just increases your cost structure doesn't necessarily drive you more revenue right yeah in this case since we're actually solidly on their servers board racer cost they're just like getting the license and they're just working with it so they can put their own life courses through blue rabbit so it does not increase or cost at all okay why how do you look invert this huge pain user base and do I mean sorry this huge free user base into axel more revenue for the company well right now we're using it as it helped us use as marketing we won an award in November thanks to this because people believe in the party so we're using it as a marketing push so we can get more paying schools through this huge advantage by telling that we've got 150 thousand European students getting got it okay but just to be clear right now bernardo you have to paying schools that make up 3 grand it's about beige pay about 1500 bucks a month for 3 grand total yes more or less okay got it and what your jewel onto the company in sorry what what year did you launch the company in ok uh last year yeah just this year in 2017 ok 2017 and considered like exactly and where was I mean where was your head at when you did this you're you're a high school teacher you have your hands full teaching you like gamification I mean why start a software company actually I started developing blue rabbit because as a teacher I decided to give me five more classes back in 2010 and and I started figuring out that using Excel to gain 5 class was not enough so I develop a blog and then it did it was enough and so I add it started adding stuff to the blog things that players could upload their their own projects into it so blue rabbit has started to grow out of the class itself so I ended up developing it based on what I was teaching the way I was teaching why I was teaching so it turned into a good business and and it's not working and other teachers are inviting it and everybody's were like hey dude you should start selling this so we decided to take it to the next level and did you develop the whole thing you wrote all the code or do you have a developer Honor no well when a developer just is year but all the other lines of code were developed like me ok got it so you're the developer you're the business guy are you the only person that owns equity besides the investor no no no we're it's my other partner partner at the end and a partner Luis who is also helping me with the development at the end has been working with me for the past three and a half years and at least just guarding with when the other partner got in also I see and do you know yet I mean it's really really early but do you have a sense of what it costs you to acquire a new paying school we already had that it's something around between $50 and $100 ok English and how did you get to that number more or less we calculated the expenses my my partner there and has a lot of experience selling software to schools he's been working on that for almost 7 years and also calculating through the direct Commission and the cost of the cost of the software on the cloud itself what commission do you pay a salesperson it's 20% of the no it's sorry it's 30% of the year deal and then for the second year they get 15% if they get another signed up okay so and and the two schools right now they're paying fifteen hundred bucks a month each right it's not exactly they pay one is paying something around two thousand and the other one is being around went out okay so this okay my point is though if I take 30% of that year-long deal that's like five grand which is part of your tak but you just told me or cackles only a hundred bucks mm-hmm yeah more or less yeah but it's not right if you pay a sales person thirty percent of the deal 30 percent of two grand a month is a $5,400 Oh Michelle sorry yeah yeah I didn't count I'm sorry I'm sorry I didn't come for that yeah you're completely right about it yeah in in terms of cost of the school for a whole year yeah it would be around five thousand dollars but it's a little less based on I was just considering how much it costs us without considering the Commission I'm sorry about that you just think there who are there any other are there any other costs associated with the sale besides a commission at the salesperson mm no no no not right now we actually crunch that down there's no other there's no other cost right now maybe if you count a little bit of the development but we absorbed that with uh with a capitalist got it yeah now that makes a lot of sense I know that cost itself it's pretty much and and what is for the team is a seven where are you based today in Mexico City Mexico see I love that and most of your customers the two schools are in Mexico or Europe yes right now we only have them here in Mexico okay very good very good will Bernardo let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what is the last business book that you read it was it last what business book that you read rework good one number two is their CEO you're falling or studying right now uh I started following again Bill Gates a little bit number two is that what's your favorite online tool for building the company it slack by far number four how many hours of sleep take it every night how many what hours of sleep Oh you can actually track me in Fitbit it's around 7 1/2 hours every day I always get all the pay hours that's good and how old are you I'm 35 next Friday no congratulations in what's your situation Bernardo married single you have kids married married and he locates marry three dogs and one rabbit all right last question take us back 15 years what do you wish your 20 year old self knew that it doesn't matter how hard it will get it doesn't matter how dark it looks you're gonna get out of it don't worry about it guys it doesn't matter how dark it looks it'll be ok coming from a high school teacher of over eight years in Mexico City he had had now launched software called blue rabbit to gamify the classroom his peers and himself are using it a lot in their rooms launched in 2017 now as to schools paying for the software doing about three grand per month in total hoping a scale at ten grand per month in total by the end here of 2018 there's they're spending about five grand to acquire these new customers with a salesperson Commission model they have a team of seven right now bernardo thank you for taking us at the top no thank you