How Chanty CEO Dmytro Okunyev grew to $30M revenue and 24K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is dimitro okonev he's the founder and owner of chanti a team communication platform he started 20 idea of a chat out back in 2017 and then realized that team communication should be made easier more flexible and powerful so that it includes chat audio and video dimitro are you ready to take to the top hi um nice to meet you guys nice thank you thanks for making time i appreciate it so tell me a little bit i mean this is a you know team communication is obviously a hot space when did you write the first light of code for chanti i think it was back in 2017 and then we started and decided this idea well a while ago before that but the first lines of code was done back then yeah okay so you launched in 2017 and how did you get your first you know 10 20 customers first 10 20 customers we got i think early 2018 and basically that were demo customers we made a lot of marketing even without product just our landing page with our um you know email grabber but we do lots of social media and content marketing and basically that content marketing gets us leads we started from writing in articles by comparison of the existing software back then and quickly gained some thought leadership uh reputation in the field so yeah people were eager to try out our software that's great now do you remember how many like how many customers you signed up in 2018 um i think that year alone we got somewhere around 200 okay though like the product was not obviously available and how many customers do you have today well right now we are reached already like 20k so it's not right there you have you have 20 000 paying customers uh paying customers we have around 1k okay what's the 20 000 numbers at free users yeah the rest are for users okay how do you so what's the number one reason a free user converts to a paid account well basically we have like natural limitations just the amount of amount of seats in the in the team or members in the team and then of course we have a business plan with some nice features which are not available on our free plan we are really no mad company you know um we are having our video calling solution only for the um business for our business customers just because we are paying a lot for our servers and you know maintaining this infrastructure that's why this is a paid feature yeah yeah people have to pay you if they want group audio calls one-to-one video calls group video calls screen sharing dedicated support these kinds of things yeah and so when the thousand number you just gave me is that a user one user or like the number of users using it or is that the number of businesses and they have a lot of users businesses and they have lots of food i see okay so so on average when a business signs up for you how many seats are they typically purchasing well basically not usually really small it's just another focus group from the company there are like three four or five users but eventually our average uh member amount per one team is 47 and a half so yes 47.5 team members i don't want to be the one that gets cut in half okay so i mean can i can i then take an average can i take 47 team members times three bucks a seat does the average paid customer pay you about 140 bucks a month um so yeah it's if i'm not mistaken our current medium uh paycheck is around uh 120 two dollars or something like that 122. okay and can i multiply those can i take a thousand customers times 122 dollars a month you're doing about 120 000 a month in revenue of course yeah you seem shy about that you should be proud that's exciting well that's exciting but you know the market is really big and we see lots of opportunities so yeah they have ambitious goals by the way well i like ambition i mean talk to me though about current growth if you're doing 122 000 a month today in revenue what were you doing a year ago do you remember yeah so the last year we got much less um economy state can be closed a year around 600k okay so you were doing like 50 000 a month about a year ago something like that yeah and we got you know a lot a lot of our users came from the channel sales so of course this our partners and affiliates they took part of that so how many affiliates have you paid at least a dollar to in commissions so we have a few years of disaffiliates or partnership programs the smaller the smallers gets 20 the highest like value-added reseller gets uh half 50 okay and again how many affiliates have you paid at least a dollar in commissions too how many of them um hard to say at the moment but actually the number is quite high i remember definitely more than 100. yeah oh so you have more than 100 affiliates who have driven you at least one customer yeah of course um these are the small bloggers these are big companies you know like very big resellers but mostly these are the smaller ones like just this this isn't this is impressive because a lot of startups want to use affiliates as their growth channel but they really struggle to recruit affiliates how have you signed up so many affiliates so early i think in our case actually call it place really nice game for us in this case i mean obviously the situation is horrible with all this code and things like that but um you know it it grow in our market people definitely see demand the product was right in place so yeah that's that happened naturally is it pretty sticky what's your churn over the past 12 months um we are currently on the churn rate around 6.8 percent so that's a little bit less than seven percent per month or per year um it's bigger per year okay that's really good for this price point how have you made this so sticky well this team chat software i mean if they start then they will use it definitely why don't they leave why don't they go use a free version of zoom or one of these other free tools popping up well you see it's like sound tools are free but actually for the for the companies they're not free so they also have like paid models basically if you are like established business or if you are like a team an existing company more than 10 people 10 15 people then any software will be not free for you yeah and then we have a really nice combination of software so we combine like slack experience of chat then we combine project management experience kanban boards like small trailer and group video calls like like zoom has yep now this makes sense to meet ro can i ask you when you get a new customer that doesn't come from an affiliate on average what are you paying to get that customer what's your cac yeah so uh one customer acquisition cost at this moment like a week ago it was 487 dollars um yeah and the lifetime value is much higher so well if you've got if you've got customers paying you on average 150 per month signing up with about 47 seats your payback period there is only four months that's not bad yeah interesting now you're early but sometimes i get surprised do you have expansion revenue and an upsell machine working yet um well we have it naturally i would say because you know like philosophy of my business is that if you will if you help some company to grow they will they will grow with us we will go with them so yeah the team starts they are we increase with our tools their uh collaboration productivity and this way you know they're starting to add more seats more people stuff like that we are adding features that no create for them more easy to use environment to share the data and collaborate so that that's how it comes but we are we don't have and we don't have plans to introduce some you know lock-in effects or do you have do you have any sales people on the team today um we currently have two in-house sales and you have around 15 um like business reps okay how many people on a team all together all together we have full-time 23 members of the team and 13 of them are in sales no no we have 22 full-time people in the team like in-house and we have more people who are sales reps so all in all it's around 35-36 people depending on the period so 36 people 13 sales reps that are outsourced they're not full time how many engineers so out of the team of 23 people 10 are engineers i see interesting and so how have you i mean how do you think about scaling the sales team do they all have quota well here we are on the weak side so we were trying to introduce that and um for the full timers for our two sales that that works but for sales reps unfortunately for us it doesn't work yeah yeah now have you driven on this growth have you bootstrapped the company or raised uh i was trapped i had yeah i was trapped i um i got um a few successful companies in the past and actually from the revenue from those companies i uh reinvested that enchanted so i'm the only person who financed that i love this do you want 100 of the business of course wow i love that this is very how old are you i'm 35. wow okay this is so cool what were your prior businesses sorry one small correction um i own eighty percent of the content twenty percent of the company is um it's a pool of equities for our employees sorry for that and an employee option pool yes got it so i mean like how much of your own personal capital have you invested in the business so far much my own personal capital so my first investment was uh half a million and well currently it's already almost working so yeah i think i really like more but so you've put in 500 000 today but now you're profitable doing 120 grand a month you don't necessarily need to put in more money unless you want to make some extra hires or something yeah this is a great story why don't more founders do this why yeah i'm being facetious obviously you can't you can't fund your business this way if you don't have 500 000 of cash sitting around but you had successful exits prior to this were they all in software uh by the way uh using heads they didn't have exits those components are still mine so they're still there what are those companies what are the urls so uh the main company is digipico this is the software development agency can you spell it d-i-g-i-f-i-c-o dot com and so it's an agency model and you use the agency revenue to launch the sas company exactly this is actually what i wanted that's that's that's a that's incredible how much revenue do the agency do last year uh i would not disclose it but it's pretty big number more than 2 million yes okay how many people are employed at the agency 120 and how do you split your time you have this fast growing sas company you have a big agency i'm only focusing on chanti and product uh basically i mean that company is 10 years old um all processes are established i don't see any problem there it's like working business it's very good they're doing fantastic stuff there with uh for us and for our respective clients so what would you not what would you value chanti at today if you had the valuation put a valuation on it the last valuation that we received was 20 million from hell um i don't remember exactly what was the um over the species it's not a big name but yeah some guys variated us so so they wanted to invest they give you a term sheet with a 20 million evaluation and you said no thank you yeah i decided that it's not the time i love the story dimitro we are rooting for you let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book thank you very much what's your favorite business book yeah so um there was one one book that i liked it was actually a name really easy it's how to make money that's a hell of a book i like that number two who's your favorite ceo um you know i really like this and you andrew wilson who is the ceo of tiny currently but he was the ceo of metal up who actually among any any other great names has uh slack number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business online for building a business it's actually changing currently you know besides your own okay um gmail i i do a lot of theirs and what's your situation married single kids i'm married with two kids and 35 years old right yes i married by the way um i married for 13 years congratulations last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. um actually sleep more and focus a lot on you know on your passions guys chanty.com is a team community communication tool dimitra owns 80 percent he's self-financed it he has an employee option pool of 20 they just passed 122 000 a month in revenue more than doubling year over year from last year he funded the business out of his agency which does over 2 million a year in revenue over 120 employees he's focused full time now on the sas product dimitro thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much 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 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 additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya