How GrowthHackers CEO Elton Miranda grew GrowthHackers to $2.9M revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is emilia she is the ceo of a company called contenttools.com a platform that helps over 700 companies plan create distribute and analyze content as a content manager for over eight years she has led video book and web-based strategies at both enterprises and smbs she's a 500 startups entrepreneur and part of the endeavor promises program amelia are you ready to take us to the top yes thank you so much nathan thanks for having me it's a pleasure to be here thank you for coming and you're absolutely glowing right now because you're in a beautiful location tell us where you are i'm in florianopolis brazil it's a small island out south it's well known for its tech and tech businesses uh it's a great environment here it's a great place to be if you're a startup owner if you're a founder floripa is for sure one of the best cost-effective places on earth what's your average salary it's around uh 3k dollars it's really monthly of course it's really low really i mean you can live well here we have more than 40 beaches surrounding us and it's amazing yeah and it has a great structure too uh it's not that that good because we have to go to san francisco often and the flights there are around 20 hours so 20 yeah between airports and yeah what how many team members do you have right now we have 30 people 30 people so i mean if i take 30 people to an average call of 3k per month right you're spending what about 90k or 100k per month in salaries a little bit less than that uh it's not not everyone earns 3k some people are a little bit less some people are a little bit more than that so we are uh around 65 okay 70k okay and tell me tell me about the the tool what does it do and how do you make money what's your business model sure uh content is the software the service model so we uh charge for subscriptions uh we offer a content marketing platform all-in-one for content managers for companies that have uh smart teams uh growing teams in marketing so if you have three four or five people in your marketing team you're growing as a business you need content right content the beginning of marketing but working with content is not that easy you have a lot of issues a lot of tools different tools uh different processes going through your approval processes and then uh publishing is also a headache so we merge everything into one single software and it's very easy to use and what does the average customer pay you per month around 100 dollars 300 it really depends on the plan they're in we have a company's paying 100 companies paying a thousand it's really uh it accommodates what a business needs so we have features from strategy to creation uh you can create content within content tools as well and distributing and analyzing and so is this like can i can we relate this to like buffer or hootsuite or or if not how's it different we do that too but we also do the workflow so that's different i see the project planning exactly so we merge everything in it uh you don't need a google docs or distributing uh to you have everything within one single software and that's different and what um how many customers you have paying you today we have around 300 customers 700 companies using content tools and many of them through their agencies okay so 700 are using but 300 are paying now all of them pay but uh some of them paid through their agencies so so you have 700 customers then yeah okay got it i mean can i do the math and if i take 700 times you said between like 100 and 300 ish per month let's just like do in the middle 150. are you in about a hundred grand per month 105 grand per month we're going there we have a lot of people paying for uh the smaller parts of smaller features like social features are a little bit less costly so we are around 70k per month okay got it and you mentioned earlier that your uh your head count expenses were around the same amount so i imagine you've raised capital uh in order to stay in business right to cover your cash burn yeah we raised the ninja rounds we're going we're uh growing to raise a seed round next year got it and so how much have you raised to date 500k 500k very good and walk me through kind of where your brain was at when you were launching this so what did you launch the company in we launched uh 2015 right after we have gone through 500 startups so i'm a content manager for um around eight years as you mentioned and working with startups and working with enterprises i've always seen the same kinds of problems when you deal with content it can be really messy for the content manager he has to poke so many shoulders too okay what is the status of your content it's very messy for the content manager and uh we wanted to make it easier right so we created content tools and launched around july 2015 we went beta and then in january 2016 we uh moved from beta and they've been growing since if somebody offered you 1.5 million bucks to buy the whole company right now would you sell it about two times your we have a big i'm not sure we have a big dream for content tools we see this market opportunity right now for growing businesses content tools is much similar to percolate new spread constantly which are great tools for enterprise companies but no one is offering a solution for mid-sized businesses for startups or growing businesses and all of them really need a content marketing solution right now because as i mentioned to you content is the beginning of marketing everyone is doing content but everyone is having trouble doing content we want to make it easier for the company manager what is um i mean you've raised a little bit of capital and i don't know if you have co-founders or not but how much of the company do you still own uh personally uh all the founders together on eighty percent of the company okay and how many of you are there four founders did you just split it evenly 20 20 20 20 around then yeah yeah so yeah it's a little bit different because we have different parts in the company so it's not exactly the same amount but it's close to that yeah so like i always i like asking the acquisition question because everyone will always answer well i have a big vision and that's because that's what you're supposed to answer and people do believe that like you're in the moment you are in the office you are building like you're in it um but like if you sold it for 1.5 something like that that'd be like basically a 300 400 000 check to you um what what would you then go reinvest that money in what would you go build like do you have another big idea percolating um not right now all my ideas are focused on content tools on uh creating the best and most uh special product for content managers and i see so much we can still do uh we want to create more business intelligence features we want to help condo managers compare and create not more content the better content according more targeted to the needs of their customers and then also on the um artificial intelligence side we also are gathering a lot of data right now to have content managers do less of the operational sites for content and more of this strategic one so all my ideas are focusing on that on how can i make people click like once and the machine will know when to publish and where to publish and they only need to to track data and only need to track uh the customer side of their content but again you get a 1.5 million dollar offer you would not sell it i may be trying to buy your company live on the show that maybe that's what's happening who knows yeah we can negotiate of course but i think we can do more than 1.5 right now because we also have like our product is so tight and in good right now and we also uh are growing uh 10 to 20 month over month in terms of revenue yeah yeah what is your our main kpi is monthly recurring revenue yeah what's your turn uh last month we have for the first time negative churn uh so that's very exciting for us uh our churches was never that big you know around two percent three percent uh so not that big but last month we have had more upselling than churn and that was uh a really great uh uh moment for us what was your so you're talking about net net churn which you said was negative right which you just described what is your gross churn right so is it five percent per month seven percent it's less no it's less we have around three percent okay so three percent gross churn which means three percent of your your users or your revenues leaving but you up sold more than three percent last month which is how you got to negative uh revenue churn is that right yes exactly and give us that blueprint how are you driving upsell revenue what are you upselling we're upselling uh especially numbers of users and projects so agencies will upsell a number of projects that means they are growing they are acquiring more customers and they need more content tools to manage all the content they create for their customers and for our customers that means they are growing their companies so they need more content as well they need more integrations with uh their blogs and social media and we charge for that when they grow integrations for publishing and also when they grow on users so when they grow their teams and what is the uh how are you acquiring customers what customers what's your cac yeah we are crackers our main um our main channel of course is content so we use a lot of inbound marketing content marketing is our main channel we do a little bit of outbound emails but uh that's uh that represents about 30 percent of our uh incoming users most of them come through our our content and we we do create a lot of um blog posts and how many how many people how many people work at the company that where all they do is content marketing uh sorry can you repeat the question how many people do you have at the company where they only are focused on content marketing or inbound marketing we have four people in our growth uh in our growth team so focusing on content two of them full-time but we do have a lot of remote people working with us as well and content tools also uh helps us with that because we have everyone on the same platform people from outside the company inside the company and they all are in the workflow so it really works working three lenses if you were working with two like content tools and what is the so are you doing any on paid acquisition or no uh no we don't uh we it's something that we are i actually always uh uh trying to uh to er how can i put it we have done before but nothing tops customer acquisition cost as content yeah so content is always cheaper so we always end up reinvesting content it's it's crazy i mean if you do the math so you we talk about average salaries earlier maybe these people are high or low we won't talk about specific people but assume 3k right then you said two people that's about six grand per month right on your those people creating the content about how many new customers are you adding per month around 20 to 30 customers yep 20 to 30 guys so what is that if i'm doing the math correctly that's like 50 or 500 or something like that and to get a new customer yeah it makes good sense um super cheap yeah when did you do when was you said you did a seat round of fun and you did 500k when was that last year we had a ninja round what month though uh it's i think it's one year now uh in may actually so you're in the middle of raising another round right now or you're being acquired which one is it no we are actually updating a lot of leads for uh uh around next year how much do you want to raise you think around two million one million and a half two million dollars and what what valuation are you going to try and negotiate for or push for uh we still have to think uh about it it's something um we won't be like much uh i mean we won't be out of the the market i think around five to seven it's so it's around that the average five to seven million or five to seven x arr five to seven million yeah five to seven million pre-money raise a million or two and do you know eight or nine million posts something like that exactly yeah that's yeah very interesting very interesting well we should certainly stay in touch selfish i don't usually do these on the shows but selfishly i'm definitely interested and i'm always looking for companies put money behind um and then you get free promotion on the show right so it works out yeah very good amelia thanks so much of course yeah hey let's wrap up your podcast i mean that's crazy you do a lot of content i do a ton of content and in fact it's something right now that is i'm having a lot of trouble scaling because my whole team is remote i have about 20 to 30 remote team members none of them are full-time and how to do it spreadsheets it's email it's a lot of google drive so i have very organized google drive folders with process docs in those folders so we'll upload all the videos or the instagram pictures or the facebook pictures and process it that way so it works uh it's but but it could be significantly more efficient yeah it's time costing because if you just forget updating one status it's all gone she's selling me can you feel it i'm sorry but i did that that's your job all right amelia let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh i think hooked this one i'm reading right now it's really good but oh i really do hard things about hard things i really do love it yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um let me see no i i studied a lot of ceos um i can i can point out one no who's there any ceo that's in software in brazil that you really you look up to in software in brazil that's an interesting question um i actually follow a lot of them they are very very interesting there's there are one there is one company here um in our uh in the same market that's we are uh they're called resultados digitized rd station is a competitor of hubspot here we are partners there what was what was the name of the company again rd station is the software and they have a great founding team uh they are competitors of hubspot hubspot is a partner of content tools and a customer they are too so uh these two companies are companies that we are always uh following and uh you'll have to link me to that name so i can link to it in the show notes and guys i'll link to that at nathan lika dot com forward slash the top seven one seven uh emilia number three is there besides your own is their favorite online tool you have like acuity scheduling um uh i really i really like the guys from chart mogul and profit well they help you to organize all your kpi's dashboard both of them are good number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night i have to tell you i have uh seven months or older oh my gosh yeah so i stopped counting that seven months ago but i guess four or five maybe it was a good night that's incredible and what's your current situation married single do you have kids or you obviously have one just one i have one just that one okay so she's a girl a great great baby she's uh really participative she comes here to work with me since she was three weeks old that's amazing i cannot complain so i'm married with a kiddo and emilia do you mind me asking how old you are i'm 33. so last question take us back 13 years what do you wish your 20 year old self knew how great this life was i wish i had started before there you guys have it from amelia she wishes she would have started entrepreneurship earlier on she has founded a company called content tools back in 2015 moved her entire team of 30 to brazil where again you just a lot of efficiencies there the average salary is somewhere around three grand per month but they're killing it in terms of customers they have over 700 paying customers paying on average 100 bucks per month so they do about 70 grand per month right now growing rapidly month over month they just had their first month which would have been april of 2017 which was net a negative uh churn in terms of gross churn they're at about two or three percent cac they're not spending any money on paid acquisition except two content folks so call it six seven grand per month there but again growing by 20 or 30 new customers per month down there in brazil amelia thank you for taking us to the top thank you too