How COR CEO Santi Bibiloni grew to $16.8M revenue and 115 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is santi biblioni he is a silicon valley-based technology entrepreneur and co-founder and ceo at a company called core the next generation solution for creative and professional teams that intelligence intelligently suggests how to manage your projects teams and finances prior he founded balloon group one of america's fastest growing digital agencies among other businesses today he continues to grow corn is also a sales and fundraising mentor at 500 startups as well as a speaker and jury in big technology advertising and entrepreneurial events santiago takes the top hi hmm thank you for watching you bet so people want to follow along the url to your website is project and then cor.com so that that's where they can follow along but tell us what the company does so we're the project's profitability platform what we understood is that in the available hours market like all companies that sell ours project management is not a problem the real problem that is behind project management is projects profitability consulting for the inside directly to agencies mostly yeah so we sell to agencies to consulting firms to law firms accounting firms these companies that are selling hours they need to understand their profitability on a in real time and the reason why this was not happening happening before is because no one wants to log hours right no one wants to look hours because it's tough to log hours finally i mean everyone's hated and at the same time everyone feels that logging hours is for their control people are managers controlling their time the reason why we are educating these people on on on on time tracking is because we are automating this with ai and at the same time we are letting them know that this is the way where managers can understand their costs to better negotiate fees with the clients this way you can hire more people you can increase salaries and you can have a healthier company understood and how are you differentiating yourself from like pure play time tracking tools like time doctor or more like task management tools like base camp hookup or monday great so that's great question um we're not a project management tool i mean we are a vertical solution an end-to-end solution for professional services firms it means you have machine learning applied on modules like sending estimates and proposals managing projects with reworks with overheads with fees with brands and clients you have clients dashboards you have everything and you are integrated with different erps you can standardize all your different services so it's 80 of our current customers have switched from tools like asana trello monday click app um you name them jira trello so these horizontal solutions are are great but once these companies try to professionalize them better they need to jump to a vertical solution that's what happened pro core in the construction vertical for example i see and and so when they do jump to you on average what are they paying you per month to use your technology yeah so they pay 30 dollars per user per month and they will have access to the whole solution it means you you'll send estimates you'll send you you're gonna manage projects fees overheads european invoicing and everything so what's the average what i'm asking is not necessarily the per seat average but the actual company average when the company signs up with you what are they paying on average per month would you say today our acv is uh 19 000 dollars yeah but of course we have like enterprise customers that have like are paying us over 100k per year and we have some some now we have a lot of smbs who are paying i don't know like five five 5k a year yep that makes a lot of sense so so you have sort of different sales motions sort of a upper mid market at 19 000 ac then smb motion as well which hopefully is probably closer to no touch right yeah what does your team look like today how many folks do you have building this 66 65 66 okay and and what's the breakdown how many would you say our engineers so today we have half and half we have just closed our csa so we're going to invest 70 growth and 30 product okay but how many engineers of the 66 today 30 yeah okay and i guess the reason i'm asking is when you look at your sales motion do you have quota carrying sales reps or is most selling happening no touch so as a company we we target more the enterprise segment so we do have a pre-sales like sdrs and we have sales people for a typical b2b sas enterprise solution so we have sdrs and we have ace this so how many total sales reps do you have in the sales team we have 12 12. well i mean was this a key and this must have been a key thing you had to think about going into your series a is if you raise money can you hire aes at what quota to like start driving ar growth right how did you think about that exactly so we are we are high we are aggressively hiring sdrs and aes and investing a lot in lead 10 in the generation today and yeah the way how we think about salaries and quotas is normally between 3.5 and 4x uh quota versus versus ote so we normally do ote half and half for sales reps half and half means if you have an ot of 150k it's a 75 salary 75 commission and then uh your your quota is going to be like 3.5 or 4x that amount so take the 150k your full on target earnings times 3.5 to 4x so something like 600 to 700 000 is your quota target for new aes exactly that makes a lot of sense i mean that's market so tell me more about the backstory here when did you launch the company so we launched the product like three years and a half ago uh here in nsf in in san francisco and after going through 500 startups program here we i mean we the co-founders are argentinian so moved to the valley like to to launch the company we we we made a we made a a company before that we exited most of it like five years ago and we've we felt the problem firsthand so the three co-founders we we know each other from like for long jose who is my co-founder and and cfo ceo he has been also a partner on the previous company i started so yeah we have we've been 10 although although we are young like 31 years old and we've been 10 years working together and santi did you guys just split equity down the middle 30 33 um we didn't um we didn't because like this there were we had like different positions on taking risks at the very beginning so we compensated equity with risk yeah i see did any of the co-founders put in capital to get the business going yeah two of us jose and i invested some of our capital uh just to develop the mvp yeah so let's build up to your current series a but let's go back and start the mvp how much do you guys spend of your own money to build the mvp it was not too much i mean uh like 10k um to just like get the a a minimum mvp a minimum buy all product uh get it like up and running um it was it was awful but we launched it and and we had like three three to four customers with that uh and that's how we got into 500. that's very cool and now how many customers are you serving today today we have 115 clients 115. okay so it starts with your own money then it sounds like you raise some capital so let's go let's work backwards you just raised i guess it's theory how much did you raise we raise six million okay six million and uh most that capital you think is gonna go towards your sales efforts or is there a lot of engineering hires there too so we're gonna invest seventy percent growth which is like marketing like all the gem marketing pre-sales sales and post sales and then we're gonna allocate 30 of the capital to to product which is already very robust and working pretty well with a great like customer satisfaction and more and part part i mean probably we're gonna invest a little bit more in product but like in features that are pro product led growth so it's product features but that will be for sales enablement yeah yeah and something i'm curious i mean pulling out a cover evaluations are i'm just curious generally about when you guys rate the six million you can give me a range if you want but like what valuation do you guys raise that so we're typically raising at um 25x revenue okay got it like how much of the company were selling for 6 million like 15 something like that yeah i mean uh today we we we we were lucky enough because we were growing at a 9 9.8 month over month so we i mean that's like kind of doing 170 180 percent year over year that's like triple in revenue year over year so we we were lucky that we got a a good valuation at this time and yeah we got diluted kind of like 10 percent on this bridge round because we raised 2 million and then we raised four at different valuations different terms uh the same the same round but we were yeah as we were growing we we decided to to just split terms and yeah for the for the last four million we got diluted like 10 percent i when was the first two million closed um like a year ago oh i see i see and explain me the strategy behind that why close chin lane and let it roll for a year and then close another four because we were not raising money we were we received um a term an inbound term sheet and [Music] and the the person so we we started the round with a with a venture capital firm which is called scop scope venture capital it's like it's um who's managing director is kevin o'connor the founder doubleclick the largest company that google ever acquired um so the company the the round was led by kevin by by his fund by base cop then um we received an inbound term to add more capital to the round as we were not raising money and it was this capital came from an individual and this individual didn't want to take a place on the board so we know that it's not typical but at least it was pretty helpful for us i mean it was it was great because this person didn't want to take a seat on the board but he wanted to deploy one million on us so we just like leveraged that 1 million and as we had some due diligence we we knocked some off like some prospects stores and we allocate we we received three other million and we we we made the whole thing as like the kind of the although there are kind of like different rounds and because there are different terms we we called it seriously like all preferred stocks there this this the same stocks for everyone yeah and so was the two million that you closed a year ago at about like half the valuation of what you just closed the 4 million at yeah nice okay got it so you can do this and have different valuations yeah i mean it's not typical but and and we didn't know before this that it was not on our mind to do this but is it's the way it went and we were very lucky i mean uh not very much dilution great investors i mean we had top vcs and at the same time great individuals uh we had the founder at so kevin o'connor the founder doubleclick then backsmith the founder annaplan public company founder aquafold sold over 1 billion thunder tracks sold to salesforce for over one billion uh global ceo at walmart um marcus galperine did the follow one who's the founder at uh i get it yeah i mean but basically to sum it up you brought into your partners you sold 10 twice over the past year 2 million on 20 and then another 4 million on 40 basically more or less yeah yeah that's great i think i think there's nothing wrong with that it's getting creative that's smart and i mean we can sort of i mean i can take a hundred customers times the 1500 rpu right on average which is a 19 000. our acv and that puts you like somewhere around 150 grand a month right now on revenue sorry say it again want to happen together you have about 115 customers yeah times the average acv you gave me about 19 grand it means you're doing something around 150 000 bucks a month right now in revenue average yeah yeah yeah okay can you break 200 000 a month this year you think yeah i mean our goal this year is to to get to continue growing into this nine nine over nine percent mother month and this will help us achieve our goal is to to be over two million dollars in er by december yeah yeah and if you're out like call again one thirty one forty one fifty uh thousand dollars a month today where were you exactly one year ago do you remember yeah i mean we're doing 400k if i'm not wrong oh and arar yeah new york yeah okay it's a lot significant growth very significant growth yeah yeah cool okay 400 to 500k i'm not sure yeah yeah no that's fine that's fair that's fair regardless good growth and just as we wrap up here where is most the growth coming from so so is it mostly outbound or are you doing other inbound things no we we started we were different animals we started to do inbound after doing outbound um yeah and we started to invest more aggressively in inbound kind of like early this year so we started with a great content strategy with seo then trying to expand our database to do more email marketing so we're having most of our enterprise customers that come from the inbound way because most of the enterprise customers come outbound but the ones that come from on an inbound way they come through email marketing by like email nurturing on the database that's enterprise when it comes to the smbs it's mostly organic it's mostly uh organic search through our blogging through our blog our content our seo and are they sticking i mean what is your gross turn look like over the past 12 months you're you're asking me for the for the greatest metric we have i'm glad that you're asking our last 12 months turn is four percent got it and what's expansion on the same cohort net revenue retention is 114 114 got it so you're expanding by about 18 you're churning four percent your net 114. yeah that's great is most the expansion coming from the teams adding more seats or do you have a feature based or a usage based upsell as well more shades more scenes yeah makes a lot of sense very cool sanji let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book start with why number two is there a ceo you're following or studying if i'm a ceo what uh is there a founder that you're following or studying yeah i i really admire marcus galbrain who's the founder and ceo of mercado library they said amazon for latin america the ceo of who mercado river more capital libra okay mercado libre is a 80 billion dollar company in nasdaq he's argentinian and he he started the largest comp tech company in latin america how do you spell his last name ah his last name is galperin marco gulperin g-a-l-p-e um r r i n got it okay marcus got brain very good number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business beside your own hopsville number four how many you're not in the acquisition talks with them are you acquisition we have two why'd you decide not to sell for we're here for the long term i mean that's the answer uh we we didn't start this new company to to sell it uh right ahead all right we'll see what happens there number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night normally human things um relationships i'm sorry to know how many how much sleep do you get each night sorry um on eight hours eight okay and what's your situation married single kids married with one eight months baby so when i said eight hours was like before the baby wow okay and you're 31 right yeah i'm 31. last question what's something you wish you when you were 20 i have no regrets i mean i i'm pretty happy of everything i did and i didn't and the things i i didn't make guys project core cor.com launched back in 2018. they had about a half million dollar run rate last year now up to north of that they've broken a million dollar runway hoping to break a two million dollar rent by the end of this year they just raised 4 million bucks at a 40 million evaluation healthy revenue multiple call 2526 x there team size 66 right now 30 engineers 12 in sales and marketing using the new round of funding to bring in additional talent to keep pushing growth forward a verticalized solution for marketing agencies to manage their project-based billing hours all that stuff santi thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan 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 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