How COR Reached 115 Customers and 170% Year-Over-Year Growth with $6M Raised (Interview with CEO Santi Bibiloni)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Santi Bibiloni. He is a Silicon Valley based technology entrepreneur and cofounder and CEO at a company called COR, the next generation solution for creative and professional teams that intelligence intelligently suggest 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 COR and is also a sales and fundraising mentor at 500 startups, well as

00:24a speaker and journey in big technology, advertising, and entrepreneurial events. Santi, you ready to take the top? Hi, Nathan. Thank you for having You bet. If people want to follow along, the URL to your website is projectcor.com. That's where they can follow along, but tell us what the company does.

What COR Does: Project Profitability Platform

Santi Bibiloni

00:43>> We're the project's profitability platform. What we understood is that in the billable hours market, like all companies that sell hours, project management is not a problem. The real problem that is behind project management is project's profitability.

Nathan Latka

01:03Consulting Are selling directly to agencies mostly?

Target Customers: Agencies and Professional Services Firms

Santi Bibiloni

01:06>> Yeah. We sell to agencies, to consulting firms, to law firms, accounting firms. These companies that are selling hours, they need to understand their profitability in real time.

01:21>> The reason why this was not happening before is because no one wants to log hours. No one wants to log hours because it's tough to log hours finally. Everyone's hated. 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

01:48>> time tracking is because we are automating this with AI. 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 help your company.

Nathan Latka

02:08Understood. How are you differentiating yourself from pure play time tracking tools like Time Doctor or more task management tools like Basecamp, ClickUp or Monday?

Santi Bibiloni

02:20>> That's a great question.

02:23>> We're not a project management tool. We are a vertical solution and end to end solution for professional services firms. It means you have machine learning applied on models 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.

02:55>> 80% of our current customers have switched from tools like Asana, Trello, Monday, ClickUp, you name them, Jira, Trello. These horizontal solutions are great, but once these companies try to professionalize them better, they need to jump to a vertical solution. That's what happened with Procore in the construction vertical, for example.

Nathan Latka

03:24I see. When they do jump to you, on average, are they paying you per month to use your technology?

Pricing: $30 Per User Per Month and ACV

Santi Bibiloni

03:31>> They pay $30 per user per month and they will have access to the whole solution. It means you'll send estimates, you're going to manage projects, fees, overheads, your invoicing and everything.

Nathan Latka

03:50What's the average? What I'm asking is not necessarily per seat average, but the actual company average. When a company signs up with you, what are they paying on average per month, would you say?

Santi Bibiloni

03:59>> Today, our ACV is $19,000 a But of course, we have enterprise customers that are paying us over 100 ks per year. And we have some, some now. We have a lot of SMBs who are paying, I don't know, like 5 k a year.

Nathan Latka

04:21Yep. That makes a lot of sense. So you have sort of different sales motions, sort of a upper mid market at $19,000 ACV, then SMB motion as well, which hopefully is probably closer to no touch. Right?

Santi Bibiloni

04:31>> Yeah.

Team Size and the Series A Spending Plan

Nathan Latka

04:32What does your team look like today? How many folks do you have building this?

Santi Bibiloni

04:36>> 66, 65, 66.

Nathan Latka

04:39Okay. And what's the breakdown? How many would you say are engineers?

Santi Bibiloni

04:44>> Today we have half and half. We have just closed our series A, so we're going to invest 70 percent growth and 30% product. Okay.

Nathan Latka

04:52But how many engineers are at the 66 today?

Santi Bibiloni

04:54>> 30? Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:55Okay. 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?

Sales Team Structure and Quotas

Santi Bibiloni

05:05>> So as a company, we target more the enterprise segment. So We do have pre sales like SDRs and we have salespeople for a typical B2B SaaS enterprise solution.

Nathan Latka

05:20We have SDRs and we have AEs. How many total sales reps do you have in the sales team?

Santi Bibiloni

05:27>> We have

05:31>> 12. 12.

Nathan Latka

05:32Well, I mean, was this a key And this must've 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 start driving ARR growth? How did you think about that?

Santi Bibiloni

05:45>> Exactly. We

05:49>> aggressively hiring SDRs and AEs and investing a lot in lead gen, lead generation today. The way how we think about salaries and quotas is normally between 3.5 and 4x quota versus OTE. So we normally do OTE half and half for sales reps. Half and half means if you have an OTE of 150 ks, it's 75 salary, 75 commission. And then your quota is going

Nathan Latka

06:27to be like 3.5 or four X that amount. So take the 150 ks, your full on target earnings times 3.5 to four X. 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?

Company Founding and Co-Founder Background

Santi Bibiloni

06:45>> We launched the product three years and a half ago here in SF in San Francisco.

06:53>> After going through 500 Startups program here,

06:59>> we, the co founders, are Argentinian, so moved to the Valley

07:06>> to launch the company.

07:09>> We made a company before, but we exited most of it, like five years ago. We felt the problem firsthand. The three co founders, we know each other for long. Jose, who is my co founder and CFO, COO, he has been also a partner on the previous company I started.

07:37>> Although we are young, like 31 years old, we've been ten years working together.

Nathan Latka

07:43Santi, did you guys just split equity down the middle, thirty, thirty, 30?

Santi Bibiloni

07:48>> We didn't

07:51>> because we

07:55>> had different positions on taking risks at the very beginning. So we compensated equity with risk.

Nathan Latka

08:04Yeah, I see. Did any of the co founders put in capital to get the business going?

Santi Bibiloni

08:08>> Yeah, two of us, Jose and I, invested some of our capital just to develop the MVP.

Nathan Latka

08:16Yep. So let's build up to your current Series A, but let's go back and start the MVP. How much did you guys spend of your own money to build the MVP?

Santi Bibiloni

08:24>> It was not too much. I mean, like 10 ks

08:29>> to just get a minimum MVP, minimum viable product, get it up and running. It was awful, but we launched it and we had three to four customers with that. That's how we got into 500.

Nathan Latka

08:50That's very cool. And now how many customers are you serving today?

Customer Count and Series A Raise

Santi Bibiloni

08:54>> Today we have 115 clients, more or less. 115.

Nathan Latka

08:59Okay. So

Santi Bibiloni

09:00>> it starts with your

Nathan Latka

09:01own money, then it sounds like you raised some capital. So let's go let's work backwards. You just raised, I guess, a series a How much did you raise?

Santi Bibiloni

09:08>> We raised 6,000,000.

Nathan Latka

09:09Okay. 6,000,000. And most of that capital, you think, is going to go towards your sales efforts or is there a lot of engineering hires there too?

Santi Bibiloni

09:16>> We're going to invest 70% growth, which is

09:22>> all lead gen marketing, presales, sales, and post sales. Then we're going to allocate 30% of the capital to product, which is already very robust and working pretty well with great customer satisfaction and more.

09:40>> We're going to invest a little bit more in product, in features that are product led growth. It's product features, but that will be for sales enablement.

Nathan Latka

09:58Santi, I'm curious, mean, playing out of COVID valuations, I'm just curious generally about when you guys raised $6,000,000 you can give me a range if you want, but what valuation do guys raise at?

Santi Bibiloni

10:07>> We're typically raising at 25x revenue.

Nathan Latka

10:14Okay, got it. How much of the company were you selling for 6,000,000? 15%, something like that?

Santi Bibiloni

10:20>> Yeah.

10:22>> Today,

10:25>> we were lucky enough because we were growing at 9.8% month over month. That's doing 170, 180% year over year. That's tripling revenue year over year. We were lucky that we got a good valuation this time. We got diluted 10% on this bridge round because we raised 2,000,000 and then we raised 4 at different valuations, different terms.

11:00>> The same roundups, but as we were growing, we decided to split terms.

11:09>> For the last 4,000,000, we got diluted like 10%.

Nathan Latka

11:12I see. When was the first 2,000,000 closed?

Santi Bibiloni

11:16>> Like a year ago.

Nathan Latka

11:18Oh, I see. Explain me the strategy behind that. Why close 2,000,000 and let it roll for a year and then close another 4?

Santi Bibiloni

11:25>> We were not raising money. We received an inbound term sheet.

11:38>> We started the round with a venture capital firm,

11:43>> which is called SCOP Venture Capital. Whose Managing Director is Kevin O'Connor, Founder of DoubleClick, the largest company that Google ever acquired.

11:55>> The round was led by Kevin, by fund, by Scope. Then

12:02>> we received an inbound term sheet to add more capital to the round as we were not raising money.

12:11>> This capital came from an individual. This individual didn't want to take a place on the board shape. We know that it's not typical, but at least it was pretty helpful for us. It was great because this person didn't want to take a seat on the board, but he wanted to deploy 1,000,000 on us.

12:38>> We just leveraged that $1,000,000 As we had some due diligence, we knocked some prospects' doors and received 3 other million.

12:56>> We made the whole thing as Although there are different

13:03>> because there are different terms, we called it Series A, all preferred stocks. They're the same stocks for everyone. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:13And so was it 2,000,000 that you closed a year ago at about half the valuation of what you just closed the 4,000,000 at?

Santi Bibiloni

13:20>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:21Okay, got it. So you can do this and have different valuations.

Santi Bibiloni

13:24>> Yeah. I mean, it's not typical, we didn't know before this that it was not on our mind to do this, but it's the way it went. We were very lucky. Not

13:39>> very much dilution, great investors. We had top VCs and at the same time, great individuals. We had the founder at so, Kevin O'Connor, the founder of DoubleClick, then Back Smead, the founder of Anaplan, a public company. The founder of AquaFold sold over 1,000,000,000. Founder of Cracks sold to Salesforce for over 1,000,000,000. Global CEO at Walmart.

14:10>> Marcos Galperin did a follow on, who's the founder at MercadoLibre. I get it.

Nathan Latka

14:15Yeah. I mean, the strategic but basically, to sum it up, you brought in strategic partners, you sold 10% twice over the past year, 2,000,000 on 20,000,000 and then another 4,000,000 on 40,000,000, basically. More or less. Yeah. Yeah. And that's great. Think I think there's nothing wrong with that. It's getting creative. That's smart. I And, mean, can sort of I mean, I can take a 100 customers times the $1,500 ARPU right on average, which is a $19,000

14:36ACV. And that puts you like somewhere around what? A $150,000 a month right now in revenue?

Santi Bibiloni

14:42>> Sorry. Say it again? 0.5 $101,100 k. You said

Nathan Latka

14:45you had about a 115 customers Yeah. Times the average ACV you gave me about $19,000. It means you're doing something around a $150,000 a month right now in revenue. Average. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Can you break $200,000 a month this year, you think?

Santi Bibiloni

15:00>> Yeah. I mean, our goal this year is to continue growing into over 9% month over month. This will help us achieve Our goal is to be over $2,000,000 in ARR.

Nathan Latka

15:16By December.

Santi Bibiloni

15:17>> Yeah. By December.

Nathan Latka

15:19Yeah. And if you're at, call again, 130, 140, $150,000 a month today, where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?

Santi Bibiloni

15:26>> Yeah. I mean, we're doing 400 k, if I'm not wrong.

Nathan Latka

15:32Oh, in ARR?

Santi Bibiloni

15:33>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:33In ARR.

Santi Bibiloni

15:34>> Yeah. Wow. Okay. It's a lot lot significant growth.

15:37>> Very significant growth.

Nathan Latka

15:39Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay.

Santi Bibiloni

15:41>> 400 to 500 k. I'm not sure.

Growth Channels: Outbound to Inbound Transition

Nathan Latka

15:43Yeah. Yeah. No. That's fine. That's fair. That's fair. Regardless, good growth. And and just as we wrap up here, where is most of the growth coming from? So so is it mostly outbound or are you doing other inbound things?

Santi Bibiloni

15:56>> No,

15:57>> are a different animal. We started to do inbound after doing outbound.

16:03>> We started to invest more aggressively in inbound early this year. We started with a great content strategy with SEO, then trying to expand our database to do more email marketing. We're having most of our enterprise customers that come from the inbound way because most of the enterprise customers come outbound.

16:33>> The ones that come on an inbound way, they come through email marketing, email nurturing on database. That's enterprise. When it comes to the SMBs, it's mostly organic. It's mostly organic search through our blogging, through our blog, our content, our SEO.

Nathan Latka

16:56Are they sticking? What does your gross churn look like in the past twelve months?

Churn and Net Revenue Retention

Santi Bibiloni

17:01>> You're asking me for the greatest metric we have. I'm glad that you're asking. Our last twelve months churn is 4%.

Nathan Latka

17:13Got it. And what's expansion on the same cohort?

Santi Bibiloni

17:16>> Net revenue retention is 114%.

Expansion Revenue: Seat-Based Upsell

Nathan Latka

17:19114. Got it. So you're expanding by about 18%. You're churning 4%. You're net 114. Yeah. That's great. Is most of the expansion coming from the teams adding more seats? Or do you have a feature based or a usage based upsell as well?

Santi Bibiloni

17:35>> More seats. More seats.

Famous Five and the Acquisition Question

Nathan Latka

17:36Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Very cool. Santi, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Santi Bibiloni

17:43>> Start with why.

Nathan Latka

17:44Number two, is

17:46there a CEO you're following or studying?

Santi Bibiloni

17:49>> If I'm a CEO, what?

Nathan Latka

17:51Is there a founder that you're following or studying?

Santi Bibiloni

17:54>> Yeah. Really admire Marcos Galperin, who's the founder and CEO of MercadoLibre. Basically Amazon for Latin America.

Nathan Latka

18:02CEO of who? MercadoLibre. MercadoLibre, okay. Haven't heard

Santi Bibiloni

18:07>> of MercadoLibre is an $80,000,000,000 company in NASDAQ. He's Argentinian and he started the largest tech company in Latin America.

Nathan Latka

18:17How do spell his last name?

Santi Bibiloni

18:19>> His last name is Galperin. Marcos Galperin, G A L P E

18:29>> r r I n.

Nathan Latka

18:31Got it. Okay.

Santi Bibiloni

18:32>> Marcos Galperin.

Nathan Latka

18:33Very good. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own?

Santi Bibiloni

18:38>> HubSpot.

Nathan Latka

18:39Number four. How many You're not in the acquisition talks with them, are you?

Santi Bibiloni

18:44>> Acquisition? We have two.

Nathan Latka

18:46Why did you decide not to sell?

Santi Bibiloni

18:52>> We're here for the long term. I mean, that's the answer. Didn't start this new company to sell it right ahead.

Nathan Latka

19:00Alright, we'll see what happens there. Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Santi Bibiloni

19:09>> Normally, human things. Relationships.

Nathan Latka

19:13I'm sorry to know. How much sleep do you get each night? Hours. Sorry.

Santi Bibiloni

19:21>> Eight hours.

Nathan Latka

19:22Eight, okay. And what's your situation, married, single, kids?

Santi Bibiloni

19:26>> Married with one eight months baby. So when I said eight hours was like before the baby.

Nathan Latka

19:33Wow, okay. And you're 31, right?

Santi Bibiloni

19:36>> Yeah. I'm 31.

Nathan Latka

19:37Last question. What's something you wish you when you were 20?

Santi Bibiloni

19:47>> I have no regrets. I mean, I'm pretty happy of everything I did and the things I didn't make.

Nathan Latka

19:56Guys, ProjectCOR, projectcor.com, launched back in 2018. They hit about a $500,000 run rate last year. Now up to north of that, they've broken a million dollar run rate, hoping to break a $2,000,000 run rate by the end of this year. They just raised $4,000,000 at a $40,000,000 valuation, healthy revenue multiple, call it 25, 26 x. Their team size 66 right now, 30 engineers, 12 in sales and marketing, using the new round of funding to bring in

20:19additional 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.

20:31One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, 1PM

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