How Flowcase (formerly CV Partner) CEO Erling Linde grew Flowcase (formerly CV Partner) to $5.5M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

guys CEO earling is an entrepreneur and engineer by trade launched in 2012 with no Revenue took him five years to break a million dollar run rate in 2017 but now today doing 5.5 million bucks in Revenue up 47% year-over-year from 4 million a year ago a year ago in 2023 they actually raised their first outside Capital $3 million seed round at somewhere between a 20 and 30 million valuation now they're focused on growth they help you add case studies and team member profiles resumes quickly and easily to your proposals they play nicely with get accept panck and other do signing tools their team of 40 today with 12 Engineers is now looking to scale into the US hey folks my guest today is erling Lind after completing an Ma and computer science from the nor Norwegian University of Science and Technology he held software development and consultancy roles at Hydro is partner miles as thoughtworks and Ford internet group with his comprehensive IT background in 2011 he presented with Nikolai neelen to found CV partner that CV partner.com if you want to follow along all right erling you ready to take us to the top yes all right what is what is CV partner who are you guys selling to what's the product do yes so uh CV uh CV is uh that's Latin for resume so as you call it in the in in in in the states so um our clients they are professional service firms uh so that means it consultancies like uh Cap Gemini or CGI it could be management consultancies like uh b or PWC uh it could be engineering firms like wsp uh and even law firms like da Piper uh all those logos are clients in some geographies um and um they all typically often share a uh a challenge when it comes to winning work so they they essentially get a lot of their work from from winning uh public sort of tenders so they bid for work and in order to win that work they need to present their people so they're Consultants or Engineers or lawyers and they need to present them in the best possible way uh so highlight the relevant experience and also include a lot of experience to make sure that they take off all the requirements in the viid uh and further they often also have to format it so in the EU there's like standard uh formats that keep changing all the time the same like in the Nordic where from that like the government issues different resume templates that you have to adhere to and the same in the US like US Government forms and typically would have these reses without our res solution the reses would be in a share in Word documents it could be on someone's laptop so you just give them a tool a B2B Niche sell solution to gather all this information uh so they can search find the relevant Consultants with the right amount of experience the certification Etc uh put them together uh highlight the relevant experience and Export it into these templates so they they save a lot of time in this process reduce the burnout of their bid and proposal teams um and they increase their chances of winning more work uh so yeah let me just let me just jump in real quick so so to try and simplify this real quick let's D Piper has 50 lawyers uh they have a startup that needs help with a lawsuit related to fintech Da Piper would use your software to find which of their attorneys is best suited for that fintech legal case that this that the software company needs and then they will send that proposal to the software company using your tool is that right yes that that would be a a good example uh but uh I I would say possibly a more typical example would be let's say uh wsp is bidding to build or like support a huge project and they need to prove that they have 100 Engineers that have participated in designing a large Bridge or something with specific requirements in the past and they need to put all these together and send it off them then they they would be able to search fine but also actually make sure that uh they perent the best possible these big law firms then those are the ones paying you as customers like the da Pipers the world Etc yes yes I see how do you price this and sort of on average what's the average customer paying you per month or per year to use the technology yeah we are kind of targeting two segments now so we go for midsize which should be like 15 to 50K USD ARR and then we have the kind of Enterprise motion which is like 50 to 500k uh US dollar AR and that yeah we we have DS in both of L boxes um MH how how many folks would you categorize in your Enterprise segment today uh I would say we have probably 30 to 50 Enterprises and is that where you started and now you're selling you're going down Market or did you start down Market going up uh we started down market so our first client was probably 60 employees or something like that small small deal and then we've gone up Market since tell me tell me that story when did you close your first customer um so we started when we started out uh we had this idea that we could uh help consultancies solve this problem I called everyone I knew in the consultancy business and they all said they had the same problem um and then I asked him like if I solve it will you pay for it and all of them said yes um but then I started building when was that what year 2012 uh was probably when we started building yeah and uh I think uh started building we had some pilot customers that gave us great feedback uh um one of the Fe one of the feedback was like you know this is aesome functionality it save us a lot of time but it looks completely so that's when I got my co-founder niai to join me and we sorted out the user experience and after number of demos we finally had one client said we're ready then there the contract and we looked at each other it's like do we have a contract and then was that that first customer I think was 2013 okay so 2013 you sign your first customer what did they pay probably 10K or something yeah okay so they pay 10K for a year for you said 6 Z seats yeah I try to remember they could be in 5K 10K some some somewhere in that range yeah got it and then so that was your first customer right scale up you know take us up to today right how many customers are you serving today and how are you growing yeah so uh today we have more than 400 customers um and we grew around 47% last year so just to be and just to be clear you said average price point earlier uh you had midsize Enterprise but and you gave me two very different ranges but was the average customer paying something like 15K uh per year yes yeah yeah I would say so that's the ACV at the moment but it's shifting upwards as we're going more up Market okay so can I take 400 paying customers times 15,000 ACV average that would put you at about 6 million run rate today yeah that's that's correct five between 5 and six that's uh the current ER that's great and so if you grew 47% to year year that means you were doing what about you ended about a year ago at four million run rate yes yes that's great growth where's most that growth coming from expanding seats in current customers or adding new customers Al together uh so we have our nrr was like 115% last year but uh we are we're definitely changing new logos and and and going through a geographic expansion at the moment so how are you Landing new logos what's your motion do you have inside sales reps is it organic SEO what is it uh we got some we we do get some from from SEO inbound uh that's more in the markets we're more established and as we're breaking into new markets it's more Outreach going to a lot of events uh conferences they start MH okay so I guess you added a million and a half of Revenue over the past 12 months where would you say the majority of those customers came from was it a big conference you went to or something else uh it's a mix it's a mix of uhing pick your I'm asking you to pick your most successful growth channel so the answer cannot be it was a mix what was your most successful Channel um I I I I would say uh it's still probably growing uh word of mou from yeah customers that uh come inbound uh but um okay how but how do they find Word of Mouth doesn't just happen in nor ases inbound So when you say inbound how do they find you what do you do I mean your organic rank on ahra from a domain rating perspective is 26 so you don't get a lot of traffic from just random inbound SEO how are you getting inbound no it's it's it's typically uh people that have used Us in other companies and change jobs and they come to us that's a obviously very successful but uh uh in order to bre into to New Markets we are so you need people you need people to get fired not necessarily fired but accepting new jobs perhaps yes yeah who would you say what are the other two or three firms you're competing with in the space what are their names um so we are uh I would say we're competing against like you know them doing building it themselves uh we have we competing against people only using this in SharePoint uh and then it's it's uh it's typically uh maybe companies that are coming this from a more like like a managing like digital Asset Management like document management more like more generic tools uh and then there's uh some sort of crms that have added the the functionality that we provide...