How Datalab CEO Andrej Mertelj grew Datalab to $15M revenue and 500 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is andre merkley he's a lifelong i.t nerd and founder of datalab the erp leader in southeast europe he then did the ipo and caught interest for farming and started development of farm management information systems now building data lab.eu andres you're ready to take us to the top sorry are you ready to take us to the top oh yeah well all right yeah sure all right very good so just to be clear data lab ipo'd or your prior company ipo'd no data live ipo actually okay we were the first technology uh technology ipo on the jubilant stock exchange it's rather an essent market or a very sleepy market so we did not get the bank the bank from the listing that we that we hoped for so this is this is the stock exchange in slovenia uh that you ipod on why did you want all the pressure of being a publicly traded company why not stay private well we firmly believe in employee stock ownership and it was very problematic to do it under the local legislation basically the only way to really put it properly in place was to to go to get listed i think um when we were there so that was our that was our main actually goal not so much raising capital but uh establishing value of the company so when did you guys ipo june 30th 2008 so we got yeah three months before everything going down and and what was revenue back in 2008 do you remember uh i would say 4 million okay like that and what have you grown it to today so today we're closely to 15 and 1 5 1 5 yeah and we're stepping up we're stepping up um extremely in the last uh two years uh so we hope that we'll be getting the 50 in probably two to three years now before we go too deep on the economics tell me who's buying this is it small farm managers or folks managing thousands of acres of farmland um mostly we were successful with the large farms what what we found in in farming is that it's it's the basic business principles that are extremely hard to to make because you have such a variable environment you see in when you when you think about a factory you have a predictable environment you have a everything that under control while you if you go planning for the farm you've got all these variables and very complex processes and stuff like that and that's what we actually wanted to to to simplify to really get an overview of all the resources in the farm and to help you plan basically to help you manage your farm the way um an industrial production would be managed and so how many uh farmers do you pay for you today so i would say that we have roughly 500 farms but our i think our biggest is 120 000 hectares so sorry not that's your largest and so what is the largest customer what do they pay you per year um we we price our software per uh per asset so basically you would be paying us per cow or per uh flock of of ship or uh per hectare of land or orchard or something like that um we're charging depends on the market where but we would we would be charging from one to 1.8 euros per hectare per per month oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're 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or something like that okay okay got it that makes sense and and any i mean you're now public any plans to go private again are there any advantages to going private yeah just just in the process of of taking the company back private uh and um gotten some investors and then scaling up how much do you have to raise to take the company private four to five would be that four to five million dollars yeah with four to five million plus um what we have spare uh actually for a stock buybacks uh we would be able to remove almost the complete free float from the market and this is the company i see so and how much cash do you guys currently have on the balance sheet [Music] i can only tell you i don't i can't tell you currently but i think in the last quarterly report it was 3.5 or something like that okay so 3.5 of your own cash plus raise four or five million and then you could use that money to take the company private yeah with these interesting and so what i mean why why do that you went public for a reason you don't like it now you want to go private what didn't you like about being public um well first first of all being public on [Music] on a back country market is not the way to go and we thought that uh the mar the the financial markets will consolidate and we basically hope to get a backdoor to also to some larger stock exchange that either the vienna stock exchange would buy that's the leblanc stock exchange and we would be automatically interested in stuff like that unfortunately um by in after 2008 everything went south and those plants did not materialize we did not establish full potential we were stuck on an eliquid market and that became a hurdle to our raising capital because again being public in a unknown foreign market was unknown legislation uh decreases your enterprise value when did you start the company what year 96 1996 wow so you you uh you did you bootstrap it from 1996 to 2008 um 1996 to 2008 we were working on erp systems for small and medium-sized businesses which carry a lot of similarities my question though was did you bootstrap or did you raise capital in that time no we completely was bootstrapped actually i went bankrupt in 94 with my previous company uh so i actually were not even credit i was not credit worthy so it was basically the last paycheck um a garage to computers and and a lot of will why'd your last company go bankrupt in 95 what was the name of the company uh gecko we we did wholesale of computer chips and and as it was flashing that day we assembled uh pc's personal computers importing from taiwan uh assembling and selling the fixed computers and why did it go bankrupt um we then well 70 of our revenues came from brokerage of computer chips we just loaded up for the christmas season and then hyundai and samsung are announced a new factory of chips and price went the price huffed while our chips were on on the uh on the flight that that was the tip of the iceberg but basically we were much too leveraged i see i see interesting okay so you launched a new company in 1996 you bootstrap it and then how much did you raise when you ipo'd we did not raise we raised zero on ipo we simply listed because we wanted to have this valuation but we did in 2010 we we raised the first million for the farming so first we we raised...