How Earnr CEO Enzo Ottens grew Earnr to $619.4K revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

atler they're building a tool called earner which is helping accountants serve smbs faster they've got between 1 000 and 10 000 registrations and they convert 20 to 50 percent of registrations to paid customers at 35 bucks a month so north of 20 000 bucks in Revenue today they just launched last year so Healthy Growth they've only raised what the accelerator or sorry under a million bucks right so pretty Capital efficient team of 10 today with five Engineers as they look to continue to scale hey folks my guest today is Enzo ons he's the co-founder and CEO of earner the robo accountancy for small businesses he's a recovering Management Consultant a delivery writer and former Chief of Staff at loot bow and metal I'm sure I butchered that name Enzo you ready to take us to the top yeah let's go come on give me the real how do you pronounce that uh all the different uh challenging Bank names yeah uh yeah you did you did perfect bow metal and loot oh okay I nailed it very good all right so tell us what earner is uh and and why smbs you know smbs go out of business all the time so your turn is going to be an issue growing kind of part of the business markets like a lot of people are turning to self-employed income as well as starting small businesses after the pandemic the the kind of Trends our gay economy your passion economy and your sharing economy uh and what does Erna really do so what we've seen is that a lot of these people still use accountants they're very very expensive expensive why can't you have software that does the work of an accountant for you for a fraction of the cost and so um how do you model this and what's the average customer pay you per month would you say so a traditional accountant for most users cost anywhere between 500 to a thousand if you're a sole Trader and uh up to a thousand pounds if you're a small business we charge them subscription wise uh 30 pounds of your sole Trader and then limited companies anywhere between 50 and 100 what do you mean sole Trader do you have a lot of Bankers do you traders who use you stock market people uh so sole Trader is the the British term for uh someone that's self-employed ah I see okay but but about 35 United States dollars per month on average uh yeah exactly very cool okay put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the business uh so we first launched the business in 2021 uh and then uh we kind of went through one tax return Season at the end of the year uh in 2021 so in the UK every January and now going into our second tax return Season that's awesome how did you get your first customer uh uh our first customer was through a um a small business Community called mindful markets mindful markets uh yeah exactly so during the pandemic a lot of um markets that were first in person turned online so a lot of new businesses propped up that helped people move from a in-person Marketplace to online so they were doing Zoom calls and that's kind of how we got our first customers but was it like a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group or how did you find this group uh it was initially we found the person that ran it through a Facebook group and then we started doing um calls with them over Zoom helping them with their taxes and then they were the first customers that then started using the app it's amazing I'm sorry what was the name again uh mindful Market mindful Market very interesting okay and then fast forward to today how many customers are you working with uh so we now have thousands of customers uh we don't like to disclose the exact amounts because we're still quite early but um we're doing pretty well was it fair to say like between a thousand and two thousand something like that uh between a thousand and ten thousand oh okay thousand and ten thousand very cool now that's not easy to go from you know a thousand or you know nothing to over a thousand customers in under a year and a half so how did you do that how are you growing today uh it's a bit of a mix so our most effective channels is when the need is highest um which is during tax return Season and this classic Performance Marketing something to keep in mind is that your average uh retention when it comes to accountant is 10 years and on the product that you pay anywhere between Thirty to 100 pounds a month for um we can be quite effective when it comes to Performance Marketing during tax return Season outside we just use a collection of referrals and SEO that works best what do you consider effective during tax season on your paid marketing right or what are you willing to spend to get a new 35 a month customer yeah so uh coming from a challenger banking background the average there that we had was anywhere between 100 and 200 pounds or in dollar terms like 120 to 250 dollars uh if we can acquire somebody for less than 100 that's already really effective uh because the payback payback period is so short um we've seen stuff way lower than that so anything less than twenty dollars 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 the 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 evaluation 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 evaluations inside of your frownerpath 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 going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview what enables you to do that that's not she I mean as you know in the Challenger and Bank world people are willing to spend a lot to get a new customer so have you found like a unique keyword you're targeting with paid or you're doing like Tick Tock ads or there's not a lot of competition for yet but why why can you get under 100 CAC uh I think it is Tick Tock that we've used exactly like you said um I think what really worked well for us were personable um ads so kind of talking in the camera kind of saying hey where'd this new app it's really amazing you should try and check it out um we built so that's very that's very boring what do you actually say I I think that is literally what we say it's no come on if I saw that on Tick Tock I'm I'm skipping it immediately there's no way that's converting me uh well you're also not our target audience like most of our customers are are women uh most of our customers are are kind of people that like Etsy sellers gig workers um it's it's literally a simple the the thing that did the best was just talking into the camera while you're walking somewhere and be like talking like a normal human being saying you know this kind of stuff is really hard I found a tool that works really well you should try and download it and check this out that's that's interesting as simple as it was are we is this right now considered tax season uh no not yet uh so for us uh it's December and January so give me a sense of like what you'll scale to in terms of paid spend are you talking like you're spending 10 grand a month on paid or like a million per month unpaid no no way less than that um we last tax return Season I think the highest we went is maybe two grand a week okay okay about...