Easygeneratorrevenue, valuation & funding

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is casper spyro he's built a great company's been an industry leader in the lnd space for over 25 years learning development space he's made an impact on this ever revolving field as ceo of the fast growing scale up easy generator and as an e-learning blogger at casperspyro.com he's also an author and a speaker at various e-learning conferences around the world casper you're ready to take us to the top yeah i am all right so what is easy generator and are you guys a pure play sas business yeah it's a pure science business where we uh enable people to basically share their knowledge so to capture knowledge and share it with other people so that's what we do and and how how does it walk me through how that works so it's very simple so it's an altering tool so you can we started out with courses so you can just write an ethernet course by yourself so the problem that is there that is creating content in a company is expensive slow and you can't maintain it so what we do is enable the people who have the knowledge themselves so and we started with courses and right now we are expanding into what we call resources like one page just checklist so one uh things like that so to make it really easy to share your numbers and what are these customers paying on average per month um so that is uh around at the rp right 560 right now 560 dollars sorry that double next year 360s now 560 is next year 360 a month right now yeah that's uh for yeah and it's really different we have really small really big customers but that's the average what's your largest contract out of curiosity uh just under 100 000 k in euros wow you know a bit over in uh in dollars yeah it's over over 100 thousand dollars what is that customer paying for so they pay that those are enterprise customers uh and they pay for an unlimited contract so basically anyone in their organization can use easygenerator and that can go into the thousands of people sometimes and give me some of the backstory here when did you come up with with this idea when it officially launched the tool was launched in 2013 uh and the idea really is what i just already mentioned is what's a classical way of creating content you have a central department creating content and it's just so slow and expensive and it's not connected to the business and i really believe that the business should own that content so that's just what we enable the idea is very very simple create a simple tool that allow people to share their knowledge by themselves and without the central department being part of that process so so how did you fund cash for the initial mvp so we started out as a business unit of an existing company and groups from there okay and what did you grow that revenue to before you spun it out it was uh around the 250 000 mark i think okay and how did you convince the bigger business to let you spin it out uh well basically i explained my vision and the market potential that i thought and uh they really believed in in that uh in that option so they they started supporting that in a great way and still do and so what did the economics look on the spin on did they make you sort of pay for the technology are they still on the cap table today they're still the owners yeah of the of the company yeah i see so how much how much equity do you own i don't equity i do have a sort of a revenue sharing plan but i don't have equity oh so they own 100 of the business yes correct so why are you doing this this is like the same thing as having a safe job yeah yeah but so that is not that's uh so the the money is not the reason why i'm in i'm uh i'm i'm 58 i've seen a lot of things and start a lot of companies and i want to do it really well this time that is basic my driver i want to create a product that adds value that is a really great product and i want to build a great place to work and how many of my main drivers how many you know you did this in 2013 it's now seven years later Currently serving 1200 customers how many customers you have on the platform now today uh so today it's uh 1200 it's just just below that okay twelve hundred and where are you getting most these customers what's the growth strategy look like so it's a mix between inbound and outbound so around sixty percent of the new customers is inbound 40 will be outbound but if you take upsell into a account because uh upsells higher was outbound it's closer to 50 50 in the in the end revenue i see and so going from 250 000 a year in revenue back in 2013 to today i mean can i multiply your customers 1200 times 360 rpoo to get about 430 000 Monthly recurring revenue a month in revenue yeah that's correct yeah yeah we will be just under four million dollars this year at the end of the year yeah that's great okay so call it three eight three nine and where were you exactly a year ago do you remember yeah at the end of the year we were just over two million so 234 in mmr and just 2.1 million in in the yearly revenue okay so 234 000 this was back in december of 2019. so fast forward a year you've you've almost doubled the business yeah so the goal was to grow 75 this year we upped that to 80 and we're almost there already or we are there basically uh so we're looking at last year we grew 87 so we want to to top that so indeed we want to go in direction of 90 yep so so you're doing what like last month you did like 310 320 000 in sales uh yes correct something like that and where where do you think you'll get growth in the next 12 months you mentioned arpu expansion last month was close to 400k that's 369. okay so if you're at a 360 if you're at 370 then your ar is going to be greater than 4 million not lower than right um i have so i will end the year on 432 no it will be three nine uh 303 million nine hundred sixty thousand why is that so if you did 370 thousand dollars last month multiply that by 12 to get a forward looking run rate that puts you at 4.4 million in an annual run rate are you giving me actual cash collected over the past 12 months from your monthly recurring plans yeah no i'm actually looking at at the numbers because well the issue is we we register for everything in euro so uh i'm checking if i might make you have uh made a small mistake there but you but last month in u.s dollars you did about 360 thousand dollars yeah last month so in euros it was three three thirty so that is around uh you know three sort of one point two yeah 360. yeah okay very good yeah so i mean 360 last month times 12 would put you over a 4 million run rate you know wrapping up the year which is obviously great but let's not get stuck on that so talk to me at the rest of the business so as you've driven this growth have you bootstrapped or did you raise Bootstrapped no it's still 100 owned by the original company we started from so we just are bootstrapped yeah okay that's great and what's churn look like the churn is around 10 i think it's really different for our enterprise customers it's way lower than for the the individual customers but on average it's like 10 per month or per year per year okay and when you take that gross churn of 10 how much expansion do you get yearly so it's about 22 percent okay 32 sorry so the net retention is like 122. that's great that's a great net retention rate and and these economics sound good so far cac is obviously a big part of unit economics how much you're willing to spend to get a 360 a month Customer acquisition cost customer so it's uh around the 4 000 mark and where are you spending that capital so a lot of the capital will be so what i said 60 outbound 40 impound so without bound a lot of people bdrs and account executives and reaching out to people cold calling uh and uh the inbound of course is a marketing team but the most expensive there are the campaigns that we run yep and for your outbound crew what base do you give them like if someone's starting with you as an account executive what base do you give them and then what quota do you target do you give them uh so they uh the the goal for an account executive is that he will probably reach a multiple of five or six times uh of his salary in uh in in revenue sales yep so what do you start people at if they join you today as an account executive what quote do you start them out uh the quota the sales quota they have yep um i think we will start really simple with a a thousand euro uh recurring revenue and build from there until we reach the the target in like it depends a bit on how much experience they have but three to six months i think until they they reached the goal so you want them to add a thousand dollars a new monthly occurring revenue each month at the beginning yeah so but it needs that needs to grow so what does it look like sorry when they're fully ramped what does it look like um i don't know that by heart i have to say uh how many sales reps do you have with quota we have like five uh account executives i think and i think eight pdrs would the bdrs have quota or no yes they do yeah but that that is in in in in sales qualified leads of course yeah yeah not not not closed commission yeah and how many engineers are on the team so we have like so we're expanding as we speak we have 14 in ukraine and we are hiring a remote team around dubai so that's now six so it will be around 20 a bit more maybe even at the beginning of the year okay and so what's the team size today total 70 in total seven zero yes so 70 total there's 20 engineers there's five quota carrying reps that's 25 where's the other 45 employees yeah so we have uh so of course the development team is bigger than just the uh uh the developers we have qas uh we have designers we have a product owner uh we have a cpo so that counts up uh we have a support team uh that does uh live support uh almost around the clock so that is like i think close to 10 people now we have a customer success team of five six people a marketing team of five six so then that's up yup that makes a lot of sense it makes a lot of sense very cool here let's let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book casper so that probably is a book you don't know it's called leading without command it's an old book i reread it recently it's really about output management and it's it really helped me to to to shape the way i form the business of the company number two is there a ceo you're following or studying that's a hard one so probably would go for elon musk at the moment number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business oh those are probably two so it will be zoom which allows us to to uh do the business because uh only 18 of our business in the netherlands so we do worldwide sales from the netherlands thanks to tools like zoom and the other tool would be intercom because we have really great support and intercom makes that possible number four how many hours of sleep date every night will be around six okay and what's your situation married single kids i'm married already for uh together for more than 40 years and my kids are like 30 28 and 25. three kids 40 years wow and how old are you i'm 58. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 um probably always trust your intuition i made some bad decisions while i knew that i was doing the wrong thing guys easygenerator.com he grew it to 250 000 a year in sales back in 2013 at his parent company before spinning it out he now has a rev share agreement with the parent company which still owns 100 of the business but he's grown it significantly 4.2 million dollar run rate today up from 2.1 million run rate just a year ago so over 100 percent year over year growth largest customer pays a hundred five thousand dollars a year but the average customer pays 360 dollars per month for their tool over 1200 paying customers today churn is less than 10 percent annually net revenue retention over 122 percent with a cap payback period of under 11 months casper 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 sass 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 p.m 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 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