How Easygenerator CEO Mo'az Galbat grew to $23.9M revenue and 1.3K customers in 2024.

hey folks good morning my guest today is casper spiro he's the ceo of the easy generator and he's both the initiator and driver behind the employee generated learning trend he's made an impact on the field of learning as a blogger at casperspiro.com so good distribution channel there and author of trainingindustry.com learning solutions magazines clo magazine and others also the speaker at various e-learning conferences around the world casper you're ready it takes the top yep all right very cool so hey you came back you came on the show back in november of last year sort of middle of covid how was copen impacting you at the time yeah it was a big boost for our business everything went online basically i think it moved everything forward a couple of years interesting and you mentioned at that time you had about 1200 customers i want to learn more about what you're giving them but how many customers today yeah we're a bit over that so i i actually made a mistake at that time it was like 1100 and now it's around 1250 something like that oh great and what are they why are they paying you tell us what you do so what we do we have a sas solution with an e-learning authoring tool that allows supplementary experts employees to capture their knowledge and share it with their co-workers and so is this are you selling to heads of hr typically or the employees directly now we're selling to to the companies so they they facilitate their employees with the tools so very often we make enterprise wide deals and so if you sell into an enterprise and they buy 100 seats what's that sort of hr manager after they purchase your tool what email are they sending to the team to get them to start using easy generator what's it sound like what do you mean what does it sound like the what the pitch is how does an a after an eight lino head of hr purchases your platform how do they get their employees to use your platform why are employees excited to use it yeah well there there is already a need for that people want to share their knowledge they want to to to do that and there are no real simple tools for that than we are but it's a whole program where we help them onboard them uh we we do webinars with them we help them communicate around easy generator and give them best practices and that way we sort of build out the audience now it's all about creating courses is it just internally for teams or can someone like me an influencer create a course to sell to my community yeah you can so you can just subscribe for a license and buy a subscription uh and create courses we even include hosting and result tracking for free uh but that uh that is where the vision started but we now are moving more and more into the corporate marketing bigger core produce but we still do that why is that so um if you sell to an individual if uh if for example it would be you and something happens with you you will cancel your account so initially this uh the churn was relatively high like uh 25 or something like that now we have moved up market with bigger contracts and determines is below 10. ten percent year annually yeah annually got it um yeah i think you told me churn annually was about 10 uh expansion was 32 and your net dollar retention was 122. have any of those changed uh yeah so i think that we we've grown significantly we grow harder last year than we expected so we ended up like we were planning for around 90 we ended on 94 we still are on the same pace which means the mrr is now over in dollars over six hundred thousand so we made quite a step there okay wait so that's incredible because when you come on the show last you were doing about 360 000 a month in revenue you're doing 600 dollars a month seven point two million run rate just crossed to five hundred thousand euro line so that is uh the six hundred thousand dollar line as well okay i mean that's actually that's impressive growth over six months you've almost doubled over the past six months revenue-wise where'd the growth come from so well we had a huge we had a huge last quarter but especially december was like a record-breaking month so our best month in growth terms ever was 90k a new mmr and last december just that month we did 47k growth in one month net in december yeah just december yeah so it was a huge jump that we make but why i mean you know success is good but if you don't understand why it happened you can't replicate it um it happens almost every year that december is like by far our best month but this was like exceeding all our expectations by far and i think it was partly driven by kovitz so we really thought that people at that time noticed so uh working from home even covet will go away working from home will not so we now need to make choices and commitment so they tried it we saw a lot of uh when cobit started we started selling a lot of pilots so we just gave them a pilot for a thousand dollars a month uh with unlimited capacity during the first month of kovit and that really paid off in the end of the year because then they had to start renew that and a lot of those companies went to to enterprise contracts in one go we actually had uh uh companies going from a six-month pilot straight into our maximum enterprise deal where normally we expect them to take like two or three years to grow into that you told me in december your largest customer was paying 105 000 per year is that still your largest customer no no we have a new one of those pilot customers went over that so i think it's like in dollars around 30. wow okay and why are they paying so much like what are you upselling against is it number of seats what's that what else what else are you upselling yeah so the upsell is more facilities better guidance higher slas but it is the key thing is unlimited seats so people upgrade to get those unlimited seats correct yeah if they buy an enterprise license then they if they go over a certain number of seats they can buy an unlimited license and then uh it doesn't really matter if it's like a thousand or five thousand people altering the price will remain the same when you say better sla you mean going from 99 guaranteed up time to 99.9 guaranteed up time are you refund them uh we have 99.4 uh and we do indeed refund them if we don't make that but uh we're working on the going uh close to 100 so it will be 99.99 shortly so we haven't refunded anybody from that yeah what we did in the past year is that we didn't refund anything no no no because we were way way over that so but we are increasing the quality of our hosting so we took away every single point of failure that we had in the last year we're now working on continuous deployment so we can also go put things live without going down um and we so it will be really close to 100 sir hopefully in a year from now okay now talk to me about capital efficiency have you raised additional capital or still just a 500 000 from 2013. no it's still so we don't have uh also the in 2013 that was also just our own shareholders uh at that time so the company were so we're still bootstrapped yeah um okay got it so does that mean you own 100 business sorry walk me through how the ownership works because i think you told me that this was a spin out initially we were part of a of another company so i started it up as a business unit and we uh sort of grew out of there uh and now we're an independent company for close to 100 people now uh making a profit uh how much how much how much profit per month so last month 30 thousands okay overall it will i expect the year because we're investing a lot of money i expect us to be just above breakeven so just on the positive side of that so making a profit is not a goal but we are growing faster than we can actually hire people and spend money have any vcs reached out asking to invest and if so what's the highest valuation you turn down so we we haven't done into that we have a lot of interest so we actually held a webinar for all the the vcs that wanted to invest in us but we didn't ever really talk to them so we expect maybe in a few years from now but right now we can fund our own growth and we're growing like 100 per year so that is what we want to do maybe if we have plans to even accelerate from that that could be something or when the shareholders decide that they they want to to exit but for now it's not a plan the parent company owns 100 equity of your business you have a rev share agreement how does that work yeah it's very simple so uh if we sell the company uh i have a uh an agreement with that that i cut a percentage of the sale oh i see got it so so interesting got it so is that more or less than 20 it will be less less than 20 but more than 10 hopefully uh no probably not come on so do you regret this is what i asked you've built a great business here you put in your hard sweat tears oh you spun it out i mean do you do you wish you you know tried to negotiate for more back in 2013 um well maybe if i knew what i know now maybe but it's as i told you last time it's not really my big drive and when we will sell the company so one of our competitors articulates they got an investment in their first investment after 20 years of business and the investment was 1.5 billion for 40 of the shares if you talk numbers like that if we even come close to that we will not but if we do that then uh it doesn't really matter if you have like a five or ten percent because it's still too much money i mean when i hear deals like that and that actually happened just recently that happened july 1st but you also have kajabi growing like crazy train you all you have uh some companies that actually have ipo'd in this space on the canadian stock exchange like if you're gonna make money in the space it feels like now is the time to do that a big secondary something like that why aren't you guys planning to do that yeah i think that we have to trust that they can do even better in a few years time but and in the end of the day that is also because i'm not the the shareholder that's the goal of the shareholders of course to make i'm building the business yeah i mean but what they must be thinking about this i mean again you have to you have to recognize timing and practice everything in in startup land and you guys have the beautiful tailwinds of kobet we're not going to have i don't think another global shutdown in the next 10 years it will not happen indeed yeah so like is it now the maximum time the highest growth the most noise the most best valuations shouldn't you pull the trigger now yeah probably we'll get into the highest multiplier or anything so indeed that's true so you want to do it but the parent company doesn't no i'm uh so even if they would sell the company i still wanted to to still bring it a few steps further so that is really what i'm working for so if the company is being sold to new ownership that wouldn't really change for me yeah yeah how much doing the company is worth today well yeah so we are doing uh this year probably around seven to seven point five million in arr so depends on the multiplier but it can be anything between 70 and 100. i even heard multipliers of 20 or more so well you can do the math yeah and i i think sometimes that's even conservative but yeah maybe between 100 million and 200 million um of the hundred people on the team today how many are engineers we have like 20 25 it's the technical team which is engineers plus qas and devops and do you have any quarter carrying sales reps we have sales rep yeah we have for like uh seven aes and i think 12 bdrs something like that and what is your quota target for those aes so there is if they start as a junior it will be i think around 3 000 and uh that will go up to like a three and a half four thousand mark when they are senior what does that mean they have that's the new ar they have to bring in each month yes yes new mmor a new monthly request so each month they have to bring in 3 000 of new mrr or that 36 thousand bucks of new acv every single month so 36 000 times 12 they have to bring about half 450 000 a new arr in their first year what about at scale your best aes do they have like a million dollar quota two million dollar quota uh i wouldn't know though so though they they uh we have i think the quote will be the same but we have like an unkept uh a system of bonuses so that is where they they go for so how does that work what does that mean uncapped system of bonuses so they will get a percentage of each sale they also will get a percentage of each sale which upsells within a year and um and we did we don't have a limit on that so the more successful they are in their sales the higher the bonus will be i see are you still paying about 4 000 bucks and cac to get a new customer yeah around that i think it may be a bit more so it will be closer to 5.5 i think we are really uh increasing our effort with marketing also expanded that team so it's uh let me see it's 5.8 so 5 800 i love that you you come on nathan's show and you have your metrics pulled up ready to go i love that where are you spending that money so i think yeah mostly uh what we already did a a long time isn't google but we are sort of now also paying attention to other sources so we're doing bing we're doing linkedin we also do a lot of webinars that we host and do ourselves so do a lot of content marketing with white papers working on ebooks stuff like that so we are sort of broadening the scope of the leads and we do see that the the the harder leads like the webinar leads and the the content leads they are actually bringing in more money they're closer to outbound leads than just the inbound links that come in through the website last question the rev share agreement you originated back in 2013 where you get five to ten percent of the business on a sale is that transferable in other words if someone's listening right now and they want to come to you and offer you five or 10 million bucks to buy that contract like the right for five percent that exit would you sell would you consider selling if i would sell the five percent of the business for that certainly you know so you have an agreement where you get five to ten percent of the business at the sale is that saleable if someone wanted to buy that from you personally for five to ten million bucks would you sell it how would i sell it uh i i'm not even sure if that if that's possible uh i i don't know no i think i think that we're just at the beginning so i really think that we so i think if we will get an investment in it will be to grow faster not to sell the majority of the shares and i really believe that we can grow way faster than 100 per year so that is the ambition so i think we can do better than that i love the ambition but i disagree i think we're in a very special time for firms like yours and we are at the peak peak growth peak revenue peak valuation but we will see what happens let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business school one last remark on that by the way because we are on the gross level of the the 90 plus percent for four years in a row now so it's not really just a peak it's consistent yeah but a lot of that growth has come from covet we're not going to have enough we're coming out of cova now we're not going to have another coba that's going to keep repelling your crazy growth rates i think that's now the very unique time or the past 12 months looks very good for all your historical financials yeah we'll see we'll see number one what's your favorite book so i have it here by the way so i'm rereading it it's a working smarter field book or i'm reading a couple of books of this it's written by jay cross it's a guy who changed our industry my my my master in e-learning okay number two i died a few years ago i'm afraid oh i'm sorry to hear that is that number two is there a founder you're following or studying so but also a book i read writes i think i will go for steve jobs where he writes uh by oprah but because i love how he had a vision i was able to translate efficiently in product and business i really admire him for that number three is there an online tool that you're really enjoying right now i'm really into my role recently creating the mind maps there but also myro it's a tool where you can draw all kinds of things so you can i think it's a russian tool which is growing really fast and i love it huh interesting number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night six maybe a bit more okay and what's your situation married single kiddos i'm mary's for 40 something years uh to my uh high school sweetheart and we have three kids together three sons and they're 15 25 and 31. and how old are you 58 or did you have a birthday i just had my birthday last week so i'm now 59. yeah happy birthday 59. last question what's something you wishing you when you were 20. follow your instinct go with your guts guys there you have it easy generator grew from call it about a 4 million run rate 18 months ago to over 7 million run rate today their team has also grown customers now 1 250 they're making it easier for enterprises to create courses internally for employees to get onboarded faster a hot space right now we'll see what happens next thinks the company's worth maybe between 100 million and 200 million bucks and it's profitable they're bootstrapped make about 30 000 per month in profit casper thanks for taking us to the top thank you bye 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 sas 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 pm 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 profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

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 profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya