How Exeboard CEO Andres Rodriguez grew to $533.8K revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is andres rodriguez he is the founder of a company called ex aboard also a recovering or sorry ex-board he's a recovering lawyer he's got degrees from the university about francisco in guatemala and duke in the u.s accredited to practice in guatemala and new york he's an investorpreneur which is obviously an investor an entrepreneur co-founder at nahal ventures ex aboard edu and soy fry he's a dreamer guatemalan born and living in new york andres are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so let's focus on export for this call tell us what the company does and how you make money what's your revenue model excellent so exabord is started as a board of directors management platform to run boards and now it's stayed on that but we also do more of management roles so we sort of added features around managing the company from a c level level it's uh basically a subscription model a yearly yearly per client and that's it okay so what are people paying on average per year for this about ten thousand dollars a year okay god and and when you say like some people have boards some people don't have a board so some people know the pain some people don't know the pain so i mean you know when i had a board obviously sometimes like it was just like getting the board deck out on time like making sure the follow-ups were done making sure the board agenda was smooth like things like this are these the kinds of things your software provides yeah it provides that and more so you have the basics sort of board stuff sharing documents votes inviting guests making sure everyone gets on time we also have a hidden feature that checks whether board members actually read the documents and whether they're doing their work if you pay enough money they might as well do their work and we also have follow up on tasks and creation of resolution so it's it's a pretty broad management system for your whole sort of board advisory boards and sea level when did you launch the company what year so we did our beta in december last year uh and we officially launched around june this year we're growing at around 25 a month okay we haven't spent any money in in ads yet what have you scaled to in terms of customers so we have roughly 60 something customers now you said six zero yeah well 60 customers and if the 10 000 acv is a good average that's about 800 bucks a month times 60. i mean that puts out about 50 grand a month right now in mrr is that right sorry i i lost the signal for a second yeah what i was saying is you said you just said that you have about a 10 000 acv on average which is about 800 or 900 bucks a month if i multiply that times 60 customers it puts you about 50 grand a month in revenue is that right yeah more or less that's great and where were you a year ago a year ago i was finishing up being involved in at now well ventures that we do no no sorry the revenue so if you're 50 to get a growth rate so 50 grand a month today where were your year ago at zero we were okay so you had no when you said you did beta though early last year so none of those beta customers were paying not when we started we first did tests and they all became paying customers starting around february or march so we did like three month tests with them so so a couple questions one so how did you first find all the beta customers uh uh our network in latin america so once most of our clients are in latin america i am america my co-founder is also from latin america so we're all there and through our network okay and then how many what percent of the people who beta had converted to paid 50 okay five zero or one five five zero five zero that's great and and the uh of the 50 that converted what was like the number one feature they were using what's the big activation metric that you got to get people to get to so they stick it was actually more mental than actual features um it was understanding that they needed a change in how their boards run so it was more philosophical than actual feature the feature that's most used is sharing documents and tasks now but when we started sharing documents but it was the customers that actually use the platform stayed on as paying customers the client the customers that didn't really use it didn't stay honest clients okay and why did you so give me more of your kind of personal background here why switch into kind of running the company versus you know staying in and doing investing or doing all these other things things you've been doing so uh this company actually started from a personal issue um my dad uh got sick with cancer and then passed away a few years ago and i ended up as a young member in the board of directors of my family business in guatemala which is consumer electronics and my co-founders dad also passed away in an airplane crash a while ago and he also ended up in his family businesses board so we were sort of the outcasts in boards very young in how boards were managed in large companies and we saw the problems moving forward we saw issues that we wanted solved we talked with other ceos and and board members we knew uh we went to a market search for options there are obviously some options we didn't see them as dynamic and they were overly expensive for normal companies so that's how we kind of started our initial idea was let's let's just build it for ourselves and then it's kind of evolved to what it is now interesting and and you started really building that was just last year or 2016 when you do the beta we started building yeah it took us about eight months to do the beta so 20 early 2017 and and so when when did what were so you're you're i understand your need and why you built this but what was taking up most of your time before this was it board just board meeting at the parent company oh really i was a lawyer at some point so i actually quit law in march last year so when i started building i was still doing law i was doing tech law basically and okay so your weight your weight you're way cooler now right this is like a much cooler thing to be doing i get to wear t-shirts yeah how did you know when the right moment was to quit the the lawyer stuff right and move full time into this that's actually a hard question because i i knew i didn't want to be a lawyer for a long time but it was serving and i was making money so so it kind of helped but some of our other investments started doing well and and and i guess it was just a leap of faith as to a lifestyle issue and it's worked out how have you capitalized the business are you bootstrapped or you raised yeah no we we actually all are when we invest we invest and we start our own companies we bootstrap all of them we don't want to raise capital we want to keep our equity and we don't want we're not necessarily looking for an exit if it comes great but we want to build companies that are sustainable so you have 100 ownership in the company between my co-founder myself and a tech partner we have uh my co-founder and i have 45 each and the tech partner has 10. that's great so it's three of you what's the total team size how many people we're at 17 now if i'm not mistaken we were in the process of hiring someone else so i'm not sure mostly tech mostly tech and the tech team is in guatemala okay so guatemala and where are the other locations where's everyone based i'm in new york everyone else is in guatemala okay very good guatemala new york that's great talk to me about something economics critical to any sas company churn what's your turn today and how do you keep it low zero to date okay so that means you're too cheap right well or we just started right yeah that's true sorry your oldest paying customer has been paying for how many months six or seven say okay zero but i can't claim for any success for it yet yeah i mean look i've interviewed a couple companies that serve boards and the challenge they all have especially with with you know companies where there's only maybe four board meetings a month or a year is they'll sign up for the board meeting then cancel then wait two months and sign up again for the next one and i'm i mean you haven't had that pattern it doesn't sound like so how have you given value to these folks when there's not actually a board meeting happening so that's where we started to add features around tasks and follow-up and going more into the management of the company so whatever the board decides or the management decides you have the task follow-up and reporting you can add documents forums discussion so you can actually get a bird's-eye view of the whole company so it's a little bit like asana in a way where you can add tasks create tasks and such um and that's basically and we also have reporting around that so it's very easy for an administrator board member ceo chairman whatever to download reports on youtube and how the tasks are going and and all that so it becomes more more of a management tool and that was exactly the issue we had and that's why we started to move into that a little bit and and what do you know i mean you have a bunch of different features but let's say somebody from my audience goes and signs up today what do you know you have to get them to do in the first session they have on the on the on the website to to increase the likelihood drastically they start paying sadly we need a call like we need to show them the platform like clients that just sort of try and do it themselves won't really get the process built we we actually try and talk to them as to what their needs we've actually told clients they don't need us to date so we need we find the needs and what if the needs work the software will work so what are the big i mean how do you quickly figure out if it's a good fit obviously you ask do you have a board uh how much money you've raised is probably a good indicator right what else well mostly most of our businesses are not startups or such so they're more of what would be corporations here and large enterprises so we figure out what their pain points are we also sort of have a cheat sheet as to who we're talking to whether if it's a chairman a ceo a director a manager and based on who they are what we tell them and we sort of hear their story and then figure out it's more of a case-by-case basis at this point okay so i guess my point is though somebody though that doesn't is not a public company or has not raised capital is is probably not a good fit because they're unlikely to have a board correct in the us that's correct in the rest of the world that's incorrect okay got it and what percent of your 50 paying customers or 60 customers are us-based 3 okay not a lot where are most of them guatemala guatemala mexico costa rica and spain interesting um do you is it too early for you to understand kind of like cac and payback period yet do you know what you have to spend to get a new ten thousand dollar customer at this point it's too early because most of it have been either through ourselves and our network or referrals from existing customers so we haven't spent any money in ads and all that but we're exploring all avenues so i guess too early we have some and we're starting a referral program sort of an affiliate fee program with regional partners and that seems to be a good business model if that's the case basically it's 25 of the first year and then a recurring 10 percent solely yeah depends on how long the client's there it'll be about seven percent are you guys casual positive to date yep oh that's great my biggest my biggest concern was signing up with something like this like especially if i was running a huge multi-billion dollar company it would actually be security like if i'm uploading board decks and things like that it's like a massive security issue how do you convince people you're secure considering you're only a year old so basically uh we we have clients that are banks we pass their internal securities we have a third party security provider that aside from our software is also checking on us we have certificates we go through ethical hackings all the time and our basically our cloud provider is is the best in the market as well so it depends on a client by client basis but we've gone through client security issues and no issues that's great are you any plans to raise capital not in the time being hopefully never yeah would you ever consider things that are non-dilutive like venture debt so you don't have to risk your own money well i mean if this explodes to a point where raising capital makes sense or doing something like that sure but our initial idea is to create a sustainable business unless we need to somehow explode um i was a lawyer sorry just to avoid the whole i'm not talking about like go raise 100 million dollars to go explode and become a unicorn i'm talking about like use someone else's money because you've done you've clearly identified a channel you can use to scale uh and you don't want to risk your own operating capital well at this point it looks so good and we're at the state where our own capital makes more sense in the long run as an investment uh probably in the future yes but not now um we'll see what happens with that very good all right let's wrap up andres with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book right now behind the cloud by mark binioff number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now jeff bezos number three what's your favorite online tool linkedin number four how many hours i sleep to get every night six ish that's good and what's your situation married single kids married and just got a puppy oh very good all right so married no kids but a puppy and how old are you i'm 32 32 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew it all worked out guys it will all work out come on from andres again took up a part a board seat at his at his father's company after he sadly passed away and realized there was a need for kind of a board management system launched ex aboard back in 2017 scaling nicely 60 customers paying about 800 900 bucks a month so 50 grand in monthly recurring revenue right now from zero just a year ago cash flow positive bootstrap team of 17 between guatemala and new york too early to talk about economics but they do have zero percent churn right now as they continue to scale andres thanks for taking us to the top have a good one