How Facelift CEO Daniel Augsten grew Facelift to $25M revenue and 1K customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is taya topher he's building a company called facelift hyphen bbt.com he's making impact on social or enabling you to have an impact on social in the easier ways a married father of four world champion and rowing and an entrepreneur taylor you ready to take to the top yes okay so first off the company website is facelift hyphen bbt.com what are you guys doing what are you building so actually we have a social media management platform system um it's comparable to hootsuite and sprout social so we're in exactly the same space and we're helping companies and larger enterprises to create impact on social very easy and how much are they paying you per month on average to use your technology that depends i was starting we're starting at 1 500 it includes six users and it goes up to whatever 50 000 a month okay do you have customers currently paying 50 000 a month yes we have oh incredible so what's the back story here when did you launch what year yes we launched exactly 10 years ago we last week we had our 10th anniversary and we started bootstrapped we had actually no funding nothing at all nothing from our family and we really started with just a bunch of photoshop files which we showed our client and told them this is our product we love that so 2011 now you use photoshop files but how did you find that first customer where did you find them yeah actually uh we were we were kind of doing um facebook um schoolings yeah for enterprises at that time in germany nobody didn't even know what facebook was in 2011 and facebook in germany had about 5 million users so not the same as today and we talked about engagement on facebook a lot and we found out that our clients actually don't have a clue but they were they ordered at uh agencies for like 50 000 bucks um facebook apps at that time and we thought okay there might be an easier way to save a lot of money so we invented one of the first leading facebook apps um toolbox so that's when we started 10 years this would have been wildfire buddy media this was all space very well thank you very got it okay very good so now did you start off with software in the space or you were selling custom plans agency model no no nothing no agency at all we really started we jumped started with a product and only we were only scaling a product yeah and how many to how many customers are you serving today today we have about a thousand uh clients okay and where were you exactly where were you exactly a year ago do you remember sorry i didn't get that how many customers were you at a year ago a year ago we had about 800 800 wow so can i take a thousand times 1500 a month to back into your revenue you're doing about 1.5 million a month no it's more it's more okay it's more what can you share with us about 20 25 million okay and where were you a year ago yeah a year ago it was about 20. and have you still bootstrapped no no oh certainly not sadly not sadly not how much have you raised no we have raised after after three years three and a half years we have raised 15 million one five one five yeah and then we then we grew up to about 10 million er what year was that 10 million was 2017 okay yeah 26 in 2017 and then we um we got a strategic investor on board it's a one of the largest german media groups called dumont [Music] they were really active in three business sections one was media the other business information then they started with acquiring our our company they started the second the third pillar marketing technology so we were the anchor investment and then we drew it up to this year 25 million now you did the 20 the 15 million raise i believe in 2014 correct yeah right 2014 yeah and what was the valuation you raised at back then do you remember oh yeah i remember but i i think i cannot tell it's a little bit it was it was like it was like that was like eight years ago yeah yeah but i i to be honest i don't know i mean that's a nice investor i guess it was around let's say 40. 40. okay got it and and how have you you know most times once you take a little bit of venture capital you have to take more every like 15 to 20 months but you haven't why no no we were actually managing the cash flow quite well and yeah in germany maybe it's a different game i mean looking at our us competitors they raised more and more and more and grew faster than we did sure but actually we have a very good positioning in europe and we were ranked in forester quite well so that was our decision not to raise more and also from an from entrepreneurs perspective we had a lot of shares when we sold our company i mean both of us we had about uh wait what do you mean when you sold your car what do you mean when you sold the company you know we we our strategic investor is so to say the the owner now and we moved up to the holding structure so my course oh so that 15 million dollar deal they bought a major more than 50 percent of them no no that was the super angel investment we had in back in 2014 and then in 2017 we sold we started selling the company to a strategic investor where we now have a share on the holding structure so we we swapped basically how much do the strategic investor invest or put in uh that i can't tell okay but the evaluation was much higher so for us as a as an entrepreneur we we did a we did a very good deal i have to say um if if my research team digs wouldn't be able to find that data don't you have to disclose that in europe like government filing yeah what about that don't when you do deals like this in europe uh if my what i'm asking is if my research team did couldn't they probably find how much that investor has put in don't you have to you don't have to disclose that in europe we don't have to disclose it why is that [Music] yeah we don't have to disclose it it's not a public listed company so we're not we don't have to disclose it interesting well hey congratulations so what's the advice there for other entrepreneurs that have built a great company right how can they also do what you did and sell a chunk of the business but still staying i mean do you still have control of the business can you do what you want i mean nobody can nobody can really do what you what he wants but still i have to say we have a large chunk of control we are now in the in the group management we are the group management we are now owning so to say or we are part owners of sort of the three other companies and um yeah i mean what what what was our what is an advice for an entrepreneur i mean i think i think from from a european or german perspective we did quite well as i already said and um i mean i if if i look back i think we sold too early yeah or we could have raised more to a fairly good valuation at that time and um back then in 2017 and i think we have grown much we could have grown faster with more um vc money in inside so but at the end we are very happy because actually we have we have on a personal note we have put enough behind the firewall but and and now we still have control and can do entrepreneurial work on a larger basis which is very nice is the company is the company profitable today yes it is it is that that's great how profitable um i mean we have we have around let's say 30 30 um uh 30 margin so you can calculate it yeah that's great so that would be about 6 million to the bottom line every year on 20 million a little bit more yeah that's great so what do you do with that capital do you pay it out as dividends to employees and you know kind of some goes to the investor but now we're back in back on investment mode so last year was a little bit like testing how profitable that can be so now we're back in investing mode and checking out what what possibilities we have in order to buy other companies and and we are growing quite good we are now adopting we are venturing or we are evaluating in terms of product-led growth a lot yeah i think this is a very good concept for us startups um and uh yeah we do a lot of stuff in there how many folks are on the team uh at facelift we're around 180 plus we have an an automated let's say automated agency which are already another 70 so in total we are two 250 how many how many engineers engineers about 60 and any quota carrying sales reps sorry what a quota carrying sales reps uh yes yes yes sure how many uh we have about 35 to 40. and one of the things entrepreneurs struggle with when they're building a sales team is how to set up the quota structure right so how do you incentivize your sales people yeah i mean and i mean this changes um when we when we went for profitability uh for sure it was different than it is now when are back on a r track um they get a quota the the the the the the we call the conversion team they get a quota on the new bill sales and then we have a success team which gets the quota on the renewal and nature and zero as they're our target and um yeah it's about ten percent of the of the 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