How Fhoster CEO Antonio Leonforte grew Fhoster to $318.8K revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is antonio leoforte he has a master's degree in electronic engineering in 1992 worked initially in the aerospace industry in italy england and the netherlands he founded his first company in 1995 and then launched his current company f foster in 2008 raised 1.2 million from private investors in a vc fund and then recently a company in the iot industry antonio are you ready to take us to the top yeah hi i hope so that's my effort good all right so what do you a focused on right now f hofstra or this iot company no actually foster has a as a development plan to enter the iot field we're not focused on the edi in iot now but that's one of the development a horizon horizon that we have okay so f hoster is your main focus explain to us kind of what the company does and specifically what's your revenue model is it a peer play sas company it's a platform as a service company yes and the the business of the platform is providing developers with an innovative way to to create to create business management information system in a much faster way and what we do have is a is a web-based platform allowing developers to model their applications and turn them into executable applications in a matter of minutes from conceptual models not by coding okay and what is what is kind of the average company or developer pay you per month to your per year to use this software well we have accounts ranging from five thousand dollars per year to seventy thousand dollars per year what would you say is a fair average uh the average i would say it's around ten thousand per year 10 000 per year okay very good and this is mainly development teams paying you well uh we do have uh we do have customers who are developers themselves but we also have uh and and and customers so in that case we got an internal department making using the platform internally to develop the final solution and in that case we get paid for the modeling as well i see so we have we got both the the the business models we provide the tool for creating applications so that other system integrators can use can use the platform or we use it ourselves to deliver final solutions to the customer i see okay you launched company in 2008 and how many employees are yet today are team members today today we've got we have 25 people okay where's everyone based we are based in rome italy oh rome very beautiful place huh yeah it is it's it's yeah there's a lot of traffic it's not so easy to live in rome it's better to be a tourist here but we managed to make business as well that's great and uh how many customers have you scaled to today well the demand and we've got 80 percent of the revenues come from about 12 customers at this point in time so not that much we focused we initially we tried to to exploit these very small business and micro companies but then in the end we realized that our our best market is in medium or large organizations okay so 12 enterprises but when you look at your entire customer base how many total customers uh i think they're about 30 now 3-0 okay so i mean can i take 30 times a 10 000 kind of per year average you gave me and you guys are doing about 25 grand a month right now something like that the last the average we in the last year we made 1.1 million in in revenues and the licenses from just pure licensing you know so licensing of the of the platform to developers were about 250 000 dollars and the rest is from consultancy so services provided to customers for creating their applications okay so just be clear and last year you did 250 000 in total just software sales and then about caught 900 000 in consulting on top of that that's correct okay so this like today like last month how much revenue are you doing per month just on the software not not consulting well i would say uh just on software licenses well uh i think we are in the order of uh let me think about uh 20 25 000 and this month yeah yeah that would be about 30 customers again paying 10 grand per year which is about 800 bucks per month so 800 times 30 comes out to about 25 000 per month that sounds about right uh have you done this bootstrapped antonio or have you raised capital no we raised capital we raised one 1.3 million in dollars in two different rounds we gave we made a seed round of about a quarter of a million and then we the rest in the second round okay and this year 2018 how much total revenue will you end with last year you did 1.1 million i don't know because we are investing a lot and uh so we had we had in the development of the platform sorry sorry i don't mean bottom line i mean top line revenue top line i hope we will make one one million and a half okay i mean but there's only like 30 days left in the year so you shouldn't i mean you should know what you're gonna do you think it's gonna be 1.5 million i i guess so i guess so yes roughly that okay and and talk to me about churn churn is kirk on a sas company what is your churn today it's very low i tell you it's very low how low um yeah it's uh well in in eight years of operations i've lost three customers up to now uh once a customer get on board they usually get want to have want to develop other applications it's very it's very difficult that they just leave it's it's also quite hard for them because they they build their information system our platform and you know to to bring all the stuff elsewhere it would mean that they would lose the advantage of making evolutive maintenance of the platform in such an easy way so it's hard for them to yeah to you know to give up on that very good antonio good stuff here let's wrap up with the famous five one word answers if you can number one what's your favorite business book uh actually it's it's not a business book it's like it's more like a marketing book it's it's never read alone that's a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now well i like a local mask i long mass is my is my meal number three how many uh what is your billing tool that you use at the company well we actually are using a tool we are not we are actually uh using a tool with that has been developed by uh by ourselves using the platform by the way okay and so we yeah using our own platform we have developed our erp and uh we are using that for billing number four how many hours i'll sleep to get every night so we said again how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh i do sleep i actually do how many hours yeah seven eight hours okay and what's your situation married single kids i'm married i've got two kids yeah they have more than 18. so that's great and how old are you i'm 43. 43. last question antonio what do you wish your 20 year old self knew sorry said again what do you wish your 20 year old self knew well i'm sorry when you were when you were 20 what is something you wish you knew ah okay well uh i wish i knew how hard it is to to create a developmental platform it's not a product that you can sell and look this this thing is doing this this and this it's much harder to create a tool and explain people what they could do with the development platform that is one order of magnitude harder and i wish i knew that guys it's harder than you think launched in 2008 f hoster again serving up and helping about 30 developers and end customers that pay on average 10 grand per year doing about 25 grand per month right now they also do a significant portion of consulting work so they'll do about 1.5 million this year up from 1.1 million bucks last year team of 25 people based in rome antonio thank you for taking us to the top so thank you so much bye-bye