How Fincome CEO Martin Courau grew Fincome to $36K revenue and 23 customers in 2023.

guys fincum.co they launched their MVP back in June they raised a Million Dollar pre-seed Round including 250k of non-dilutive capital from the French government had called a two percent cost to Capital they've used that to be Scrappy they've now got 23 oh sorry they've got under 100 paying customers but more than one paying customer these customers paying on average call it 130 to 150 per month a couple thousand bucks a monthly requiring Revenue as they look to keep scaling and extending their Runway hey folks my guest today is Martin carrot he's the former private Equity investor turned SAS entrepreneur he's an HEC Paris graduate and started at Goldman Sachs in London and Morgan Stanley in London before moving to PE after a student's strategy Consulting today he's the co co-founder of fincom that's with an e on the end fincum.com which is a real-time financial data platform for SAS Martin you ready to take it to the top absolutely let's go all right what kind of real-time data well so right now we update it every day but uh we're moving to closer to real time with updates coming in around every 20 minutes that's three times an hour and depending on the system uh we're pushing that limit because we want our clients to have the threat as data possible okay but what what so it's mainly the SAS companies but is it is it data that the CFO uses data that the tech people use I assume it's Finance fincom right it is so we're a financial data platform so basically we provide either the CFO and the finance team or the founder with the live financial data and kpis that they need to understand what's going on in their business on a day-to-day basis or even on an hour per hour business and to make the right decisions based on that and are companies paying you already for the product or are you pre-launch you know we launched a few months ago and we're scanning up our user base right now mainly through uh direct Acquisitions and Partnerships that's great okay so so walk me through sir what's an average customer pay for the platform so right now we're pricing it at around 100 euro per month uh we have a small discount for the annual plan else it's a basic month month to month plan and we're going to push that price point up to uh probably 150 uh almost 200 depending on the features because we have a big feature roadmap that we're delivering with a lot of features being pushed in the coming weeks and that's going to allow us to uh go for higher price points because we're delivering more value in our product and what's the I'm trying to go to it's not working for some reason what's the correct URL the website I'll send it to you right now okay with any at the end ah thin car oh God I got it Finn .com dot Co that's what I for some reason I don't know maybe you're in Paris right yeah we might have some some issues with uh us connections we've had that before we're I think I think that's what it is but let me I'll try and open it in an incognito window so I can ask better questions but like what what is the home page of like the big bold text across your homepage say so it's in French it's not translated yet but the uh the tagline is a 360 vision of the performance of your SAS in real time very cool okay so so folks are paying on average 130 bucks a month um and are you pricing based off number of seats or is it amount of data in the platform or how do you price so we're pricing it uh by the feature so basically you're gonna have a plan with a limited limited access to uh our feature that's mainly going to serve smaller clients that don't necessarily need to have the more advanced analytics feature that we offer and then we're going to have a Pro Plan for larger companies with bigger teams that need access to analytics that need access to cost analysis that need access to wider data sources that we can plug into our system that's how we're pressing it right now miracle and then take me back here so you launched a couple months ago but when did you write the first line of code for the platform was it 2022 or 2021 it was early 2022. yeah okay we spent 2021 sitting and getting the team together we started coding early 2022 uh we put the first version in June we pushed the uh updated version in September and we've been uh working on this one ever since how much money did you personally spend on the MVP before launching it honestly not that much I mean we have we raised fun but fundamentally uh we have this bootstrapping culture that we try to uphold uh honestly below 50 Grands and who didn't work uh so at the start we got our start with an agency and for the that was for the front end for the uh the back end and the algorithm which is where the real value lays uh that was our third associate uh Lucas who's uh who's our CTO very cool which agency did you use and are you would you recommend him are you still using them today no we're not using them because we're kind of outgrown their purpose uh it's a french-based agency called Blue Square we really recommend these guys they're great for trying to launch an MVP uh in France they're very agile they know the ropes they'll provide you with a ton of useful inputs this certainly uh saved us a lot of time and US helped us avoid a lot of mistakes to help you get the MVP live in addition with your third you know your CTO who did the back end work absolutely yeah yeah oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay very cool now how did you guys I mean it sounds like you raised but how did you pay your bills all last year when you were pre-revenue um our own assets basically okay so you just saved up some money before you quit and said okay savings every year well private Equity you know yeah it's uh it's a great career uh you know it was tough choosing to to leave it but you know the uh the draw of Entrepreneurship was just too strong but it's a it's a very well paid career so yeah we did have some money saved and uh we've been living on that ever since and uh well that changed obviously after we raised yeah now when did you raise what year we closed in July of 2022. okay and how much did you raise where is the million total we're out okay and as I said I'd be like your pre-seed round and then look most people were selling most people are selling like 15 to 20 in their pre-seat around were you serving that same range no lower than that okay good so that you are you you well then we there's something to learn from here because I'm always trying to help Founders avoid dilution so how are you able to give up less than 15 in your pre-seed round so uh we raised some non-diluted financing in that round so that's Equity plus some debt uh how would you raise debt though in your pre-revenue uh in France you can have access to loans even pre-revenue there's...