How Freeverse.io CEO Alun Evans grew Freeverse.io to $100.2K revenue and 2 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is alan evans he's got 15 years experience in the tech industry and has a strong passion for building teams that create products to solve real problems he was previously ceo at share3d.io cto of body pal and director of barcelona world race of the game he's got a phd in medical physics from the university of college london ellen you ready to take it to the top absolutely yeah let's go all right you're now building freeverse.io which is effectively this concept called living assets nft 2.0 is what you're calling it what does that mean yeah um i think what's really interesting we've seen in 2021 is how the nft space has exploded right it's heading for like 20 billion in in market cap in this year i think from a few hundred million last year and uh it's great we're really excited to see that there's been so much of an explosion in this space but i think a lot of the value of current generation nfts are based on the speculation about how rare they are and at freeverse when we founded the company three years ago um what we were really interested in is how we could generate nfts that would actually have value based on how they are used so how the user can actually interact with those nfts and affect their value and therefore drive up the price and so that they can buy and sell for something that's not just speculation so give me your top use case right now tell the story of a customer using you guys and it's worked exactly how you hoped it would yeah so actually we're very excited we're launching our platform to production uh next month with our first client which is a small marketplace in ibiza the uh the mediterranean island of ibiza and uh we're very excited we're signing a couple of deals unfortunately i can't announce who they are we're signing a couple of deals one for a huge um event uh in february next year and also one with some super big ip based over celebrity ip in the united states so we're really excited about about that and see how that goes you've had three years incubating this you all pre-revenue so it begs the question how did you fund your personal rent food things like that um yeah so we were we were lucky um so both myself and most importantly my co-founder tony mateos had previous startup experience um and we had a quite an extensive network of angels and so we went to uh then we've raised two funding rounds so far we're in the middle of our third funding round right now um and we went to our network of angels and and pitched them a great idea to really really transform an industry and i think i think what's really important about when was that first round the first round was in 2019 uh the second round was earlier this year and now with the boom with nfts we're seeing a great interest from investors now so we're sort of in the middle of raising our third round now so that 2019 round how much did you raise there we raised half a million so we're in europe and so typically the initial angel rounds in europe are much smaller than perhaps you're accustomed to in the states uh so we raised half a million from angel investors then we raised just under a million uh earlier on this year and now in this round we're going to slightly something bigger so and so um walk me through you know when you raise that first round of capital uh what what's the story sound like is it the same same story you're telling today in your new funding round uh it's very similar the difference is now we have we have a product and we have a platform um we have clients contracts that are signed we have people are going to use them right um and i think it's really interesting when you're raising money pre-revenue um because you don't have you know the standard kpis and the metrics and and the revenue and the growth that investors like to see however i think a lot of investors especially um sharp investors um what they're really interested in is vision right and if you have a vision that you are going to change the world right then that's uh and it sounds a bit trite right to be watching too many reruns of silicon valley perhaps on on the television but if you have a vision that you are going to change the world and that vision is coherent and you're a strong team then that's something that investors like to see and that's something i think that's been reflected in the success we found raising money so far and so how is the team structure how many co-founders do you guys have uh we're four co-founders um so i'm ceo um my uh the cto our cto is telling mateos who's uh absolute genius 30 patents to his name very intelligent guy and also a very very charismatic guy as well so um and then joining us is our head of engineering he's alessandro he's a real uh blockchain expert and uh ferrana stanley is our chief operating officer who's got a lot of experience in managing large teams as well so we're quite a strong funding team and obviously if you believe you're building something big yeah you want capital to execute that vision but you also want to be smart about ownership and dilution so when you thought about that 500k pre-seed back in 2019 how did you structure that in terms of cap how much of the company did you sell [Music] yeah around about 20 so we've tried to structure every single of the rounds following the standards you know diluting 20 i think it's very difficult when you're when you are raising in a situation like that in your pre-revenue um you it's very difficult to control that level of how much you dilute because obviously you want to raise more money to give you more runway um but the more obviously the more you raise um you know it's very difficult to negotiate a higher valuation for the company when you're when you're raising so much money when you don't have that revenue so it's something we find um again for this round that we're raising right now it's going to follow a similar uh similar similar structure i think um the difference is now um really we have a product we have clients that are signs um we're launching we have a road map and most importantly uh perhaps most luckily we're in one of the hottest spaces in investment uh right now which is the nft space so um we're very lucky in that sense you said customers are assigned how many customers have signed yeah we've got two clients signed up right now um uh one of which is this uh this uh client in ibiza which is one of the one of the major universities you're interested in living assets for educate for tracking educational um uh progress and then and how in your professional training so one of the larger universities in the states has signed up with us and we're judging so we have a really interesting very new model where we charge uh it's quite simple in maximum money sense we charge a monthly fee uh based on the number of nfts that are launched that are launched within that the universe for the client and also commission on the trade for each um sale of those entities on our platform i see okay so what is the subscription fee you know average these two contracts together on average what are they paying per month um it depends entirely on how many entities they launch so let me give you an example right so if a client were to come and launch like a thousand ft's they would pay like um a hundred years a month so very loads of initial subscription that scales very quickly so if they're you know launching with a million nfts and the advantage of our platform is that it's the advantage of our living asset nft is that we don't want them to be valued just by how rare they are they don't want to be these exclusive expensive things what we want to be is that they can essentially be given away for very low cost or for free and then evolved and upgraded if you like by the users so if you imagine good state where you have like a million nfts uh being being created and out there in the in the in the universe and that will be several hundred thousand euros of recurring revenue a month in the in the monthly subscription but um you know it really depends also as well how much of those nfts are traded because a lot of our revenue predictions come on forecasts of how much those revenues we trade averages entities will be traded so that's quite an interesting duopoly between that recurring revenue and and the commission in the marketplace yeah i'm trying to capture a sense of how big these first sort of contracts are so between the two of them how many total nfts did they basically sign and say yes i want to pay for this many thousands of nfts so they'll both be developing entities when as they go off so the to start off with they'll be launching a few thousand nfts um the provisions for the contracts we're signing now uh for to launch next year uh to launch you know several hundreds of thousands of nfts so that would be a much much larger escalation oh and i know but but the two sign today that's what i'm trying to get at so the two signed today though they're starting with like two three thousand it sounds like four thousand nft something like that yeah that's about right yeah okay got it so that means each of these contract values are something like a thousand dollars a month a hundred fifty dollars a thousand employees i see well but but no it's not that they're lower high i mean this is a big deal you got your first two you know basically customer contract sign this is a massive moment um i'm curious just to hear how you think about scaling so when you look at your revenue projections...