How fuelfinance CEO Alyona Mysko grew fuelfinance to $618.1K revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is alyona misco she is uh she's got really fuel uh she's building fuel finance which is fuel for your cloud-based financial department she does spreadsheets graphs and automations but her backstory is interesting obviously founder and ceo but she worked in finance for more than 10 years being an expert in financial planning and risk management during this period she was a lector for students over 1500 participated in incubators and all-around startup person two years ago she launched fuel finance dive deep into staff into ceo staff details trying to change the world of finance it's fuel finance dot me if you want to follow along al janna are you ready to take it to the top yeah hi hi nice to meet you i i thank you for making time for me the audience won't know this because you're wearing a massive smile and you look super healthy but you're actually based in ukraine what part of ukraine are you in i'm in western ukraine it's near leave but another city run from kievsky yep why again thanks for reaching out the second you reached i said i i want to obviously capture your story talk about your startup and i'm glad you're hopefully in a safe spot right now yeah we have we have like syrian today one hour ago but i'm glad that i can talk now today with you so what happens is siren goes off and you you sort of go into a bunker or a basement or something yeah yeah yeah it's a bomb shelter usually well is that where you are right now no no it's not bomb shelter i'm now in working but we have bomb shelter here like near this co-working so we all usually go there okay okay got it well thanks for that extra context i'm glad you're okay tell me about fuel finance what do you tell me tell give me a story of a customer that's paying you uh yeah first of all like i was working really in finance very long time and i always see these problems huge problems that founders they really don't like their finance and it's not something glamorous or not something very exciting for all people not only for founders uh but i'm really in love with finance and i believe that it's like the new way of business management it is a new way of thinking and like additional very cool skill for all founders that's why we created fuel to completely change the way how founders think about finance and make really cool easy fast financial function for all founders for all startups because i believe they can really grow faster and more efficient with good financial functions are these founders paying for your tool or cfos at startups paying for the tool founders so we completely like work with founders and we really like cloud financial department so we cover software parts with all automations and with planning plan fact analysis was all dashboards beautiful and also we covered like uh financial success manager they are like guided by our clients guided by our financial success managers to help them understand what is going on inside their software and inside their old graphs and so what is a what are companies or founders paying per month on average to use your tool yeah like uh we have subscriptions starting from 999 dollars per month and uh usually it's like our basic price was that's like a thousand dollars a thousand per month yeah yeah okay and when did you launch the business what year uh it was two and a half years ago so it was uh 2019 before college 2019 and are you the are you the sole founder uh alyona or do you have a co-founder i was a solo founder but uh six months ago i am now have co-founder uh yara savage so now i'm not solo founder and i'm happy 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 evaluation 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 how much equity did you give him or her uh equity yeah did you give him equity uh yeah but it's not information that we are ready to share you you still you owned 100 at the beginning though right yeah okay got ian you still own the majority right yeah okay fair enough and how many folks are on the team today full time uh we have 23 people full time 23 wow okay and how many paying customers today um we have already 30 paying customers and and they pay on average you told us a thousand per month so you're doing about 30 000 some some of them paying more so i we have like the price the price starting from one thousand dollars but we have also other higher packages for uh more like later stage startups so 30 times your minimum price of a thousand per month is 30 000 of monthly recurring revenue it sounds like you're doing more how much more uh we have like uh we're now growing from months to months uh 15 20 percent that's great and i guess if you're at like 30 or 40 000 a month today in revenue where were you exactly one year ago oh we like one year ago we were like completely three times less so what does that mean like says that five thousand a month or ten thousand a month yeah yeah ten thousand it was a little bit like ten thousand months uh one year ago okay so you've you've tripled the business then over the past 12 months yeah congratulations keep growing even during the war that's amazing and have you bootstrapped the business or did you decide to raise uh we now uh like every time before like this this month we were like bootstrap and uh like all two years two years and a half we were like uh profitable and break even and uh but now we already started to think about fundraising and how much would you look to raise uh when i was thinking about one two millions but we still analyze uh the situation because we are really break even and we simply want now to invest this money to boost sales marketing and product development like with uh more speeds again i mean are you sure that more money will enable you to move faster uh like do you know where you would plow that money into because obviously it's delusions a real thing you got to give a bunch of equity yeah uh we like we made many different tests like one year ago and as i'm really a financial person so i need to have like data proven ideas and uh very understandable and proven financial forecasts and that's why i had many thoughts about if we need to really fundraise because we are break even and we are growing uh but on the other hand i also understand that market and what we want to deliver to this market what we want to create we need much much more and we simply already understand what uh what already works in sales and marketing for us and especially we totally understand how products should be developed in the years like months and years so that's why uh for us now at this period of time fundraising is uh really reasonable i think and now joanna how much equity do you think you have to give up if you raise two million well we think about like we have now seed round basic so it's like 15 20 usually uh when we talk about seed rounds it's usually part of equity yeah you'd raise two million and this would be your seed round yeah yeah yeah so you're willing to sell 15 to 20 percent of the business for two million yeah okay well maybe this interview people will reach out afterwards and go i want to invest let's see what i mean it is i mean look everyone's gonna be wondering listening to this like how is she doing this in ukraine in the middle of a war i mean how are you just really good at compartmentalizing how do you keep your team focused on this when they've got family members being killed and there's bombs flying and sirens going off uh i think that all ukrainians now very hard working i think even more than it was before the war because now we have no other ways so we all should work to help ukrainian economy and especially uh i also understand now all our team members when they work it's like like type of um i think type also relaxation and don't think about all other around and uh don't ring like all different views so that's why i think uh it's because like how how we deal with it with everything what is going on now in ukraine and uh that's why i think people stay productive but yes we now already understand after two months so it's like we understand that it can be like much longer period of time with the worst so now we try to understand when we need like to make some short break and some day offs for different team members because it's also complicated to work i think now we work like 15 hours per day and simply like without some weekend or something like that because when we have time uh we try to volunteer and make all other things so we couldn't say that we have some weekend of time to rest now or like different hobbies time for hobbies so that's why we simply have work or help the country understood understood that makes sense well again we're obviously rooting for you guys and congrats on balancing all this and at one time shifting back to growth before we wrap up you obviously are a tester you're in analytics you're all in on analytics what does it cost you what's your cac to get a new a thousand dollar a month customer uh we have now positive position so like otd to cc ratio seven to one so that's why we are like well that doesn't answer the question though so what what what's the dollar value of the lifetime you're putting on a customer uh we now have approximate like uh lifetime value more than twenty thousand dollars per customer okay and so when you say seven to one uh you're spending something like twenty five hundred dollars to acquire a customer uh twenty five yeah twenty five hundred years like something like that yes yeah so twenty thousand of lifetime value divided by two thousand five hundred attack is about an eight to one or seven to one ratio yeah yeah and where are you spending that two thousand five hundred on cac we now calculate in this month only our hours uh spending because uh we don't have like digital marketing or some special investments in marketing so we simply calculate like our salaries now on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's the last book that you read uh last book uh i'm now reading this book uh about ventures be smarter than the lawyer because uh i had the recommendation that this book is very important to read before fundraising number two is there a founder or ceo that you're following or studying uh founder a ceo couldn't remember i i really following now on twitter and uh i like uh bosses that he had now especially for sales businesses i couldn't remember like his name but it's really interesting yeah yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building uh fuel favorite tool for building fuel yep notion number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night now i think it's like six uh six hours on average six okay and what's your situation married single kids single okay no kids how old are you uh 29 29 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um when i was 20. no i think everything was okay with me it's not something that you wish you would change it's just something you wish you knew um yeah one reason i wish i knew that i simply can ask everyone about like 30 minutes call and ask about different recommendations about personal development and i wish i could use much earlier than at 26 or 27. guys there you have it fuel finance helping founders of startups understand their finances more clearly they've grown from 10 000 a month up to 30 000 a month in revenue or 360 000 in terms of run rate she's building something special here team of 23 they're bootstrapped today and profitable break even looking at raising 2 million selling the 15 to 20 percent of the business we'll see if she can get it done doing this all with her teammates in ukraine western ukraine eastern ukraine spread all out alliance incredible story thanks for taking this off thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red 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