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...