How Geeklab CEO Jesse Lempiäinen grew Geeklab to $1.3M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

he was in charge of getting installs done at his last Mobile gaming company Mobile app gaming company and said no there's no good tool for this let me build any launched geeklab.app in 2019 they're doing 60 000 a month today in Revenue across 60 paid accounts up from 27 000 a month just a year ago they're looking right now at getting a round out round done targeting a 1.5 million raise at somewhere near 12 million post money valuation hey folks my guest today is Jesse lempiano and he's an experienced product manager marketer previously at Rovio leading the launch for Angry Birds dream blast and successful collaborations with Legends such as Iron Maiden and the Super Bowl he founded geek lab to solve app marketing challenges serving top mobile gaming Studios and we're sipping to the best app marketing agency award it's called geeklab.app Jesse you ready to take us at the top hey Nathan thanks for thanks for having me uh yeah so by the way we are you're helping these mobile app developers get more installs are you doing this via software or Consulting yeah exactly so so through software uh so in other words like uh you know when you're scrolling on Tick Tock or Instagram or whatnot and uh you click an ad so on average around like 20 to 30 of those peoples actually only end up installing the app so we have a software that allows you to optimize that flow and actually make it all the way as high up to 80 so truly multiply the amount of installs that you'll get interesting and so a lot of people use like a tool like pendo for this on their website applications you sort of help them do this but inside a mobile app activation process right and we're actually one step step above even so so we're actually at that exact moment when the users decide whether or not they hit the install button so on the App Stores in Google Play Store so that's kind of our sweet spot where we uh tackle the the marketability issues understood and give me a general sense of of Economics here how much do customers pay on average per month to use the technology yeah uh so on average we're a bit over a thousand bucks a month uh 1200 ish uh and it ranges from all the way up from like 300 bucks a month uh to like 5 000 plus so you asked earlier whether we're strictly software or also uh also uh on on the agency side of things so we don't have an agency uh but as you mentioned we actually won the app marketing agency award like this year so how it goes is that with like the very high-end uh like tiers that pay us like 5 000 bucks a month ish uh so we actually are very hands on in helping them not only use our tool but also building the strategies around like how they can get the most out of our tool and make successful campaigns you upsell the strategy you know a one-time consulting fee of 50 000 bucks or is that just included in their monthly plan we've actually we've quite a lot like play around with this this strategy and so far we've found that uh in some use cases it's still like a good hook to to sell like a once off consultancy first and showcase what we can do and then like on that based on that like start the ongoing uh billing but uh but now these days the best solution we found out is that we actually take three months retainer or so and then get it from there and typically then those like uh transfers to like ongoing months give me more the background story here when did you launch the company what year right so uh it was actually 2019 when we got the idea I was still working at Romeo back at that time and and this was actually a problem that I had at Rovio so I was trying to find a it's a a tool that would allow me to actually uh like find out what would be the best app name for a new game that we were making and I looked at the market I saw one tool that didn't work and another one that costed like 60 000 bucks and for this one test and I was like okay there there's got to be an easy way to do this called my friend uh I said let's fix this uh he said yeah we need two other guys to to help us actually build this tool and then we got our founding team together 2019 uh and got our like first sort of NDP out in 2020 uh right in the midst of of code actually uh so another covet uh uh like spawn there were four there were four co-founders that you split Equity evenly at the start uh not not really uh we've done some shifts after that as well it's the first tough conversation you have as a Founder right so help our audience how did you guys decide who gets what equity like uh so so basically we we just looked at like what everyone's doing so so what are the responsibilities and how much time as well like because we we sort of split it between all the founders jumped in into it right away full time and so on so like uh that that was kind of the everything also part of our company culture from from starting from us Founders was like uh no and that's what we live live by as Founders and we've lived by ever since so uh that's how we got with with those tough conversations just strictly talking about like things as they are and putting things on the table and being honest about things 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 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 so 2019 you get going first customer that year walk us through how many customers you have now today So currently today um like we have around 60 paying customers at the moment uh so we're talking about like game developers uh mostly um 60-ish then we have a lot of we have a soft spot for Indie developers and and uh and smaller Studios trying to make it uh so so we have plenty of free users too that we we uh all in all I mean we've had uh over over a thousand sign ups uh and an actual like uh users uh but uh well what does that mean how many of the Thousand signups have actually started like installed the software and started using it exactly so uh a lot of those like over 90 has just like kind of looked around the tool and and not really had the use case for it so so the thing is that with our tool you can actually create like app store pages and kind of these app pages without actually having the app so we've had a lot of curiosity out of like actual people who would want to use the tool for business purposes just to play around with it and see like how their own app could look like and uh for just to say the numbers in a very clear way a thousand have signed up today 90 have played around but then left so 100 are still sticking around and 60 of the 100 are paying customers around this year those those numbers are okay interesting so 60 customers at a thousand bucks a month would put you at sixty thousand dollars...