How Geeklab CEO Jesse Lempiäinen grew 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 a month today in Revenue where were you exactly one year ago yeah exactly one year ago uh we were a bit over close to 30k uh around okay um mrr and then we hit like a 50k mrr uh by the end of last month uh last year uh and and been we're now on track on on reaching uh like a million ARR quite soon so that's that's currently our next draft or have you raised capital so far 100 bootstrapped oh great but uh I will say though that like that will change this year for sure um for all the other Founders as well uh they they definitely know the pain if they bootstrapped um for us we've sort of seen currently that it actually limits our growth quite a bit so uh like I said we have 60 so we have 60 customers now and and um one of the core things for us is to be very Hands-On on helping them to get the most out of the tool because when we can actually showcase the amount of value that our tool can bring so then uh we we make our turn negative uh because they they share the cross stories everywhere Gaming Community is awesome uh but like for us to be able to do that we actually have to have like people Hands-On helping them and having the expertise in and and uh bootstrapping with our our margins is is making its own with these economies where we want to have buffer for our employees and make sure that they have have a job to go into uh months months ahead uh so uh it's just uh it takes a lot of time to sort of build up that buffer and then then to kind of hire again to grow again well but Jesse I mean using bootstrapping isn't holding your growth back per se because like everything you just articulated has nothing to do with growth it just has to do it has to do with people that you think you want to hire ahead of growth ultimately if you hire the people they've got to be creative enough to go get any new users so where do you know you can spend money to go get new users and grow faster uh right uh and well that's actually one of the things that we are now now like solving as well like currently our sales pipeline is is quite focused on on Founders as well and Gaming Community in general so uh it's it's it's a lot about like uh Outreach uh participating on uh on The Gaming Community uh the events and everything how does money solve that you said bootstrapping is restricting you I think I mean from what you're telling me it's like how do you know it's money burstick new versus creativity restricting you so so like honestly we actually uh by the end of last year we we didn't take all the all the agreements in uh in December that we could have so we actually put some agreements uh that we're just gonna start them in in January where we knew that we were going to get more people because we wanted to make sure that we actually have enough account managers to take care of them rather than us ending up on a situation where we actually wear a bit um like earlier last year uh where we had a lot of customers coming in and then like not clear enough processes not enough people to then actually serve them in a level that we we wished to serve them so that served them I mean this sounds to me like a lot like agencies and agency margin I mean you haven't used the word software to serve them at all uh I mean is this this is really I mean this feels to me like an agency oh well I'll put it this way every every single uh like campaign that we run uh are 100 using our our platform so you can't run a single campaign even even our agency if you will can't run a single campaign without utilizing our platform uh and on the other side we have customers that only use our platform where we just saw like a technical related issues with well but then why do you require hiring more account reps to onboard new people if they only use the technology why do you need more human why do you have to throw humans at the problem uh I I guess it's it comes down to also the fact on on um kind of our main customer segments right now so we have three customer main customer segments we have bigger like Enterprise Solutions where uh we we talk about like the the Giants in the gaming industry if you take a look at on our side you can say multiple of this uh so Rovio being being one of the examples but like then out of the ones that we can't disclose uh if you take a look at top 10 Mobile gaming companies so we have plenty of those uh and uh like with those like they really really want Hands-On help and someone from our team to actually help on the strategies as well uh and then on the second tier we have uh sort of a bit smaller companies that do like require that like the Hands-On support our customer success managers to help them and then we have like the the uh self-serve uh segment which is currently the one that we have not optimized as much as the uh understand it to I guess we're running out of time here but I do want to show you said very definitively when I said are you bootstrap you said yes but that will change this year do you have a term sheet in hand already or why do you say that so confidently uh yeah yeah so we've we've had plenty of discussions and and actually multiple of those uh late last year and now kind of just figuring out how to to move forward from here well we didn't answer my question do you have a signed term sheet not yet signed okay so like how do you convert those conversations into real action because a lot of Founders right now are having a lot of conversations but the BC Market is close I mean effectively closed yeah so so what where we found success is really by well first of all we we are profitable business uh so that puts us in a totally different situation than yeah then a lot of uh developers uh companies just trying to to make it um and uh just how you can actually articulate the vision uh I I think that's that's kind of the learning that I I did over 100 calls uh last year uh with with faces to to kind of get to a point where we have multiple them Shades uh and we actually have the opportunity to to decide uh where to go uh so yeah uh just but you just see how you don't have but you don't have multiple term sheets right now uh yeah we do so I I say we didn't we have we didn't sign sign one oh you do have term sheets though yeah oh I see so I guess what are you waiting for uh we're we're waiting for uh like uh we we could have had this conversation in in about two weeks or so and uh and I I could have been able to answer a bit differently but uh but yeah uh anyways I'm sure like the funding situation is is about change and I'm trying to help my Founders learn who are listening you said you had a lot of calls last year macroeconomics are changing things that are totally outside of your control right has something to do with your business but these markets are shut down you're saying not for me I'm gonna get a deal done and I'm gonna say it very confidently my audience is going to go well why is he so confident everything even even another profitable bootstrap companies can't raise right now no one can raise Equity right now why can you raise equity yeah okay so so I have some ndis in place where that prevents me for saying too much but like likes it so we've actually signed uh like uh a letter of intents already and and so on and things are moving on that front again what I'm the reason I'm asking these questions because like there's there's tons of VCS right now that are still taking meetings with Founders and those VCS are not deploying money they just take the meanings that feels good that's what they're supposed to be doing as a great VC they're not actually deploying I mean how do you make sure this Loi the term whatever that you've signed how do you make sure it actually gets done and you you hedge yourself from these macroeconomic risks of the world economy going into a recession and impacting the VCU signed an Loi with uh well what like one thing as well like for us it was hot like the hardest to get like that first term uh but as soon as we got that so then like all the other vs got scared and and now we're in a situation where the one that we move forward with is going to be closed um how much are you hoping to raise uh 1.5 million okay 1.5 interesting and this would be your I mean most folks in their pre-seed round are selling you know 15 20 of the company are you sort of in that range uh yeah yeah a bit less than that actually so we were happy to to uh make quite good good times yeah so that's about like a seven eight million post money evaluation selling under 15 to the company something like that uh 12 12 to be exact oh that's great I mean yeah yeah I mean that's great I mean you're I mean so that would that would be more than a I mean you can do the multiple on that right but that's a good multiple in this market um you're confident that multiple will hold up as you go through diligence and actually work towards the money being wired and closed yep yep okay cool and what's the what's the team size today how many folks are full-time uh 13. uh sorry full-time uh so actually uh nine which is not one guy left for a student Loop so yeah well we hope you get everything closed we're out of time though today let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh monetizing Innovation um well I would have said a lot of the Rings or something but uh business related so monetizing Innovation number two is our CEO you're following or studying um I have to say uh even though this guy's a mainstream guy uh so the supercell CEO IL Cabana us being heavily related like heavily invested in gaming industry and uh and him like for two reasons one like what was his name Jesse so he's the CEO of supercell The Finnish uh gaming giant um so yeah he's uh also like whenever we talk with startups it's either him personally or or supercell that's kind of packed him here in Finland so that's I think awesome as well that they put the the success back to the market very cool number three what's your favorite online tool for building geek lab uh like uh I would people will hate me for this but I have to say Chachi pity has like just made so many processes so much faster uh great number four or GitHub yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh between five to six okay and what's your situation married single kids uh married married uh for uh three three years now any kids I know not yet all right and Jesse how old are you this company uh 27. last question something you wishing you when you were 20. uh uh don't invest in cryptos guys there you have it he was in charge of getting installs done at his last mobile uh gaming company Mobile app gaming company and said you know there's no good tool for this let me build did he 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 we're certainly Jesse rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top thanks thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on 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