How Gellify Reached $25M Revenue Across 75 Customers While Staying Profitable (Interview with CEO Fabio Nalucci)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Gellify.com launched in 2017, they broke 1,000,000 in revenue the first year, today doing 50,000,000 in revenue across 75 customers, that's up from 25,000,000 back in 2020. 50% of the revenue is SaaS, 50% is consulting. He sold his first company for all cash is what I foresee to Accenture for call it somewhere between 50 and $100,000,000. Now on round two here as he looks to continue to scale. He's raised about $30,000,000 total after and was a series

00:24a of 15,000,000 in 2019 and a 79,000,000 post money valuation. Hey folks, my guest today is Fabio Nalucci. He's been entrepreneur investor and founded a company called gellify in 2017, which helps support corporate innovation. Specifically, it's an innovation platform helping corporates innovate through B2B SaaS products. Before gellify, he sold i4c analytics to Accenture becoming sales global lead for analytics software. In 2020, he launched FNDX Ventures, a VC advisory company with 500,000,000 AUM, including its investment vehicle.

00:54Fabio, are you ready to take us to the top?

Fabio Nalucci

00:56>> Yeah. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

00:57Alright. So real quick, what did you learn selling I four c analytics to Accenture?

Fabio Nalucci

01:03>> It was 2014, actually in US. It was a very exciting experience. I learned so much from from that experience in the past, and it was the starting point of my investment career because it was very, let's say, liquid after that deal. So

Nathan Latka

01:22Mhmm. That's great. What was the sale price on that deal?

Fabio Nalucci

01:26>> Oh, it's it's still undisclosed because as you can imagine, they are listed. But I I can say that was more on the 100 millions figure than on the 50,000,000 figures just to That's ballpark. Fair.

Selling i4c Analytics to Accenture

Nathan Latka

01:42So between 50 and 100,000,000, closer to a 100,000,000, was a bunch of that stock or was it mostly cash for you?

Fabio Nalucci

01:48>> No.

01:50>> Exclusively cash because as you can imagine, they are list so they don't do equity swap in any case, then they give you some shares, but after you stay and any sort of bonus when you stay.

Nathan Latka

02:05And Fabio was I foresee bootstrapped or had you raised capital?

Fabio Nalucci

02:09>> No, actually it was the former way of doing you know, ventures because I started like in '20 in 2007 and so no capital raised and completely boot strapped. So I was, let's say, main shareholder.

Nathan Latka

02:25Wow. That's very cool. We have to get you to come speak at one of our events and tell us that story. We love a bootstrapper, you know, exiting. That's great. Let's fast forward now into gellify. What is gellify doing? Is it a pure play SaaS company?

What Gellify Does and Revenue Target

Fabio Nalucci

02:37>> No, is not completely pure SaaS company because actually what we do is supporting clients, large corporate mainly, in doing corporate innovation. And we have an internal platform, which is basically the typical SaaS platform. But at the same time, we do some bunch of services. We are going to close 50,000,000 this year in revenues. $5.00? Yes, exactly.

2022 Revenue and SaaS vs Consulting Split

Nathan Latka

03:04And what was revenue last year?

Fabio Nalucci

03:06>> It was roughly 25.

Nathan Latka

03:09Okay. And how much of the 25 was SaaS versus consulting?

Fabio Nalucci

03:13>> You can say roughly 50% is is something reasonable as

Nathan Latka

03:20a So 12,500,000 was SaaS, 12.5 consulting.

Geographic Focus: Italy, Spain, Middle East

Fabio Nalucci

03:25>> Yeah, exactly. Interesting. And so, yeah. And so, I mean, this is something very interesting for, because it's already a platform for innovation, which is already acting in three different geos, Italy, Spain, and Middle East. I I choose that that areas because and that geos because honestly I think that teaching how to do innovation in US and UK is too aggressive and so I decided to stay niche market but anyway very awarding in terms of potential market

04:04>> share. So that was the choice and we are now planning to open up in a new GPOs in Europe and then maybe in the future US as well.

Nathan Latka

04:16So Fabio, on just the SaaS side, what's the average company paying for your software?

Average SaaS Contract Value

Fabio Nalucci

04:21>> Oh, consider that it really depends on the vertical market because we are much more aggressive in pricing for banks, just to make an example, and large corp in the partial sector while we are less aggressive when it comes to

Nathan Latka

04:44let's say So, Fabio, what's the average? If I if I forced you into an average, what would you say? $100 a year, $10 a year?

Fabio Nalucci

04:50>> It's more in a a 100 K a year.

Nathan Latka

04:56Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

05:19your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:43get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

06:05not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

06:31going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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

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07:19the interview. And how many customers today are you working with?

Customer Breakdown: 75 Total, Large Corp vs SME

Fabio Nalucci

07:25>> It's roughly, you can count 25 large corp clients, which are my preferred one. Then we have roughly 50 in SME, small medium enterprises. It means from 500,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 in revenues. And honestly in in these clients the size of our platform is actually less in terms of pricing, I mean.

Average Revenue Per Customer and Largest Account

Nathan Latka

07:57So Fabio, if you did $25,000,000 in revenue last year across about 75 customers, that means the average customer paid something around $330,000 for the year. Is that about right?

Fabio Nalucci

08:08>> Yeah. Correct. On average, obviously you have some spike and you have some outlier in the What's the largest

Nathan Latka

08:15customer pay you per year? Any million dollar customers?

Fabio Nalucci

08:18>> We we have a bank, a large bank for which we have roughly three in a year contracts multi year. So just to make an example, this is what I define as pike or an outlier of our clients.

Nathan Latka

08:33Yeah. This is great. I mean, obviously, you can't build a $100,000,000 revenue business without a couple that pay you more than 1,000,000 per year. Did they start off at $3,000,000 a year or did you expand them? And if so, teach us how you drove the expansion.

Land and Expand Strategy and Meta-Platform

Fabio Nalucci

08:45>> It it's a typical letter expand and and when we enter, it was more like 500 ks, but then in three years time, we were able to grow that business till this 3,000,000 multi year for the next three years. But what we are doing is actually having enablement of of internal users to expand to a to a different level. Even because one of our strategy on platform is having some, let's say, a plug in from our startup

09:16>> portfolio, because we also invest in startups that are useful to create more traction into our platform. So what we can have is what we define meta platform. So our proprietary platform with plugins coming from different enabling technologies of our startups.

Nathan Latka

09:34Mhmm. Very cool. Now how many folks are full time at the company today?

Team Size and Engineering Headcount

Fabio Nalucci

09:39>> Roughly 300.

Nathan Latka

09:40300. How many are engineers?

Fabio Nalucci

09:45>> 85%.

Nathan Latka

09:46Oh, wow. Okay. Maybe like two thirty or so are engineers.

Fabio Nalucci

09:50>> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. We we have done small corporate functions, some marketing as you can imagine, administration stuff, and and a bunch of sales guys, but most of the sales are driven by our, let's say, the network of our managing partners.

Nathan Latka

10:06Mhmm. Mhmm. Now, I guess walk me through the sales reps. How many of them carry a quota?

Client Success Tribe and Sales Structure

Fabio Nalucci

10:13>> We have what we call client success tribe, that it is composed by 16 people nowadays.

Nathan Latka

10:21Okay. Interesting. And I guess funding history, you bootstrapped I four c before you sold to Accenture. Are you bootstrapping gellify or have you raised?

Funding History: $30M Across Three Rounds

Fabio Nalucci

10:29>> No. I raised till now 30,000,000.

Nathan Latka

10:32Okay. Take me to the last round. What year was it?

Fabio Nalucci

10:36>> '15.

Nathan Latka

10:37In 2015?

Fabio Nalucci

10:38>> No. No. Was no. Sorry. I said the '15 was the money raised as the last round that was in 2019.

Nathan Latka

10:452019, you raised $15,000,000. Would you consider that your series a?

Fabio Nalucci

10:51>> Probably I consider the the series A. Yes. Now we have some because we are profitable, which is very important nowadays because as as you can imagine in the last twelve months, the the works of VC changed completely. And we have some fees fund, let's say, asking to enter in the company with much, much bigger round because there is a lot of interest for profitable companies. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

11:20Now in 2019, when you did that round, most folks in our series A's are selling 10% of the company. Were you also selling about 10% of the business?

Fabio Nalucci

11:30>> It was slightly more than 10%. Okay. But but yes, I think it's reasonable.

Nathan Latka

11:37So something like a $100,000,000 post money valuation, maybe you sold 15%.

Fabio Nalucci

11:41>> Slight slightly slightly less.

11:45Okay.

11:45>> It was in eighty's, '79 to be 79,

Nathan Latka

11:52that's This post

Fabio Nalucci

11:55>> was the pre money.

Nathan Latka

11:57Pre money, okay, cool. That's very good. So call it 99 post, that's great. Any money raised before that or no?

Fabio Nalucci

12:04>> Yes. Yes. We raised another 15. So the total raise was 30 in three previous round and this was the last one at 15.

Nathan Latka

12:16And when so before 2019 So total total know. Before 2019, when did you raise the other 15,000,000?

Fabio Nalucci

12:23>> 2017, the first, let's say, seed rounder that was actually for for starting a company because they have a, let's say, very good network of people saying, if you start something else, we give you the money directly. And then another one in 2018 in the second half, and then in the second half of twenty nineteen.

Nathan Latka

12:43So again, in twenty twenty eighteen, how

12:46much did you raise in that round?

Fabio Nalucci

12:49>> 10. So we 5 before. 15.

Nathan Latka

12:52Yeah. That's what that's what

12:53>> I was looking.

12:53You made me work really hard for that. That that's what I was looking for. And so 5,000,000 seed round, 15,000,000 or maybe 5,000,000 pre seed, 10,000,000 seed, 15,000,000 series a, 30,000,000 total raise to date. Many people are gonna go, wait. Why did he give up on a bunch of the company? He's already rich. Doesn't he wanna keep equity? Why didn't he just fund it with his own money?

Fabio Nalucci

13:13>> I think it's pretty common nowadays. I see a lot of, let's say, rich people anyway, raising money from others. I think that is part of the reason is having some partners that are good enough to have an influence in the in the story. Just to make an example, in the last round, a a very big bank entering to the company and and so and that helps for example, closing that contract with the bank I was mentioned

13:44>> before. So I rather prefer to have some partners in the journey that helps in growing the company. So so. Other revenue Two

Revenue Milestones: $1M in Year One, $10M by 2019

Nathan Latka

13:56other revenue benchmarks I wanna grab from you before we wrap up. When did you cross 10,000,000 in revenue? What year?

Fabio Nalucci

14:03>> It was two years after launch of the company, after the starting of the company in late twenty eighteen, 2019.

14:10>> 2019.

Nathan Latka

14:11And we

Fabio Nalucci

14:12>> started the company in November, in November 2017. And so late twenty nineteen was was around 10,000,000.

Nathan Latka

14:19That's great. And when did you pass?

Fabio Nalucci

14:20>> That's before COVID.

Nathan Latka

14:21Yeah. When did you pass a million in revenue? Do you remember?

Fabio Nalucci

14:25>> Oh, the first year.

Nathan Latka

14:26Okay. Wow. Was there a First year?

Fabio Nalucci

14:27>> Wow. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:28And that was just a big a big customer or people you'd already worked with?

Fabio Nalucci

14:32>> No. I already worked with. I mean, it's not the the thing you do when you are, let's say, a twenty three years, you know, founders. I mean, I'm a a 47, so it was easy because a

14:45lot

14:45>> of clients trust me and then so it was the first meeting was like asking for, okay, guys, we start something new. Please sign here.

Nathan Latka

14:52Yeah. Yeah. That's great.

Fabio Nalucci

14:53>> Not not to be

14:54>> big deal, honestly.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

14:55Let's stop you on that. No. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Fabio Nalucci

15:00>> The book of Nike, the story of Nike.

15:04>> Shoe dog is a good one.

Nathan Latka

15:05Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Fabio Nalucci

15:09>> I I think that actually, I I don't wanna be, let's say, very easy in the in the but your marketing is something I really follow and study for many different reasons.

Nathan Latka

15:20Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company?

Fabio Nalucci

15:24>> Sorry. You said

Nathan Latka

15:25Your favorite online tool.

Fabio Nalucci

15:29>> Oh, this is a very good one. I've never thought about that, honestly. And

15:38>> I I don't know.

Nathan Latka

15:40Did you use this This

Fabio Nalucci

15:45>> morning, I actually used my car because I was racing in Mizano, it's

Nathan Latka

15:49No, Fabio. An online tool that you use, Figma, Google Calendar, G Suite, there's HubSpot.

Fabio Nalucci

15:55>> Honestly, it's a it's a a mainly email. So I do 95% of my time using Outlook. I mean, it's it's I'm not a tool fan. Okay.

Nathan Latka

16:08Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Fabio Nalucci

16:12>> Oh, I I typically sleep seven hours. I go to to bed at ten at 10PM and I wake up at five.

Nathan Latka

16:20And situation, married, single, kids?

Fabio Nalucci

16:23>> You can imagine. I have wonderful wife and one daughter.

16:29One daughter.

16:29>> Which is the reason why I go to sleep very yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:32And you said you're 47 years old, right?

Fabio Nalucci

16:35>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

16:36Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Fabio Nalucci

16:43>> I

16:46>> think

16:50>> having better idea on how the VC works.

Nathan Latka

16:55Guys, there we have it, gellify.com launched in 2017. They broke a million in revenue the first year. Today doing 50,000,000 in revenue across 75 customers. That's up from 25,000,000 back in 2020. 50% of the revenue is SaaS, 50% is consulting. He sold his first company for all cash is what I foresee to Accenture for call it somewhere between 50 and $100,000,000. Now on round two here, as he looks to continue to scale, he's raised about $30,000,000

17:19total after and was a series a of 15,000,000 in 2019 and a 79,000,000 post money valuation. Fabio, thank you for taking us to the top.

Fabio Nalucci

17:26>> Thank you very much.

Nathan Latka

17:28One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

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