How Genially CEO Marine Dumoulin grew to $26.9M revenue and 60K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is alberto lopez he launched genially to provide a tool to create interactive communication experiences and more engaging content for more than two million of his current users worldwide he participates in tasks such as the business development strategy funding process and public relationships alberto are you ready to take us to the top yes hello thank you thanks for coming on and just to be clear are you one of the co-founders yes one of the co-founders i want to make sure that now the audience know that now we have more than seven million users so what does that mean what's the company doing what are they using well we provide a tool to make all kind of interactive content so that you are able to learn once one tool and you can create almost everything you can create infographics presentations video presentations gamification experiences and everything that you can imagine we save money and time to people because you have just to learn one want only tool and when you say seven million users uh are those free and paid sign ups yeah free and paid uh our conversion rate is around it's a little bit lower than one percent so we have uh yes more okay got it so 60 000 customers and about how much do you charge per month on average oh it depends we have different plans we have monthly plans and yearly plans our most expensive plan is one is 250 a year by which you can create you can use everything and our most affordable plan is the student one which is 15 euros a year but you will find some uh challenges for you for the use so what is the just because you have free pro master and team you have a bunch of different plans and you have professional and education there so there's a lot of things going on here can you just sort of give me an average what's the average customer pay per month would you say the average we could say around sixty six zero two years a year six zero a year sixty euros a year okay i'm trying to hear if you're saying one six or six zero six zero six zero six zero six year a year for for teachers teachers are around our eighty percent of our clients now can i take sixty thousand customers times five dollars a month you're doing about three hundred thousand dollars per month in revenue yes our our mrr in this moment is around three three hundred kmr three hundred thousand that's that's great i mean congratulations let's dive into this backstory and how you built this what year did you launch well we launched it in 2015 and but we didn't we didn't start to monetize till 2017. we started very slowly but now we have we are growing really really fast we are growing at a rate of 15 monthly average um so yes our marketing approach actually is its reality we we grow and grow because word of mouth because you know we have a logo in the creations we have around 70 million creations all around the world so more and more on what basis 17 million things created daily weekly monthly uh in total total how many per month per month i don't have these data okay got it um so you launched in 2015 you started monetizing 2017. how did you fund the company for the first two years have you had no revenue coming in well actually we we based our first year from other company we were actually generally come from another company called the covantes in that company we were a communication agency our clients we that was big corporates and also education corporates they wanted to edit the creation we developed for them but since they didn't have knowledge or background in design and computing they couldn't so we suddenly thought that it was a good opportunity for us to create something that by which people without knowledge in our background in in design could create these things so for the first year um we were working at the same time in that agency and also in in generally so also um another two co-founders um king so they invested their own time and also so you have three you have three founders you plus two others no me and juan ruby which is this is the ceo roldan is the cto and luis garcia which is the who is the uh four co-founders for co-founders yeah you could say that did you guys i mean that's a tough conversation to have you're spinning a company out of an agency there's four co-founders do you guys just split equity 25 25 25 25 or no no no it's much more complicated it got our cap table is difficult because uh in in the older company in the in negovantes we we were four co-founders so we owned 15 25 of that company so the cup table is a bit complicated in this moment because we have raised around 5 million dollar in this moment a lot of different vcs came so the cup table is not uh it's not like that well so so does the agency own any portion of genially yes how much does the agency get to keep in this moment yes well i think it's the data i cannot share with you i'm sorry a range is fine um around you could say 20 okay got it and so you gave it to agency because you basically built this in the agency and then spun it out you four co-founders then each own some amount of equity and then investors who put in five million dollars own some equity as well exactly i see okay how did you get your first you know thousand customers do you remember well yes my colleagues um they did very well because they built a community around around the around the the product itself we i remember myself launching this typical um text to my colleagues to my family please register here because it's very interesting it's a very interesting tool for you you can create your presentation for your sales team you can create your cv and you can grant me things and also we build a community of of um how you call it ambassadors where where can i view the community well the the community is in in social networks in facebook linkedin and instagram tiktok we are also also in desktop how many how many ambassadors do you have um 150 in this one okay so you have 150 ambassadors there's currently 87 people following your guys's linkedin page so not all the ambassadors follow you on linkedin i mean help me understand exactly how the ambassador program works oh the ambassador programs consist mainly it is more focused in education and this usually is um consists of people who are in love with with uh with them with the tool we give them a free master plan which is our our most advanced plan and they help us by making webinars by making cross-selling from gross marketing and to spread the word to spread the word within their networks got it and this is obviously a super smart plan if they help you get sales do you give them a commission or no um well sometimes we pay we paid them by for example when people could travel around the world we could pay the travel for them but we we usually don't pay in in cash okay how many people are on the team full-time today ignoring the ambassadors uh 17. seven zero seven zero how many of them are engineers around fifteen one five okay and do you have any full-time quota carrying sales reps or no oh yes we have we have team um we have a sales team and actually we don't we don't like to call them reps because uh we don't for example we don't do a leads urination generation because we receive every day more than uh 3 300 leads because we have you know thousands and thousands of people go to our website and start creating and we we have several yeah alberto that's fine i'm not i'm not that's that's great you have so much inbound all i'm asking is how many people are full-time on your team that have a quota in sales team um five five okay got it and again they're handling all those inbound leads that you get every day yes yep yep fascinating so talk to me a little bit more about the product i mean should people think about this or like a canva yeah it's um similar to canva but i would say that genially is more it's more like more interactive because standby is more focused on on designers they convince thought for to create online and to download your creation um you know like uh for a communication piece to be to be downloaded and to be printed but generally is more focused to be consumed the the content for the content to be consumed online we are more uh more interactive in this sense and we are also more versatile because uh with camera you can create presentations and and doctors for example but with generally you can create a very wide range of pieces of communication different pieces i see and and you know when you sell to students right churn is obviously going to be an issue right so what is your guys gross turn per month currently two percent in this moment okay that's actually not so 24 annually that's actually not that bad no it's not that bad of course we have to there is a way to to improve but it's not that bad the students actually are not our focus in this moment we have we want to have a plan for them because we have millions literally but they usually don't charge too much actually they pay 15 euros and most of them during renew but uh we know we are aware that most of them are going to be free forever yeah we are happy with that um so 24 churn do you have expansion revenue do you have ways to upsell customers or no yes yes how much expansion do you see annually annually i don't have to date or monthly is fine wait wait a second for example this this month september uh well five thousand expansion five five thousand five thousand euros expansion okay got it into a base that is essentially three hundred thousand so about one point eight percent it's mrr yeah so you saw five thousand a new mrr into a base that's three hundred thousand mrr so about one point seven percent expansion monthly yeah yeah approximately yes yeah that's that's great and what are you upselling typically is it number of seats or feature-based upsells or what yes it's only mainly it sits because um well you can also upgrade your plan if you are if you're a student you can upgrade to a to an edu plan if you're a native person if you're a teacher you can upgrade to the plan to a master plan but most of the of the upsells are four seats that makes a lot of sense any big product updates coming up that we should know about of course we want to implement the the seats the automatic seats because now nowadays it's a nightmare if you want to buy more seats you have to contact our service team which is quite crazy crazy and we are we are working on uh and implementing the seat the automatic seats system and the the seats administrator albert door you guys still you did this last raise of i think it was four and a half million euros or something like that back in uh february of 2020 so fairly recently are you now burning capital today on a monthly basis reinvesting to drive growth yes we're going to rise uh 10 million in around two months and if you ask me why i don't know why because we have to actually have the most of the money in the bank um we don't need the money but so you still you just to be clear you still have four million dollars in the bank around two million okay got it because half of it you have mentioned four and a half million that's that uh half of it was secondary secondary um secondary money so it was for for for people who who sold a little vivid bill or generally so we want to to create um a round we want to raise money again just to to be to be in the market you know for a possible exit in the future so our vc's our current partners have advised us to you know to to create this this round how much are you how much are you burning per month right now in terms of cash i don't have the data nissan i have to let you know later i don't i don't know validated a range is fine i mean are you basically break even are you burning like 100 a month yeah we are now seeing second since covet 19 we are we we we went through the break even now we are profitable i've got it got it so so you look to raise later this year so let's say you go do raise 10 million dollars what would you spend that money on uh we want to grow more in the states our ceo moved there in one one year ago but we have to to grow our team there we we need to build our network there and also we have more projects um more technical projects apart from the seats we want to um we want to create this you know are you familiar with scrum am i telling you am i familiar with scrum yes yeah agile development scrum yeah yeah um i'm sorry scorm it's a an lte lte is a technology by which you can you can monitor uh who is doing any part any click or any um technology like that so we have to implement this technology and yes we want to grow the [Music] the team in the states and actually in other markets because since the the covet 19 we have been like we have seen like how genie is growing in other markets like for example for example in brazil in india and in asia in general so we want to make the most of those of that import opportunity for us to grow faster yep very good well look hey we're out of time alberto it's clearly a fascinating story here let's wrap up quickly with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book well um are you familiar with uh what's the name i don't remember the name uh the guy who created salesforce mark benioff yes uh behind the cloud yeah very good number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying what is there a ceo you're following or studying [Music] well um the guy from tesla i love elon musk elon musk number three what's your favorite online tool for building genially online tool your favorite online tool what does it mean i'm sorry a tool that you use online an online tool slab an and also slack of course number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night alberto how many what sorry sleep oh a day hours of sleep well now since i have been i've had recently be a father i slept i slept two few hours let's say now five hours five hours and just one new kid i know the kid you just just became a father only one or you have more i have more i have two two daughters i want another one married with married with two kids yes and how old are you 38 38 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 um [Music] very good question when i was 20 wow maybe i would like to to know more about the the problem or the problem the big crisis of them how you call it the crisis is in english the dot com.com crisis are you familiar with that dot dot com crash dot com crust yes very good guys alberto from genially they're so called a canva competitor but built more exclusively for online more interactive content they've got sixty thousand customers paying average five bucks per month doing 3.6 million in terms of annual run rate right now they raised 5 million to do that most recently 4 million 4.5 million in february of 2020 but 50 of that was secondary they'll do another 10 million dollar round here in q4 of 2020 so watch out for that 70 people 7-0 on the team right now 15 engineers five quota carrying reps they turn 24 of their customers call it annually but have about 20 expansion so net revenue retention about 96 as they look to continue to scale alberto thanks for taking us to the top thank you nissan thank you so much 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 pm 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 button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya