How Genially CEO Marine Dumoulin grew Genially 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...