How Getsocial CEO Joao Romeo grew Getsocial to $8M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is juan he is the 30 and the founder of getsocial.io a content and social analytics platform that helps companies like adobe at t sky news and mtv to better understand how their audiences share their content he's a member of the world economic forum as a global shaper and a board advisor at cio.net all right joe are you ready to take us to the top i am thanks for having me today you bet all right so tell us what the company does and what's your revenue model are you pure play sas yeah we're pure play sas we've been tweaking around the business model and the pricing model for uh last year's actually we're trying to test every every now and then what we can improve there but the company is a content analytics platform so we work with some of those companies that you mentioned and we help them understand what their audiences are sharing on their website so we measure one thing very specific called dark social which is when people copy and paste links into private messaging apps that is misattributed as direct traffic and we help the social media teams and the marketers better understand what that means to them uh pricing wise we started as a freemium model um unfortunately i mean it's a two-way road but we got a lot of users but we got a lot of users that didn't pay as well so for the last four years or three and a half years we've been tweaking uh that model more towards the enterprise so we can do very low um value subscription plans like 50 a month 49 a month to the likes of 17 80 000 a year depending on the customer and so what what do people pay on average per year today so uh i would i would divide on the segment so for smbs they would pay something around 100 a month okay for the enterprise customers around three thousand dollars a month okay and if you look at if you look at your revenue from the past 12 months what percent would you say is enterprise versus smb yeah enterprise now corresponds for about 80 of our revenue oh eight zero eight zero yeah oh well okay that's that's that's a lot okay great put this on a timeline for me when you launch the company what year so we launched the company in 2013 as a completely different product e-commerce focus we built the product go to went to the market failed and pivoted in 2015 to the publishing world to the media worlds um we have one feature and starting with one plan at nine dollars per month and we went from there from zero to 500 customers today interesting okay so you're serving 500 how many of those are enterprise customers uh i mean for for they at those 80 revenue i would say 10 customers oh wow okay so 10 customers pay you three grand a month so that's 30 grand a month that makes up 80 percent of your total revenue yeah yeah yeah got it okay so at least three a month there are some customers paying a few more a few months more okay so if you look at your total revenue per month today what you're like 40 grand 45 grand yeah around that almost 250 yeah 50. okay that's great congratulations um so okay i'm just gonna put i'll say 500 customers right you're doing 50 grand a month so on average there we can obviously divide and get that but i just i'll make a note that basically says you do have an enterprise cohort that makes up a significant chunk of your revenue absolutely what's what's growth look like so if you're at 50 grand a month today what were you at a year ago joao what was revenue a year ago i'll miss you sorry it was we're actually doubling last year's revenue so we did about 220 last year we're going to be half a million this year um so um it's it's been 100 growth uh for for the last three years now that's great so if you're doing 50 grand a month 50 grand a month today you're doing 25 grand a month uh a year ago correct yeah yeah that's correct that's great casual positive today or no for positive a profitable business uh five and a half people let's say that uh where is everyone based in lisbon portugal oh very good are you bootstrapped or have you raised capital uh we raised a seed round in the beginning we waste most of it in that initial product and once we ran out of money we started charging customers for money so since 2015 our customers pay our salaries and our costs which is fantastic i mean uh i do have still investors on board but uh we haven't raised ever since joel how much total have you raised to date uh 700 thousand dollars yes okay seven hundred seven hundred thousand bucks in one round churn is critical in this kind of space what's your turn today so our churn is close to zero uh because uh the net churn uh the net mrr journey is close to zero sometimes we even expand so we do we don't have a troubles expanding the revenue of these enterprise customers because our pricing scales with their size their sessions per month their volume of traffic so our goal as a product is to help them increase their traffic so if we work okay and we do uh we help them make more money so we make more money so on average i would say our turn rate net turn rate is below one percent per month but even that one percent what's gross joe so are you what's gross gross growth gross revenue churn per month uh between two and three percent okay so you're expanding one to two percent per month then yeah yeah so that's that's the trick so it's quite easy for us to close those annual deals with bigger customers and then on the next year we're actually going to charge 5k more 8k more based on the experience that they they've been having for the last year yeah yeah so if you're 36 kind of gross revenue churn per year you're expanding 24 25 right so net revenue retention you'd say somewhere in like the like 90 range something like that uh interesting what are you pricing against so you mentioned you're up selling what's the pricing axes that they're pricing against you're pricing against um so in terms of model for us like sometimes you have like number of seats or number of traffic channels or like what are your metrics you price against so the main one is volume of the website so sessions per month as they would easily see on their google analytics dashboard so that's the main one the bigger the website the more you charge okay of course there are some customers who don't have a very big website but they have specific needs either a specific module for their teams or something that they need or agencies for example for white labeling purposes we can get a little bit more revenue by customizing the product towards those kind of deals that's interesting is the the sessions per month yeah and how are you getting new customers uh content works great for us so this this thing i was initially discussing about dark social it's still not mainstream but we start writing about it in 2016 and all of our main brands all of our main customers the ones who paid us the most came from a given piece of content a blog post a guest posting a known website a white paper our last white paper on dark social is working brilliantly to us uh for us it brings a lot of leads qualified leads they want to know more about this and then we have a solution for them so content is the main thing for us we don't do a lot of paid we don't do events it's mainly content marketing for us yep yep that's great and in order to get a new kind of call at 100 a month customer what are you spending on cac typically uh we don't we just wait for them we build um a lot of partnerships integrations with uh wordpress shopify anything that makes the installation process codeless so people go they find us we got we have proper seo on those platforms we have proper reviews they find us they click a button they install they get to use the product and then they start a trial and then they convert so so you don't know how to spend money to make more money that's what you're telling me right now one of the challenges correct so yeah don't spend money on acquiring customers we manage leads and inbound links that come to us two ways yeah so smbs it's a it's a process so we have a funnel we have automatic uh conversations with them with enterprise we have a shorter or a short sale cycle but it still requires a few calls any plans to raise capital uh we we should raise some capital uh in 2019 so the goal now is to do exactly what you were saying so trying to find the levers of growth where we can spend money and actually generate those those new mr that new mrr at uh an efficient cost we you like to be cash flow positive we like that balance but we need to find ways for us to put money on the table and generate more business to us so how much do you hope to raise um in this stage it would be around 1.5 million to 2 million dollars and what evaluation do you hope to raise out we would expect at least a 7 million dollar cap okay and okay so you're gonna do a note yeah yeah for now note because small team it was my goal would be just to get to um that money to accelerate growth for us to raise a more serious round in let's say 18 24 months uh where we would be making around 150 200 a month so that was the plan for these next episodes and how do you so going back to the product real quick um i'm about to have a we can't announce this yet but i'm about to actually i've sent a major deal with a major network for my own reality show right on cable if i want to if an episode comes out and i go to that and i pull the link for the episode right or i want to use your tool to measure the dark web discussions about the episode how let's say it's to be a whatsapp how are you getting access to whatsapp messages to know that they're talking about nathan maca's new show yeah so good question so what we do is we tamper with the all the urls from a specific website so let's say that you have your own page your one website which has all the videos or all the links that you want to to distribute over over the web so what we do is we make sure that every page view is served a different kind of url so we can measure everything that goes out of the website and everything that comes back in so we can bundle in a thing called dark social everything that goes socially via copy paste or by people clicking the buttons into channels that don't have any referrer data so if you go to facebook you will get some referral that's saying this is coming from facebook if you go to whatsapp if a link is pressed there it's going to show up as direct traffic with us we are going to identify that traffic yeah the problem the trick there is oh you're assuming everyone's always going to when they talk about my new show they're always going to use and copy and paste that exact link when in reality what's going to happen like when i converse with my friends about a new show i like i'm saying hey sam i just saw this show on netflix called xyz go check it out and he'll then go on google and type in the thing and find it like there's no way to track this stuff so how much extra activity are you actually picking up that would be more of a listening function which we don't do by the way um our our target is more measuring the the variability of each piece of contents over private conversations over private channels so it's not that much the case you were explaining is for example having uh helping editorial teams understanding which of their content is picking up in real time on private conversations a specific story a specific topic not so much listening about if people are talking about people you know but my whole point is like these darks i mean social is social it's talking right the huge assumption you're making is that people are always going to when they talk about my new show they're always going to use this weird link you've put together that has all the tracking inside i'm just saying i feel like that's a massive assumption uh i wouldn't say i'm assuming that um in terms of i and i'm telling you very transparently what what you are saying it's not something that we even do uh and i i would have to think of a very creative but i think it would be rather impossible way of doing what you were saying that would be interesting because i'm not saying you should do it i'm just trying to quantify what you are doing and all i'm saying is to do what you are doing people have to use the link and i'm just curious how many times people actually use that link on dark right like how much attribution are you actually tracking so let me say that 80 of shares on a big publisher are normally made via copy paste into a private channel so it's people not talking anymore or not sharing anymore a link over their private public social media facebook twitter et cetera yeah now very good i understand that just because i understand that we are limited in our scope on on what we do because it's based on people sharing links what you're saying is next phase next next level uh it's a a derivative of of what you do very good all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um i like gucci great number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i like uh uh well he left the position but i i really liked uh the the one of the x directors for bus steve racing steve razen buzz uh number three what's your favorite online tool uh i like uh trello number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh about seven and what's your situation married single kids single no kids no kids and how old are you i'm three thirty last question what do you wish your twenty year old self knew um i i wish i could have worked a little bit more in corporate with other people learn a bit from other people before jumping in and building stuff guys work a little bit in corporate learn a little bit that's what he wishes he knew back in the day but look seems to be doing pretty well funded the company in 2013 measuring dark web conversation sorry dark social conversation so people can track attribution 500 customers doing about 50 grand per month in revenue up from 25 grand just a year ago a lot of their growth coming organically from wordpress and shopify integrations cash flow positive since 2015. 700 grand raised five people six people based in portugal uh net revenue retention each year about 90 percent they're turning 36 in terms of gross revenue return 24 expansion don't know what their paid channel metrics are yet but hoping to scale over the next six to 12 months y'all thank you for taking us to the top thanks so much thanks for having me