How Golee CEO Tommaso Guerra grew Golee to $1.6M revenue and 600 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is tommaso guerra he is the founder and ceo co-founder and ceo of go lay he graduated in the usa from lynn university and has professional experience in italy spain and florida across various sectors like marketing real estate and sales he's been a footballer all his life playing for professional teams in italy and for the american college in the united states now building a sas solution for digitizing sports tomasso are you ready to take us to the top yeah hopefully so you're playing soccer and do you have this idea on the soccer field or what yeah it is correct while i was in italy maybe you can hear it from my accent i was playing at the highest level highest youth level but then i moved to the united states i played for the soccer team in my college and uh in the us everything was different in fact we had people at the stadium statistics on our games highlights of the matches and so on so when i came back to italy i wanted to i wanted to build a software a platform that could give value to the entire youth ecosystem youth sports ecosystem eventually it turned out to be not only a platform that gives visibility to the youth players but also working tools for sports clubs and coaches and everybody involved in in the lives with of a spark club and tommaso what are these sports clubs paying on average per month to use goulet um more we have a freemium mode so you don't need to pay anything and then you can start upgrading in different with different modules on average they pay 500 euros per year okay so call like 650 united states dollars uh per year or approximately 50 60 bucks a month something like that that's correct okay and why did you decide to go to the freemium model how many people are on the freemium waitlist more or less right now we have 20 of our clients who are paying clients obviously in the past year and a half it was a little bit different because of covet before caveat we had 70 percent of our clients who were paying clients while right now is only 20 but we believe that we are right now uh changing uh this situation and and getting back to the way it used to be before covet but uh covey on one end it closed sports activities but on the other end it speeded up the process of digitization of the entire industry in fact right now we are on boarding hundreds of new clubs every month and how many last month um 200 and something wow okay and how many total like since you guys have launched how many total are on the free plan or free or paid right now more or less three thousand oh wow okay and you have twenty percent of those three thousand that are actually paying yeah right correct wow and is there any concentration here are you mainly focused on us sports clubs or italian sports clubs any geographic focus so since we began here in italy most of our clients are are in italy but in the past in the past months we started our process of internationalization and so right now we have a few hundred clubs from spain uk uh colombia and also in from the u.s and tommaso 20 of 3 000 it sounds like you have about 600 paying clubs right now across those geographies yeah more or less wow okay give me more the back story here when did you launch the tool when you're at the first line of code what year so it was the first experiment started in the 2017 and then eventually we funded the company in late 2018 and uh let's say the first months we use them to to create our mvp 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 it 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 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valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview 2018 it was the the the first real year where we were on on the market and uh it was only five of us at the time at the beginning of 2020 obviously covet came and it changed everything but we got lucky enough well hold on hold on how much did you go revenue to in your first year in 2018 do you remember 2018 more or less 50 000 euros amazing okay that's pretty good for the first year yeah yeah because it wasn't a full year it was only a few months and then eventually 2019 we we had some technical problems so we needed to to close for a few months but anyways we we managed to do better than 2018 obviously and our revenues were about 70 000 or 80 000 euros and then 2020 it was a it was a a weird year because of hobbit and everything lot everything uh shut down at least here in europe you were not allowed to play to play sports at all how much did your revenue decline what was total revenue in 2020 uh we go back to 50 000 uh okay so about so about 70 000 united states dollars and did that improve in last year in 2021 yeah exactly so in 2021 everything got shut down until july in july it reopened and right now we're we closed this year with more or less 150 uh euros and uh but right now our uh obviously during copied our monthly recurring revenue was about three and seven thousand between three and seven thousand euros per month and right now is growing every month uh reaching now 30 000 euros yeah 600 600 customers uh paying 50 a month on average is about 30 to 35 000 united states dollars per month something like that yeah exactly that's great well congrats on the growth have you done this bootstrapped or did you decide to raise capital no we we decided to raise capital also because it was a it was an industry that wasn't ready to to uh let's say adopt new new technology right so how much did you raise in what year uh we raised in the past three years uh what was 2 last round last fundraise was last year where we raised 700 000 euros and and um what would you consider that like your seed round or what uh yeah maybe maybe it is still uh uh not not an early stage but yeah i would say sid round the whole amount that we've raised is considered to be sid round in fact right now what we're doing is to get ready to do our series a towards uh in the second semester of this year okay so you're looking at potentially raising raising now or or in the next course call it six months how much how much are you targeting how much do you hope to raise between 7 and 12 million let's just make the map easy let's say you raised 10 million what valuation are you targeting we we will give away maximum 22 of the company that's very specific number how did you get to 22 percent uh it's because right now in our in our cap table we we've we're really giving away a lot of stock options to our employees and how much uh more or less twenty percent okay and uh we want we wanted to keep growing and i was so we we made a deal with current investors that if we managed to to do another round with with us some some dilution we would unlock some other stock options and this is something that we believe a lot on on giving...