Golee Revenue, Valuation & Funding (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 even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that 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 stock options to employees and to people who can help you to bring forward the company and tomaso when you raise the 850 000 what valuation you to raise that at last evaluation was 7 million okay 7 million got it so how much do current investors currently own of the business more or less 30 30 okay would you change anything about how you raise capital to date or do you look back and go you know what i did that the right way yeah so look uh italy europe in general is very different from from the u.s market and italy is one of the latest country i mean it is very behind the mentality and the and the openness of investors and busy to give you money is uh it's a mess so yeah i would do something different i would start right away in looking for for money outside of italy and not having traction only in italy but also in europe like we're doing right now so it'd be easier for us to to raise some money outside of italy but how much do you own of the business still today more or less 35 percent and then your co-founder owns the other 15. [Music] uh yeah exactly yeah employees well you have the employee stock option full of 20 which you said you said investors own 30 which leads about 50 for you and your co-founder right yeah exactly the stock option pool is not only for employees but also for for everybody who is operative full-time on the on the on the project i see very cool now if you want to go out and raise 10 million on a 50 million valuation that would be selling around 20 to the business but you have 400 000 bucks in ar today you're asking for a valuation multiple almost 150 times your your forward-looking revenue do you think you have to grow revenue a little bit before you go do that that next raise yeah yeah that's for sure this is why we're we're looking to do this uh series a in the second semester of 2022. we want to we want to reach this moment with three metrics very consolidated which are uh clubs acquisitions so right now we're we're working with more or less 3 000 sports clubs and we want to reach at least 10 000 sports clubs and in the place that we're growing right now it is uh it is doable completely doable second of all uh we want to demonstrate the fact that we can scale internationally so right now we're having the first clients outside of italy but we want to to do our series a one we have over a thousand uh clients throughout europe uh and obviously uh increasing our revenue uh so what we're looking to do is when is to reach 50 000 euros per month monthly recurring revenue and that those will be the metrics that we're we're comfortable in in doing the disservice understood tell me more about your team today how many folks are full-time 20 people and how many engineers uh nine nine where'd you find everyone always has trouble hiring engineers where'd you hire so uh one of them was my one of my closest friend and uh and and so he started out from him they had a couple of friends in the university that joined our team very very junior and and they knew another guy who was the cto of a huge company here in italy and after one year that we were begging him to come to work with us he finally decided to to to quit his job and join us in our you know our in our project and little by little this is how we're growing uh it it was a i mean it still is pretty difficult to find capable it developers and i believe word of mouth in this case is the best and obviously you you need to have a good project and the good people that are working in the company but this is how we managed to do it guys it's hard to find engineers it's even harder if you require them to come into an office encourage you to think about hiring remote folks and you know at founder path we're fully remote six people fully remote and we use remote.com to manage payroll across many countries across many geographies to understand taxes and all that they've given everyone here listening to the show a free access code you can go to nathemaca.com forward slash remote to check that out tell me more about your sales team tomos do you have any full-time sales reps yeah yeah for sure so out of the 20 people uh nine are ite in the iit department and the rest of it is in the business and marketing department so uh what how many sales are up so with quota yeah exactly so what happens is that they don't do only sales they do they do marketing and sales and customer care what we believe a lot in making them capable of doing different tasks not all not only one specific task understood though but how many sales how many people carry a quota seven people okay so you do have seven that carry a quota but they do sales and other things as well yeah exactly what quota do you have them try and hit uh so right now uh what what we're doing is that every single every three months we we have a new objective because it changes so quickly and it really it really changes also upon on on what happens with kovid yeah obviously so uh i make him we make all all together the the entire team decides uh the objectives for next quarter and tomas so you mentioned you added almost over 200 new clubs in the last 30 days are you spending money to add these folks and if so what's your customer or your freemium acquisition cost no this is the premium acquisition cost okay but how are they how are they finding you though so we're doing web marketing and right now our caco web marketing is pretty low is between six and eight euros so every six euros we spend we get a new registration and then apart from web marketing we have partnerships within federations and important uh newspapers or let's say sports references within the country i see so if you convert 20 to your free registrations into paid accounts you need five signups at six bucks a pop to get one new paid customer so you could kind of say your cac is somewhere around thirty dollars for a new sixty dollar a month customer yeah this is correct interesting very cool partnerships are working well for you as well i'm not going to ask about churn because kobe's really impacting your business but you're back on the growth track now let's wrap up here tomasso with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh well i would say i would say uh even if it's not a business book i recently read the shoe dog and that's a good one yeah it is number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh no really i follow uh let's say i i wouldn't say steve jobs because everybody would say steve jobs but i read books about how how the netflix and how startups created their model number three what's your favorite online tool for building golay online online tools for building goals eh yep [Music] not sure what to do for our our internal organization we use trello number four how many hours of sleep to get every night between uh let's say six on average okay and what's your situation at the masa married single kids no i'm uh i have a girlfriend okay not married no kids how old are you i'm 31 31 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh i wish i knew how difficult it was to to start a business not not because i'm not doing anymore but at least i was i i could have been more ready to do so guys go lay spell g-o-l-l g-o-l-e-e dot i-t launch back in 2017 now doing about 35 000 a month in revenue their last round was an 850 000 seed round on a 7 million valuation they're growing about over doubling year over year as they recover out of cobit again software to help sports leagues soccer specifically capture virtual moments and bring them online quickly track stats and things of that nature tommaso thanks for taking us to the top 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 nathanlacka.com 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