How Golee Reached €30,000 in Monthly Revenue and 600 Paying Clubs on a €7M Valuation (Interview with CEO Tommaso Guerra)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Tommaso Guerra. He is the founder and CEO cofounder and CEO of Golee. 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 SaaS solution for digitizing sports. Tommaso, you ready to take

00:23us to the top?

Tommaso Guerra

00:24>> Yeah. Hopefully.

Origin Story: Soccer to SaaS

Nathan Latka

00:26So you're playing soccer, and do you have this idea on the soccer field or what?

Tommaso Guerra

00:31>> Yeah. It is correct. When 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 in my college. And 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

01:00>> 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 lives of a sport club.

Nathan Latka

01:24And, Tommaso, what are these sports clubs paying on average per month to use Golee?

Pricing Model and Freemium Structure

Tommaso Guerra

01:29>> More we have a freemium mode so that you don't need to pay anything, and then you can start upgrading in different with different modules. On average, they pay €500 per year.

Nathan Latka

01:43Okay. So call it like $650 United States dollars per year or approximately $60 a month, something like that.

Tommaso Guerra

01:51>> That's correct.

Nathan Latka

01:52Okay. And why did you decide to go with the freemium model? How many people are on the freemium waitlist?

COVID Impact and Paying Customer Mix

Tommaso Guerra

01:57>> More or less right now, we have 20% of our clients who are paying clients. Obviously, the past year and a half, it was a little bit different because of COVID. Before COVID, we had seventy percent of our clients who were paying clients, while right now it's only twenty percent. But we believe that we are right now changing the situation and getting back to the way it used to be before COVID. But COVID on one hand closed

02:27>> sports activities, on the other hand it speeded up the process of digitization of the entire industry. In fact, right now we are onboarding hundreds of new clubs every month.

Nathan Latka

02:41How many last month?

Tommaso Guerra

02:43>> 200 and something.

Total Club Base and Geographic Reach

Nathan Latka

02:45Wow. Okay. And how many total, like, since you guys have launched, how many total are on the free plan or free or paid?

Tommaso Guerra

02:53>> Right now, more or less 3,000.

Nathan Latka

02:55Oh, wow. Okay. And you have 20% of those 3,000 that are actually paying?

Tommaso Guerra

02:58>> Yeah. Right. Correct.

Nathan Latka

02:59Wow. And is there any concentration here?

Tommaso Guerra

03:02>> 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 in Italy. But in the past months, we started our process of internationalization. And so right now, have a few 100 clubs from Spain, UK, Colombia, and also from The US.

Nathan Latka

03:28And Tommaso, 20% of 3,000. It sounds like you have about 600 paying clubs right now across those geographies?

Tommaso Guerra

03:34>> Yeah. More or less.

Nathan Latka

03:36Wow. Yeah. Okay. Give me more of the backstory here. When did launch the tool? When you're at the first line of code? What year?

Tommaso Guerra

03:42>> So it was the first experiment started in 2017. Mhmm. And then eventually, we founded the company late twenty eighteen. And let's say the first months, we used them to to create our MVP.

Nathan Latka

03:58Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:21your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:45get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

05:07not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:33going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath.

05:51And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna

05:53go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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.

06:19I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview.

Tommaso Guerra

06:22>> 2019, it was the the the first real year where we were on on the market, and it was only five of us at the time. At the beginning of 2020, obviously COVID came and it changed everything, but we got lucky enough.

Revenue History: 2018 to 2021

Nathan Latka

06:39Well, hold on. Hold on. How much did you grow revenue to in your first year in 2018?

06:42Do you remember?

Tommaso Guerra

06:43>> 2018, more or less €50,000.

Nathan Latka

06:45Amazing. Okay.

06:47That's pretty good for the first year.

Tommaso Guerra

06:48>> Yeah. Yeah. Because it wasn't a full year. It was only a few months.

Nathan Latka

06:54Mhmm.

Tommaso Guerra

06:54>> And then eventually 2019,

06:58>> we had some technical problems, we needed to close for a few months. But anyways,

07:06>> we managed to do better than 2018, obviously, and our revenues were about 70,000 or €80,000.

07:16>> And then 2020, it was a weird year because of COVID. And everything shut down, at least here in Europe. You were not allowed to play to play sports at all.

Nathan Latka

07:32How much did your revenue decline? What was total revenue in 2020?

Tommaso Guerra

07:37>> We got back to 50,000.

Nathan Latka

07:40Okay. So about 70,000 United States dollars. And did that improve in last year in 2021?

Tommaso Guerra

07:46>> Yeah, exactly. So in 2021, everything got shut down until July. In July, it reopened. And right now, closed this year with more or less €150,000 But right now, obviously during COVID, our monthly recurring revenue was about between

Monthly Recurring Revenue Today

Tommaso Guerra

08:11>> 3,000 and €7,000 per month. And right now it's growing every month, reaching now €30,000

Nathan Latka

08:19Yeah, 600 customers paying $50 a month on average is about thirty to thirty five thousand United States dollars per month. Something like that.

Tommaso Guerra

08:29>> Yeah, exactly.

Nathan Latka

08:30That's great. Well, congrats on the growth. Have you done this bootstrapped or did you decide to raise capital?

Fundraising History and Seed Rounds

Tommaso Guerra

08:35>> No. We decided to raise capital also because it was an industry that wasn't ready to, let's say, adopt new technology. Right?

Nathan Latka

08:45So how much did

08:47you raise in what year?

Tommaso Guerra

08:49>> We raised in the past three years 2 millions.

Nathan Latka

08:53When was the last fundraise?

Tommaso Guerra

08:55>> Last fundraise was last year where we raised €700,000. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

09:01And and what would you consider that? Like your seed round or what?

Tommaso Guerra

09:06>> Yeah, maybe. Maybe it still

09:11>> not an early stage, but yeah, I would say seed round. The whole amount that we've raised is considered to be seed round. In fact, right now what we're doing is to get ready to do our series A towards in the second semester of this year.

Nathan Latka

09:25Okay. So you're looking at potentially raising now or in the next, call it six months. How much how much are you targeting? How much do you hope to raise?

Tommaso Guerra

09:34>> Between 7 and 12,000,000. It depends.

Nathan Latka

09:38Let's just make the math easy. Let's say you raise 10,000,000. What valuation are you targeting?

Tommaso Guerra

09:43>> We will give away maximum 22% of the company.

Nathan Latka

09:48That's a very specific number. How do you get to 22%?

Tommaso Guerra

09:53>> It's because

Cap Table and Ownership Breakdown

Tommaso Guerra

09:57>> right now, in our cap table, we are really giving away a lot of stock options to our employees.

Nathan Latka

10:07How much?

Tommaso Guerra

10:09>> More or less 20%. Okay. And we want it to keep growing. And so we made a deal with current investors that if we managed to do another round with some dilution, we would unlock some other stock options. And this is something that we believe a lot on giving stock options to employees and to people who can help you to bring forward the company.

Nathan Latka

10:41And, Tommaso, when you raised the $850,000 what valuation did you raise that at?

Tommaso Guerra

10:46>> Last valuation was 7,000,000.

Nathan Latka

10:49Okay. 7,000,000. Got it. So how much do current investors currently own of the business?

Tommaso Guerra

10:54>> More or less 30%.

Nathan Latka

10:5630%. Okay. Would you change anything about how you raise capital to date? Or do you look back and go, know what? I did that the right way.

Tommaso Guerra

11:03>> Yeah. So look, Italy, Europe in general is very different from The US market. And Italy is one of the latest countries. I mean, it is very behind the mentality and the openness of investors and bosses to give you money. Is a mess. So yeah, I would do something different. I would start right away in looking for money outside of Italy and not having traction only in Italy, also in Europe like we're doing right now. So it'd

11:40>> be easier for us to to raise some money outside of Italy.

Nathan Latka

11:43But How much

11:44do you own of the business still today?

Tommaso Guerra

11:47>> More or less 35 percent.

Nathan Latka

11:49And then your co founder owns the other 15?

Tommaso Guerra

11:53>> Yeah, exactly. Co founders and employees.

Nathan Latka

11:57Well, you have the employee stock option pool of 20%, which you said. You said investors own 30%, which leaves about 50% for you and your co founder, right?

Tommaso Guerra

12:05>> Yeah, exactly. The stock option pool is not only for employees, but also for everybody who is operating full time on

12:16>> the project.

Nathan Latka

12:17I see. Very cool. Now, if you want to go out and raise $10,000,000 on a $50,000,000 valuation, that would be selling around 20% of the business, but you have $400,000 in ARR today. You're asking for a valuation multiple, almost 150 times your forward looking revenue. Do you think you have to grow revenue a little bit before you go do that next raise?

Tommaso Guerra

12:37>> Yeah, that's for sure. This is why we're looking to do this Series A in the second semester of twenty twenty two.

Series A Plans and Growth Targets

Tommaso Guerra

12:45>> Want to reach this moment with three metrics very consolidated, which are clubs acquisitions. So right now 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 pace that we're growing right now it is doable, completely doable. Second of all, 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 do

13:20>> our Series A when we have over a thousand clients throughout Europe

13:29>> and obviously increasing our revenue. So what we're looking to do is to reach €50,000 per month monthly recurring revenue. And that that would those will be the metrics that we're we're comfortable in in doing the the CVT.

Nathan Latka

13:49Understood. Tell me more about your team today. How many folks are full time?

Team Size and Engineering Hiring

Tommaso Guerra

13:53>> 20 people.

Nathan Latka

13:54And how many engineers?

Tommaso Guerra

13:56>> Nine.

Nathan Latka

13:57Nine. Where'd you find everyone always has trouble hiring engineers. Where'd you hire?

Tommaso Guerra

14:01>> So one of them, he was my one of my closest friend. And so it started out from him. They had a couple of friends in the university that joined our team very, very junior. 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 quit his job and join us in our project. And

14:37>> little by little, this is how we're growing. It was, 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 need to have a good project and good people that are working in the company. But this is how we manage to do it.

Nathan Latka

15:01Guys, it's hard to find engineers. It's even harder if you require them to come into an office. I encourage you to think about hiring remote folks. You know, at Founderpath, 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 nathanlatka.com/remote to check that out. Tell me

15:23more about your sales team, Tommaso. Do you have any full time sales reps?

Tommaso Guerra

15:26>> Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, out of the 20 people, nine are in the IT department and the rest of it is in the business and marketing department.

Nathan Latka

15:37What How many sales reps go with quota?

Tommaso Guerra

15:39>> Yeah, exactly. So, what happens is that they don't do only sales. They do marketing and sales and customer care. We believe a lot in making them capable of doing different tasks, not only one specific task.

Nathan Latka

15:56Understood, though. But how many sales How many people carry a quota?

Tommaso Guerra

16:00>> Seven people.

Nathan Latka

16:02Okay. So you do have seven that carry a quota, but they do sales and other things as well.

Tommaso Guerra

16:06>> Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

16:06What quota do you have them try and hit?

Sales Team and Quota Structure

Tommaso Guerra

16:10>> So right now, 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 what happens with COVID. Yeah. Obviously. So, make him we make all altogether the entire team decides the objectives for next quarter.

Nathan Latka

16:40And Tommaso, you mentioned you added almost over 200 new clubs in the last thirty days. You spending money to add these folks? And if so, what's your customer or your freemium acquisition cost?

Customer Acquisition Cost and Partnerships

Tommaso Guerra

16:51>> No. This is the freemium acquisition cost.

Nathan Latka

16:54Okay. But how are they finding you, though?

Tommaso Guerra

16:57>> So we're doing web marketing. And right now, our CAC on web marketing is pretty low. It's between €6 and €8. So every €6 we spend, we get a new registration. And then apart from web marketing, we have

17:16>> partnerships with federations and important newspapers or, let's say, sports references within the country.

Nathan Latka

17:27I see. So, if you convert 20% to your free registrations into paid accounts, you need five sign ups at $6 a pop to get one new paid customer. So you could kind of say your CAC is somewhere around $30 for a new $60 a month customer.

Tommaso Guerra

17:39>> Yeah, this is correct.

Nathan Latka

17:40Interesting. Very cool. Partnerships are working well for you as well. I'm not gonna ask about churn because COVID is really impacting your business, but you're back on

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

17:49the growth track now. Let's wrap up here, Tommaso, with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Tommaso Guerra

17:56>> Well, I would say I would say even if it's not a business book, I recently read Shoe Dog and That's a good one. Yeah, it is.

Nathan Latka

18:06Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Tommaso Guerra

18:11>> Not really. I follow let's say 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.

Nathan Latka

18:27Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Golee?

Tommaso Guerra

18:31>> Online tool for building Golee, you say?

Nathan Latka

18:34Yep.

Tommaso Guerra

18:40>> Not sure.

Nathan Latka

18:41What's the two that you need?

Tommaso Guerra

18:42>> Our internal organization, we use Trello. I don't Okay. Know if you

Nathan Latka

18:46Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Tommaso Guerra

18:49>> Between, I'd say six on average.

Nathan Latka

18:53Okay. And what's your situation, Tommaso? Married, single, kids?

Tommaso Guerra

18:58>> No. I'm I have a girlfriend.

Nathan Latka

19:01Okay. Not married. No kids. How old are you?

Tommaso Guerra

19:03>> I'm 31.

19:05>> 31. Last question.

Nathan Latka

19:06What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Closing Reflections

Tommaso Guerra

19:11>> I wish I knew how difficult it was to start a business. Not because I'm not doing anymore, but at least I was could have been more ready to do so.

Nathan Latka

19:23Guys, Golee, spelled g o l l sorry, golee.it, launched back in 2017, now doing about $35,000 a month in revenue. Their last round was an $850,000 seed round on a $7,000,000 valuation. They're growing about over doubling year over year as they recover out of COVID. 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.

19:50One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

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