Greencast BV Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Folks. My guest today is Konstantinos Kouzelis. He's a Greek born and raised in The Netherlands. He founded Greencast straight out of university to help companies measure, analyze, and report on their climate impact. The website is greencast.io. Konstantinos, you ready to take us to the top? Yep. All right. So how do you do this? Do they have to install any physical objects to do the measurement or it's all software? [00:21] >> Yeah. So no, we're actually a carbon management software platform. We're software as a service. And what we do is that we invite our customers to connect their data sources, such as their accounting, their e commerce platforms, or their HR system, CRM. We pull the data, we make the conversions and the calculations and they get their emission impact back. [00:43] What might one of these companies have on their HR system that enables you to quantify their carbon emission? [00:49] >> Yeah. So, for instance, in the HR systems, we see a lot of travel movements, lunch expenses. Actually the activities that employees perform during their work, which in the end all result to some sort of emissions. [01:06] And what's an example of that same thing? But if they attach their e commerce data source, what could you see there? [01:11] >> Yeah, so for instance, for e commerce, we see the products that the companies we serve have sold. So let's say you serve a commerce, well, a party that sells washing machines, these products do not only impact the environment at the moment they're produced, but also after they're sold. So for the lifetime of this washing machine, it's going to consume energy, which is going to have an impact on climate and that's something we use to map the [01:38] >> complete impact of what a business does across Scope one, two and Scope three. [01:42] And so when these founders want to quantify their carbon impact, what are they willing to pay you per month to use your technology right now? What's your average customer revenue? [01:51] >> Yeah, so our customer revenues range from 1 or €90 per month up until 1,000 plus. And it's really dependent on how far your business is. For startups that have raised less than 2,000,000 in funding, we have a free plan and the rest above 1,000 are enterprise customers which want to dive, well, let's say deeper into their supply chains. [02:12] And what would just for the paying customers, what would you say the sweet spot is? About 100 and what, $250 a month or something like that? [02:20] >> Yeah. A bit above. I think around 300 is the the sweet spot. [02:24] >> So about 380 United States dollars per month, something like that. [02:27] Yeah. Interesting. Give me the backstory here. When did you launch the company? [02:31] >> So I started building on the company by making a clickable demo in July 2021. Actually started the company in September '21. And I was a one man team with a pitch deck with which I raised 400 ks pre seed rounds. And then actually started building out the team, the product, and doing sales. And we've closed our first customers now. They're really happy and growing actually above expectations. [03:00] How many customers sit on the platform? [03:03] >> Yeah. So now we have around 10 customers on our platform live, but the pipeline is filling up and we're actually trying to onboard as many of them as possible. But we have a little bit of a backlog which we're working on. [03:15] That's awesome. Congratulations on your first 10 customers. Tell us the story of how you got the first one. [03:21] >> Yeah, so the first one was actually quite a funny story because we got some press here in The Netherlands through a startup journal that found us and that resulted in quite some conversations coming inbound while product wasn't working yet. But this was a really small consulting firm somewhere from the East Of The Netherlands where we didn't expect our first customers to come from, but just people that are willing to try new products and that are willing [03:47] >> to take the leap with us. Yeah, that's how we started. [03:51] That's amazing. Okay, so 10 customers at about $380 per month in revenue means you're doing about $4,000 a month right now on revenue. Is that right? [03:59] >> Yeah. Pretty much. [04:01] Oh, 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 [04:24] your 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 [04:49] get 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 [05:10] not 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 [05:36] going 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. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But [05:58] 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. I hope to see you there. All right, let's jump back [06:24] into the interview. And you said that you're growing fast. You have a long wait list now. How are you getting new signups today? What's the growth strategy? [06:32] >> So the growth strategy is actually threefold. So we do inbound sales. We don't do as much of that as we would like to because it's quite time consuming. We have some inbound leads that we take on, but most importantly, we're trying to differentiate through our partnership proposition. So the product that we originally built is a carbon accounting platform for businesses to use themselves, but we actually saw very large pain points with sustainability consultants which use hacky [07:01] >> Excel forms and email to do their analysis. And we want to empower them by providing them with software platform and the software tools to do their work faster, more efficient and eventually better. [07:12] Fascinating. Okay, so partnerships outbound and inbound makes a lot of sense. What's the team size today? How many folks? [07:17] >> Yeah, so the team size at the moment, we're with six and we're expanding rapidly. We're hiring, which is one of the reasons that we can't focus much on outbound sales at the moment. We need to make trade offs. [07:29] And, Konstantinos, when you did the pre seed round of $400,000, was that at the traditional sort of $5,000,000 cap? [07:37] >> Yeah. So for European standards, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. With a cap and discount, let's say around 5,000,000. [07:43] Yeah. Interesting. And are you looking at raising now or no? [07:48] >> Yeah. So we have run way for quite a while now to go. But we're looking How at raising a bit earlier. We have about eleven months left. That's, yeah, so on the burn rate we're predicting, but we're looking at raising around earlier on. So even before the summer, we're considering it because we see that the partnership proposition is getting a lot of traction and we want to deviate from actually requiring us to get consultants in house [08:19] >> to actually empowering them to do their job better. [08:21] Mhmm. And if you did raise before the summer, how much would you target to raise? [08:26] >> Yeah. So between 2 and €3,000,000. [08:29] Mhmm. Mhmm. Okay. And what would sort of the story be? In other words, you need to manage delusions. So in order to get whatever a $10 to 20,000,000 valuation, what story do you think you have to tell? [08:41] >> Yeah, think our story is now that we show very strong traction with the consulting proposition. And what makes that unique is that every consultant signs on an average of three new customers each month, which then become our customers. So the growth compounds. While we sell to one consultant, that means that every month we'll get three new customers signed up. And obviously that is very strong. That makes a [09:04] >> lot of sense. [09:05] Of the six people on your team, how many are engineers? [09:08] >> Two are engineers and they're actually offshore in Poland. And the funding that we would raise during our seed round would be to get engineering in house as much as possible. [09:20] Is the Poland team an outsource engineering firm? [09:23] >> No, actually, are direct hires, but we started on an agency basis. But we believe that to scale fast and to take these first steps, we need to have a local team that is able to bridge the gap between us and the offshore engineering team. [09:39] You had an agency before this or you started your engineering team via an engineering agency? [09:44] >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. The second part. [09:46] The second one. Okay. Got it. Which agency did you work with? [09:50] >> CVT Services. And they're much recommended, to be honest. They're great. [09:54] CVT Services? [09:56] >> CVT. Valentin. Cedric Valentine Theodor. [10:00] Ah, okay. [10:02] Okay. CVT Services based in Poland. Yeah. How did you find them? [10:08] >> Through references. I've got some friends here who have started their businesses and met quite some people on the way, and they were recommended by three people. I spoke with them, obviously spoke with a lot [10:21] >> of agencies, but they were committed to making the business successful and not so much trying to push hours rather than deliver quality. And not the cheapest around, but you get quality fortune paid for. [10:35] Yeah, mean, was gonna be my question. So like, about how much do you think you paid to have them build your MVP to the point where you could sell your first customer, you think? [10:43] >> I think about 20 k, which was quite affordable. [10:45] Okay. Yeah. That's not that's not terrible. And how long did it take them to build it? [10:51] >> Matter of weeks. [10:52] Oh, wow. [10:53] >> Couple weeks. [10:54] Okay. [10:55] Cool. And so I guess why do you want to move now in house? Why not keep using CVT? [11:01] >> Well, they're great. But obviously, when you serve more when they serve more customers, there's bottleneck in how fast you can move. They need to take account that they need to serve more customers in a week. So you don't have a full time team dedicated to you. And that's the reason we decided to hire in house so we have people that can jump on every problem right away and continue building at the times that we don't have [11:26] >> issues to work on. [11:27] Well, Konstantinos, this is a great story. I'm rooting for you. Let's wrap up here with Famous Five. Number one, favorite business book? [11:33] >> Favorite business book. [11:37] >> Let me think. I really liked The Almanac of Naval. [11:41] >> Yep. [11:42] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [11:46] >> There's many I'm following or studying. Here in The Netherlands, there's a CEO called Rene Janse, Founder of Lepaya, an upskilling platform for employees. And I think he has had a great journey, came from consulting but completely pivoted into entrepreneurship. [12:01] Are you going to the SaaSiest conference from SaaS Nordic up there in Malmo, Sweden? [12:09] >> I haven't signed up yet, but I'll have a look. [12:11] Very cool. Alright. Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building the business? [12:16] >> For me, it's Figma. [12:18] Figma. Yep. Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night? [12:21] >> I try to get eight hours of sleep a night. Eight. But obviously, that's different some nights. [12:27] And what's your situation? Married? Single? Kids? [12:31] >> I have a girlfriend. Not married. Going to move in very soon. [12:34] Very cool. And how old are you? [12:36] >> I'm 27. [12:38] >> 27. [12:39] Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [12:42] >> Oh, that's a good one. Something I wish I knew I was 20, that I would be doing this at the moment. I really have my doubts about where I was gonna end up, but I'm really happy with the path that I chose. [12:52] Guys, he's launched greencast.io to help companies understand what their carbon footprint looks like. You connect your e commerce platform. He looks at what products you sell and estimates. You connect your HR, and he understands, wow, your employees spend a lot of time entering things in the HR system. Here's how much computer energy they're using up. Here's the carbon emission from that. Really tries to quantify all of this stuff. Going last year in September 2021. Is onboarded [13:13] 10 customers paying an average $400 a month. They're doing about $4,000 a month in revenue. They raised $400,000 pre seed last year to hire their first six team members at a 5,000,000 cap, looking at potentially raising 2 to €3,000,000 here in a seed round before summer. We'll see what happens. Konstantinos, thanks for taking us to the top. [13:30] >> Thank you very much. [13:33] One 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 [13:58] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [14:21] 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 SaaS 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 [14:42] up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and 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. [15:02] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.