How Greencast BV CEO Konstantinos Kouzelis grew to $240.6K revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is constantinos cool zelus he's a greek born and raised in the netherlands he founded greencash street at a university to help companies measure analyze and report on their climate impact the website is greencast.io constantinos you're 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 yeah so no we're actually a carbon management software platform we're so far as a service um 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 what might one of these companies have on their hr system that enables you to quantify their carbon emission yeah so for instance in the hr systems we see a lot of travel movements launch expenses um actually the the activities that employees um perform during their work uh which in the end all result of some sort of emissions and what's an example of that same thing but if they attach their e-commerce data source what could you see there 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 uh well a party that sells washing machines these products do not only um 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 can have an impact on climate and that's something we use to map the complete impact of what a business does across scope 1 2 and scope 3. 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 yeah so our customer revenues range from one or ninety euros per month up till up until a thousand plus um and it's really dependent on how far your business is um for startups that have raised less than two million in funding with a free plan and the rest above a thousand our enterprise customers which one did they have well let's say deeper into their supply chains and what just for the paying customers what do you say this sweet spot is about 100 and what 250 euros a month or something like that uh yeah a bit above i think around 300 is there a discrete spot so about 380 united states dollars per month something like that yeah interesting give me the back story here when did you launch the company so i started building on the company uh by making a clickable demo in uh july 2021 actually started the company in september of 21. um and i was a one-man team with a pitch deck um with which i raised a 400k pre-seat um and then actually started building up the team the product and doing sales and with close our first customers now uh they're really happy and growing actually above expectations so how many customers sit on the platform yeah so now we have around 10 customers in our platform live uh but the pipeline is filling up and we're actually trying to unborn as many of them as possible but we have um a little bit of a backlog which we're working on that's awesome congratulations on your first 10 customers tell us the story of how you got the first one yeah so the first one uh was actually quite a funny story because we got some press here in the netherlands um through a startup journal that found us and that resulted in um yeah quite some conversations coming inbound our product wasn't working yet um 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 to take the leap with us um yeah that's how we started that's amazing okay so 10 customers at about 380 dollars per month in revenue means you're doing about 4 000 a month right now on revenue is that right yeah pretty much 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 gonna 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 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 to 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 and what you can get now inside of founderpath 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 evaluation 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 and you said that you're growing fast you have a long wait list now how are you getting new sign ups today what's the growth strategy so the growth strategy is actually threefold so we do unbound sales uh 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 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 fascinating okay so partnerships outbound and inbound makes a lot of sense what's the team size today how many folks yeah so the team says at the moment we're with six um and we're expanding rapidly so we're hiring um which is one of the reasons that we can't focus much on outbound sales at the moment we need to make our trade-offs and konstantinos uh when you did the uh the pre-seat round of 400 thousand bucks was that at the traditional sort of five million dollar cap [Music] um yeah so for european standards yeah pretty much yeah with a cabinet discount let's say around five million yeah interesting and um are you looking at raising now or no yeah so we have run away for uh quite a while now uh to go but we're looking launching a bit earlier uh we have about 11 months left um that's yeah so on the burn rate we uh we're predicting but we're looking at raising around uh 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 um we want to deviate from actually uh requiring us to get consultants in-house to actually empowering them to do their job better and if you did raise before the summer how much would you target to raise yeah so between two and three million euros okay and um what would sort of the story be in other words obviously you need to manage delusions so in order to get whatever a 10 20 million valuation what story do you think you have to tell yeah i 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 uh consultant that means that every month we'll get three new customers signed up um and obviously that is very strong benefits that makes a lot of sense of the six people on your team how many are engineers two are engineers and they're actually offshore in poland um and the funding that we would raise during our pre or seed round uh would be to get engineering in-house as much as possible uh is the poland team an outsourced engineering firm uh no actually those are direct hires but we started as uh on an agency basis uh but we believe that to skill fast and to take these first steps we need to have a local team uh that is able to bridge the gap between us and the offshore engineering team you had an agency before this or you started your engineering team via an engineering agency yeah exactly exactly the second part the second one okay got it which agency did you work with uh cbt services and they're much recommended to be honest they're great c c b t services t v t spelling time uh cedric valentine uh theodore uh okay okay cvt services based in poland yeah how did you find them um through for instance um i've got some friends here uh who have started their businesses and met lots of people on the way and they were recommended by three people i spoke with them and obviously spoke with a lot of um a lot of agencies but they were committed to making the business successful and not so much trying to push hours rather than deliver quality you're not the cheapest around but you get quality fortune platform yeah i mean that 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 i think about 20k which was quite affordable okay yeah that's not that's not terrible and how long did it take them to build it um a matter of weeks oh wow a couple weeks okay um cool and so well i guess why do you want to move now in-house why not keep using cvt well they're great but obviously when you serve more uh when they serve more customers there's a bottleneck in how fast you can move you need to 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 issues to work on well constantly this is a great story i'm rooting for you let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book um let me think i really liked the almanac of naval number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh there's many i'm following or studying here in the netherlands there's ceo called renee janssen founder of lapaya an upskilling platform for employees and i think he has had a great journey came from consulting but completely pivoted into entrepreneurship are you going to uh the sassiest conference from sas nordic up there in malmo sweden um i haven't been signed up yet but i'll have a look uh very cool all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business um for me it's figma big one yeah number four how many hours i sleep to get every night uh try to get eight hours of sleep a night but uh obviously that's different some nights and what's your situation married single kids um i have a girlfriend not married going to move in very soon very cool and how old are you i'm 27 27 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh that's a good one something i wish i knew i was training that i would be doing this at the moment i really had my doubts about where i was gonna know i'm really happy with the part that i chose guys uh 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 got going last year in september 2021 now is onboarded 10 customers paying an average 400 bucks 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 million cap looking at potentially raising 2 to 3 million euros here in a seed round before summer we'll see what happens constantinos thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much 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 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