How Greencast BV Onboarded 10 Customers at Around €300 Per Month to Track Carbon Emissions (Interview with Founder Konstantinos Kouzelis)

Introduction and Product Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Folks. 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?

How the Carbon Measurement Platform Works

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

HR and E-Commerce Data Sources Explained

Nathan Latka

00:43What might one of these companies have on their HR system that enables you to quantify their carbon emission?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

01:06And what's an example of that same thing? But if they attach their e commerce data source, what could you see there?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

01:42And 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?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

02:12And 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?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

02:27Yeah. Interesting. Give me the backstory here. When did you launch the company?

Company Founding Story and Pre-Seed Raise

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

03:00How many customers sit on the platform?

10 Customers on the Platform

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

03:15That's awesome. Congratulations on your first 10 customers. Tell us the story of how you got the first one.

Story of the First Customer

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

03:51That'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?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

03:59>> Yeah. Pretty much.

Nathan Latka

04:01Oh, 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

04:24your 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

04:49get 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

05:10not 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

05:36going 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

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06:24into 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?

Growth Strategy: Inbound, Outbound, and Partnerships

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

07:12Fascinating. Okay, so partnerships outbound and inbound makes a lot of sense. What's the team size today? How many folks?

Team Size and Hiring

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

07:29And, Konstantinos, when you did the pre seed round of $400,000, was that at the traditional sort of $5,000,000 cap?

Pre-Seed Round Details and Valuation Cap

Konstantinos Kouzelis

07:37>> Yeah. So for European standards, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. With a cap and discount, let's say around 5,000,000.

Nathan Latka

07:43Yeah. Interesting. And are you looking at raising now or no?

Runway and Seed Round Plans

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

08:21Mhmm. And if you did raise before the summer, how much would you target to raise?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

08:26>> Yeah. So between 2 and €3,000,000.

Nathan Latka

08:29Mhmm. 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?

Consultant Partnership Multiplier Effect

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Engineering Team in Poland and the Agency Question

Nathan Latka

09:05Of the six people on your team, how many are engineers?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

09:20Is the Poland team an outsource engineering firm?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

09:39You had an agency before this or you started your engineering team via an engineering agency?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

09:44>> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. The second part.

Nathan Latka

09:46The second one. Okay. Got it. Which agency did you work with?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

09:50>> CVT Services. And they're much recommended, to be honest. They're great.

Nathan Latka

09:54CVT Services?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

09:56>> CVT. Valentin. Cedric Valentine Theodor.

Nathan Latka

10:00Ah, okay.

10:02Okay. CVT Services based in Poland. Yeah. How did you find them?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

MVP Build Cost and Timeline

Nathan Latka

10:35Yeah, 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?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

10:43>> I think about 20 k, which was quite affordable.

Nathan Latka

10:45Okay. Yeah. That's not that's not terrible. And how long did it take them to build it?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

10:51>> Matter of weeks.

Nathan Latka

10:52Oh, wow.

Konstantinos Kouzelis

10:53>> Couple weeks.

Nathan Latka

10:54Okay.

10:55Cool. And so I guess why do you want to move now in house? Why not keep using CVT?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

11:27Well, Konstantinos, this is a great story. I'm rooting for you. Let's wrap up here with Famous Five. Number one, favorite business book?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

11:33>> Favorite business book.

11:37>> Let me think. I really liked The Almanac of Naval.

11:41>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

11:42Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Nathan Latka

12:01Are you going to the SaaSiest conference from SaaS Nordic up there in Malmo, Sweden?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

12:09>> I haven't signed up yet, but I'll have a look.

Nathan Latka

12:11Very cool. Alright. Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building the business?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

12:16>> For me, it's Figma.

Nathan Latka

12:18Figma. Yep. Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

12:21>> I try to get eight hours of sleep a night. Eight. But obviously, that's different some nights.

Nathan Latka

12:27And what's your situation? Married? Single? Kids?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

12:31>> I have a girlfriend. Not married. Going to move in very soon.

Nathan Latka

12:34Very cool. And how old are you?

Konstantinos Kouzelis

12:36>> I'm 27.

12:38>> 27.

Nathan Latka

12:39Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Konstantinos Kouzelis

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.

Closing Recap

Nathan Latka

12:52Guys, 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

13:1310 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.

Konstantinos Kouzelis

13:30>> Thank you very much.

Nathan Latka

13:33One 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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