How Gruntify CEO Igor Stjepanovic grew to $1.8M revenue and 55 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is igor stefanovic she loves solving real problems with innovative and creative solutions his specialty is geospatial technology and real-time delivery of cloud and mobile applications now building a field workforce automation tool at gruntify.com igor are you ready to take us to the top i am nathan all right what does field workforce automation mean well we help our clients effectively be more productive in the field so we um automate their field operations through technology make sure the right person receives the right information at the right time and our aim is really to boost productivity and save money for our clients and who are these clients can you name a couple of them yeah sure we have clients in the united states and in australia for example we have modus a company in the united states that's rolling out 5g hardware all over this country we have core logic as one of our property clients and we have multiple government clients in australia in the united states for example the city of san jose oh wow and so city of san jose if they have like repair people they'll they'll use your tool to manage their repair people or how's that work yeah well they they actually have multiple uses for our technology including responses to the fires in the city in emergencies as well as various housing related use cases very interesting okay so what do these companies and cities pay you on average to use your technology per month uh well look that that varies of course we have a range of planes um uh obviously the professional is our entry-level plane and provides for inspections and then if you want to go to more advanced uh field workflows you go up to a business plan which is a charge of 49 per person per month and obviously for our largest clients we provide a premium service we call the enterprise plan and that's uh usually priced on application okay but what would you say i know there's a lot of different options here but what would you say a sweet spot is the sweet spot like a thousand bucks a month or three thousand a month or what uh based on the number of seats obviously um that varies but most most people fit within about five thousand to about seven thousand a month i see and that's usually about how many seats six thousand a month that's that's approximately 500 600 seats interesting okay um 6k per month is 5 okay per month is is if you said 50 seats or 500 seats 500 but we provide obviously uh you know for for higher volumes we provide discounts um so we basically charge less the more users you have the the less you pay and tell me more the back story here when did you launch the company igor we actually launched in australia out of an innovation challenge one of our early clients posted a challenge trying to solve a problem for their graffiti and vandalism um issues and uh we pitched our solution and uh built a prototype an early prototype which we took from there and then basically modified what year what year was that that was 2016. uh that was the earliest the version of grantify we are now in version four of the platform and we've expanded and built a lot of the additional capabilities which of course we didn't have early on but since our early days we've expanded across different industries and different geographies as well and how many paying customers do you have now today we target as i said the predominantly larger clients so about we have about 50 60 clients so not not that many but we are currently focusing on the small to medium sized clients and that's where we see a lot of growth and a lot of interest lately 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 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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 i mean if i take you know what would you say 55 customers times 6 000 a month on average what you guys are doing about 330 000 bucks a month right now in revenue yeah well yes sort of uh it's more about 250 at the moment 250k but um that's growing and um we are obviously uh this year also also launching in europe which is a big market opportunity for us as well as we are starting to grow in singapore so across asia asian market day so we see a lot of opportunities uh for uh for this type of technology uh this year and beyond and if you're doing 250 000 a month in revenue today what were you doing about a year ago uh probably about a half if that about a half so 125 000 bucks a month yep and what's driven most the growth is it the current 50 customers buying more seats or is it brand new customers coming in well actually we we are growing through mostly at the moment word of mouth so our happy customers are referring us to other customers uh we don't have we're not investing a lot uh in marketing and sales which is something we would like to change this year we are also investing in our partner uh partner sort of program but the growth is coming mostly through an organic sort of world of mouth uh growth what's the best way to do it have you done this all bootstrapped or did you decide to raise capital now we are 100 bootstrapped at the moment but hey i love that that's awesome and we've done that for a number of years obviously we are very conservative with our money so with the money that we earn we invest and reinvest back into the business so that's that's been working okay but we are hitting the stage where i think we should really accelerate our growth because the platform is starting to be very mature we have validated it in the marketplace so it's all about growth now uh-oh the raise is coming all right so how you might you might go to the dark side then how much would you look at raising this year we're looking to raise between 5 and 10 million hopefully um to grow internationally um so that's really our aim and uh yeah that's that's what we're working on at the moment but right now or you're the sole founder do you own 100 of the business yes that's amazing no co-founders huh no unfortunately not um i've been a vlone wolf for for a while now but how did you get the mvp live did you code it yourself no no um uh well actually we had a team of three early on so i was i did not code it myself but i do come from technical background as you might appreciate i used to be a geospatial computer programmer back in the day so i come from that dark side yeah you're right okay but what happened to the other three two people though they're still here um they are still with me now we have about 22 so we have grown you know slightly over the last four or five years and every year we would put on you know two or three five people depending on uh what was needed but uh we are we are growing organically as i said but igor how did you get those first two people to do work for you without giving them equity did you have a bunch of money you could pay them like a full salary that's a great question no we granted five was born out of another company which i started called gis people and that's a professional services company servicing oil and gas and mining clients that company actually is the one that developed gruntify and then grandfather was spun out of that company and became an entity of its own it became it took over our other operations really became our uh primary focus but uh it that that startup if you like was really part of of open gis people business initially so that consulting business back in 2016 how much revenue did it do that year was it a big agency uh no it was about three or four million dollars at the time so we invested part of that uh i guess revenue in in this gruntify business because we noticed um we started receiving a lot of inquiries about uh field operations and helping clients automate their uh workflows and uh we didn't really find a great solution and so we decided to build our own and that's how really gruntify emerged um an event from there that's amazing yeah so agency you take the way you were to pay these there to people is you pay them as agency employees and then spun the ip out you own 100 of the of the new ip quantify 100 correct i see okay so you want to raise 5 to 10 million it sounds like this year to put the pedal to the metal you know go a little bit faster how much equity are you willing to sell for 5 million bucks well that really i guess you know depends on on on the arrangements that we negotiate with our investors um you're looking probably about 20 percent of the business 25 maximum again depending on what uh what other than the money what else they can bring to the table because some people might be able to open some doors and create introductions and sometimes that's a lot more valuable than the money itself at the moment money is somewhat cheap as they say you know and there's plenty of it around but good connections and uh introductions are to me worth more than just money itself so if someone's listening right now and they're top tier vc and they think you'd get along with igor and you're comfortable writing a five million dollar check at a 20 million free money evaluation 25 million posts buying about 20 of the business eager they should email you they should reach out to me right now very cool all right and and you definitely want to go through the equity route i mean if someone offered you two or three million bucks in debt but you keep all your equity would you look at doing that or no you would consider that but um like i said it depends what else they can bring to the table um we are able to source money from the banks and whatnot that's a problem but we're really looking for strategic partners and potentially bigger businesses that can uh you know facilitate introductions and help us spend more work as well as just you know help us kind of tool up in our marketing and sales departments which is where most of the money would be invested in you mentioned 22 folks on your team right now how many of them are engineers uh other than myself the chief financial officer and the chief operational ceo there would be effectively all of them are software engineers testers we have we use a scrum methodology and agile uh so we have you know scrum masters and product owners and those kinds of folks but uh yeah that would be about 18 19 of them no sales team no paid marketing spend all organic at the moment no correct interesting and what's net dollar retention over the past 12 months we literally don't lose any clients once we win them they stick with us so what about expansion though if someone pays you five grand a month from a year ago were you able to upsell them to six grand a month in 2022 yes yes we see especially from our larger clients they start off with one project uh and then they introduce additional projects and additional teams so we we've had uh with some of our large clients we've had basically clients come in and purchase say a hundred licenses now they're over a thousand wow so it you know it it really depends but most of the clients grow over time quite significantly hey gore i love this story congrats let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book yeah well it's uh thank you for for your nice words nathan really appreciate you let's wrap up here favorite business book number one um uh look uh i don't know you got me now on the spot that there are so many um can't think of them but anything to do with startups anything to do with um uh innovation and not necessarily i.t centric i read a lot number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh not a single one again there are many um i followed you know uh elon musk's of the world and uh ceos of google microsoft and so on but again not a single person i follow multiple people number three igor is there a favorite online tool that you use to build gruntify um we do use again a lot of tools but we love trello cello and atlassian software called jira um we use those tools a lot so we love number number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night can you repeat that sorry how many hours of sleep do you get on the average height not many um usually about six to seven uh that's that's sort of enough for me yeah i get get by and igor what's your situation married single kids i'm married with four children uh live in australia great place wow four kids and how old are you i'm 46 uh and so soon to be 47 so heading towards the 50s happy happy early birthday last last question or something you wish you knew when you were 20 um well i wish i knew how much i didn't know at the time so you know all those things you think you know and uh makes all those assumptions so i think i i wish i had more of an open mind back then but i guess you learn as you as you grow older that hey the world is a wonderful place and there's a lot of things you really don't know um and the more you you you experience experience the world the more you realize how much more there is to know guys gruntify.com is a bootstrap sas coming out about australia with three million dollars in terms of run rate up from 1.5 million just a year ago now saying you know what it's time to raise and grow faster targeting a five-ish million dollar raise at you know selling 10 20 to the business they help customers like modis in the city of san jose here in the united states manage their field sales teams really sharp technical team of 22 mainly engineers of 18. we'll see what happens next igor thanks for taking us to the top nathan thanks for this opportunity 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