How Indidesk CEO Deigo Santiago grew Indidesk to $50.4K revenue and 400 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is diego santiago he's originally from guatemala and then moved to madrid to build a virtual workplace that enhances productivity for remote work he generally believes it can be done with this there'll be no limits for undeveloped countries which have so many people with an unmeasurable desire for success but lack education and decent fair job offers diego are you ready to take us to the top yeah sure okay so the company name is into desk i believe tell us what the company does and how you make money okay well um indie desk is a collaborative work manager um basically what you can do over in the desk is you can manage your teams projects tasks communications files everything in just one place okay and what do people pay on is this a sas company and if so what do they pay per month on average for it yeah we are a sas company um we launched four months ago uh our better version um we just got two months since we launched officially to america and europe uh basically what we do is uh we integrate every single future of every sas company um there are a lot of of different amazing tools uh communication tools like slack hold on diego sorry that's a really generic statement you integrate everything across everybody i mean are you like like a zapier kind of uh no what we did is we developed our own our own futures uh basically enhancing productivity like the well-being of the project we understood that there are a lot of times that people or teams working remotely usually use more than three tools uh communication tools tasks management systems just be clear this is a project management tool like base camp or monday or trello yeah but we have some things you can identify your in-house resource and your external resource okay and what do customers pay on average per month for this uh 9.99 999 no 9.99 so 10 10 yeah 10 basically okay yeah and you just uh you launched recently i love this so we're getting you right as you're kind of launching and going and hopefully the show brings you more customers but what have you scaled to today how many customers today uh we just grow hitting the 90k users right now um and we just hit about 50k in adult revenue for for for now that's great okay so 50 000 in annual revenue i believe would be about four four or five thousand dollars per month uh in revenue uh and if you charge on average kind of ten per customer i can divide and it looks like you have what about 400 500 customers yeah okay that's great and wait so i mean that's pretty impressive for kind of just launching where are you how did you get 90 000 users and 400 customers um i think it was our strategy um we work a lot in our in our offline strategy we we go to a lot of different startup events and tech events and people love the the tool and how you can use it uh the easy so it's so easy to use that people actually like us a lot so that's why that's how i think we well be specific so let you go to a startup event you're in there everyone's drinking beers and maybe there's a speaker how do you go from that to getting them to pay for your platform well basically uh not just like to take peers uh we always are in uh we always have a booth and showing the entire solution and we have an online marketing strategy too i think mixing both offline and online strategy make us right here so what i mean what do you pay to acquire a new 10 a month customer well the entire cost the acquisition cost of a customer right now it's about more than 25 dollars per age so 25 bucks to get a 10 a month customer so you're getting paid back and call it two or three months yeah and where are you spending most that money like you said online sometimes where where online um social media uh instagram google ads linkedin facebook too and what's working most effectively for you google ads yeah definitely google ads and about how much are you spending per month right now on google ads about six thousand dollars okay wow okay so our it sounds like you must have raised capital because that's more than what you're doing per month yeah yeah we raised capital um actually like 10 months ago okay how much did you raise uh we raised 400 000 okay and was that from the local kind of local investors in brazil or madrid uh yeah our local he was from guatemala actually and he has like this new fun like angel fund for for a couple of startups and he's based here in madrid oh that's great very good how did you convince him to put money in and was it equity or a convertible note it was a comparable load it was a convertible mode yeah we're about to raise another round in a few months how much are you wanting to raise uh three million three million and at what valuation ideally uh 30 million ideally okay how are you going to convince people that you're worth 30 million bucks when you're doing 50 000 a year today uh well we have um really good growth right now i think sorry just to be clear though going from a dollar of revenue to a thousand bucks in revenue is huge growth but it's very very small numbers yeah it's huge growth it's huge growth but really small numbers um i think the reinforcement of the of the marketing online campaign is going to help us um basically a lot of people is working together because you cannot work on a project alone so every single time there is one people inside in the desk he's starting by the entire team and that's like kind of a viral thing right now okay totally totally understand that what do you think you have to grow your revenues to in order to get a 30 million dollar pre-money valuation about 250k a month okay 50 000 bucks per month yeah okay so i'll be call it 600 grand per year that's still i mean if you're doing 600 grand per year i mean and you want to raise it 30 million that's still a 50 5 0 x i mean that's a that's a pretty high value weight i mean who do you think is going to pay that uh well it depends on how long are we gonna gonna how long it's gonna take for us to actually be there because we're expecting it to happen uh maybe january because we're well right now we're we have in 22 countries we have users and we're growing really really fast so so you have four grand you have about four grand per month today in revenue and you think over the next 45 to 60 days you're gonna more than 10x that to 50 grand a month yeah and sorry what what help us understand by the way i believe you can do it but help us get in your head what gives you the confidence you can do that okay um well basically what we did uh different like a lot of startups is our solution it's a global solution because there is two big trends right now the jig economy and the other one is the remote work in the desk enhance both of them so basically what you can do is you can start hiring freelancers inside in the desk and you can manage their roles so basically it's easier for them to actually integrate into a project first and remote work is actually our mission right now to prove that remote work can be done so the jig economy is pushing us forward we're uh looking to launch a new entire product for for for freelancers exactly i think that's gonna be really really gross effect it's gonna it's gonna take us to another league okay that doesn't sound very that doesn't sound very specific yeah well basically what our solution is a global solution okay so i mean i get that but basically what you're telling me is the gig economy is growing a lot the freelance economy is growing a lot and we're just going to take a small percentage of that and it's going to make us really rich i mean if everyone said that everyone would you see it doesn't work oh yeah i understand no um basically what we did is we start looking for the jig economy because they are really they started like growing a lot like for example upwork so we're basically integrating with opera it's more than 10 million users right now i don't work um and we're competing back in latin america latin america has a lot of development houses exporting their service back to united states and europe so every single uh software factory it's about 5000 users per month and we have a lot of trials right now with a lot of companies back in south america and india right now so we're just about to close deals it's like an expansion what's the team size today uh it's 15 people one five and where's everyone based uh here in madrid we have also teaming guatemala and back in india too very good diego let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business book it will be tools of titans from team ferris number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now yeah actually i have the book right here i was writing it a couple of hours ago is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um i actually like my own style so i learned a lot from a lot of ceos but i admire a lot elon musk steve jobs also bill gates at his time um i have a lot of sales that i try to understand how they create things number three what billing tool do you use sorry what billing tool do you use billing tool uh we use a strike okay and what's uh how many hours of sleep to get every night about four to five hours okay and what's your situation married single kids single not married no...