InEvent Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2023)

hello everyone my guest today is pedro grows he grew the comp he grew this company uh in invent.us uh from a two-person team to larger team size from zero to 100 plus clients and from zero to a million in 26 months his work includes recruiting talented hard-working people communicating the company's strategy and closing major deals they also provide product development and coding support to the rest of his team all right pedro you ready to take us to the top yeah let's go let's go okay nice to have you yeah thanks for coming on so you said you went from basically zero to a million dollars in arr in 26 months yeah that's right and what are you doing today monthly yeah so today we we're a bit around double that okay so if you're doing that to per if you're doing two million a year right now that means you're doing about 160 thousand dollars a month right now yeah that's right around 150 it varies a lot because you know events okay well yeah let's let's talk about let's talk about that so what's the product it's an event product how does it work so basically we have a event management platform that works with integrated with other crms so think like the company has salesforce or some kind of software like mercado some instance and they want to extend that so they want to have more uh integrated products focus on events so then the event comes and provides that's a landing pages email communication access control mobile apps and everything else okay and what do people pay on average per month for this so it can store around uh a thousand dollars and can go up to a hundred thousand depends mostly on a month how how it's going to yeah that depends upon the volume that you have okay you have people paying you people paying 100 000 a month right now yeah yeah but that's for very very very large contracts yes okay so uh just be clear on average customers are paying you about a thousand dollars per month and that varies depending on how many events they're doing it depends that's not the average contract so we have people that will pay a little bit more what's the average it's around two to three okay per per month it's usually yeah okay but it's usually something that but the contract is not like uh a sales based model that you have constant revenue all the time so some customers they may hire for six months and they may hire for three months it's not like they are paying every month well do you consider yourself a sas business yeah because the assessed business okay well sas business the whole point of a business is i have monthly recurring revenue so this is a trend i found when i had reggie on with cvent once i had the social tables people on i've interviewed probably 30 in the event space and this is always a challenge because events are by nature kind of a one-time thing usually and so they're not really sas companies because it's kind of one time now if it's one time or two times every single year then it's recurring yeah that's it yeah it's just that we we provide them they are constantly buying the product it's just that update i paint the same month every day for the same platform it's but overall if you get the customer lifetime which can be like for five years you're going to see that's recurring revenue it's just not specific on a single month every day so let's not talk about it let's not talk about it monthly because that's not how your business works let's talk about it yearly yeah right so someone might pay yearly so on average per year what might a customer pay you yeah so they will pay per year they would say around you'll be two six to seven thousand okay got it that's helpful and then how many you launched this you said 26 months ago so 2016. no so the company started in uh 2014 and we have been growing so the the beginning the beginning was very slow and we then but then we started when we launched the product then we had a very high start uh most of this we started latin america and we we have grown broadly uh to the us and europe and that's when sales really picked up and how many customers do you have today so active customers uh it's around uh 50 but then we have on our overall industry we have more than 250 so that's the number that we usually go with so 250 customers that have paid or have given time using the product okay so basically every year you have about 250 different brands that pay you something yes and they vary the the level of uh of what they need and what they're trying to do and so those are complex uh scenarios most of them they're hosting sometimes very large event very complex events some for them we did one for 47 000 people uh and then what was that there right it's a for a spanish bank called something there oh yeah santander we've yeah we've had we've had them on the show before so just to be clear if you have 250 people paying you each year about six grand a year maybe for one event or two events or whatever that means you're doing about 125 000 a month right now and that puts you at a run rate of about 1.5 million right now not 2 million yeah you understand the numbers they're pretty close to that i mean in in overall sense i may may go overall can be six or seven thousand but maybe they may grow a bit so that's the updates that i got from last year okay but you're saying over the past over the past 12 months you've done about a million in revenue yeah yeah that's correct yes okay and in the next 12 months what do you think you'll do but that's the first uh 26 months that we had right so that's when we started the company so last year we did more than one million months so that's the point so now we are close to two okay so at the at the beginning of last year right so this would have been for the year of 2017. so not last year but the year before that how much did you do do you remember yeah so 2018 we did between 2017. i'm saying in 2017 total yeah 2017 was much slower than that was around 400 000 yeah okay 400 000 total and then you're saying you basically triple i'm trying to get growth right here which is why i'm asking so you tripled year over year to get to get up to one about 1.3 1.4 last year yeah but last year we didn't do 1.4 we're trying to do one point four in 2009 in 2019. then what did you do last year so last year we did one million okay okay got it so you're you're more like double in your year okay yeah let's see what's uh two point two point something that was the growth rate so 110 yeah yeah that's great okay and where are you getting um i assume you're just a hustler but how are you getting all these new customers what's your growth channel look like so there is a very good marketplace for salesforce um and also marketo if you're going to there you're going to see that you just enroll your company and then a lot of leads they come through and so that's a really good place to acquire an elite on those marketplaces then we have um they don't have outbound like we call people we we get to know their company we call them and there is also inbound basically landing pages that we provide with the content they are looking for so those are the three main channels what boundary mount and the marketplaces how many leads does marketo send you every month depends around it's begun to be slow right now so three four last months and the beginning was much stronger it was around 10 to 15. and what about and what how much does salesforce drive you there's not much um most of them are usually larger contracts so customers that come from those places they're they're usually they're usually having uh larger contracts because they want to deploy for the whole organization because they have this vision of how the crm is i understand that my question was just simply how much are you getting how many leads are you getting from the salesforce app exchange oh for so source we are we're still being validated the most that we drive it's from marketo yes okay so you're getting less than two or three leads from salesforce per month yes okay so round out the team for me how many folks are on the team so 19 people yeah and where's your one based so we have a couple of new york we have a couple people in sao paulo brazil and have a couple of people in uh now we are hiring in london but that's the first person that's going to be hired there that's great and have you bootstrapped this company pedro have you raised yeah we have bootstrapped me mauricio here's my side and and then we have venetia's also uh he's traveling he's also a music customer here did you guys split it at 30 30 30. yeah it's uh that's for the information it's something we keep for us but so the company is it's between all of us so we are the three shareholders currently in the company so that's great because as we grow we're going to have bandwidth to to acquire capital easier are you break even today or are you profitable or burning no we're profitable you are probably being profitable yeah since 2016 here like 10 or 20 grand to the bottom line or you reinvest all that back in the business and we reinvent it we put everything back okay so thank you yeah because our teammates we we don't have uh we we don't have a lot of fixed costs or even people that we have to pay off but so we keep this cost internally and we so we have a lot of money to invest back in so that's the whole idea of the business do you know do you know what your what it cost you to sign up a new customer so today it's very very very diverse so if you're talking about inbound leads they're they're much easier to acquire because basically it's creating a landing page and then they propagate overall outbound is much more expensive um so what would you say your fully weighted cache is today to get a new six thousand dollar a year customer what are you willing to spend to get that customer yeah it's not something that i have very clear i can get the information and then share with you but no it's okay it's something you don't track yeah but it's basically we tried per channel remember much more important to direct per channel how much does this channel bring in uh so what channel is your best right now southbound is the first one outbound is really the the best one because we can focus on large companies and then that's when they they get called they're very large deals so it takes around two to three years sometimes to close them but it's usually the best paying customers two to three years to close this year you've only been around for two or three years no we start in 2014. yeah okay yeah so three years puts you at 2017 but you're saying there are some contracts just now closing that you started talking to back in 2015 yeah the time 16 years so there are a couple of customers that we start in 2016 like hospitals and from social companies yeah they just closed right now yeah very good very long it's a very long yeah okay let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh i read one uh uh recently by i'm going to decide that there is a company called imbrea it's a company of uh it's merging with boeing so what's the book so i recommended it it's um the history of a dream by osiris history of a dream number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i see ceo oh yeah i follow mostly bill gates uh not a ceo anymore but someone that i follow number three what billing tool do you use billing tool yep uh you mean internally uh fresh books number four how many hours of sleep to get every night oh that's not much let's not put our number here no that's a question how much i don't know i don't know usually six hours okay and what's your situation married single kids no no you're really young just maybe maybe in the future married not married no kids and how old are you yeah no just happy happy person how old are you pedro i'm 26 26 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i wish how long it's going to take to build a b2b business it takes very very long guys it takes longer than you think he's building in invent.us number one channel or the salesforce marketo app exchanges again helping event organizers run more efficient events 250 customers paying 500 bucks a month or about six grand a year on average doing about you know about a 125 grand a month today that's up from about 34 35 grand a month just about a year ago they are operating totally bootstrap their breakeven with a team of 19 in new york city sao paulo and london pedro thank you for taking us to the top thank you thank you