How Innform CEO Michael Azzopardi grew Innform to $550K revenue with a 5 person team in 2025.

hello everyone my guest today is michael osopody he's the co-founder and ceo of employee development and e-learning company esabazo since being set up in 2013 the company's software products helped develop upwards of 500 000 employees across 97 countries michael is currently focusing his attention on the company's latest product inform a staff training tool for hospitality teams michael are you ready to take us to the top hi nathan how are you i'm good thank you i think i just lost it for a second now that's okay thank you so just be clear you have two you have two products sabazo and inform.io which one is the sas company inform is a sas company so inform is an employee development tool which um is basically aimed at the hospitality industry it's kind of like the uh greatest hits kind of a compilation of things that we've been working on uh for the last kind of five years with sabato okay so so i want to understand sabazo and then inform but so first of all help me understand what what what that company does and why you made the decision to go full sas with inform so sabato is um our first kind of like mother company that's what we started seven i my business partner about five years ago in london and that's an employee development software company so we work with um several kind of global hospitality companies and we help them basically build custom software tools for them to uh for the managers and the hr people to train their global workforce so we kind of uh equip them with the features and tools they need to to drive their workforce forward with everything they need uh around the world um so sebasto is very much a traditional software company in the sense that we build the tools on project basis or license kind of bases um and then inform is the sas so hold on michael before we go to inform so sabazo um what was the revenue model there were you basically taking a cut like how did you price it so we had two have two uh ongoing uh different uh kind of like pricing models there project basis so complete custom solution so literally uh specify as building software on specifications uh and the other thing we do is licensing software out to companies i see interesting okay so just to understand kind of what you're moving away from help me understand over the past 12 months how much revenue did that company do just sabazo so um what's the buzzer i'm not that prepared to kind of disclose that information uh but we what i will say however is we've built sebasto from literally nothing five years ago to quite to a good i would say growth rate of upwards of 40 percent at the moment we're trying to actually increase it up after five years um and what we've done is we've decided we said okay look we have this wealth of information we have this customer base we know a lot about the e-learning industry we know a lot about the hospitality industry so we said what can we do to basically move into the products space so what we've done is we've grabbed uh we'll do basically literally saved up 200k uh from the past and launched in form using that uh that's funding so michael i won't push you harder on this but give me a give me a range i mean are we talking 5 million or less 10 million or less generally speaking how big was the prior company no no it's it's it's uh it's at 1 million or less okay the reason i asked that uh and i appreciate you being transparent the reason i ask that there's a lot of ceos that get stuck with called a million bucks in revenue but it doesn't scale and they don't have the the guts to say we're pivoting you have made a decision to pivot so i want you to serve as an example to others so so you have this asset it's it's high churn it's per project you know less than a million per year you're now using everything you've learned there including the customer base which is valuable save 200 grand in cash so you're good on cash flow to put into inform so what are you doing different with inform how's the revenue model work and what are you going to deliver so with inform and it's very good that you mentioned so with inform what we've done and the reason why we've done informed now is because we believe that we can do a lot a lot more with it so um the revenue model is the classic success model three it is three tier and two pages um it's aimed at small to medium-sized enterprises but what we want to do is want to deliver a full a fully featured kind of one-stop shop lms solution to these enterprises hospitality enterprises this is a niche product um so the important thing there is the big challenge with the learning management systems nathan is the idea of content right lms's are abundantly available in the market so what we decided to do was we said look let's build a great a fantastic lms solution which we've done but we wanted to go a step further i wanted to solve the issue that many hospital companies face every single day and that's to generate really good engaging interesting content for their employees yeah that the employees will actually engage with absolutely there's no there's no reason to get to to to implement an lms solution in an organization unless you have a great content so what we've done is we've moved into the content space as well with informant we're going to provide our customers with kind of top-notch text and video bases the courses that they will have access to as soon as they become paid members so there's a feeds here where they can buy the courses and then there's a paid tier where they have full access to the course when did you launch the paid plans we we're still building we're selling beat the face at the moment okay revenue on this company yes absolutely okay got it uh that's great now how many customers did you work with that sabazo um so with the bazaar we've got about 20 customers that are big big big clients of ours we are basically their sole lms supplier these are global companies so um as you said earlier different model and but they basically provided us with um a lot of what we need to know to kind of move into the the market space and besides the 200 000 bucks that you've saved up i mean has the company bootstrapped or have you raised capital totally bootstrapped yeah both both companies that's great and uh how many folks on the team across both companies in total around 15 people we're we're around with 10 people on sabbath and we're five on informant as we speak okay and you said that the whole company launched in 2013 and forum obviously launched here in 2018 correct yes and and what is the um you mentioned earlier trying to continue to improve sabazo why not cut your safety nets and go all in on inform force everybody on it why try and grow something that you know is not the future good question so firstly there's a fair amount of ongoing projects and ongoing let's say legacy solutions which we've built over the years those provide a fair amount of annual revenue for us including you know maintenance uh sla agreements and so on that is the reason because we've kind of like worked i think quite smart in that way we've managed to generate enough um capital and safety in that foreign form yes your question is valid there could be a point at which that could happen and we we we we do discuss this actually quite a lot what will happen if inform is is you know hopefully kind of like goes the way we think it will go um the answer is you know both companies are would be would be profitable why um you know why um abandon the first the first company when we can have you know potentially two leaderships for both and run them simultaneously yeah are they does sabazo are they the same cap table are they two separate companies so um technically they they're the same company the way we want to approach it is the atlassian side right so having the mother company with several products underneath so the way we see it in the next five years about there will be the mother company with several products underneath it yeah but just be clear atlassian is that's not a professional it wasn't like a professional services agency brand that they kept to then house products underneath it they're kind of a multi-set but they're all they're all sas products right so i don't think that an analogy holds for you oh sorry i just lost you there did you repeat the last time i'm just saying i was just saying comparing what you're trying to do to modeling and lasting i would say is not fair i mean they didn't have an agency model that they kept going just for the hell of it you have an agency model you want to keep going for the hell of it because it generates cash so so okay um to clarify we don't want to keep it going just to see where it goes the plan for the next five years is to transition fully into the product space got it so so we don't intend to let the survivor model go indefinitely the the plan is to transition fully into them so how do you so how do you shut it when will you decide to move the rest of the employees fully off of sabazo and into inform well so the current clients we are committed to keep in service you know until until we can we we're not going to we're not going to go anywhere close you know stopping this prematurely the the reason is as i said there are long-term projects happening um michael just be clear though you said you're not gonna do this indefinitely so what if a customer says i want you to do this for the next decade you're gonna keep doing it for the next i mean i would consider that in our time frame indefinite that's a good question and the honest answer we don't have a plan for that yet i mean the um the the way we see it um pan out is if if that was would be the case we definitely would need would need a transition plan of sorts uh as i said we our relationship with our clients so far you know is um kind of very important to what we're doing with inform as well so we we're nowhere close to to to kind of like severing any any of those ties or even um stopping sebasto was as the time as a time at the time because because this is this is um a very important model that we've adopted to kind of sustain any projects that's come out that come in the future yeah just to be clear call it what it is it's cash flow plus you're learning about your customer base that you're going to ultimately eventually sell and to inform absolutely and also the idea of bootstrapping with this model um i mean i can highly recommend it because the reason is as you said you can you you can never you can never buy resourcefulness you know um the the what we've achieved with the seven eye and the whole team and in five years working with these customers face to face a tremendous amount of experience in the space and i can't think of any way any other way to kind of like get that uh than to continue to have the relationship with the clients we have now yep that makes a lot of sense let's wrap up here michael with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh there are many um i would say i mean i'm not sure if it's a business book it's how to win friends and influence people it's one of the books i read many times number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um yes uh the name escapes me the ceo of slack i believe his name is butterfield yeah stewart stewart butterfield number three what's your what billing tool do you use bidding tool uh zero number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night it's between seven days okay and what's your situation married single kids saying to no kids okay um and how old are you 31 31 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew what do i wish so many things uh i would say not to take things too seriously in the sense of uh failing uh just just just to look at it for what it is which is a fantastic game which to which is this is made to just enjoy and welcome failure a bit more guys there you have it michael again it's just a game go for it launched company back five years ago grew the basically professional services business up to a million bucks in revenue then realize you know what we've got to transition this into a true sas company they're doing that with a company called in form which will essentially help teams train their employees faster and a more end in a more engaging model that pricing launch is here at the end of 2018 their pre-revenue today funding it with 200 000 bucks they've saved up from the agency so totally bootstrapped which i love michael thanks for taking us to the top thank you thanks for having me