How Intellibrand CEO Chau Sanh grew Intellibrand to $1.2M revenue and 40 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is chao sand he's got a bachelor of science in computer science postgraduate and project management and co-founder currently of intuitive intelligence a cro company sold in 2016 to pm web he's been an entrepreneur for over 10 years today he's focused on a company called intellibrand which is digital trade marketing and it's obviously a sas solution ciao let's jump in are you ready to take us to the top yes hello uh nathan nice to meet you nice meeting you as well so tell us about intellibrand what's the company do and how do you make money okay uh the company started uh three years ago and we our focus is to help brands to invest better and to sell more in the e-commerce uh segment so uh what we we did in three years ago was to build a sas platform in order to collect an uh a big large volume of that information about uh their products in the e-commerce and we uh we provide uh analytics about pricing uh assortment uh trade marketing uh process position in the in the e-commerce uh websites and also we we we analyze their sales so we can uh uh we can and try to bring together we can use the platform to demonstrate how their improvement in the digital trade market uh uh uh experience in in the e-commerce it helps to sell better got it help me help me understand the scale today what are you doing in terms of revenue okay uh uh well we we started uh uh three years ago with uh something about uh 5 k of mrr so in today and three years later we are we are doing 100k in a month in monthly and how much and how many customers we have already 40 customers all our big industries uh customers so such as engine labor nestle uh requiemser so the majors coca-cola the the majors are uh industry in the world are our uh main customers here in brazil in awesome late america and they're paying about 2500 bucks a month is that accurate sorry they're paying if you have 100 in revenue and 40 customers they're each paying about 2500 bucks a month on average correct great that's correct and what do you pay to acquire these customers what's your cap our tech is about we uh ten percent ten percent about these uh all the revenues a first year revenue yeah okay so caught kind of like three four grand something like that yeah exactly and what are you spending that money on is it a sales team or is it direct paid spend or what well we discovered that what happened is that this is a new market uh for the us for the industries and also for us so we are creating this market here in brazil in america in latin america so uh that's why our customer is not uh so uh we don't have uh so much customer uh for a sex company because also we our target companies are b2b enterprise companies and so what we are doing is that uh today we don't have to have a lot of sales manager uh sales executives but what is what is the team size today how many people the team size is just three sales credit and all the the money is going we are spending on customer success in marketing so sorry ciao what's the total team size uh about six people six people okay so half of them three of them are sales and marketing yeah half a are some uh sales and three are customer success okay good so three thousand bucks to acquire a customer that pays 2500 per month that means your payback is about two months correct and what do you assume what is churn today well as we are starting the business right now we just got one percent turn so we still didn't have a churn basically because uh our customer team are improving a lot with our customers so we didn't experience uh intern so you you have not lost you haven't lost any of your customers any other customer it seems not good very good and then you know that's obviously tricky when you start to try and understand what lifetime value is but what do you assume that lifetime value is of these customers well uh this uh we think that this is very early for for the semester because uh we as we we uh our growth very fast in the last year uh in the contract our one year contract and we didn't have a turn so we we don't have a metric right now to to to determine the time value of the customer we we are going to start to uh to uh calculate these uh right now yep and have you raised capital or are you bootstrapped we started a business tracking and we raised capital last year with djf ventures how much total have you raised we were raised about 1.5 million okay and was that last round an equity round or debt no the for the the last round yes it was equity yeah equity number okay and what valuation did you raise at okay we raised a valuation at uh five uh five million five million dollars free money or post uh free money pre-money so sick call it six million post and uh and so look you know you're doing called a hundred grand per month right now or about 1.2 million per year if you're raised at a five million pre you know that's obviously you know it's a good evaluation three to four x um how did you what was it like negotiating that valuation down in florida i think you're in florida florianopolis brazil correct no we are in sao paulo sao paulo okay but what are brazil valuations like in general uh birds evacuation in general are uh about five uh plus uh and already so i think that's five plus five multiples of uh uh annual revenues okay and where it depends on the business yeah and where were you just to get some growth rate numbers here where were you a year ago today you're doing a hundred thousand per month what were you doing in july of 2017. well uh this year our goal is to to do something about we are going to to go to 2000 k and how we are doing this we are spending our solutions to late america to other markets and sorry just to make sure i understand you're doing 100k today you said your goal by the end of the year is 200 000 per month yeah correct and what were you at a year ago in the past in the past we were just uh 40 40 000 a year ago for college yep correct okay very good so healthy growth you're more than doubling year over year yeah exactly where do you plan to get these new customers from how are you going to get them well we are going to uh our plan for the next uh for uh for 2019 in the in the next month is to spend more in marketing marketing and also in sales we are going to to invest money in sales here and [Music] also we are going to use to spend in late american markets so brazil is not just just the unique market that we're going to to to go through ciao i love it go ahead yeah this happened because uh all of our customers are international companies and they're they are doing this this this step for us they are they are taking our solution expanding to other markets where they have offices so this is why we are increasing and growing so fast here yep and just to be clear too in case people missed in the beginning again you're helping kind of the e-commerce space under management in that space understand pricing and competitive pricing and things like that correct correct exactly and also uh sales intelligence so we collect sales from the e-commerce website we are partnering with them and so we can correlate uh uh how all the spending in digital marketing in the e-commerce uh are converting in in sales yep that's good child let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book well uh i love the jeff bezos uh history so this is my favorite book amazon store yeah amazon store number two is there a ceo you're following or studying besides jeff bezos uh not yet no okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business sorry what's your favorite online tool uh well i i don't have right now well what do you you have to have what do you use on a daily basis to build the business well i i well we plan a lot here one of the things that we we do a lot here is it's planned a lot of what what we're going to do for the next five years so we we will i i don't know if if that's the question but uh the question is just what tool do you use on a daily basis the most uh for our business here to to to to managing just you in general as an entrepreneur uh i i don't have a specifically too okay i i try to a lot of tools here but i don't have my basic two is a it's a xl too but i don't have nothing specific okay number four how many hours of sleep to get every night well six five six hours per night okay and what's your situation married single do you have kids get married no kids no kids and how old are you uh 44 44 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew sorry what do you wish that your 20 year old self knew against some when you were 20 what's something you wish you knew ah okay i think that i would love i would like to uh try to to enter to go to the entrepreneurship uh uh earlier guys start a company faster that's what he wishes he knew when he was 20 again launched in telebrand back in 2015. today has over 40 customers paying 2500 per month for a hundred grand in monthly recurring revenue a year ago he was doing 40k monthly recurring revenue so healthy growth he helps to close 2018 out...