How Inventaprint CEO Rich Mokuolu grew Inventaprint to $1.2M revenue and 20 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is rich makulu his passion for venting and tinkering was ignited at an early age when he attached some wires to battery and a light bulb and lit up his childhood bedroom for the first time it also happened to be around the time he saw the movie flubber so it's safe to say his fate was totally sealed he has a patent related to the military space and was experienced and has experienced how difficult it is to get the products he'd spent years developing and prototyping actually made this led to the creation of inventoprint with his twin brother roland that's what they're working on today richard are you ready to take us to the top yes let's do it all right so what is invent to print and what is your revenue model how do you make money yeah so invent a print simply put is we apply intelligence to the hardware development process so we basically take hardware companies component specifications where they are in the product lifecycle and give them a list of vetted manufacturers that can bring those products to life our model is we're a sas plus company so we have an annual license fee that hardware companies pay us and the plus side of things is we get paid on in transaction from the manufacturers okay so let's just focus on sas for a second what's the average customer pay per year would you say yeah so the average customer is about like uh five thousand dollars per per month right per user per month or per year per month per month a month okay so let's say that i i uh have a patent on something i want to get it created i'm paying you five grand for the year and you're gonna help me find manufacturers to build my product correct so basically we we have two tiers of customers within our sas uh business model so the the within the enterprise level customers we work with innovation teams right so they would pay uh for access to the platform and basically by using a platform they get connected to better network manufacturers to help build uh their their products okay so i sign up with you today it takes me six months to pick a supplier from your network i then eight months in finally have like the first product done and then maybe 10 months and i'm starting to drive sales and let's say my little widget is now doing 10 grand a month in sales via that supplier you're taking a cut of those sales that is okay and how do you what i mean what percent are we talking so it's roughly around 10 but it's volume based okay so if i'm doing a million bucks in sales you'll take less than 10 percent correct okay and i mean how do you track that imagine once i work with a supplier you then have to basically track that my widget is being sold in target and kmart and walmart and i mean how do you actually know how many sales i'm doing so for us it's not necessarily focusing on the sales piece of it it's focusing on the friction side of things right adding value and reducing that friction of how do you actually build a product better and how do you go to market quicker with less money from a workflow from a working capital perspective um so that's what we're really focused on um the added benefit is you know people tend to have more cost competitive products um people tend to have more better well thought out ideas going to market um so this extra sales is just an added piece of it but our core focus on what we actually target is how do you apply intelligence to that hardware development process and that's your five thousand dollar kind of per month fee correct okay so sorry i don't understand then how to think about the plus part of your sas plus model you're taking person 10 of what sales of other transactions what transactions right the transaction of the hardware company with the manufacturers so think about it in this way right so you have a hardware company let's say you're the hardware company um you are trying to build a new innovative product that goes to space widget nathan's space widget nathan's correct space widgets um so you you have our our sas uh model where you pay us for the access to the platform and with each transaction we get a percent commission um similar to how you pay oh i see this is like this is like upwork or fiber so if i pay a manufacturer uh a hundred grand you're gonna take ten percent of that cut right and it just uh just disaground you on the way it works right now without a platform similar to the real estate industry how you have uh brokers real estate brokers you have manufacturing brokers in the hardware space and those people take anywhere between 15 to upwards of 25 right so what we do is by using a 10 percent we're actually undercutting the broker mac the broker market and giving a more cost competitive solution there yeah as long as your sas fee is so they have to be doing enough volume where the sas fee is marginal correct so we're mainly b2b yeah okay so like let me ask you your average customer how many dollars in a given year are they giving to manufacturers that you've connected them with or which i'm assuming it's in the millions yeah so our our our dollar profile is you know for a mid market company really determine it by a million dollars worth of spend a year and then for the enterprises over that um so that's where we kind of target the mid-market enterprise range i see so if so if nathan's space widgets is doing so well or i beat elon musk to the moon and i'm putting more than a million bucks per month or per year through the supply through the manufacturer that you connected me with uh you know i'm still paying the same flat five grand per month fee regardless of my volume but again you're taking some cut of sales that's dependent on the volume uh that is correct i i just missed the last piece of it uh that's okay i'm just trying to understand whether someone's whether someone's putting a dollar to the manufacturer or 100 million to the manufacturer they're still paying five grand a month right and the key for us is making sure that we add value outside of that transaction right so the reason why we're more of a sas company is because we give companies tools to better efficiently interact with their internal teams to where when they're transacting that's all fine and great but they already see value without transacting so they're customers that we have that even pay us regardless of transacting because we provide so much value i see without those transactions i see and how many customers have you scaled to today uh so right now we have a network of over 100 manufacturers uh we're mainly b2b we have around a little less than 20 pain pain customers but more many larger b2b 20 kind of large b2b customers and you're helping get the connected to a network of about 100 potential manufacturers um you know if i take 20 times that 5 000 price point you guys are doing north of 100 grand per month at this point is that right wow uh well thanks for backing into revenue well i mean you gave me i mean it's just multiplication not that hard i know i know it's funny i mean yeah that's accurate that yeah something like that okay and help me understand growth so take me back to november 2017 what were you doing per month back then november yeah a year ago i'm just looking year over year growth so you're doing 100 grand a month today what were you doing a year ago yeah so so for a year ago so i don't know if you know the background um but basically uh a year ago we're actually part um so my twin brother and i were part-time i just started invent a print there were part-time jobs we actually just went full-time about three months ago both of us so how little were you a year ago so we were pretty little we're probably maybe three customers and most of them were getting the the transactions like the the funding of just transactions alone okay so like are you talking like less than 10 grand a month back then correct okay very good and so uh and just to be clear so today you're over 100 grand per month so right now we have a pipeline of over 100 grand okay what are you actually doing though per month because it's so it's less than five grand a month then if you have 20 customers and you said 20 customers 500 we're yeah we're actually doing over five grand a month like our our revenues for projected okay yeah i'm trying to i don't wanna talk about projection i wanna talk about like what you've actually accomplished like actually like today the monthly recurring revenue you're doing is about how much so it's roughly five grand right now okay you're only okay so you're doing five grand per month across the entire company no no for the transactions for each customer yeah that's what i'm asking so total revenue per month right now is about what so if you were to multiply again like five grand per month by 20 that's what i did it's a hundred grand per month and you said and you said no it's around there so i'm trying to ask you what is it oh yeah so the no was about we also get offered transactions as well i know i'm sorry so just the sas model you're doing yeah yeah that's accurate you're doing 100 per month right right got it and then you're you're adding on top of that transaction fee so true or false you're doing more than 100 per month right now in revenue okay got it just wanna make sure cool and um okay so i wanna put this back on a timeline so you can tell more your story here you guys were part time a year ago so you really launched this you started tinkering...