How Joinposter CEO Rodion Yeroshek grew Joinposter to $16.6M revenue and 8K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is rhodium he is a 27 year old entrepreneur tech entrepreneur from ukraine never worked as an employee and started as a freelancer at 13 co-founding his first company at 17. he started in web development and graphic design in terms of his agency and in 2010 co-founded an entertainment city guide and plus outsourced loyalty system for restaurants three years after the product pivoted to sas point of sale called poster which is what he's working on today at poster they do a point of sale and inventory management for cafes restaurants and shops for 8 000 businesses in 75 countries you're uh eroding you're ready to take us to the top yeah sure that's right so just be clear those eight thousand businesses are all paying correct yeah for sure those are eight thousand restaurants and we have right around like six and a half thousand businesses that's great okay but eight thousand when you combine them yep okay good so uh give us the backstory here the the the company specifically start off as an agency what's the sas product do today what are restaurants getting restaurants getting a point of sale it's like an application for ipads android or windows device where you can process your sale make payment transaction and so on and afterwards all this data is synced to cloud it's where a business owner can see their detailed stats do inventory management finances and stuff like that and what do they pay on average per month for this per location um like the average check would be around 45 dollars okay 45 a month yep and you launched this in what year put this on a timeline for us uh we just celebrated five years it was in 2013. oh wow okay so 2013 um and you've scaled you said to 8 000 locations today right yup can i take 8 000 times 45 a location you're doing about 360 thousand dollars a month in revenue yep and what does growth look like so exactly a year ago what were you doing per uh month year ago we did like around 200 200 a month okay so healthy growth walk me through your first 10 customers how did you get your first 10 locations you know you walk in and you're trying to convince them and they're going who is this guy why should i use your point of sale software how did you how did you land the customers um we were like the very first customer we got we were just a um like we were visiting this restaurant for a long time and we were familiar with the restaurant owner and i wanted to pitch my idea for a long time i wanted to sell it but he never got the time and once he had a few minutes and i would just describe this because we were doing this first in our region and there were no alternative products like us they were all on premise all solutions with a server and so on and there is like a big company who do who does this on-premise solutions it's called our keeper and i will just say that we're proposing you an art keeper for 50 bucks a month what is this pronounce pronounce art keeper or sorry respell it rr keeper yeah spell it uh r k e e p e r i c okay so our keeper is the on-prem solution that you're replacing yeah yeah and what did he say did he write you check on the spot yeah yeah he was just ready to to get this keeper for 50 bucks a month because it actually cost costed at that time like around 5000 for on-premise install that's funny okay very good and then have you bootstrapped the company or raised uh we did have a small like a pre-siege round at the very beginning when we had a prototype and uh but from that point on we bootstrapped okay so how much raised today uh we're not disclosing it but it was like a very very small amount of proceed round like you're talking like a hundred grand or like a thousand dollars uh it's like um less than 50. oh okay so very very small that's great so you're basically bootstrapped and what's the team look like today how many people uh today it's uh 140. 140 people and where's everybody based mostly in ukraine and nepal and also we have offices in moscow and in poland okay so ukraine and remote locations and how many of the 140 are sales are sorry our engineers uh 35 35 and the rest are what sales marketing onboarding uh sales and support are likely the biggest we have around around 50 people i believe in support and around 30 in sales and what is it so to get a new location that pays you 45 bucks a month what's your fully weighted cap look like how aggressive are you being uh it's actually rather low for uh our current markets like ukraine and russia it's around uh to 60-65 so you get paid back in two months yep and where are most these locations right now are they in ukraine and russia or in the united states uh no we don't currently have a lot of traction in the states uh like russia and ukraine combined is around eighty percent and then we have some russian speaking countries then poland and then uh latin america and asia okay now you're based in redwood city right uh no this is like where our legal entity is based i see where are you sitting right now uh in nepal ukraine ah very good okay interesting why did you set up the legal entity in redwood is it just help with kind of validation uh it helps to establish international connections and contracts and it's like a much better place to store your intellectual property than to do it in ukraine very interesting um is the is is kind of the political environment over there affecting your business at all um i think uh yeah if you look at this at the point of view from a point of view of a person who doesn't live in ukraine from foreigner it affects but it's something that we're used to uh for for a long period of time so i i don't think that we mentioned that much yeah you're used to it okay let's talk about some of the economics around the restaurant business so so churn is obviously critical in a sas company what does your churn look like today it's uh less than four percent monthly i believe like three and dates we did last year okay that's a logo turn per month yep and okay and are you expanding accounts at all year over year or no you don't have upsell things to upsell yet uh we do that but that's like we i don't track that in the moment so the percentage of up sales but um just to understand for example we we grew uh 75 in customers in the last year and 86 in revenue so we did like a bit of sailing but that's not a big big figures yep yep and in terms of how aggressive you're being with your current cash are you i assume you guys are profitable right yeah we're profitable and we're trying to burn as much possible to to grow faster yeah so i mean when you say profit were you talking 10 ebitda or 30 how profitable yeah last year we did 10 a year before we did 20 and i just made it clear to the management that we should burn more aggressively to get lower profits but uh grow faster yeah so you're currently at a run at about 4.3 million bucks obviously if you take 10 ebitda you'll take 430 grand and cash the bottom line and you're saying make that lower invest it yep um do you know where you'd invested is that the problem you don't know where to invest it to drive growth uh no that's not a problem actually we just during the last year we increased our marketing spends we increased um the onboarding of new developers in the team to to give more value to our customers and so on that's great now in terms of your dev cycles are you guys operating under kind of continuous integration or two-week sprints uh we're doing two week sprints but we do not use like a release model everything that we uh finish a task and we deliver it instantly uh we we do we do deploy it on a cascade so at first we deploy any features to five percentage of new customer of our customer base then on the like next day to the 15 percent and then to the whole customer base because uh the um i mean uh the mistakes that we can make can affect the business uh very uh like drastically drastically yeah because of this point of sale so we're trying to uh reduce the risks for ourselves yep yep no makes good sense let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh it's uh horrible it's the hard thing about hard things number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um no not exactly number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company for me personally it would be my trailer or spreadsheets number four how many hours i sleep to get every night seven to nine okay that's good and what's your situation married single kids um married no kids no kids and how old are you 27. okay and last question rhodey on take us back to your 20 year old self what's something you wish he knew i wish maybe i uh was more courageous and i'm having to to take more courageous step forwards and move faster guys be more courageous earlier on rodeo on lunch is coming back in 2013 on the back of an agency now 8 000 cafes and restaurants using pay 45 bucks a month mainly in ukraine uh and europe uh 80 of his customer base is over there they're doing about 360 grand a month right now on revenue so 4.3 million in terms of run rate first customer was from a restaurant he visited a bunch convinced the owner to basically replace the on-prem competitor our keeper now they're driving incredible growth that's up from the run rate...