K Looks Revenue & Valuation (2024)

guys klook.com dobr was launched back in 2021 2022 he broke 500,000 bucks of Revenue in 2023 cleaning a Brazilian financial data and selling it to Big firms like Captivate IQ and Bloomberg which many of you guys might actually you know listening might actually pay for directly some of that data is provided by these groups like KX he has specific OCR technology with his seven Engineers but then it's the human layer on top of that where they clean the data sort it filter it make sure and check for accuracy before they sell it off to the End Market uh that really is their secret lost 50% of his Revenue today and they'll do about a million dollars this year 50% of that is data as a service another 30% is pure services and then 20% is true software as a service completely bootstrap selling through two major resellers in Brazil That's neoway and TTR data uh where he takes a cut of the sales there if he goes direct he's selling for 300 to 400 bucks per month and has over 50 customers to date hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview hey folks my guest today is Alex abujamra he is a former m&a adviser in manufacturing CFO today he's a CEO and founder of K looks he graduated in business and administration sumacum L and again is now building this tool which helps structure unstructured financial data and sell it in a SAS Das model that's software as a service data as a service model Alex you ready to take us to the top hello guys great pleasure to talk to you again yeah we appreciate it we had you back on back in January of 2023 about a year ago at that point uh your Revenue was about 60% data as a service 20% software as a service uh and then 20% just pure Services what's the revenue mixed today what are you selling uh right now we are on around 50% of that of the data of service um 30% on on service itself and 20% on on S but everything has grown from there uh We've we had some interesting uh uh growth last year kind of 50% growth and this year we are we are probably reaching uh $1 million in revenues that's great so targeting a million in Revenue this year what did you end last year at uh it was kind of 800,000 yeah that was it that's great now who are you selling this data as a Service uh data too is it Banks and financial institutions yes uh actually originally um the the data we would sell to other intelligence platforms so we would sell to Bloomberg to Capital yq uh mood's analytics so these guys would get our data which is like financial data of private Brazilian companies and just put under products under on their sess uh and that's that was our original Revenue model um and well um after a while we started selling it to Banks as well so that's our Rush right now to to put our data directly into into Banks and not only in intelligence platforms um that that's part of our our priorities at the moment is capital IQ still paying you today are they still a customer sure yeah yeah yeah and what are they paying you for is it specifically I know you specialize in uh financial statements from private companies in Brazil are they paying you for all your Brazil company data that's right um they they are paying to have uh financial data of private Brazilian companies that we crawl in the web and and if your data is really valuable to somebody like Bloomberg or Capital IQ eventually don't they want to come buy you so that you don't sell your data to all their competitors as well they might but I don't think that that's uh a enough at the moment um I mean it's Brazil is a is a is a small uh Target for them it's not like well I'm the only one who has data of private American companies and that's a huge um uh competitive Advantage um it's braz is kind of a marginal Market to them so um I'm not sure if that that's something that would make sense at the moment maybe uh uh once we reach like five to 10 million Dollar in revenues that might uh make sense because our process is really unique uh it's been proven uh uh operationally and and in in Practical so uh um and financially has been growing uh but as soon as we escalate enough I think that that might be something they might look into because these guys they have uh their their thresholds for for m&a they're quite higher than our our size right now yeah that makes sense how many customers are paying you today oh directly might be 50 or 60 and indirectly might be 500 600 give me an example of an indirect customer um so I sell my data to CQ and to all these guys but I have some clients that they don't pay me for my data but they integrate in their product and they sell my module so these guys uh they have like 100 clients uh they use my module so that's the indirect indirect customer can you give an example of one of those companies where your module is built in sure um there's some guys in Brazil called nway um NE e o w a y uh they're quite big in the Big Data uh environment here and well they they resell our data in a in a module uh inside their product so if neoway in Brazil sells your module the Kook mod module for 100 bucks a month to end users how much of that $100 will you keep versus what neay will keep uh well when they distribute me they I I keep less than when I sell it directly obviously so I have I have large quantities but I don't have the uh um the value per customer that I would have selling directly but I don't have any any c as well I don't have any CA of acquisition uh of customers um so uh I would I would sell directly for roughly $300 to $400 monthly and they would sell me to like $100 monthly so same question though if neoway sells your module for a 100 bucks a month to an end customer what percent of that Revenue will neoway keep versus what will they pay you oh no that's what I would give they would sell it for a little bit more and then we we split it how do you contractually make sure that your value added resellers like neay don't uh cannibalize your own direct sales by decreasing your module price point inside of their Channel super low yeah it's an awesome question really good and the the the answer is well I don't I'm not sure about it uh I I don't have a way to make sure that they don't cannibalize it's more of a um um empirical conclusion like well um I think it's not cannibalizing I'm not getting any feedbacks that that indicate that that's happening and how we conclude it I see how many value added resellers like neoway uh drive you customers every month uh we have new way and another one uh called TTR okay so just two two big value added resellers that's right I see and T it's TTR domcom uh is TTR record.com I think it's transactional track records the the um um they originally sell data of uh transactions like uh abda uh EV abda multiples that that was their their primary business but they integrated out solution um and they are focused in Emerging Markets such as Brazil and uh other South American countries is it TTR dat.com uh let me check fairly I'm fairly certain it's ttrd dat.com but you can tell me if I'm wrong there um so those two channels do a lot of a lot of your reselling is that TTR yeah yeah so they do a lot of reselling you also go direct um H tell me more about your process I'm always fascinated because you know the whole world I mean maybe not the whole world but anyone potentially can get access right to uh uh private company financials in Brazil I imagine because they have to file something on some public domain but you have some unique process you use to get to the data to transform it to clean it to then spit it back out so that these Partners can sort of use it what did I just say that's not accurate or is all that pretty much true no that's pretty much true the the but the the thing that makes us unique is um the data is really hard to find so um it there are some sources that are easy to find but most of the sources are hard to find and we're the only ones that are investing heavily on on crawlers uh to to hard to hard to find sources and when I mean hard to find sources is not like oh it's a website that have everything structured and um and then it's just like a bot that goes there and gets the data and no it's it's it's a complete mess because the hard to find places is like uh thousands of different uh uh files that you don't know if that's a financial statement or if it's not so we have our Bots need to find out if it is a financial statement statement or not those files are in PDF format so um the data is unstructured so we need to to have other Bots that take the data out of the PDFs and then we have a quality assurance process with humans that make sure that everything is uh uh perfectly classified and structured um and we got pretty good on this routine of taking financial data out of PDFs and putting that into uh tables like Json or Excel or whatever so we started even selling this process to Banks uh Banks received thousands and thousands of uh financial statements in PDF formats every day and it's a complete mess to turn that into like actionable data and that's something we do very well actually I haven't seen anyone doing that as well as we do um uh anywhere else wh why why does this why do you guys have this DNA you know how I guess let me ask it differently how many folks are full-time today at Kooks 40 and how many are Engineers uh seven engineer okay and are you an engineer or no if I am an engineer no I'm I'm I'm I'm graduating in business and that Administration but well I C A little bit just uh it's been a necessity to you know try some stuff and make sure that we can develop some some things I Envision so I guess thousands let's say you get a data dump of thousands of documents it's they're in weird languages you're not sure if there even financial statements or not your your team of seven Engineers have built some some process to go analyze those I guess my question to you is isn't this something that one day sort of AI and and sort of these llm models take over in other words have you built some moat have your seven Engineers come up with something that open Ai and these other folks have not thought about where you will always be in need in terms of cleaning that data uh I I don't see um open Ai and these folks uh uh solving this this problem um so early because um when you go into PDF tables it there's a lot of things that ocrs don't solve so if if you don't have like a A system that goes into the PDF and structures that perfectly for the AIS to then take uh have an opinion over it um it it just doesn't work so the the technology needed to solve that is not the the the chat GPT or open AI technology is the OCR technology which um uh what's that stand for OCR OCR is a optical character recognition it's uh it's a system that that looks at a picture or a PDF and identify characters so it turns like an image to text so that's the that's the thing um there is a one uh specific problem which is a um like grammar errors um sometimes very often the the the systems they think that a g might be an eight for instance and and these confusions um um are not solved yet might be solved of contextual um nlps that might understand that in the middle of a a sentence of a word there's not a number then that's something that AI might help uh but uh um when you go into tables and and and when the the OCR there's another problem there is very very common uh they make confusion on line so they might put a value that is for assets in in current assets and this confusion is is tot totally deadly for our risk analysis yeah that's interesting do you have an example like on your desktop or something that you could screen share of some some some PDF you got that was that that open AI could never deal with because it's so confusing but your OCR technology is able to read it and extract sort of characters and and things that we can read in a programmatic way yeah the key thing is not exactly the OCR because the the OCR uh we we different uh uh ocrs bought in the market the the real difference is um is the process the quality assurance process we do over the OCR process so uh we have a system of alerts like hey guys this uh total assets is not equal to Total liabilities there might be something wrong here so our quality assurance team uh uh just goes into and and fixes the problem and we have like more than 500 alerts uh that make uh uh our our data get out of this process completely uh perfect and and validated that makes a lot of sense tell me a little bit more Alex as we wrap up I mean it's clear the technology here is powerful you've got big folks like Bloomberg and Captivate IQ paying for it how do you get more customers you know you launched this I remember back in 2022 we chatted you doing like 200,000 of Revenue 2023 you get up to 7 800,000 this year you want to break a million your bootstraps you're in full control which I love but is there any way you can grow this faster uh with Creative Marketing advertising but also stay bootstrapped uh yeah we have we have three different um uh products right so in our data as a service I don't see I I don't see that making uh the the big difference that would change us from a million to 100 million uh where I see that happening is is on our service that turns PDFs into um into structured data if we do that internationally if we can find the channels to to um to to go intern ational uh with this service um I think it's very unique and and uh the the like the big Tech folks they're not focusing on that right now so that might be an an advantage at the moment for at least a few years and I see our SAS as um as a nice catapult of growth and that's something we've never invested that much but we've been having really nice results in lead generation for the last uh four to to five months and uh that's making that's making us very happy and and um excited about uh what might come in the future for RSS solution well I'm rooting for you we'll see what happens in the meantime though let's wrap up here with the famous five Alex number one your favorite Business book oh favorite Business book uh sapiens it's not a business book right but it's book I like it works that works number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um I'm I'm super clich on the sort of questions I would say like Al musk at the moment number three what's your favorite online tool for building kxs um I'm still with the the answer I gave you last year I I love Google Sheets to to prototype stuff number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh 6 to8 okay that's fair and did you have a birthday are you 38 now I'm 38 that's right okay still single with one kiddo that's correct awesome last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 something oh sorry say it again something you wish you knew back when you were 20 years old oh um I would like to be less afraid of making mistakes I think that would have helped guys klook.com dobr was launched back in 2021 2022 he broke 500,000 bucks of Revenue in 2023 cleaning a Brazilian Financial data and selling it to Big firms like Captivate IQ and Bloomberg which many of you guys might actually you know listening might actually pay for directly some of that data is provided by these groups like KX he has specific OCR technology with a seven Engineers but then it's the human layer on top of that where they clean the data sort it filter it make sure and check for accuracy before they sell it off to the End Market uh that really is their secret sauce 50% of his Revenue today and they'll do about a million dollars this year 50% of that is data as a service another 30% is pure services and then 20% is true software as a service completely bootstrap selling through two major resellers in Brazil That's neoway and TTR data uh where he takes a cut of the sales there if he goes direct he's selling for 300 to 400 bucks per month and has over 50 customers to date Alex thanks for taking us to the top thanks Nate and great pleasure to be with you again