How Kantree CEO Maxime Bouroumeau grew Kantree to $360K revenue and 200 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is maxime boromo fuso he is a full stack developer and co-founder of digicoop the company behind his current company can tree you'll uh we're going to jump obviously into the company today focused on the collaboration and work management platform space and maxine are you ready to take us to the top yes hi nathan hello all right what's the company doing and what's your business model how do you make money so yeah so country is a work management platform um we see ourselves like a super powerful trello really focused on the business uh we really want to to make it to four businesses a super flexible one where we give full power to the end user uh so we really usually compare ourselves to like a very powerful trailer uh as powerful as jira but as easy to use as trello so this kind of middle ground between between the two uh and our business model we have two offers one is uh cloud stats offer like usual uh seven dollars per user per month and uh and we have a more enterprise focus offer with private cloud and on-premise uh uh hosting options interesting okay and so what does the average customer pay you per month would you say uh right now average customer around 10 to 15 people uh companies teams more likely usually is a team inside a company that's our typical customer team insider company 10 to 15 people uh but we do have an enterprise offer some really large companies so we have for example company with 5 000 users yeah yeah it will be many small teams a part of that but totally get that i'm just curious though on average what's a new customer pay you per month uh so 10 to 15 users mean between the 70 and 100 per month okay okay that's great so we'll call it be 80 bucks per month on average and maxine put this on a timeline for us what year did you launch the company in okay so three and a half years ago development started we we actually registered the company three years ago something like that to start uh to start building actually 2015. yeah yeah the summer 2015 or something like that if i remember correctly uh we still had a long time like figuring out developing the product we are small development teams so it took a bit long to to really get something competitive on the market because like work management like all this kind of stuff is super competitive market uh and then we really started on we actually focused on enterprise customers first we had the network we we had a good sales director who had uh an enterprise uh contacts in the enterprise world so we we went there first and for the last year we've been actually only since this year since uh february we we started to grow our cloud offer uh much more uh and been focusing on that that's great and and so what have you scaled over the past three years in terms of total customers on the platform so right now we have uh we are approaching 200 customers total across the two offer uh which is around 10 000 users total so okay and can i can i take 200 customers times that 80 per month average you're doing about 16 000 a month right now no no because on the enterprise offer we you know like the people pay for the volume so like when we have a customer with a thousand users accounts we don't give him seven bucks a month per user like that well yeah well sorry that's why but that's why i asked an average right an average is typically right yes okay but the average i give you is for the cloud offer i'm like super focused on the cloud offer right now so like as a cloud cloud offer and we we tend to really have the two different because the cloud offer is like what everybody is talking about sas software and stuff like that so like uh on on the cloud offer the average will be around 80 bucks but like on the enterprise offer is a yearly contract on a volume of user is super hard to give an average like and it's a lot of negotiation for a large company well right now i can just tell you our mr like our mr at the moment is around thirty thousand a dollar okay and that's across all our company all kind of across all offers and is that including on-prem service revenue yes okay but it's all recurring none of that is like one time agency fee stuff yes yes yes everything is right here okay that's great okay so about 30 000 bucks per month across 200 customers um obviously again two very different platforms so i understand that churn is critical in a sas company what's your turn what's your turn today around a year right now after a year we see uh like well customer like drop after one year or something like that right so 12 months the average customer stays for 12 months yeah okay so that's that's actually pretty high churn i mean that means you're churning eight percent of your customers almost every single month why is it so high it's like uh you know a lot what we see is a lot of when you have a small team like that using the product inside a larger company is usually the manager putting his own company credit card to pay for the software and then the manager like either moves to another project or something like that and the person after him like does not pay for the does not want to just keep the project because you know so we see a lot of stuff like that um like people like uh just switching team and not bringing the the product with them or switching company and things like that so there's a of things and then moving between product we're in a space where everybody switch from one product to another uh constantly so it's uh it's very challenging to keep customer for a long time uh like this is a lot of work i mean you spend a lot of time and energy to install an on-prem piece of software for them to cancel after a year i mean that is okay yeah so so like the the okay so the the churn rate is for the cloud offer which is no contract like for uh enterprise customers yeah we see more like uh two three years churn like anyway the most of them will sign like longer lease contract like we actually so what's your turn no making sorry so just make this easy so your churn across your entire customer base it sounds like it's more like three percent or four percent per month yeah it's really hard i prefer to give you the churn for the cloud and the churn for the enterprise there are two totally different way to approach like okay well that's fine so the cloud is eight percent per month or about you know which is about 100 churn per year the enterprise you said is about two to three percent per month we know even less we haven't lost we for the month we haven't lost a single customer on the on the enterprise offer so and our oldest customer is three years old right that's great that's great what is the team size today uh we are like uh five that's great and where's everyone based paris paris that's great and have you guys done this bootstrapped or have you raised capital yeah we are bootstrapped so we're a bit special but like we are kind of bootstrapped and we have raised some like we have we have got some external money but without giving any like shares away or stuff there were grants from the government sorry they were grants uh part of it part of it is like some other like some investment contracts so we we do investment under a contract but not against shares so a bit special like uh but there is very specific to france anyway so how much have you raised these vehicles 350k yeah okay 350k and and um okay that makes sense and then talk to me about growth if you're doing thirty thousand dollars per month today what were you doing exactly a year ago [Music] oh a year ago a year ago we're doing around like uh 12 15 000 something okay so pretty pretty healthy growth that's good um what's the next what's the next stop are you planning to raise additional capital no we're not planning to raise more you're profitable okay yeah we're profitable yeah that's great uh the goal is to we we didn't want to give share away so we really wanted to keep the bootstrap period and the spirit and we had this opportunity to raise this kind of amount of money via a contract so it was it was a good deal for us but we we really want to keep the bootstrap spirit and so we focused on becoming profitable which we are now the goal is we are hiring uh one more person for marketing efforts and right now we are completely focused on growing the marketing team and growing all that to accelerate the growth and uh so so that's the that's the focus for us so we we are fully like uh focused on the cloud offer uh to really grow that because it's less time consuming than the enterprise stuff of course makes perfect sense yeah maxine very good let's wrap up with the famous five quick answers here if you can number one what's your favorite business book it's a very tough question the lean startup let's see number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now uh yeah actually the guys from base camps we really like their approach and their spirit number three uh what tool do you use for billing for billing uh we have uh we use stripe for everything great number four how many hours of sleep to get every night oh good eight hours okay and what's your situation married single kids married no kids no kids okay and how old are you that's 31 31 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew [Music] i have no idea actually i think i'm...