How Kukun Reached $4.8M ARR with 20 Enterprise Customers in 2026 (Interview with Founder & CEO Raf Howery)

Cold Open: Salary Raf Gave Up and Revenue Snapshot

Nathan Latka

00:00Pretty cushy job you quit.

Raf Howery

00:01>> Yes. Correct. It was a difficult choice to make, but for me, I never looked back and I never regret it.

Nathan Latka

00:07What revenue or what salary you gave up to go all in on the start up?

Raf Howery

00:10>> Close to a million dollar a year, but lots of other perks.

Nathan Latka

00:13If you have 20 paying customers, right, paying $20,000 per month, that would put your monthly recurring revenue around 400,000 per month. Is that a fair calculation?

Raf Howery

00:21>> Yes. Correct.

Nathan Latka

00:22How much time do you need? Is it at twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven? When do you think you can break 5,000,000 of ARR?

Raf Howery

00:27>> I think we're poised to do that next year.

Nathan Latka

00:29If somebody's listening to this podcast and comes to you today and offers you $10,000,000 all cash to buy a 100% of the business, do you sell?

Guest Introduction: Raf Howery and Kukun

Nathan Latka

00:38Alright, folks. My guest today is Rolf Howery. He's the CEO and founder of Cocoon founded back in 2014 after a career at Capgemini. He's now scaling in the space of we're just gonna call it property data as we dive in. So, Raph, are you ready to take us to the top?

Raf Howery

00:52>> Yes. I am.

What Kukun Does: Property Data and the PICO Score

Nathan Latka

00:54Alright. So tell us what you do in like one or two sentences. The homepage says the PICO score, get credit for upgrades. What does this mean?

Raf Howery

01:01>> Well, we are about in sort of improving the value of every single home. It is the largest single investment that most of us make. And what we do is we help everyone maintain it, figure out how to increase its value, how to optimize its value. And then we help those businesses that want to serve those consumers, helping that customer doing that. So think of a wealth manager, think of a bank, think of an insurance company that

01:26>> wants you to invest in your home, can maintain it, improve its value. That's what we do. We build the data, the analytics and the software to enable that.

Nathan Latka

01:34Okay. So like if I just put in if I put in like a random address, Mansell, yeah, let's just do Austin, Texas here. What's happening on the okay. So why doesn't you so is this all are you only in certain states?

Raf Howery

01:46>> No. We are national, but sometimes certain properties, if they're either new constructions or maybe there is no public data available, we can do that. Okay. Maybe try a different address. I can give you a different address if you like.

Nathan Latka

02:01Oh, let's just look at one of these. Right? So Elder Miller Resort, Port Richey, Florida. So price $2.85. So I guess just to be clear before we jump in deeper here, you have four homeowners and four businesses. How is your revenue made up? Are homeowners paying you or are banks paying you?

Product Demo and National Coverage

Raf Howery

02:15>> It's mostly business. So banks, insurance companies, brokerages. What we do on the homeowner side is we help homeowners, but we also use that to enhance the user experience to understand better what people want, and that allows us to enhance the software for our enterprise customer. But most of our revenue is in the enterprise space as a side.

Nathan Latka

02:37So to be clear, a company like a bank or a mortgage broker, right, is wanting to work with a homeowner. If PNC Banks wants to do more mortgages, they will then you will sell directly to them, and then they will help get Cocoon used by the homeowners they're looking to do loans to.

Raf Howery

02:53>> Exactly. Yes. We white label the software. They insert it on their web pages or on their app, and then they enhance it with other things they have. So it becomes like it's their own experience, but it's really most of it or part of it is light labeled by us.

Nathan Latka

03:09I see. Okay. So how many b to b customers, those white label customers, are you serving today? Are we talking five big enterprises or 5,000?

Raf Howery

03:17>> No. It's not in the 5,000. It's definitely not in the five either. We are in the back, the 20 to 25.

Business Model: Enterprise vs. Consumer Revenue

Nathan Latka

03:23Okay. So, pretty high touch then sales cycle if there's 20 to 25?

Raf Howery

03:27>> Yes, I would say that.

Nathan Latka

03:29Okay. And which of these sort of use cases are the are the biggest? Or is it 20 realtors or is it more mortgage brokers or banks or real estate investors? Which one's the biggest use case?

Raf Howery

03:38>> I would say banks and lenders are the biggest use case because there's a very clear ROI driven from generating more loans when you use this service. So there's a direct correlation between increase in loan apps and what they what those applications that we offer. Other businesses see a different so for example, if you think of an insurance company, they're mostly to maintain assets, make sure that there's no risk. And yeah, maybe they partner with a lender

04:10>> and generate more business. So it's a very different ROI and a very different use case, but the banks are the cores of it, followed then of course, by the real estate

Nathan Latka

04:20Okay, and so for a hypothetical bank that's using you, let's just stick to that for a second. How do you price? You don't have pricing on your website, have a contact form. So is it a one off negotiation each time? How do you structure this?

Raf Howery

04:31>> So, because it's a suite of products, we basically depends on how many of the products they want a white label. So the price shows with that, but basically think of it as the number of addresses that they want to engage with within the band per month. So let's just say a bank says, I want to hit this kind of volume. I wanna engage a 100,000 customers, a million customers a month. We price it by those bands.

04:59>> And then as they increase, they go to the next band.

Nathan Latka

05:02Okay. Is that fairly I mean, if I asked you for the average number of customers per month that a bank wants to, you know, use you on, is a 100,000 the right number there or is it smaller?

Customer Count and Sales Cycle

Raf Howery

05:11>> A single bank, I would I mean, I can't share numbers just obviously because of the contract terms.

Nathan Latka

05:18Oh, no. I said I'm not asking you to share your actual. I'm saying on average. Yeah.

Raf Howery

05:23>> I would say your look it depends on the bank and the size of the bank. So that's very hard. A large bank will see probably hundreds of thousands. It depends also on their marketing where they put it. If they put it within a signed in experience, that's a lower number, but a much higher engagement. If you put it on the public side, that may be a higher number, but then it becomes a function of how well

05:48>> they do the marketing and the closing after that. So there's an engagement with, you know, integration with Salesforce, Adobe Audience Manager. So what we've seen is that every bank is different and some banks are better at certain things while others are better at other things. So it's really not a very specific formula, but yes. Well, let's just say a large bank or, let's say, a regional bank will see hundreds of thousands.

Nathan Latka

06:14Okay. Okay. I guess maybe a better way to ask this might just be across your whole system, how many of these are you processing on a monthly basis?

Raf Howery

06:22>> That's a very good question. I think because it's a suite of products, if I have to aggregate all of those, I'm gonna say per month, but I'll talk about a year or per month. I am gonna have to guess around maybe somewhere between 400,000 to 500,000 between the big and small clients.

Nathan Latka

06:43Yeah. Yeah. So 400,000 across 20 banks. Right? So you get to the average. The average bank on your platform is doing something like 20,000 per month.

Raf Howery

06:50>> No, it's five banks. The rest are other. We sell to the fintechs, we sell to the prop tech, we sell to insurance companies, held to brokerages, so in any business. So, would not say that 20 is all It's all Sorry. What I'm trying

Pricing Structure: Bands, Products, and Discounts

Nathan Latka

07:04Raph, what I'm trying to get to is just your usage metric. This is more complicated than what I was trying to get to. Let me just put it differently. Your average customer, whether it's a bank or somebody else, your average business customer is processing about 20,000 applications or uses of your platform per month. Is that a fair statement?

Raf Howery

07:19>> That's a fair statement.

Nathan Latka

07:20Okay, and it's across a bunch of different product suites depending on what their use case is?

Raf Howery

07:24>> That's correct.

Nathan Latka

07:25Okay, got it. For that hypothetical average customer at 20,000 right a month, generally, will you price for that? Is that a thousand dollar a month contract, a million dollar a month contract, something different?

Raf Howery

07:35>> No. No. It's a it just ranges between it depends on the bells and whistles, but it ranges between 10,000 a month to about, let's say 50,000 a month.

Nathan Latka

07:44Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into five fifty software companies so far, again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. Sign So up at founderpath.com. And when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through

08:06YouTube, and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Okay. And how do you how do you decide what pricing ax to price against? Because again, you have use it. You have a bunch of different products, more than 10 that I see listed on the site in terms of the things they can get from you. And then you can price each of those differently. Plus you can price

08:26for product upsells. How do you decide the I mean, it feels like a very complex pricing structure.

Raf Howery

08:31>> No. Actually, it's a pretty standard. Think about it this way. I have a band that's say a zero to a 100,000 address. Think of that as your basic, and then you have a product. A product map. So those each product has a price. And then when you bundle multiple products, you get a discount. So let's say the price for their cost estimator, the renovation cost estimator, which is one of our most popular products, it can range

08:55>> between 5 to 25,000 based on also like there are certain, for example, banks require a lot of InfoSec services. So that changes the price structure. But let's say it's 10,000 a month, very simplistically. If you add two more products, each one of them is gonna, let's say 5,000, 5,000, and then you get a discount on the 20,000 that we've just added up. So it's really a very simple matrix. It's pretty straightforward. It's by bands of addresses,

09:22>> by product. And then once you have that price, you add them all up and you apply the discounts.

Nathan Latka

09:27Yeah. Well, I mean, so I mean, we can kind of reverse engineer, right? If you have 20 paying customers, right? Paying $20,000 per month, that would put your monthly recurring revenue around 400,000 per month. Is that a fair calculation?

Raf Howery

09:39>> With some caveat.

Nathan Latka

09:40Okay. What would those

Raf Howery

09:41>> I'm right now in the middle of something. I cannot share too much about that, if that's okay with you. But I would say the caveat is often it's it cycles between volumes between summer and and winter, and also between what the the bank or let's say the fintech wants to do. So I would say that that is even though it's relatively consistent, it does fluctuate a little bit.

Nathan Latka

10:05Okay. So maybe you're lower than that today, but do you think there's a path over the next year or two to breaking $400,000 per month in revenue?

Raf Howery

10:11>> Yes. Very clear right now. We're seeing it actually very clearly in the pipeline. And also there's a trend right now in the industry where I think a lot of the large institutions are focusing a lot more on retaining that customer post transaction. As you probably know, when you give somebody a mortgage, you're only gonna interact with them when you send them the invoice. And right now there's a whole sort of a more focus on trying to

10:38>> stay close to that customer that they capture the next transaction and they capture more share of wallet, more HELOCs, more car loans, and that's not gonna happen by dropping them after the transaction. So this is where we, the value proposition that's becoming more of the business case that most of the industry is looking at today.

Nathan Latka

10:56Mhmm. And you mentioned you're in the middle of something. Are you exiting the company or raising right now? Are you bootstrapped? Give me more of the backstory there.

Raf Howery

11:02>> No, we are mostly bootstrapped. So we have only taken private money. That's been the case, including some of mine. And we lived within our means most of the time. We try to be always near profitable, meaning that we try to stay profitable, but we reinvest. We don't try to be very profitable. So that's just but we can switch to that. We are in the middle of two transactions that may change the way that looks. And so

11:29>> I that's what I I need to be careful. I'm not sharing more than that. I'm not we're not exiting right now. Let's just say that we're not exiting. We may be raising, but right now, it's sort of like being evaluated. Let's just put it this way.

Nathan Latka

11:43Fair enough. When you say you're mostly bootstrapped today, you put in your own money plus some you said, quote, private money. How much total money have you plus other private investors put in the business life to date?

Raf Howery

11:53>> If you exclude me, about 7,000,000.

Nathan Latka

11:55Okay. Well, I mean, your money is the most important money. Right? You're putting your money where your mouth is. Your baby. Are you comfortable sharing how much you've put in? And was it are you swinging for the fences? Is, you're a 100% your life savings and passed to work, or or is it, a drop in the bucket for you?

Raf Howery

12:07>> Let's say we I put in a little north of a million dollar in into that business. It's not a drop in the pocket, but it's also not gonna kill me if it but it's something that I really preserve very carefully, and I've built a very careful strategic plan to build what I wanted to do, to build, and that I knew would take some time to get there. And that's why we stay with my own money and

12:33>> private money so that we can control that growth. Right now, we're at a very different stage. Right now, we we got what we wanted. We built what we wanted. So going into a large transaction, we'll we'll be in a in a better position. Basically, we're at the point where we can explode sales, and we are seeing it right now with a very small sales team. So we wanna grow that.

Nathan Latka

12:55What's the team today? All all in?

Raf Howery

12:56>> About 55 people.

Nathan Latka

12:5855. Okay. And how many are sales with a quota quota carrying reps?

Raf Howery

13:02>> Just two.

Nathan Latka

13:03Two. Okay. Interesting. What are the rest? How many engineers?

Raf Howery

13:06>> Mostly engineers and data engineers. I would say 40 to 42. There are some of course, then there's all the rest of the management, and then you have a bit of marketing.

Revenue Math: 20 Customers at $20K per Month

Nathan Latka

13:19Okay. How do you get this business to a more efficient spot? Right? Because you said it earlier, you're under $400,000 a month in revenue, which means you're under about a $44,000,000 run rate with 55 people. That's very low revenue per employee. It's like $70 of revenue per employee. That's not generally seen as an efficient operation.

Raf Howery

13:36>> Yeah. That's because we have not really put a lot of energy into sales. We've only put energy in sales in the last year because as I said, we wanted to build and control and build that moat around it. Now this is where the transactions are going is to build the sales function. Today, I can tell you that our sales funnel is extremely healthy with just two sales guys. So what we're we're saying is that we're gonna

13:58>> change that. Again, that's part of why we invested more in engineering all along, and now it's time to invest in sales and marketing. We do a little bit, but that's where that's gonna change. And that was by design. It looks that way. I'll also say that the cost per employee is very different. We have a large team sort of overseas where the I rate is very would say 85 of the company is between India and Colombia.

Nathan Latka

14:26Okay. So 40 are between India and Colombia?

Raf Howery

14:29>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:30Okay. So, I mean, that helps a little bit with burn, but but still, if you're under 4,000,000 then, right, with yeah, I mean, right, if you're if you're if you're under 4,000,000 of revenue with 7,000,000 from private investors, a million from you, that's 8,000,000. And today, you're at 72 k of revenue per employee. I mean, do you have enough cash in the bank to continue exiting your plan or do you have to go raise money today

14:50to extend runway?

Raf Howery

14:51>> No. We can still definitely live with enough cash that we have, but it will not allow us to explode. Right? This is where we will need to raise money to to go big and big and far. So and that was, again, by design where we tried because, again, part of the business is to collect all the data and refine the data to get to a point to build a user experience that works for everybody, and that

15:16>> was time consuming. And so this is we are past that point, and now we're just gonna invest all of our energy in sales and marketing.

Nathan Latka

15:24How many months of runway do you currently have left?

Raf Howery

15:26>> We have about a year, at least.

Nathan Latka

15:28Okay. And does that make you every founder's different. Are you comfortable with that? Does it make you nervous?

Raf Howery

15:32>> I'm never comfortable. I'm always nervous. What what makes me feel better is that the pipeline is the healthiest I've ever seen. So we are we're in a good position to end q one on a really positive note looking at it today. So I think that's what gets me less nervous, but of course, I'll always be nervous. No founder is ever gonna remain I'm not nervous unless they're

Funding History: Bootstrapped with Convertible Notes

Nathan Latka

15:53Fair enough. Okay. Let's go back real quick. We've got about four or five more minutes left here. I wanna get the the launch story. So you launched in 2014. Obviously, zero revenue there. It looks like you quit a pretty good I mean, you were at Capgemini for many years. It's pretty cushy job you quit.

Raf Howery

16:07>> Yes.

16:08>> Correct. That's correct. It was a choice. It was it was a big choice, a difficult choice to make, but it for me, I never looked back, and I never regret it.

Nathan Latka

16:19I want others in your same shoes. They're listening around a comfy corporate job. They're looking for motivation here to quit and do their own thing. I want you to inspire them a bit if you're comfortable. Can you share what revenue or what salary you gave up to go all in on the startup?

Raf Howery

16:32>> Let's say in close to a million dollar a year, and let's say lots of other perks. I was in management consulting. My client list was some of the most powerful people in the world. I was an adviser to a lot of key folks in the in the market. There's a lot of perks, a lot of, they just say, ego involved. Let's put it this way. But I gave up all of that because one of the things

16:59>> I wanted to do is to build something that I can finish. In the world of management consulting, you build for others and you move on. So that is one of the things. And, yeah, there's another reason for this. I was on a plane very often, and I think I was missing my kids. I my kids were growing up without me, so I needed to stay. And, of course, when you're a global leader, the only people that

17:24>> wanna hire you are the people who wanna put you in another global role. So I really kind of that was another, you know, I would say motivation, or should we say influence, or maybe I was pushed into that direction. So there's a little bit of, you know, not if not only.

Nathan Latka

17:40That makes sense, Rob. How old are you today, and how many kids do you have?

Raf Howery

17:44>> I am 16 and have two.

Nathan Latka

17:45Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. And you can see here again, you put in your time. I mean, this is well over a decade at at Kept Gemini. So, yeah, quite the history here. Okay. So you bet on yourself in 2014. You get going. Do you remember your first million dollar revenue year?

Raf Howery

17:58>> Yeah. I think it hold on. 2018, I would say.

Nathan Latka

18:04There's people listening going, well, I wanna be like Roth and go from zero to a million dollars in my first three and a half, four years. You know, that bank didn't just call you because out of randomness, you did things to create your luck. What did you do those first three years?

Raf Howery

18:17>> Well, first of all, I think I solved a problem that no one has solved before. And I think that's an important thing. You're actually creating a solution for a problem that people have either thought it can't be solved or never bothered to notice it.

Nathan Latka

18:33For our on distribution. Because there's a lot of founders that they had world class products and they never take off because no one knows about them. So focus on distribution.

Raf Howery

18:40>> Yes. I think the distribution was to actually want, like, in the beginning, there was not a whole lot because I said we were building. The idea was I worked when I built the first tools, my first clients, I distributed to realtors, and I distributed it for free. So I would go literally from one brokerage to another, and I will pitch one by one. It was a small use case, but that was for me, was validation more

19:03>> than an actual revenue. So for me, that's where it started. And then from there, realtors tend to have a lot of let's just say, they use a lot of word-of-mouth. So that has helped. We incentivize them to do that. And from there, it got over to other other clients. The other thing that I think this was really important for distribution that I think nobody has figured out yet, and this is what we've done. You see a

19:28>> b to c experience. You're going through it right now on screen with me. Yep. That is my best marketing tool. Because when when companies look for solutions, they are gonna see an enterprise ad or they're gonna see a very business page, but they have to call you to find out. Here, they're playing with it as they're themselves, as actual users, And they're basically kind of that's when they reach out to me. So one of the best

Team Breakdown: 55 People, 40 Engineers, 2 Sales Reps

Raf Howery

19:56>> things that we've done in terms of distribution, in terms of marketing, is to make the customer as an individual use our tools. Every time I pitch anything, I say, you have a home, go play with it. And that actually made a big difference.

Nathan Latka

20:10This is a distribution around was was you hustling, giving away for free, and then it was product led growth, individual agents using it. And if an individual agent, if five people at Keller Williams start using it, then eventually the CTO at Keller Williams says, gotta buy a company license.

Raf Howery

20:23>> That's correct. That's how it started. Cool.

Nathan Latka

20:26Very cool. Okay. So, that was going forward to, to 2018 when you broke a million of revenue. You you know, it sounds like you're flirting with around 4,000,000 today. How much time do you need? Is it at 2026, 2027? When do you think you can break 5,000,000 of ARR?

Raf Howery

20:41>> I think we're poised to do that next year. Very early, actually. Looking at the pipeline right now, we should be in good shape. But again, you don't know what the market does. We are sensitive a little bit to mortgage rates. Things look are looking really positive in the last, I would say, twelve months that we've seen this.

Nathan Latka

20:58Good point. People are buying less houses because mortgage rates are still in the six to sort of 8% range. How do you hedge that? What other products do you offer that are not directly correlated to mortgage rates?

Raf Howery

21:07>> Actually, this is where it actually helped because we focus on investing your own home and because people don't wanna sell their home because they have a great mortgage rate, we're seeing a lot more people saying, I'm staying and I'm building and I'm improving.

Nathan Latka

21:21These these products, remodel costs, maintenance plans, etcetera.

Raf Howery

21:24>> That's correct. And so we've seen a lot more. Let's face it. The market is short about 5,000,000. So there are fewer homes on the market. People are not buying because everybody's still betting that they want to go back to the 3% mortgage date, which probably never gonna happen in in our lifetime. And so a lot of folks are saying, I'm not gonna give up my 3% mortgage. I am just gonna invest in it and maybe borrow

21:51>> against it and buy something new. And that played really well for our use case.

Nathan Latka

21:55Yep. Yep. Makes a ton of sense. Okay. Are there any other growth channels besides product led growth that you're using today that are working really well for you that you wanna teach our audience?

Raf Howery

22:03>> Personal reach out has been my best thing. I personally been involved in the sales cycle has really helped a lot. The second thing is you need to become a consultant in your distribution story. So you would need to constantly explain the ROI. You can't just sell a product like it's a SKU. So it's a slightly different sales cycle, but it's really easy once you master it.

Nathan Latka

22:24And, Rapha, as we look into the future and where you're going, obviously, you've raised some capital here. How much of the company do you still own personally today or or the team, like not investors?

Raf Howery

22:33>> Over 50%. Definitely over 50%. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:36Okay. So you've been able to raise and also sort of manage dilution. Are you comfortable sharing the last value the last priced valuation of the business, what year that was?

Raf Howery

22:44>> We never did a price valuation. We did convertible notes. So beyond that, I have not really pulled any money in the last four years. Three years.

Nathan Latka

22:53Okay. Okay.

Raf Howery

22:54>> So all those 7,000,000

Nathan Latka

22:55of convertible notes were all raised before 2022.

Raf Howery

22:57>> That's correct. We decided to live within our means when we saw the market. As you'll recall, about two years ago, the venture capital space was quite tough. So we decided, made our own, you know, kind of decision to stay in control and not to need money that that help that really hurt us a little bit in terms of growth, but at the same time, it allowed us to control the the the game a little bit. And

23:22>> now we're seeing that pay off.

Nathan Latka

23:24Rath, if somebody's listening to this podcast and comes to you today and offers you $10,000,000 all cash to buy a 100% of the business, do you sell?

Raf Howery

23:31>> Nope.

Nathan Latka

23:32That was quick.

Raf Howery

23:33>> Well, you gave me an exact number, so it's easy to give a quick answer.

Nathan Latka

23:37What's the number?

Raf Howery

23:38>> I'm not gonna talk about that right now. Unfortunately.

Nathan Latka

23:41Fair enough, Raj. Well, hey, this has been a lot of fun. If people wanna learn more about you and the business online, where can they follow you?

Raf Howery

23:46>> So I'm on LinkedIn. That's the best way to get ahold of me. I am on basically, that's pretty much the only social media platform that I'm engaged with on a regular basis. Of course, you can always go to our company, mykukun.com.

24:06>> Actually, if you say contact us, I see every form that comes. That's just make it something a decision I made long ago that I at the end of the day, I look at every contact as they came in and I and I actually don't always handle them, but I make sure that if I need to step in. So if you send us any contact, I we sure that I will know about it.

Nathan Latka

24:26Guys, there you have it. Mycocoon.com was launched in 2014 after Roth quit a consulting gig where he was making over a million dollars per year. He bet on himself and broke a million dollars of revenue in his first three and a half, four years. He went on to raise about $7,000,000 in addition to putting a million dollars himself into the business. That was all before 2022. Mammion convertible notes, they continued to scale by empowering real estate

24:50agents early on to use tools they built for homeowners. Eventually that product led growth led to word-of-mouth where they sold directly B2B, directly to the brokerages and now to banks and now to FinTechs that wanna use their tools for things like lead gen or helping the homeowners that they might lend money to. Today, they've got 20 businesses or enterprises paying them. They're a little under 400,000 a month in revenue and they're getting a lot of consumption.

25:14On average, their B2B customers are processing 20,000 addresses, that's home addresses per month through all of their different product suites. There are 55 people on the team with a little headcount arbitrage, about 40 of those folks are in India and Colombia as Rob continues to scale the business. Rob, thank you so much for taking us to the top.

Raf Howery

25:33>> Thank you, Nathan, for the opportunity. Appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

25:36You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.