How Leadboxer CEO Wart Fransen grew to $406K revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is wart france and he's the ceo of an amsterdam-based company called lead boxer and overseas general operations and business he's also the product owner and planning the roadmap for lead boxer's future before the company he was co-founder and cto for open tracker a web analytics company specialized in tracking individuals and behavior what are you ready to take us to the top yep ready all right so your ceo today i mean are you one of the founders of lead boxer i am yes okay same thing as open track okay very good oh great very good um and what year was that when did you launch the company well we officially uh uh started the company in 2014 but uh it took us about two years to actually launch it into a product so that's uh 2016 where we first released the product okay and how did you kind of fund yourself those first two years well we uh we have several companies so uh the other companies basically funded this startup uh and then in 2014 we also joined an accelerator which included also some cash and uh then we had a seed round in 2016 uh pre-seen mostly um so that's how we fund it okay so how much raised just in this company to date uh only half a million euros okay very good and um and now before we get too much into kind of the details there let's take a step back what's the company do what's the product so we're basically uh it's a new category we call ourselves a customer data platform basically what we do is we collect all the information from online activities like email web behavior social all that stuff complete unique profiles uh create customer journeys and from that information we pass that on to marketing and sales so that they can do actually some commercial stuff with that okay the customer do you know i'm viewing a website and that website pays to use lead boxer do i have to opt in to give the website all this data or are you collecting this through public sources uh it's a combination so we have a pixel you can put on your site we have a pixel you can put in your email we have a gmail plugin we collect data from linkedin we get collect data from uh chamber of commerce so there's multiple multiple sources okay and is this like you're mainly scraping kind of unstructured data and building into your platform what's kind of the main data source the main data source is actually the customer data so that's the web the email data okay so if if i visit a website and don't actually start a trial or opt-in you don't have my email so what's the source of truth yeah that's true uh so that's why we combine it usually with forms with email uh so usually it works best if you have some kind of um uh uh identifier which is unique yeah so that we can start from there yeah okay very good um what does i'm sure you have tons of different customers but on average what's the customer pay per month for this on average about uh three to five thousand euros a year okay 35 000 euros a year and um and then walk me through kind of why someone would pay the lower end versus the high end how are you upselling uh so um depends a little bit of course on how kind of integrations you're doing what kind of um uh enrichments you want uh so we have like a starting package which just includes some what we call degeneration options uh we will identify companies we'll identify uh track all their behavior and stuff like that um and then the upsell goes usually goes to when we um start integrating with pipedrive with salesforce with other crms that kind of stuff okay so i have to pay extra to move up a pricing tier to get all those integrations uh some of them yeah i see so like save yours for free are free it's included okay and what have you scaled to over the past couple years in terms of total customers on the platform uh so we now have about uh 100 to 150 customers okay so that's good so i mean if i take the minimums you gave me so 100 customers and 3 400 bucks per year as a minimum i mean you guys were doing 20 30 grand per month right now in revenue uh yeah that's about right okay and when you look at growth so a year ago what were you doing per month uh oh i would say less than half so we've doubled in the last year uh as i mentioned we don't have a lot of outside money so we're cash flow positive so we're scr we're scaling and growing uh still a little bit organically waiting until we hit the magic number to start doing a real series a or something what's the magic number for me it's about 30 40k why uh to not uh to basically to get a enough for the percentages of the company right it's all about valuation so what if you hit 40 grand a month in revenue and you want to go raise a million bucks what valuation do you think you can get on that uh i would say about uh three to four three to five million i mean in europe things are different than in in the us obviously so it depends a little bit on if it's in uh if it's a uh us or america europe-based uh pc where are you based amsterdam is the whole team there uh no half the team is in the netherlands the other half is basically spread around the world basically we have people in india malaysia poland and the us so it's spread and how many total uh about 15. one five okay good so 15 folks all remote all around all over the place um do you do you know metrics like churn yet obviously it's critical in a sas company sure yeah yeah we have a well it depends a little bit if you're looking at number churn or or dollar chart dollar the dollar churn it's pretty low it's um i would say between one and two percent monthly um [Music] so the lifetime value is about five thousand euros at the moment um usually the customers renew but that's still growing um yeah what are the numbers you're looking for what about what do you pay to get these customers in the first place so to get a 3 400 kind of first year acv what are you paying to get that guy uh we're paying uh it depends a little bit on the channel we're we're focusing on both getting partners and uh direct sales uh and the online channel of course so it depends a little bit um i would say we pay about 100 euros for the online channel uh about two 300 euros for direct sales channel um partners is a little bit hard to guess okay so look if someone's if you're paying 300 bucks to get a you know 3 000 per year customer you're still you know your payback period there is what one or two months yeah exactly that's great so i mean are you operating right now cash flow positive yep we are oh that's good okay good so cash that's impressive so i mean that's impressive on your revenue you call it 20 30 grand per month and 15 employees you must have you have some economics there where you found some kind of lower cost labor that's still pretty talented exactly yeah we uh we have quite a bit of experience right we've been in the business for 20 years so we have our sources and our uh resources basically that we've been working with for more than a decade and we know uh yeah how to how to make the economics work yeah what are you all in on this company are you spending time on other companies as well uh actually some of us are also focusing on other companies we have we have uh three companies uh we're focusing on so uh lee boxer is is my baby basically is this the biggest uh at the moment no no ah yeah it's it's close it's it's we're competing so what why why don't you sell why don't you just sell off the other ones and go all in on your favorite because it's my favorite right and uh but the other founders they have their own favorites right so we're a little bit competing internally uh but you all have equity in all the other ones exactly so so you're like you're just like racing each other it's like a football game exactly yeah so we keep the competition alive so that's uh what's the winner get huh that's a good question we don't have uh come on any good competition you gotta you get you get plus five percent equity in every company if you hit a you know a million bucks an arr first how about that i think that's a really good idea i'm gonna pitch that to these and your buddy nathan gets half a point [Laughter] all right very good uh when you you broke down kind of your channels earlier direct versus channel versus kind of online spending you talked about your growth as well um this i mean look this looks really healthy when do you think you're going to hit the million dollar ar mark so you can go and try and do that raise i hope to do that in 2019 for sure so uh uh it's hard to guess uh when we were doing it because it depends we have some really big deals coming up um we just closed booking.com which is a nice nice customer so we uh yeah we're we're on our way 2019 should be the year and and i mean how do you like when i look at what you do i can't help but think like okay this is like this is clear bit basically this is like uh you know a not as well designed version of clear bits so how do you i mean is that what you are how do you compete with their enrichment tool well if you clearbid is is um they specialize in enrichment right they basically built the database of all the companies and the people in the world and they sell that that's their business model for us it's all about getting the data from all these different sources combining it into one single profile and then using that information for marketing or sales yeah okay so so i mean that's that that's the upside i mean again i'm just thinking about whatever uses on my site get latke where i have a sign up period i'm interested in the customer data and right now what we do is we just enrich with clearbit after we get the identifier which is the email address i'm just trying to think of a use case where i would use you over clear bit no no for us it's more of the customer journey right so let's say you send out an email and the person opens the email he clicks around if he clicks on a link he goes to the website he browses around if he does that constantly constantly the score of that person will increase and the moment they they hit the threshold we will trigger it and send it to an integration or to an as an email or anything like that so it's more it's more it's combination of marketing automation getting all the data together which is really hard right if you for most companies all that customer data they live in different silos and different products they have some data and mailchimp some data in pipedrive some data is in there in an erp some is in a crm we combine all that data and bring it into one database basically so what you're saying is essentially you can say okay nathan if someone has hit your site five times over the past like four days they opened three emails and they hit your pricing page two times automatically send them this email with a discount because they're highly likely to close yeah and all these things are are tunable right so we can send them an email we can send it to pipedrive or your integration crm anything basically so what other events can you track is it website visits and email opens are those the two big ones uh those are the two big ones but we have an api which you can send us basically any event if you can integrate it we have people sending us sensor data we have people sending us mobile app data um it could be anything basically okay interesting that's good well good listen uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book that would actually be one of the a bit of an oldies uh called uh getting uh getting getting things done or something like it's from like 30 signals okay i'm not sure yeah i've heard of those yeah getting things done number two is there a under the radar ceo in your town that you really like enjoying or brainstorming with oh yes um uh that would be um ricardo asti uh italian and uh ceo of wonderflo wonderflo good number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business uh besides lead boxer i guess it would be pipe drive uh yeah number four how many hours of sleep to get every night very steady seven i think yep yeah okay and which situation married single kids married with kids how many uh one okay good and how old are you work i'm at 44. 44. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh 20 year old self i guess uh spend more time on the commercial side of life um in terms of um we were actually so i come from a product background i've been building products technical technologically uh but um what i would tell myself now is focus more on the business side and spend more time on that learning that guys there you have it him and his friends are racing the first million to arr his baby is called lead boxer it's a combination of kind of data and and kind of uh website you know visitor data but more importantly kind of where they're clicking what they're opening and putting marketing materials around whatever events those things are founded in 2014 team of 15 people all around the world doing between 20 and 30 grand per month right now in revenue 500 000 bucks raised 100 customers that pay call on average 3 400 bucks in year one uh acv 2 gross revenue churn per month you know we'll spend up to 300 bucks to acquire one of these customers so healthy payback considering especially considering their lifetime value is called 5600 bucks thank you for taking us to the top all right you're welcome