How Learnifier CEO Mattias Borg grew Learnifier to $3.6M revenue and 340 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is amanius borg he hates to go to and go home from parties but loves skiing and beer that comes with it he loves traveling with his family and friends his background is small tech companies advertising companies in leadership training he's spiritual but not religious optimist and self-critical now building a company called learn a fire which we'll jump into today maddie is you ready to take us to the top yes sure of course all right so what is learn a fire and how do you guys make money okay so what we do is that we do a product a tool that helps companies uh share knowledge and both internally in their company but also to the customers so it's a sas play so obviously we we sell it to companies that want to share knowledge either internally or with our clients and partners okay and what do people pay for this on average per month on average per month it's uh about 800 euros oh sorry about that dollars yeah yeah 800 yes okay and and is it a peer play sas company yes it is interesting okay so your bio is great it seems to have a ton of fun skiing and all this so what what why did you you kind of double down and decide to focus on the company and what your launch we launched in 2014 and uh the reason we started was that actually as i said i had a big bit of a tech background and then i did leadership training for some time uh the realization was that it was still a very traditional approach to training and learning in most companies so we were looking for for a tool that was mobile friendly worked well with video and was easy to use and we started building it out ourselves and found actually our first client in california then we've done a lot of business both in the us and in sweden interesting so 2014 was kind of day one how many customers have you scaled to today we have 110 customers today okay 110 at 800 bucks a month means you're doing about what 80 90 grand a month in revenue yes exactly that's great and where were you a year ago so we can understand growth uh so we we've grown our mrr by 104 uh since uh in the last 12 months oh wow okay so you're doing about 40 000 a month a year ago yes yeah exactly where money is where's most that growth coming from upselling old customers or landing new logos all together uh it's mostly landing new logos but we're also right now starting on doing a bit of upselling okay so but most of it i would say come from new logos yeah i want to talk more about upselling here in a second you mentioned you're building this for yourself watch me through the second you know you were your first customer but how did you land the second customer uh actually in a hotel bar in new york so we were which which bar it was at a hotel i i think it was america's house close to times square yeah yeah so we were actually consulting for that company and we know that they had this issue they were looking for something so we had built out a prototype and we slipped a piece of paper under the hotel door to one of the founders of that company we did a presentation in the bar and then we said let let's why wouldn't you trust a small team in sweden to build this product for you so actually they have been a big part of our journey and also funded it because we're bootstrapped this far and they were an important player early on wait so what did the note say that you slipped under his door and why couldn't you just email him or call him uh because they were doing presentations all day were really hard to get to so we said that we have something that we want to show you please show up and uh and uh we'll meet in the hotel bar so what it just said show up at like 8 p.m eastern and we'll spend 10 minutes together yeah but we had i mean we weren't totally unknown to them so it was not like just anyone slipped a piece of paper they as i said that'd be creepy if i got that if i got that under my hotel i'd go what the heck yeah so they actually knew who who were so and they knew about you because of the consulting business so did you have a big consulting business before the sas business yes exactly yeah so that's kind of as i said i started out in tech then i did leadership training for some time so that was what i did as a consultant and then obviously this is kind of the venture that came out of those two backgrounds so was the consulting company your own company or you were consulting in someone else's business it was my own company it's still running today but i'm not part of that today but we were also doing work for this larger american company as kind of some contractors so that's who we pitched it to and help me understand that consulting company i mean what did you grow to in terms of revenue before you stepped away and went all in on the sas uh that was actually just in a startup price as well so i think we were three people and when i stepped into the sas business so i i left the old job i had in the advertising business and then i started this consulting company and then uh realizing the need or kind of being able to do the combination of the two both the leadership training with the tech background that's kind of what led me into learning fire very cool very very cool all right and then let's walk through some of the growth today so i mean have you bootstrapped the company or raised and bootstrapped totally bootstrapped that's great and um how many people today ten people today okay ten of you guys and where's everyone based everyone is today in business.com okay so sweden and and so what's the i mean are you know obviously being bootstrapped i imagine you're running what right at breakeven are you profitable uh we were exactly at break even each year yeah so that's kind of the plan yeah so how sticky is the thing i mean when people sign up are they sticking around a while what's your turn today uh we've uh actually this i would say the last six months is this first time we've seen a little bit of churn but it's still below two percent so it's still fairly low two percent what monthly or annually or what monthly yes yes so we've had a bit of churn this fall but we also did kind of last fall was when we really started selling it more aggressively so it was kind of natural but we're still finding the perfect product market fit so uh it's it's in a way expected so and when you look at the customers you're adding today and you look at your marketing channels i mean what are you spending in terms of fully weighted cac to get a new 800 a month customer uh so uh in the total cac for for that company is about uh six five to six thousand dollars okay period earn it back unless when in 12 months yeah that's great and we're still we're still really working on improving that because we're also seeing that it's really decreased i mean it was way harder higher just 12 months back where is most that five thousand dollars going is it salesperson commissions or paid marketing spending yes to this today is mostly direct sales but we're also starting we've done some partner sales and we're building that uh we are also ramping up marketing efforts this is your first partner uh it's actually a production company so given that our tool needs content in it uh companies usually need to produce some videos and things like that so it's quite an often that a client could come ask them for the production and then they realize that they need a tool to deliver it in and then we become that national and what have you structured in terms of the kickback for the production company they bring you a client 20 of the first year uh arr and then goes down to nothing yes okay interesting okay so you have the partner channel and then you have a salesperson commissions so how many i want to understand how you structured your sales team so of the 10 how many are sales uh today there are four that are full time okay all quota carrying uh no three of them are and so three are quota carrying what's the other person doing is they they're in charge of scheduling ours yeah exactly yeah and so those meetings i mean are these like demos essentially over zoom yes a big part of it is yeah and so how did you decide what quota to put these three quota carrying reps at uh we looked at the history of the past 12 months and then we kind of through discussion so it's this is still kind of an organic process and it's quite different for the three different people at this stage okay so each person one of them has a quota is more of a that's what i said one of the people is now working uh entirely on up sales so we're just now recruiting uh three more sales people so we're just now uh interviewing for that and those would be then hunters how are they the one focused on upselling what typically what pricing axes are they upselling against is it features or number of seats or some usage metric uh it's is the usage metric it's both actually we have both a useless metric and a perceived fee part to our pricing what is the usage metric is it like number of videos uploaded or what no it's it's totally dependent on a number of active use or active learners of people going through some sort of a learning initiative so they're team size essentially yeah exactly and then it looks like you also use the number...