How LearnWorlds CEO Panos Siozos grew LearnWorlds to $27.3M revenue and 4.5K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is panos chozo he's the co-founder and ceo of learn worlds a cypress-based e-learning company that's transforming self-paced learning through hassle-free textual and video-based learning he co-founded the company in 2014 during a period which the economics of both greece and cyprus were not conducted to new ventures lower rural is now a multi-million dollar status company based in 70 countries with a team of over 30 employees panos are you ready to take to the top yes okay very good and in fact we're even bigger right now we're we're at 75 people right now and growing so our online courses are super hot so the past few months have been amazing for us so how many customers do you have we have over four and a half thousand customers right now okay and what are they paying for uh if we are a software as a service people start by our lowest package is 29 dollars per month and you get a full blown online school which you can use to sell online courses our most expensive package packages are 7.99 per month 799 yes yes what what is the average customer pay per month average customer is around 120 right now 120 dollars can i take 4 500 customers times 120 you're doing about 540 000 a month in revenue no no that's not uh precise there are some some other like lines of business some mobile applications that we're selling and other stuff which uh make it slightly bigger okay so you're doing more than half a million a month in revenue yes yes okay that's great what's the back story here when did you launch we launched originally back in 2014 we have a as a team three co-founders we go way back in e-learning i have a phd in learning so we started first working together as scientists within a university setting you know creating platforms for the academia publishing papers but didn't have much entrepreneurial capacity or understanding back then so after a few years of working in the academia and doing different stuff we got together we were really believing in the future of e-learning and that the future of the learning is the future of learning is online actually so we wanted to create a platform that will take the state of the art of learning the things that we were studying and bring them at the hands of actual trainers and creators and and folks who want to monetize their their audience this is how we started and and tell me a little bit more about uh how you guys decide to split equity in the early days it's always a tough conversation well for us it wasn't a tough conversation we've known each other for 25 years we've had done several projects and we we always even when we were students we had a joint pot we were doing like projects and had a you know a little piggy bank for purchasing books going to conferences doing uh even like fun stuff together so we we split evenly that wa that was a so four four four co-founders you each took 25 percent three okay we're three co-founders we we split evenly in the first couple of years we bring we brought in our very first couple employees and they got a very small part also of shares we couldn't pay them proper salary back then nobody got a salary so they also got into the business with some uh like with with some with some equity understood now if you're doing if you're doing more than 500 000 a month today what were you doing a year ago so we can look at your growth rate well uh in our growth rate in uh 2020 was about 200 so uh we were already growing by about 100 per year before that that was the average i guess of the entire online course industry it's not just us other businesses as well but 2020 kovit has been a catalytic phenomenon overnight all learning became online people started to try to find the solutions to stay online get in touch with our customers get in touch with our students they were trying to find emergency solutions so it was obviously a breakout year for us and the growth was about 200 percent for 2020 and it's continuing at a very high percentage so 200 year-over-year growth and you're doing more than half a million a month today we mean about a year ago you were doing call it 250 000 per month in revenue something like that uh i think it was less less than that because okay very cool now you talked to him talking a bit more about your team there's 75 people today is that right yes and what's the breakdown how many engineers well we got about 30 engineers overall or in the product team let's say because they might include product managers and and people who are like or working also on the on the back end and the devops and all this stuff and we have about 25 people that are working on customer support and customer success roles uh very few people that are on the admin we're quite lightweight in terms of our processes because of all the like everything we super automated as much as we can and the rest are marketing and sales people empower us how many sales people do you have that carry a quota uh right now we have five sales people five sales reps very cool and what is their quota uh this depends because we are working on different segments uh different geographies so it's not uh it's not a unique number for for all of them and also i would say that less than half of our pipeline comes through the sales people we are very much a product led company so more than half of our funnel is automated people understand that upon us but there's a lot of people with product like growth that are trying to hire their first sales or trying to figure out what quarter to put them on so i'm trying to learn from you here what did what quota did you give your first sales rep this is something that uh we cannot share and this is something that as i mentioned depends on the geography we are we have customers to know where was the first geography you hired a sales rep for uh it was the the us okay and how did you you don't have to share the exact i guess quote if you don't want to share that but what ratio did you have between like what the full on target earnings a sales rep could earn relative to his or her quota uh it's about 50 so it's 50 the salary and 50 percent is the the the commissions no my my question is how much higher is the quota target relative to what their full pay is if they hit quota it's it's it's about 50 higher so you well if i joined you today as your first sales rep my full earnings would be about 200 000 if i hit a 250 000 quota or 300 000 quota that's 50 percent higher uh yeah i'm not sure how you break that down because that's that's not how we that's not how we calculated things initially uh us that's upon us that's what i want to learn give me give me the exam that's what i'm trying to learn here you're making me yeah yeah in our in our case just since we are learning here and the the the thing is like when we got our first people we didn't have fixed numbers we created the numbers along with the people who got on board on sale so it's a it's a role that we didn't have before uh like the platform was selling itself it was purely product-led so once we we hired a few people we started measuring what impact they had on the conversion rate like how many of the five of the what what percentage of the funnel wanted to be sold to because not all of them want and once we we started getting this uh extra this this boost that the salesperson would add into the uh into the the funnel the conversion rate then we started negotiating with them the the the commission so it was something that we built along there isn't once you have a when you have a company that's learning and growing and the numbers are not stable you don't go out with uh like with a with a specific quota this is something that we created along with uh with the sales uh with the sales people how many demo calls do you want your account executives doing today on a monthly basis our account executives do about 20 calls per per week that that's the weight okay so call it 80 per month and how many do you hope they close we hope that they close around 30 of those okay got it so 80 calls per week 30 percent got it so you're looking at like 20 you know maybe 20 new sales per month per rep something like that yes but in in our case again i guess it's this is unique for for every company with our lifetime with our customer lifetime value and average contract value these are usually the biggest customers and the most like uh the most complex product the most complex cases the most complex contracts i would say what is what is your lifetime in dollars today sorry what is your lifetime in dollars today lifetime value that's not something i can i can share let's say that the uh as us as i mentioned there are like usually the people that go to our sales people and want to be sold to and go through the sales process uh usually they buy our middle plan which is at uh at two and a half thousand dollars per uh per year honestly what i'm really getting into is product led growth lifetime values really should be through the roof if they're sticky right if your product's keeping customers in it so how sticky is your platform which churn over the past 12 months er churn is close to the retention is close to 100 slightly less than 100 so it's not ideal we are trying to get it with expansion that we are adding into the product we're trying to get that about above...