How Likvido CEO Maximilian Frimmer grew Likvido to $1M revenue and 350 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is maximilian afrimer he is the ceo of a company called lickveto.com it's a danish fintech startup they help smes optimize cashflow with a digital invoice to cash platform that smes can integrate to their accounting software and then lets them automate the accounts receivable process in the future they also want to use the transaction data on invoices and payments to offer their customers a line of credit and factoring solution maximilian are you ready to take us to the top i hope so all right you bet yeah thanks for coming on so tell us about the company what's the company doing what is your revenue model is it peer play sas exactly we have uh we have a sas business model um but not with a typical subscription we take the uh we take transaction costs and so the the standard way a company would price a product like ours that would be to hire bookkeeper so they would hire bookkeeper to do the accounts receivable manage management manually okay and they would let's say pay five euros or something so instead of paying five euros for an invoice they will pay us let's say one euro and then they can get some discount so if they have a lot of volume then they get a as a subscription on the on the average month and then they get the the transaction costs lower so how many how many customers are you working with today we have around 350 customers in denmark okay 350 and then when do you launch the company what year we launched the company last year and we've been live for eight months now so it's it's still early days for us so how did you get the first 300 customers what growth channel did you use yeah i think the first 50 were like friends family other entrepreneurs in denmark uh we had another startup before so we knew a lot of people and then the last 300 customers that was a primary inbound so we've done a lot on linkedin uh seo and now we just launched a sales team with three people doing outbound okay walk me through what you started doing on linkedin how did you get you know someone on linkedin find them and then get them to start using your tool we basically addressed the pain and before we founded this company and my co-founder i had a another company in denmark and we actually went bankrupt with that company and we did that because we couldn't manage our cash flow efficient so we had a lot of money out and a lot of clients we had around 300 clients not paying us on time and basically what we did was that when we founded this company we told that story and we could see that a lot of other entrepreneurs they could relate to this so we went to the newsletter outlets in denmark and told that story we told that story on linkedin and then we started to share what do you mean max million you told the story on linkedin you just made a linkedin post we made posts we made a lot of videos yeah i think right now one of the most efficient ways on linkedin to get your message out is by video okay so we've done videos where we interviewed our customers interviewed other entrepreneurs how they worked with cash flow management what worked we shared free resources max hold on sorry i want to be really specific here you post a linkedin video of this story some people like some people comment what do you do next to get them to go to the website and sign up for a paid plan exactly good question so after they reacted in some way they like they comment and something like that then we'll connect to them how so we send them in in a connection invite with a specific message saying hey nathan thanks for commenting on my post last week i think this free resource let's say this is a template for how you could do your donning flow i think this free template could maybe be something for you and maybe it's heads for some questions what do you do today with your invoicing process and then we get people into to interact we get them to answer then we either pick up the phone and call them to to follow up and you get their phone number we call the company so we we find the the often our company is a smaller company so if you know the name of the company and you call that number there's a register in denmark with where you can find let's say 90 of companies phone numbers so we have the the main number of the of the front desk and our customers they are typically three to thirty employees so if you call them main on and you know the name of the contact person it's pretty easy often it's the ceo taking the phone or it's your your one call away from from getting that person on the phone okay and just to be clear your revenue model is you're taking a percentage of money processed through your system is it accurate and not entirely we take a transaction fee so fixed around one in denmark it's uh it's 10 corner that will be around one one dollar okay so one dollar transaction fee and and how many and give me a sense of kind of growth so like in the past month how many transactions did all 350 of your customers kind of put through your platform the last month let me just count on that the last month we made a 25 000 euro revenue okay and so that was a couple of thousand transactions we just changed the pricing so last month we had a revenue model where we only took the late payment fees so last month data was not based on number of transaction that was only based on that if people didn't pay an invoice on time then you can add some late payment fees and last month we got 25 000 euro and late payment fees this month january we on top of the late payment fees we added this transaction baseline so the transaction thing is new you haven't done this pricing before exactly okay and we just one comment that we did that actually because we could see that our solution was pretty efficient so in the beginning there were a lot of late payment fees so we made a lot of money the first month on a new client but because our solution was very efficient and then the client started paying on time our revenue on the client decreased over time and therefore we added this new we changed the the revenue model and max million are you profitable today uh no but we just raised a seat round with two danish investors to to scale up how much have you raised we've raised 500 000 euro okay and that was from that was a convertible note no that was a that was around in denmark it's in denmark 500 000 is is considered more like a c round okay yeah and so we're here and so now you're hiring you mentioned you're building a sales team three people so far how many people total on the team we're six in copenhagen and uh three in ukraine okay so nine total um uh denmark and ukraine and walk me through as you raise capital obviously you have to think about burn rate how much money are you burning uh per month today we're burning around i always have to calculate back to euro because in denmark it's corner but yeah burning around uh 30 30 to 50 000 a month okay 30 000 euros which would be called 30 35 000 us dollars you just raised 500 grand though so you have what uh you know 10 you know more than 10 maybe 10 to 15 months of runway exactly yeah but but if we don't increase we went to we went from zero to twenty five thousand in revenue in around uh five months and so what do you hope to grow to by the end of the year uh one million okay so eighty eighty three grand a month exactly so so the total that our total revenue this year should be around 1 million euro and how do you plan to go from 350 customers and 25 000 a month up to you know a mill you know 83 000 a month where's the growth going to come from three things more people selling uh investing more money in in marketing and then increasing the prices on the existing customers so so basically we need we we're getting more clients we now figured out a good way to to get clients in the beginning we spend far too much time selling to each client we now have our pack down so it actually makes sense for us what is your good what is your cac it's around 500 euros okay and you and they're paying on average 70 or 80 euros a month yeah that's that's what they pay on top of that we make the same amount on late payment fees so we make 150 a month so just to be clear if you sign up a new customer that you paid 500 to get them or 500 euros to get them how much how about your payback period how many months will it take you to make back the 500 euros that would take us two to three months okay depending on the engagement but on average on average it would take a three month i got it and and how do you get that because if i take 25 000 euros right now per month divided by 350 customers that means each customer is paying you about 70 euros a month so to get that back would take way more than three months if you're spending 500 or euros and that's because last the revenue from last month was only based on the late payment fees so now we add on top of that the transaction piece and that you have the double amount yeah but you don't know you're not sure you're not sure if people are like you might have churn when you when you put this new pricing in place exactly yeah so that just to clear that's a projection that's that's...