How Livestorm CEO Gilles Bertaux grew to $11.5M revenue and 3.5K customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is giov bertov he is uh building a company called livestorm as the co-founder and ceo uh okay let's jump right in uh geo you ready to take us to the top yeah sure thanks for having me you bet tell us what the company's doing so lifestyle is a webinar software right in your browser you can host broadcast like this one but one to 1 000 people at once right from your browser with all the marketing automation that you need okay so so how do you beat zoom webinar jam go to webinar i think our take is to cover more ground so not you know just stick to the streaming but you know get the registration flow promotion flow retargeting and so on so really cover more ground not just the streaming not just the webinar i see okay um give me some more context here right so on average when people sign up to pay for this thing what are they paying per month um so it averages i'll say the average basket is around 120. okay and now are you generally focused on going up to kind of enterprise levels or staying for smbs well we want to cover like outside the full spectrum so we'll have still have 60 percent of our customer bases around like smbs i'd say you know 50 to 250 uh people and now we got like more enterprises leads and customers coming down the funnel with you know 1 000 to 10 000 people in the company so i'll say we can cover both and i'm just actually right now structuring sales to cover those enterprises guy what's a team look like today how many people um 15. 15. do you have any sales or no i i just hired the first sales is it was that nerve-wracking uh i'm sorry what was that did that make you nervous doing that yeah yeah absolutely i mean we probably got i come from marketing my co-founders go from come from products it was kind of a you know kind of a whoa huge step for us you know let's you know have some sales and how it goes and it turns out it's a huge success for us we know we maximize the value of the leads coming in on the funnel so yeah usually how do you um what goals do you give this first sales person do you have a quote attainment or like an ar close rate things like that yeah it's basically you get you get to close around three to four k more a month so and then there is like a variable so there is a fixed fee right a fixed salary would say and then like a commission base and there is no limit so you can you know close like one thousand uh you know a few thousand uh mr per month yeah so you basically want them closing about 36 somewhere between 30 and 40 uh thousand in arr each month um each month yeah that's almost a half a million you know uh per year per uh arr per uh sales yeah yeah exactly so 500 000 in air are kind of quote attainment per sales rep that's kind of your first stab at your first sales hire to see if it works yeah and what do you think the risks are when why would that what are the why won't that not work uh you mean the sales bar yeah well i think i'll say the the thing that i'll see two friction first one is having like a proper pitch to make sure we're different you know right i mean the first question you ask is how do you beat zoom in all those guys so having like a proper pitch built to make sure we can you know differentiate ourselves sales wise second thing is uh being able to scale the pricing point and not just sell something around 120 but you know being able to actually maximize the basket to make sure you have something that you know uh actually be efficient cash wise because you have to actually pay the salary or the person actually sells and then you know be so sell more than that so yeah i think those are the two frictions but so far so good and we we have a huge success with sales and you know it's in french we said it sells it sells itself like bread yeah what do you put what do you put commission at for your first sales hire you give it 20 30 um it's oh okay let me let me think about it uh i think it's i don't know you know what i just forgot about it i don't want to say something stupid no it's okay i mean if i join you today as a sales rep though right you're going to say nathan join us we're going to pay you a base of x and we're going to give you you know 10 of every sale exactly so it's basically you have it i'll say like you say well one three thousand mr which is the objective rate and then you have i think it's like 20 30 something like that uh for the quarter okay um and then uh so that's for the monthly plans and if you go with your yearly plans you have also a different quota i think more elevated uh so you can like be incentive to actually go with a yearly subscription and then reduce the term so minimum commission is maybe ten percent yeah exactly yeah yeah and then what i mean what do you put base at are you talking like 30 grand 50 grand 100 grand i'm sorry can you go again what do you put base compensation for a sales person at the base so the pace right now is like 40 40 grand 30 grand and uh 40. 40 grand here in france that's a big that's kind of a regular thing we do here i mean in france in paris for example so so a sales person that joins you today that knock that that hits their goal 500k new arr closed you're going to pay them a minimum 10 of that so 50k plus a 40k base so they could potentially make almost a hundred thousand dollars yeah and then if this works then you hire 10 of them right exactly all right uh let's go back uh put this on a timeline when did you launch the company what year um so this year you launched this year i mean i know can you go again maybe when did you launch oh we launched in 20 2016. 2016. yeah end of 2016 was official lunch we had a bit of before that but yeah end of 2016. and how many customers today uh slightly below 1000. okay about a thousand so what can i multiply those you're doing about a call 100 000 a month uh yeah that's that that's pretty much lucid yeah like have you broken that yet yeah yeah yeah okay so i mean yeah cause i take a thousand times 120 rp that put you at 120 grand a month yeah that's that's about it yeah yeah okay good and then where were you a year ago uh your goal was uh you had to divide that by 10. okay okay if you're only in 12 000 bucks a month a year ago uh it was uh a year ago oh no actually no it was 24 months ago when we're the first one i'm sorry time flies actually was 24 months ago we were like divided by 10 then we went yeah exactly so you have actually two uh divided by two in 28. so about 60 60 000 a month a year that is correct and before that six thousand dollars a month yeah exactly that would have been in 2017. yeah exactly very cool very cool okay where's most of growth coming from how are you setting up customers um it's mostly inbound marketing so we have seo um obviously we have this webinar product so basically people hosting webinars are basically doing promotion and you know demos for us so there is a huge virality coming from the our customers then it's seo as i said then it's adwords and we use also capture and digital cloud okay so on captera and g2 crowd what terms are you optimizing for um webinar uh webinar capture paying are all just regular placement both both actually we do a lot of reviews we do a lot of ppc on captura um so webinar for qatar and 4g crowd it's uh thinks that the directory is web conferencing is it i mean so does it by the way on the kepter listing right now you've got 80 reviews on this thing um how many clicks will they drive you per month would you say hmm that is that is a good one actually i don't have that data okay if you had to guess like a range yeah i i would sell you around between 230 300 300 clicks per month yeah yeah i think that that's about that's about right actually and then what do you pay for that like a thousand two thousand um no actually it's much more than that i think something like five yeah five to six thousands is it worth it yeah yeah because then oh no it's not clicks it's actually sign up okay so you get 200 300 sign ups yeah yeah actually there is more yes it's more clicks and there's one 200 to 300 sign up so that gives us around uh i think the average cost per lead that we get on capture is around 40 to 50 bucks okay uh that's uh that is for a new paying customer that's not that just for the lead for the trial okay so if i take five thousand dollars of total spend on cap tara divided by 300 clicks to you yeah that would be about 17 a click yeah but you're saying you think those aren't clicks you think those are actually trial signups yeah yeah so i really don't have the data here so i'm not sure but basically the funnel goes like capture then visits on the website and go with the trial essentially right so i know that we pay because i have the bill so it's like like five to six thousand dollars on capture per month and we get uh and i'm really not really sure about the number of stories we get from capture um after that do you pay more or less on g2 crowd uh no actually we don't pay and youtube crowd i don't think so uh do you know how many trials you get from there we don't get that much it's mostly like contact requests from the phone yeah yeah yeah very cool and then seo keywords what's like your keyword that you're most proud that you ranked really high for usual the usual webinar software web conferencing software based landing pages webinar that kind of thing so mostly like i'll say conversion driven like really people searching actually for webinar software and so on yeah but how do you i mean how do you win that right so when i search webinar software i don't see you anywhere on the first page oh i do actually sorry sorry i see you right near the bottom yeah so um how we go from here so there is actually two things so east we've been on software that's highly competitive so this is actually if you type webinar software i think the top pages will be captured on youtube yeah it's captera adventure of venture harbor exactly so we basically hacked our first position position going to from kaptera to make sure we can be found on those first results then we make the acr work to you know climb the pages so for webinar software and so on and all the related and we also bid through adwords on the same keywords have you reached out to ventureharbor.com which has the number two spot for that keyword and try to give them an affiliate cut to put you at the number one spot yeah we reached out but you know usually that either they don't want to change their article or they don't want to get you know affiliation or something so you know we reach out but no they get paid i mean that this is like a big hack right they say at the top disclosure we sometimes use affiliate links so like they definitely are getting paid by so number one is this company i've never heard of called ever webinar i guarantee that's an affiliate link so if you i'm just curious like if you reach out and you offer to pay and you're literally your cold email says hey we'll pay you 2x whatever webinar is paying you right i bet you they put you at the number one spot i'm curious if that perform for you yeah yeah that would be interesting you know what i'll just i'll ask actually because we are actually in the process of building this affiliation program with us so that would be a good opportunity to test thank you that's it's funny all right churns critical on a sas company what's your turn uh uh that's a big one uh actually i would say three to five if you you know take uh take uh the um all the other guys that say that posing and come back okay so uh you said about three percent sure that's revenue churn monthly yeah yeah three to five percent and that i'd say the annual annual net churn you know excluding all the poses that come back say 36 yeah 35 36 annual so uh do you have with sixty percent or five percent gross revenue monthly that's 60 annually and then you said you maybe expand to call it 26 so your net revenue retention annually is more like 66 is that right uh yeah yeah if it's a 36 percent churn you know for the the customers 36 uh that's net though right yeah if you exclude all the guys actually you know you actually post it and then come back so 36 net churn would be 64 net retention yeah yeah that would be right yeah so if you're turning 60 gross that means you're expanding 24 to give you again the net of 64. very cool um okay and then what about uh funding have you done this bootstrap to raise capital uh yeah race capital in 2020 20 2017 2017 was a small fundraiser here in paris for like a half a million and we are actually in the middle of the process for a new round how much do you want to raise uh this is actually something i cannot disclose well ignore what you're actually debating i'm just saying like what's what do you think the right amount is to raise right now uh i think yeah so i'd say something somewhere between like three to six i think would be a good er here in paris would be as a market practice and is that going to be on a convertible note or actual equity not true liquidity and what i mean what is the market like in paris are our investors comfortable paying for 5x arr uh yeah actually the market is changing pretty fast in paris we actually had the first series seas above like 200 million so i mean there is a huge uh change uh vcs are more comfortable being that kind of that kind of valuation so you think you can get 5x i believe we can get 5x yeah hopefully it's more i mean you're doing 1.4 right now so right multiply that times 5 that puts you at like 7.2 in terms of in terms of 5x so if you raise 6 on 7.2 you're giving up like 80 of the company you don't want to do that no no they don't want to do that i think yeah again i think you have like the good range is three to six at a uh 20 yeah 25 something yeah which which gives you like a uh i say a range between 11 to 15 pre yeah yeah yeah yeah 11 to 15 pre yeah yeah yep exactly very cool um let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh this one here um you know the hacking um yeah the hacking cells well actually another good one here i see is biggest scaling i've actually uh read a few um a few months ago pretty cool um and uh also play i don't know i i cannot pick one single one let's say like the play bigger is actually a good one also how to build a new category which is extremely relevant when you're a really crowded market yep and by the way i meant to ask you i mean are you still burning capital to drive growth uh we're burning capital i mean we are actually pretty um i'll say i know how to say it in english but like is it like five five five grand a month burn 10 grand a month 100 no it would be like minus 20 and the net burn was around minus 25 something okay that's not 25 000. yeah exactly that's not bad all right number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um yeah so uh actually i like um so the guys i knew i mean i don't follow per se seo seo but more of the companies i have like as a role model so like slack intercom those guys and here in france uh the ceo of a company called uh alan which i like most spell it alan so a l a n it's like a insurance new kind of insurance based company uh to you know for health care and so on i think you guys have something similar in the us called high oscar yeah yeah lemonade things like that uh number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um so one thing i'm really addicted to is notion to build like knowledge base inside a company that's uh that's a big one number four how many hours of sleep are getting every night eight that's i'm trying my best to get eight and what's your situation married single kids single with a girlfriend all right and how old are you i'm 28 20 28 28. okay last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh take you know take it easy i'd say you know everything's gonna be okay guys live storm dot co doing about 120 000 a month right now in revenue up from 60 000 a month just a year ago they're currently raising three to six on somewhere between called 11 and 15 million pre-money valuation in france uh they're building again or paris growing quickly they've raised 500 thousand dollars today burning 25 grand a month they have about 15 folks on their team 60 annual revenue turn 24 expansion spending 40 bucks to get a new customer that's paying again about uh you know way more than that right so payback's pretty instant in less than a month over a thousand about a thousand customers again paying 120 bucks a month as they look to scale in the webinar space but inside of a browser live real-time with less friction geoff thanks for taking us to the top thank you for having me one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end 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