How Livestorm CEO Gilles Bertaux grew Livestorm 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...