How LlamaFinancial CEO Filippo Burattini grew to $4.2K revenue and 5 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is filippo baratini he is the founder of llama phi and uh sturpy helping founders and sas companies grow and scale by reducing churn and improving ltv felipo are you ready to take us to the top yeah let's go all right so just to be clear which one is which which one does more revenue llamify or stir uh lama5 yeah those uh churn reduction and ltb boosting and uh stir p is for uh financial modeling so okay space so tell me how you attack helping sort of sass companies reduce turn and improve ltv how does your software work yeah so basically it's a code snippet very lightweight that you install on your website and you know when a customer goes to cancel they usually click cancel button and it's just a model asking for a confirmation and we take it from there so we go through as quick survey and uh yeah and we try to understand the main reasons so first first step is understanding the problem then uh with insight you can fix them but also we can do some uh custom offers for uh the user uh depending on his answers to those questions i see and and how many customers should they have installed this code snippet on their website yes so we are pre-launched now basically so we are just doing some uh we have some users so we have around uh five to ten users that are actually using it with their uh business yeah so what are you learning you got your first five to ten users to install the snippet what are you learning so yeah we are learning that actually other sas companies have the same issues as uh we do because lama5 actually uh we developed the for us so it was a tool that we added to our uh to 30 uh to manage our churn like at least to know why people were cancelling which is a big blind spot sometimes and then we decided to package it and to sell to others and uh yeah we see that most founders don't know why people are cancelling their work focused around the product onboarding which is totally understandable and so they they are lacking it a lot like getting to know why yeah so you built that you built it for yourself which is great how many engineer like what's the total team size just on llama five yeah so we are a small team we are three uh two people here in italy uh me and uh coworker and then we have a co-founder in uh yes and does the same does the do you three own both stirpy and llama ah okay and what you split equity evenly amongst the three of you or not uh no so one of us is actually uh like a employee like a contractor and the two me and the guy in america john a big shout out to him we have like a kind of 50 50. i own a bit more because i started the before each one 55 for you 45 for him right yeah all right um that's cool so so you're using this on when did you realize churn was an issue at sturpy like i mean can you can you share like what does the revenue that story does yeah so step is also uh not that big of a revenue uh like we have around 500 hmm but it's uh it's a big uh revenue per account so we have uh more users let's say how many customers are on stirpy i think around i don't remember now but let's say more than 100 yeah okay so they so if you're doing 500 a month in revenue across 100 customers each one pays about five dollars a month yeah okay uh no let's say it's more like ten dollars a month 9.99 you know you experiment 99 15 around the price range so we change price over time of course like we're always experimenting oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this 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hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay but 100 100 customers 500 a month in monthly occurring revenue you're going churn's an issue how do we solve it you built a tool for yourself yeah exactly we wanted to know why people were leaving and instead of doing like manual outreach sending the email which normal response and stuff like that uh which i mean we have an engineering team in our so let's just build a quick survey and uh yeah that worked pretty well we how long did it take you to build the the javascript code first oh okay so building for us was weak like one week maybe yeah we have a good engineering team and uh then but then packaging it and transforming into a solution that can work for others it took a bit more like a couple of months maybe yeah mm-hmm i see so how many survey responses have you gotten using llama file on stirpy so far oh uh see like uh 20 maybe okay yeah and how does it work i mean are they are they do you give them like a multiple choice answer or they can tell yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah you you try to give them a multiple choice answers and the the options that you provide them are usually things that you want to like that you have a sense that might be an issue that's also what we recommend to our users like if you know that you may might have an issue with customer support let's say your documentation you try to give those options to the user and uh yeah so you ask those and you also of course leave the option to have an open answer but then it's harder to extract the data out of an open answer yeah so what it what is what are the three top responses you're getting right now from people when they say they cancel oh yeah so main one for us which is very specific to our cases like uh we no longer need it because like imagine a financial model you need uh yeah you do it once uh maybe you check it every couple of months but it's not something that you uh spend a lot of time on yeah but is it isn't that not a useful answer for you because i mean everyone just can say we don't need it i mean but they do need it if they have a sas company they're going to have a churn every month they need it right they just don't they're not getting value from it uh and i'm talking about 30 sorry oh sorry sorry sorry got it guys yeah so the main answer is for serbia yeah i see i see yeah yeah no my bad yeah so it's financial model they do it once which is what sterpy is and then they cancel yeah exactly what's the second most responded answer uh the second most is uh i like i don't know how to use it basically which means so for us means okay uh there's a problem around uh either on boarding documentation so we started rolling out like youtube videos so each time you go into a page you get a youtube video that explains like a one-minute video i see and so tell me more about what you and the team want to build it sounds like you've built a nice little swat team that moves quickly you can launch products fast right it's very different to launch your product fast and get your first dollar revenue is very different than going from you know a dollar in revenue to a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue are you guys sort of like a product studio you're just gonna keep launching products like this to go from zero to one not really so this is like maybe a me issue like i i always like building things and having a short attention span maybe it's not the best when you try to do a startup but uh it's cool like you explore a lot of different topics and a lot of skills are you can use them in various different in different areas but uh that is definitely the biggest strength that we have so moving fast and like having a good uh technical foundation so we can tackle problems quickly and this also means that we can uh yeah we can play around with products uh a bit more quickly so we can get an mvp up and running uh in months so what's the focus right now llama fire stirpy uh kind of both but you're only three you're only three people how can you yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah no so um me i'm more focused around llama because uh i i developed it and i want to see like uh if it's easy to scale and uh while john is more focused around therapy and seeing how it could scale and then we we have kind of a deadline let's see not really a competition because we help each other of course but uh basically let's see what how the market responds to which one why not build these tools and sell them i mean you could probably go sell llamify right now for for you know ten thousand bucks or twenty thousand bucks then move on and focus on or sell sturpy sorry for like twenty thousand bucks and focus on llama five yes we are not really looking to sell we we kind of like what we do like we started both of them because we like the the problem and uh so we enjoy the the building process and whatnot yeah yeah i mean how do you pay your i mean just to be direct how do you pay your bills yeah yeah no i i actually got a bit lucky with a mobile app that i remember when i said like i like building products so one of my laps is uh well so i managed to get uh some good revenue from that and it's completely passive so at the revenue and that keeps uh what's the app called uh it's very niche it's very strange so like uh a bit embarrassing do you want to know i don't know if it's available in your sales yeah what's that what's the name of the app what does it do uh it's uh it's reading uh manga i don't know if you know about manga yeah okay so japanese comics and what what so people that read japanese comics download it to read those comics yeah exactly yeah and you make money every time someone downloads uh no i make money when i show ads uh to the users and i make money based on information yeah i see i see and i get like a horrible business to be in because like you're basically an employee of google apple and your provider yeah yeah when did you launch that app uh probably like three four years ago and how many downloads does it have uh so i have a lot with some problems with google and apple uh because i mean they are very not fun to work with let's say and so they got that down they had to upload another one but combined all the apps have like one million downloads i see okay so like i mean i just don't know anything about apps i mean how much money can you make from a million downloads or not much at all absolutely i mean depend depends very much on the monetization strategy that you use but for an app like mine which i think is like most common type of apps so free up and uh you see ads every once in a while so imagine all the games basically uh the the other raven impression is is very bad like i think it's like uh 0.000 so four zeros one per uh uh like thousands uh uh impressions so you're making how much a month from this application like 100 bucks yeah so yeah in my best month i was doing a 7 to 8k okay yeah so i mean it's not much but it's good to run myself but that's part that's a key part of your story right because that is why you can spend time on llama and stir because this other thing makes you money yeah exactly that thing makes money and allows me to uh focus completely i left my full-time job and i can do all this understanding yeah back to llama5 real quick so just to be clear you have five users right now but no paying customers yet right oh no we yeah no those five are paying yeah what do they pay per month uh they pay 69. six nine seventy dollars a month yes oh okay so you're doing 350 per month on mama yeah ah this is great okay so you have some this is good you have some you have some revenue um is it sticky are you getting good feedback or that you think yes yes no i mean we one cool thing about llama that we kind of learned for 30 is like uh having a different type of problem making sure problem is very sticky as you was as you were saying before like uh if you have a suspicion you have to churn every month like uh that's just the name of the game so it's like once we get the user to install it and uh put it in their website it's very sticky yeah yep i see okay very cool this makes a lot of sense how are you getting new customers yeah that's where i shot cut quite honestly so i mean how did you get a million downloads on your mango japanese app that's what i asked myself every time i actually no i mean yeah so uh apple uh yeah app game is very different so you are in a marketplace so it's uh more structured and there is things that you can do things you can do and so yeah the time i see i see yeah yeah well this is exciting so so how so there's three of you on the team you're doing 300 per month i mean how does your co-founder make money i mean did you guys raise capital or is it bootstrap no completely with strap it uh we we had a big conversation before we decided to do this and we basically say that until uh no neither of us will get anything from the company until it starts making revenue like significant so okay that makes good sense now this is also a very competitive space there's a lot of companies that do this churn key bright wheel profit well there's a lot what do you think about big announcement yeah yeah what do you think what do you think you can do differently than all these other players right to grow your customer grow your customer base yeah so um that's true we have a lot of there is honest competition and profit while being the the leader i'd say like uh the industry leader in this space i mean churns churns churn zero is much larger in terms of revenue uh than profitable yeah yeah yeah absolutely but i'll i'd say like in terms of uh how sas companies uh like general education software is approaching the issue and uh what we do like um the main differentiated factor is that uh we also have like a built into the software uh so with the sim card snippet you also get uh ltv boosting and uh arpa boosting which is basically um converting people from monthly to only and upselling customers to one plan to the other how do you help them do that with the code snippet how do you help people upsell someone from five bucks a month to 30 bucks a month yeah so basically you can score users every time they do uh an action that you want to reward okay so let's say let's imagine a paid instagram okay every time a user posts something i want to score it like okay so i said you can score it five and once it reaches like a 50 as a score then that is like a not lead and i can try to upsell it i see i see yeah so we also built that into the app which we don't see others well it was a great story and just because you launched lama phi this year right or last year no it's actually not even launched yet we are uh very much well when did you first write the write the first line of code for it uh yeah no it's this year definitely like three months ago four months okay very cool well listen come back on in six months give us an update okay yeah sure all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one last book that you read okay uh so the last book that i read was actually from brandon sanderson the the way of kings it's uh it's a fictional book number two is there a ceo you're following or studying not not really like uh deeply following but i like i like the guy from valuetainment uh patrick yeah sorry from which company valuetainment uh no valentine's is the name of the like the youtube channel that yes i see got it yeah number number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business i'm not a big online to users honestly like emotion maybe not use trello okay number four how many hours of sleep to get every night eight it's a must and and what's your situation people married single kids i'm single yeah okay and how old are you uh 25 25 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. well uh uh what i wish i knew uh maybe that the world is much bigger than what you realized and there are a lot of people doing cool things even at an early age so like i think 18 is like uh people are really building businesses and doing crazy things so like 20 years old you should already be going guys there you have it felipe made his first money on a japanese comment gap his best months he does seven to eight thousand dollars a month there over a million downloads but said he know what not into this launched sturpy called a year two years ago which is financial modeling for sas companies doing four five hundred six hundred bucks a month there in revenue but said you know what churn's an issue let me build a tool to solve that that tool is now called llama fire alarmfinancial.com they've got five customers signed up paying average 70 per month their first 350 bucks a month in revenue which we love they're seeing it be sticky they're seeing it get used they built this with a team of three all totally bootstrapped to rooting for you filippo thanks for taking us to the top thanks 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 dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we 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