How LlamaFinancial CEO Filippo Burattini grew LlamaFinancial 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...