How Magnettu CEO Rafael Calle grew Magnettu to $48.4K revenue and 11 customers in 2024.

they started coding the company back in May in 2022 today they're doing 2 860 per month in Revenue with 120-ish cash in the bank burning 7K a month with a team of eight as they look to scale raised 255 000 in their precede around last year at a 2.5 million post money evaluation they sold 10 three co-founders building together again trying to help you turn your employees into a marketing arm for the company right now focus on the real estate broker real estate agent uh relationship niche hey folks my guest today is Rafa Kai he was born in Colombia but moved to Spain when he was 20. since then he's worked as a digital marketing manager for startups and multinational companies in December of 2021 he decided to quit his job and start Magna to his third startup it helps transform employees into your best marketing channel Rapha you ready to take us to the top yeah all right tell me to here tell me tell me a customer story who's someone that's using you and how are they using you yeah okay so we we you are mainly focusing on on several on on different uh niches but just to give you an example real estate could be one so we all state agents are needing to attract property owners in order to sell their properties so what we do is we wonder ground then run them a platform where they can get specific content to share on their social media and to attract these clients so this content is completely customized to your personality to their company goals to your company ton of boys as well so all what they need is to access to Magneto find this content and share it on their social networks at the same time the marketing departments can check how many uh real estate agents are actually sharing content the traction that this company is generating and so on so we are kind of converting this uh real estate agents in this example into our marketing channel for the real estate company so instead of going to Google ads or to Facebook ads they just put the person up front in order to attract clients because understood and what are companies paying on average per month to use this technology so we we charge by C and it goes from 24 uh Euro a month a month per user depending on the on the on the on the content that you get on on the the frequency then you pay up to 99 a month okay again 24 euro per month which is 26 27 United States dollars per month and what's the average company when they sign up what's the average number of seats they're buying yeah we we started with 10 seats right now we are closing deals with 25 to 30 seats ideally uh in one year we're expecting to close deals with 50 to 100 seats so Rafa is it fair to say your average customer is paying for 10 seats at 26 bucks a month correctly okay so 260 a month on average now that we understand the economics let's get the back story here what year did you launch the business yeah so I was actually facing the the issue I was working as digital marketing manager for one of the leading real estate companies in Spain um and I was burning a lot of money spending spent on Google ads Facebook ads and it was very expensive to to acquire Property Owners online so I asked my my real estate agents just to share content online in order to get those clients but they were telling me Rafa I don't want to share boring content if you share specific content and personalized content then I will do it so I ran a pilot and I asked my team to create manually this content for them it was kind of a hustle because it was written manually so it was not scalable but we did it and we selected some some of our real estate agents and it really worked it worked really well so what year though did you write the first line of code for magnitude so I we grow the very first line of code back in 2022 it was like in May it was up pretty pretty lean um let us say it was like our MVP was yeah May last year okay and when it was your first paying customer it was when when we officially launched the product was October last year and the very first month we got the first uh paying client which was really cool before that we were we were just running uh Pilots so so it was for free and we were just testing the concept when we launched the product officially the first client came in like the second day which was really encouraging for our team 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so how much did you spend between the first line of code May 2022 and the first customer on October 2022 how much did you spend in that time frame on the MVP barely two hundred dollars was very very lean and actually we got well what did you spend the 200 on it was a paying webflow which was no code terraform to start building the the NDP um buying some design stuff online fiber on this kind of uh stuff so that it was pretty lean I I just crafted everything with my uh co-founder so the rest was just you and your co-founder putting in Sweat Equity yeah did you guys split Equity evenly at the start 50 50. yeah then another co-founder came in later on and and we we were in Nepal at that time because he he joined once we got our first uh investment round so so we then we didn't feel like a equally with him so when was the equity round how much did you raise we raised 255 uh K that's zero and that was in October last year so everything came at the same time the very first client the first investment round uh was such a nice amount for us and how much of the company did you sell for the 255 000 dollars 10 percent did that make you nervous at the time no not at all not at all to to to be honest I was kind of expecting it uh and the the Spanish Market is kind of tough when it comes to valuation and I I thought it was fair and it was like Smooth for us that's great so what is a split now 10 investor is what 40 you 40 your first co-founder and maybe 10 for the late co-founder something like that no it's it's around 30 something for the very first two co-founders 20 something for the third co-founder and and ten percent for for for our uh investor any plans to raise more capital or you're good for a while we we were actually raising more and we we have committed uh 70k it's just an extension round in order to to to speed up the process so we will we will be facing actually a seat ground by the beginning of next year that's like the the idea about to refer our Runway right now is better than we thought it would be so we are not kind of uh needing to raise money now but we are kind of acting in advance in order to go uh faster so we raised 70k from from friends and family we don't wanna we we just wanna be close at this uh stage with people that can add some value to to to the company in terms of advisory um so we feel that is the way to go right now and how many paying customers do you have today we're working with 11 companies in five countries and how many seats to those 11 companies pay for so uh the the average seats right now we have 15 seats in average the the deal sizes are different because the very first clients came what we didn't have like an idea on what to charge for the service so so we started charging very low until one day one client told us guys I will pay like double for this service so we understood that we needed to raise the pricing uh but we will never raise the price to the the like the the funding clients you know so that's the commitment that we got with them that's great so 11 customers paying 260 dollars per month on average would mean you're doing about three thousand dollars per month right now on revenue is that about right that's right and one year ago today so July 2022 you were doing zero right zero yeah we you are actually growing around I would say 20 in average month by month which is easy when you're dealing with small numbers but if you keep that up for a long period of time that becomes very interesting tell me how you went from Pilots between May and October last year to your first SAS paying customer were the pilots free or did you charge for them it was they were free and we were learning from from from different users from different companies so we started piloting the the tool with real estate agents then we do we did it with some other uh Industries when we felt that the the the the concept was already proved or proven we decided to to to go live uh it was it was very cool because I went to a podcast uh back in August and through that post podcast we got our first client and it was from Colombia uh we we weren't actually targeting clients in Colombia and I come from Colombia but our idea was to start uh getting clients in Spain or Europe but the very first client came from my country which was very cool and it came through inbound marketing through a podcast so I truly believe in the power of podcasting I truly believe in the power of human marketing and this is how we have been attracting uh clients uh since then Rafa what about managing your Runway you raised 255 000 last year how much that you saw in the bank rob you spent it all no no no we we we still have around 120k then we'll have 70k uh that will be coming in soon and are you proud today are you burning money every month we are burning money we're burning around 7K a month which is not quite a lot if you consider that we are a team of eight we have three developers uh we have three uh people doing uh marketing then our co-founding team we have finance and we have a Apple stock developer our CTO School stack developer well Rafa we're rooting for you let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book ah so it will be The Alchemist from Paulo Coello it's a good one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh not to refer specially rather than a CEO um I like to to to follow people that that are doing great uh job as leader or something like that for example in sports now now I'm following a guy that is very young actually he's a tennis player he's Paolo alcaraz from Spain and he just won Wimbledon so so I just started my people that is not on the same scope like yeah exactly let's move forward here uh quick quick answers if you can he's a rapid fire what number three what's your favorite favorite online tool for building the company I love loom loom number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night or like five or six but this is because I have a little baby oh congratulations okay so um are you married how many kids yeah one yeah like very exciting congrats how old are you I'm 36. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. take more more risks um payoff they started coding the company back in May in 2022 today they're doing 2 860 per month in Revenue with 120-ish cash in the bank burning 7K a month the team of eight is able to scale raise 255 000 in their precede around last year at a 2.5 million post money evaluation they sold 10 three co-founders building together again trying to help you turn your employees into a marketing arm for the company right now focus on their real estate broker real estate agent uh relationship Niche all right Rafa thanks for taking us to the top thanks a lot Nathan see you soon one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya