How Massive DH Reached $996K Revenue Bootstrapped with 8 Customers in 2023 (Interview with CEO Gianluca Ruggiero)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Massivedh.com. Big consumer brands pay him for data. It's data as a service. He was doing $40,000 a month a year ago, now doing $83,000 a month. Just broke a million dollar run rate, which is great. But what I love is he's done this bootstrapped with a team of seven. So pretty high revenue per employee. You know, he maybe buy the business at 10,000,000, 15,000,000 today. But, again, totally bootstrapped. We'll see what happens next. Hey, folks. My

00:21guest today is Gianluca Ruggiero. He is a global innovation and marketing expert with more than twenty years of working in cons in consulting for Fortune 500 companies across five continents. After five years of working on proprietary AI technology, he launched Massive in 2019 to help companies launch successful products in today's hypercompetitive markets. The URL, if you wanna follow along, is massivedh. That's d as in dog, h as in hog, .com. Alright. Gianluca, you ready to take us to the top?

Gianluca Ruggiero

00:47>> Hi. How are doing, everybody?

What Customers Pay For

Nathan Latka

00:49We are we are all doing well. So tell us, what are your customers paying you for?

Gianluca Ruggiero

00:55>> Sorry. Say it again? What are

Nathan Latka

00:57What are your customers paying you for? What do you do?

Gianluca Ruggiero

01:00>> So the, basically we are a data as a service platform that, provides our customers with a full cycle, product strategy management. So from product innovation to assortment optimization, all the way down to category management and everything that basically revolves around product. Our typical customer customer is is a large CPG companies like Procter and Gamble, Nestle, that kind of companies.

01:34>> And Espresso, Melissa and Doug, the these kinds of folks. Olay, etcetera.

Nathan Latka

01:38So are they paying you SaaS fees or service fees?

Pricing and Contract Structure

Gianluca Ruggiero

01:42>> SaaS fees. Okay. Subscription on a yearly basis, the average price of our services goal is defined by the category, that we analyze. So for example, in the case of, you know, cosmetics, you can assume, like, for example, facial moisturizers in one category, facial cleansers is another category, and the price goes between $100,000 and $150,000.

Nathan Latka

02:07And is that based off number of SKUs analyzed or number of seats or something else?

Gianluca Ruggiero

02:12>> It's, actually not very much based on it's based on how many retailers, for example, we have to analyze for customers, depending to your point of, yeah, a bit about the extensions of the category in terms of SKU that needs to be monitored Cause we take a census of the categories that we analyze. So we in our database, there is always every single SKU is included. But depending on how many SKUs the customer wants to monitor, of

02:39>> course, the price varies. Yeah, in a to a minor extent, also the number of seats.

Nathan Latka

02:45Okay. And how many of these customers are paying you today?

Customer Count

Gianluca Ruggiero

02:50>> We have currently nine well, no. Eight customers paying.

Nathan Latka

02:55Okay. And so can we take eight times a $150,000 a year? You're doing about 1,200,000 a year right now?

Revenue and Growth from 2022 to 2023

Gianluca Ruggiero

03:01>> We are currently at one because we are it's funny. We started when we started in 2019, we were pricing actually much lower. As we grew, we extended the pricing because we we noticed that the problem that we were solving was much bigger than the price we had. So we started at a typical more normal SaaS price and then we we grew basically.

Nathan Latka

03:26And Gianluca, if you're doing $83,000 a month today or a million dollar run rate, what were you doing exactly one year ago? Do you remember?

Gianluca Ruggiero

03:32>> Well, one year ago was actually half. So it was 40,000. It's a bit less actually than half.

Nathan Latka

03:41Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

04:04your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're

04:28gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

04:50is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe

05:16you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second,

05:38but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back

Bootstrapped Growth and Customer Acquisition Strategy

Nathan Latka

06:04into the interview. And so how have you driven this growth? Have you bootstrapped the company, or do you raise outside capital?

Gianluca Ruggiero

06:10>> Totally bootstrapped.

Nathan Latka

06:11Oh, I love that. Congrats. So how did you drive that growth? What's your customer onboarding strategy here?

Gianluca Ruggiero

06:17>> Yeah. That's

06:20>> I mean, across, of course, many, many mistakes along the road. But what we are doing is basically reaching out to them with cold emails and cold messages. Not very sophisticated strategy, honestly, and just with our story, with our use cases. And and, you know, we were lucky enough to strike from the get go big customer pilot contracts like Procter and Gamble, which has been

Nathan Latka

06:50a How did you land Procter Everyone would love to land Procter and Gamble as their first customer.

Gianluca Ruggiero

06:53>> But but Procter and Gamble, I was gonna say you're a startup.

Nathan Latka

06:56I'm never gonna bet on you. I'm not gonna pay you a $150,000 a year. How'd you get that deal done?

Landing Procter and Gamble as First Customer

Gianluca Ruggiero

07:00>> Yeah. So actually, these large companies for since a few years ago, since actually five years ago, they have people in the company who are basically tasked with finding startups which can up their game. And we were lucky we actually reached out with a very basic and very actually bad cold email, I must say, which was not very sophisticated. But somehow it struck a chord into what they were looking for, which was new signals for, you know,

07:33>> to find alpha in product for product innovation.

07:38>> And the way we actually got the contract was that the guy told us an impossible gave us an impossible task. He basically asked for a tool analyze a very difficult category out of China. They were getting crazy about that. They couldn't find, you know, value. He was basically kind of saying, okay, you

Nathan Latka

07:59He claimed challenged you and you delivered.

Gianluca Ruggiero

08:02>> Challenged us big time. We came back with the answer. It was, that was the wow moment. And then he said, okay. So that

Nathan Latka

08:09Gianluca, I think the wow here that I think my audience is gonna be curious about is you mentioned your data as a service. Now data as a service, you're only as strong as the data you're getting. And there's two kinds of data that you're buying it from someone else or proprietary data, you're building tech and getting data no one else has. Which one is it?

Proprietary AI and Data Methodology

Gianluca Ruggiero

08:22>> We have proprietary data, which are basically a transformation of public data. What we do is we take e commerce data, like everything that you find on e commerce retailer that is public. And we have an artificial intelligence, a true artificial intelligence that we developed. We started developing in 2014. Just as a as a comment, our team is is in Italy, we have more than 100 papers published on AI. So it's serious stuff.

Nathan Latka

08:52Wow. How how many folks are full time today?

Team Size and Structure

Gianluca Ruggiero

08:55>> Three people in the engineering, and, we are, like, seven people right now, but we are very much scattered. We almost we have two offices, but basically, they're empty because we have our CFO is out of Paris. Our SDR is in Chicago, the chief revenue officer is in Germany. It's just, you know, the way we built. I am very happy with the team that I built and that and a lot of talent, but we we didn't decide,

09:28>> okay, this is going to be the office today. Now the office, I'm here right right now in Connecticut. So we serve mostly US market because it's the most dynamic and responsive. But still when it comes to talent, we have a very diverse

Nathan Latka

09:45So Gianluca, just to cut to the chase here, though, you you don't necessarily have a unique data set nobody else can get. Your IP is really how you process public data to organize it and then use it to do analysis.

Process IP vs Secret Data

Gianluca Ruggiero

09:56>> Correct. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:57Okay. Yeah. So your IP is a it's process IP. It's not some secret data source only you have access to. Correct.

Gianluca Ruggiero

10:03>> Yeah. It's process IP. Very good.

Nathan Latka

10:05And why has no one else thought about running the same process?

Gianluca Ruggiero

10:08>> Well, I think it's because, it's very difficult to put together, competence in, marketing marketing strategy and AI for transformation. And, in during my career, I was lucky enough to put together these two things. One thing that I noticed from typical Silicon Valley data as a service company is that they don't know very well the marketing the market they are targeting to. So they don't what happens in companies, what they're really looking for. And there is always

10:40>> this misunderstanding between what is a data point and an insight, which are two totally different things. So they tend to provide data points instead of insights. The transformative power of our technology is to transform these data points into actionable insights.

Nathan Latka

10:56Are you ex CPG though? I mean, are you I mean, someone to trust for P and G to trust you to take data and put it in a sentence to make it insights and to drive strategy, don't you have to have experience in like the moisturizer industry if you're giving P and G, you know, feedback on how to sell more moisturizer?

Gianluca Ruggiero

11:13>> Well, this is interesting. We actually, when we get the information from our AI, so the AI that we have does not require training. It's designed for that purpose because otherwise it wouldn't be But it's interesting that we gather information from the first data that we receive from AI that gives us more information than usually the customer has. And I know it sounds arrogant, but when we come into a meeting with customers because, yes, we do meetings

11:45>> with customers. Although it's SaaS, customer success is a big part, especially with a platform that is very big like ours. So we do training. But when we come into the meeting, we usually know almost, I would say, more than the customer because you see markets today, and I know it's your experience as well, are flooded with new products coming from small brands and things like that. And big companies have lost contact with reality because they don't

12:14>> have the data. So we come in with a fresher view. We understand straight from the voice of the customer what's going on in that market, what are the real trends. And also we can pinpoint what are the new players that they never heard about before. I see.

Nathan Latka

12:30So you're you're when you say you're pulling data, you're going to like a big ecommerce thing like Walmart, for example, and you are pulling a bunch of metadata and you're using this kind of stuff to determine how many things are being sold and where and at what price point and margins and things like that.

Customer Types: Brands vs Hedge Funds

Gianluca Ruggiero

12:44>> Exactly. Yep.

Nathan Latka

12:46Interesting. Okay. And are all your customers brands or the hedge funds? I mean, is valuable data for hedge funds.

Gianluca Ruggiero

12:52>> Well, yeah, hedge funds, so we had experience with both hedge funds and private equity. I think that for a go to market strategy, we are more viable or let's put it this way, private equity is more viable for us because for example, we do play a role in the M and A strategy. We had a private equity fund for which we did a pilot, which is the fund that is behind the Philadelphia seventy sixers and they

13:25>> were looking to purchase new live events like stadiums, arenas, things like that, and they used our data to assess which was the best

Nathan Latka

13:35But Gianluca, sorry, because we're short on time. They're not your current customer. That's not your focus today.

Gianluca Ruggiero

13:40>> It's not. But we are now expanding. For example, now one of our customers is Changi Airport, which is the largest airport in the world out of Singapore because we can actually so I'm messing up. Actually that came, we are opening to service them and that came out of the experience with the private equity hedge funds. Back to your question, not really good target because they're used to buy alternative data by the kilo. So quantity versus quality,

Valuation and Funding Plans

Gianluca Ruggiero

14:12>> we are very qualitative. So we are not exactly a target for them.

Nathan Latka

14:17Understood. Well, this is a heck of a thing you're building. I love that you're just three people with your revenue, the revenue per employee is through roof and I always love high revenue per employee. Now plan to stay bootstrapped or any plans to raise capital?

Gianluca Ruggiero

14:28>> We that's a very we don't know. Actually, we think with this at the time being, we can actually do without funding. Funding would be fine if we can because we wanna grow and we wanna hire

Nathan Latka

14:43What would you value the business at today? Sorry? What would you value the business at today? Valuation.

Gianluca Ruggiero

14:49>> I mean, if I go by a 10 factor, I would say, of course, $10,000,000 or $15,000,000.

Nathan Latka

14:57So somewhat offered you here listening. There's there's investors that listen all the time. If they offered you a $2,000,000 seed round on a 10,000,000 post money valuation, so they're buying 20% of the business, would you accept?

Gianluca Ruggiero

15:07>> I don't know, actually.

Nathan Latka

15:10Good answer. Leave yourself some negotiation room. Alright. On that note though, Gianluca, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Gianluca Ruggiero

15:21>> I know the the title in Italian. It's a it's a book from

15:28>> oh my god. I don't remember. Anyway, let's put it this way.

Nathan Latka

15:31We'll skip it. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Gianluca Ruggiero

15:36>> No. My former my first CEO who's not working anymore back in Unilever, Umberto Ruggiero, he was a total genius, and I still looking for something as a genius as he was.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

15:49Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business?

Gianluca Ruggiero

15:57>> Well, we currently use

16:00>> Pipedrive, but I am looking I'm exploring a lot, so I don't have an answer, but I'm very excited about many things that are coming up with AI.

Nathan Latka

16:09Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Gianluca Ruggiero

16:13>> Yeah. Eight eight hours, seven hours.

Nathan Latka

16:15And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Gianluca Ruggiero

16:19>> Married with two kids. We just did an twenty years of marriage.

Nathan Latka

16:25Wow. Congratulations. And how old are you?

Gianluca Ruggiero

16:28>> I am 53.

16:29>> 53.

Nathan Latka

16:30Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Gianluca Ruggiero

16:35>> Yoga.

Nathan Latka

16:36Yeah. There you guys have it, guys. Massivedh.com. Big consumer brands pay him for data. It's data as a service. He was doing $40,000 a month a year ago, now doing $83,000 a month. Just broke a million dollar run rate, which is great. But what I love is he's done this bootstrapped with a team of seven. So pretty high revenue per employee. Know, You he maybe buy the business at 10,000,000, 15,000,000 today. But again, totally bootstrapped.

16:58We'll see what happens next. Gianluca, thank you for taking us to the top.

Gianluca Ruggiero

17:01>> Thank you. Bye.

Nathan Latka

17:03One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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

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