How Miitel CEO Takeshi Aida grew to $32.8M revenue and 1.6K customers in 2024.

guys me tell think of it like gong uh but for Asia Pacific plus extra things added on top of gong he's got over 1600 paying customers doing over 1.6 million a month in Revenue up from 800 000 a month just a year ago done this very Capital efficient they raised 15 million bucks in a series they had called 150 million valuation uh back in 2020 and hasn't raised since so very efficient growth 200 on the team 80 Engineers 30 sales reps 120 110 plus net dollar retention as he TK looks to scale hey folks my guest today is TK after joining Mitsubishi Corporation he was involved in automotive trading planning and executing sales and marketing initiatives and overseas markets cross-border investment deals and new company formations among many other things he founded a REV common July 2017 which provides the self-coaching tool called metel and me tell for Zoom a service that uses artificial intelligence to visualize sales calls call center operations and meetings companies expanded more than 40 000 users in four years among Japan Indonesia the Philippines and the ustk you ready to take us to the top yep all right how's it going good to meet you man so just be clear is is Rev come a parent company with a bunch of companies or is the main thing me tell uh anything detail it's uh the you know company name is revcom it's a revcom Inc and our services Mito and media for Zoom okay so the website if you want to follow along will be revcon revcom dot Co dot JP right yeah all right we have LP like you know meta.com that's great all right so let's talk about metel.com right so what does the product do and what kinds of customers are you selling to yeah it's um you know B2B sauce self-coaching tool um very simple service it analyzes it visualizes the sales and shares competition by audition intelligence in terms of what and how so in terms of how um we you know visualize took recent ratio number of silences overlaps overlaps means an interruption by the way um and number of silences rallies Raleigh's music composition back and forth and speech rate how many characters per second operator spoke um and customer did so for example in terms of uh Speech rate it is said that pacing is important in cell so she has pacing means you are supposed to talk plus minus 10 of the customer because there's a strong correlation between brain speed and speech rate so if you speak to us a customer can't understand and if you speak too slowly I think you're stupid right yeah so that's why you're supposed to talk plus minus ten percent of the customer in this way uh you can see how the communication was made and the way the issues are and in terms of what we transcribe the whole composition and summarize it and Order market and put it into crmsfa um so that's what we did Tiki can you do syntax in a syntax analysis you know happy sad things like this yeah uh we um you know analyze the emotional as well interesting okay very cool I mean have you been what this reminds me of I mean it feels like you're effectively gone but for Asia I mean is that a fair comparison or no yeah it's a fair comparison um so the difference between gong chorus and me tell is that very simple um you know the me tell Eco gong plus um you know Zenfone or diapod and reading Central which is IP form so me tell consists of two parts right IP phone Cloud iPhone plus conversation analytics since it's a One-Stop service and we provided with only 79 bucks and gone cost you know you know 100 240 bucks so yeah so so it's 70 I see you're very clear on your website it's 69 or 70 bucks per month is that per user per seat yeah per user per seat yeah okay per user per month yeah 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 founder 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 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 what does the average sort of company pay per month this will be driven by obviously the number of seats they're paying for their team size um it totally depends um but in Japan um Enterprise customer pays us um usually like you know 140 bucks per a month per uh ID including you know cold charge and mobile um uh um you know um options and also storage options you know um so 69 box um it includes two months of recording um you know storage but Enterprise users usually um store um there's you know we call data we call it data more than you know 12 months yep so they have to pay the storage fee yep that makes no that makes a lot of sense to Smart upsell but if you look at your not just your Enterprise Court if you just look at all of your paying businesses today is it fair to say the average business is paying something like 500 to a thousand bucks a month yeah that'd be like four or five seats basically yeah yeah okay interesting it's uh you know industry uh diagnostic um from financial industry to manufacturer from listed company to SMB yeah um yeah it's a horizontal sauce this is great okay I understand what you charge I understand the product put this on a timeline for us when did you launch the business uh we launched a metel in 2018 um November so it's been about four years and uh three months or so and are you the only founder yeah I'm the uh solo Fonda that's that's the way to do it man right now are you already Super Rich you put up your own money or what well not really I mean um what what I'd like to do um in the future is like you know I'd like to spend my time and uh Network social network to the philanthophic um you know activity so most of the uh share is owned by um you know my um Foundation it's called a think act foundation and Takeshi Ida Foundation um so 90 of my share is owned by found that foundation and you also do that because of attack from attack strategy perspective that's smart tax planning um yes and no I willing to pay uh talks to the Japanese uh you know government for the you know Society um for the society right what is the average tax rate in Japan if you sell the business for a billion dollars and you own all the equity how much you're gonna pay the Japanese government yeah capital gain tax is 20 percent so it's not that much lower lower than that's lower than some spots in the U.S so right so you know the tax strategy is not that important right so yeah so you get going here in 2018. now did you write the original code or did you convince an engineer to write it for you um I I convinced engineer uh right for me yeah so you're very convincing that how did you do that um there's no you know secret sauce it's um keep communicating with a lot of uh Engineers um but my um findings um at Ali stage was that uh there are four types of engineers right um the engineer for all strength uh strong art um you know uh structure architecture an algorithm and application and management right and so what um Ali stage founder should find is architecture engine through a stronger architecture engineer because if the architecture is not well architected then you have to rebuild in at some point usually business person uh seeking application engineer because application engineer is very very um you know well known so the engineer who made um this service right and pay him or her a lot of money or did you give him equity um Equity plus um you know uh money what what doesn't are I mean don't tell me the salary of your first hire but in general an architecture engineer in Japan today I mean what are you going to pay them per year in salary well it totally depends um so at first I paid them only you know 5 000 bucks a month yeah plus sorry uh plus stock option right um yeah but we're talking like under five percent equity right yeah on the five percent equity I mean that's still impressive that you're able to recruit someone that you feel like is pretty talented for five thousand dollars a month plus under a five percent option Grant I mean he must or she must have just really believed in Your Vision yeah that that's that's the point right um but why why did he believe you I mean is this your second or third company how did you build his or her confidence enthusiasm man it's all about enthusiasm dream vision and also um engineer really care about um you know logical strategy right so how are you gonna um make the business bigger and watch your tactics and watch your strategy you have to be very logical so it's a balance of enthusiasm and logic it's it's all about that yeah that's the origin story you get going in 2018 we put out a report every year the fastest growing SAS companies we found you you give us results I don't wanna I don't want to steal your thunder here so I'll let you share right uh what What's Revenue today and how fast did you grow the last 12 months um it's um it's we are not disclosing the revenue uh but um you gave it you gave it to us already publicly let's say um you know beyond uh T2 D3 cop which is uh you know triple triple double double oh yeah yeah you know that's a non-amer let me let me ask you let me ask you this question instead of a revenue figure um you know you get your do you get your first customers in 2018 or did it take you a couple years to get the first customer uh 28 18. um we had um you know at the first of um you know launching we already have 30 uh companies how'd you do that um you know I went to a Salesforce event and keep talking hey um we are self coaching tool and if you're interested why don't you use a closed beta version and then uh when we officially launch you can you know turn it to paid customer so that's amazing what I did what was your initial price point was it always 69 bucks a month no um at first it was a 49 because the you know function was very limited we didn't have any emotional detection engine also we didn't have a transcription engine we only have how to speak engine like you know token ratio novel silences overlaps and speech break that's it but you know customers willingness to pay with how to speak engine was you know 59 bucks so you know 30 customers because you're hustling at a Salesforce conference you get 30 signed up now fast forward today three years later how many customers are you working with um we have um a company number of company is uh 1600 1600 yeah okay and you mentioned earlier the average one pays about a thousand bucks a month right I mean so we can sort of I mean you're doing somewhere around a million and a half bucks a month in Revenue you can guess I'm not guessing I'm multiplying your numbers you told me earlier your average RP is a thousand a month then you just told me your customers were 1600 is there any reason I couldn't just multiply those yeah I mean um yeah I mean uh average APA uh average revenue pop account is more than a thousand bucks so so you're doing more than 1.6 million a month right now on Revenue yeah okay that's good enough you're at you know above that range today where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate a growth rate um it's a half of it okay so you've grown 100 over the past 12 months that's great now did you do this bootstrapper have you raised a bunch of capital uh we raised um approximately 15 bucks uh three years ago and since then we have not raised any money um all right you raise the capital efficient you raised how much 1 5 15 million USD oh million okay I thought you said you raised fifteen dollars yeah you raised that money in 20 in what 2020 you said no 20 yeah 2020. it was 20 20. yeah and why I mean why did you need to raise that money what what about this business is capital intensive well um to accelerate oh hiring and also sales Market marketing uh expense um I'd like to um you know raise approximately 10 million but um you know for the 10 million coal um 50 million five zero million um has you know knock knock us so I have to arrange um you know who to welcome and then end up with that one five million yeah yeah that's fair now would you consider that sort of your series A yeah series a yeah yeah I mean most people in their series either selling between 10 and 15 of the business were you sort of in that same range yeah yes okay so it's like 150 million valuations something like that yeah yeah okay very good and do you remember what Revenue was back in 2020 um it was like approximately um 200k mrr okay okay so did that valuation back then feel fair to you would you do anything differently yeah it was fair for sure I mean what is that what is that 150 divided by 2.4 that was a 62x multiple I mean back then pretty much back then that was the market today that would be very aggressive yeah yeah yeah the market has been changed totally do you are you in a position right now to sort of Outlast the recession or are you burning a bunch you need to go raise money this year uh we don't have to raise money um we are still a capital hint so that's awesome that's awesome um so what's what's the target this year I mean do you think you can break a 30 million run right 35 million run rate this year um less than that run rate I mean uh burn rate right no no what do you think you can hit this year in terms of Revenue Well we'd like to double it for sure okay so that I mean you think you can get over 40 million dollars in Revenue run rate this year pretty much that would be aggressive but yeah a little uncomfortable but doable yeah I think uh it's doable um in in terms of we are expanding you know our um you know Market not only in Japan but also Indonesia will be in the US Henry shock uh went out and acquired chorus recently well called a year and a half two years ago for about 450 million bucks I imagine he's aggressively looking at Asia I imagine you've had to have conversations with folks in terms of m a um are you in any conversations right now to sell the business um not really but uh we are open um every time I actually talked with uh ex-founder of uh you know chorus Roy or who yeah Roy yeah yeah you know Roy of course knows everybody come on yeah um I mean look you're an interesting Target you're an interesting Target for Zoom info you're an interesting Target for a meet at gong like anyone that wants to expand to Asia Pacific I would say you are like a prime target you're very well positioned because you're so Capital efficient yeah you have your ARR is more than correct me if this is wrong you have more ARR today Revenue than the total amount of money you've raised yeah for sure of course so you're very Capital efficient which makes you a prime target yeah no I love that that's great how many folks are full-time on the team today uh 200 people approximately how many engineers um 40 okay got it so call that 8200 yeah 80 Engineers yeah how many sales reps with the quota uh 30 30. and how aggressive are quotas over there and I mean is it is it a million a year is what you want them to do is is that it that's what you have yours set at a million dollar quota for your top reps yeah wow okay do all of them hit it ah no uh only 20. they're using you know self coaching to me tell so um yeah that's fair that's fair okay very good and then um I guess look net dollar retention is obviously a critical component of a SAS business are you guys above 100 today and if so how far yeah for sure yeah yeah our key metrics is uh NR so what is it maximize what's over 100 percent 250 yeah okay World classes I would say 140 or above so it's less than one 140. yeah okay fair enough but you're between 100 and you know call it 110 and 140 somewhere in there yeah yeah somewhere around that very cool well listen uh this is a great story I appreciate you making time we're out of time now for today Famous Five number one favorite book um um I I love you know philosophy um I I like the uh critique of sheer reason that's uh my favorite book yeah that's the one the copt number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um I would say my dad but um uh what I respect most is uh Bill Gates Bill Gates number three what's your favorite online tool besides your own for building retail um I would say slack without slack I cannot do your work yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night um usually six hours okay and what's your situation married single kids married with one uh you know daughter oh that's great that's awesome how old are you uh I'm 33 33 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um when when I was 20 when you're 20 years old um I don't know um start my business all year I I started my business when I was 28. I should start um you know much earlier guys me tell think of it like gong uh but for Asia Pacific plus extra things added on top of gong he's got over 1600 paying customers doing over 1.6 million a month in Revenue up from 800 000 a month just a year ago done this very Capital efficient they raised 15 million bucks in a series they had called 150 million valuation uh back in 2020 it hasn't raised since so very efficient growth 200 on the team 80 Engineers 30 sales reps 120 110 plus net dollar retention as he TK looks to scale very exciting space TK thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much it's a pleasure to talk to you 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 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 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