How Mobal CEO Jakob Wikström grew Mobal to $2.9M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

guys he's grown 200 to you every year doing about a 1.5 million dollar run rate today that's up from just 35 ish thousand dollars a month exactly one year ago and they closed their first round of funding 2 million bucks on around a 10 million post money valuation before that they just had two early Angel Investors that put in a couple you know 10 20 30 000 bucks a pop otherwise him and his co-founder split Equity 50 50 for their tool mobile dot IO which helps businesses keep their metadata updated across many many listing sites whether that's Google places or some other app exchange hey folks my guest today is Jacob vikstrom he is the founder of mobile.io that's m-o-b-a-l it helps with business profile automation Jacob already takes to the top yeah I'm happy to be here what does that mean business profile Automation and what business profile automation mean um that means actually like if you Google let's say a restaurant on the Google search engine you see this info profile with pictures reviews uh opening hours anything it takes manual clicks to actually update it well our software automates a lot of that updating in a nutshell So Meta it's like metadata updates across many different listing sites and many different different listing sites yeah and we believe like that sort of the world is consolidating into this bigger platform so again Google Instagram Facebook and really soon as well apple is where uh we're integrating with the platform you have a lot of energy does that mean you're rich do you have a lot of customers already no I don't know I I think it's part of my personality uh but but things are going well to answer your question also that's very cool okay so what are you charging companies on average to use this technology per month so it's a good question so again per month it changes depends on how many locations you have so again to take you through some really Basics again the Google profile listing or in Apple Maps the listing itself the companies that actually need it are those who have foot traffic to their location so again for example a restaurant car dealership cafes different retail companies Rick and mortar and so forth because because customers use the search engines or maps to actually like find some kind of hyper local information um so so yeah the pricing to come back to that again how we price um the product is according to the features like if you want to let's say that you're a restaurant and reviews are really your issue then we can charge as well just for automating the reviews but Jacob just give me an average real quick what's the average customer pay you per month and our average customer I would say like again it depends on the locations but let's say uh if it's one location it could be everything between 40 and 60 depending on the automations but then if it's 300 locations um it can go well under 10 euros as well per location yep okay but Jacob make the map easy if you add up all your customers and divide by your Revenue right what's the average customer paying per month the average customer paying per month like are you talking about the whole customer base that we have yes the annual uh the average uh contract value I think it's about 5k um at the year um per year yeah okay 5K per year that's great and that average what is that for five locations ten locations what's your typical user and typical user is a smaller chain like with the with that actually has the the like need for its business to run that the food traffic has to go into to the location itself and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company what year we launched three years ago um and how we launched was that we actually started by just doing this manually as a service to the clients to update the listings that was how we started and from there we started to learn the pain Point what the customers actually needed then we built a tool for ourselves to update the listings uh even more effectively ourselves and then customers started to ask as well to use it and and from there we became a SAS company so how much revenue did you do in your best year as just a service business before you launched the SAS company as a service business it was something closer to a million um that we did with the service business yeah and who's we when you did a million in Revenue that year how many full-time employees did you have at that time I think um something maybe closer to 15 people because before we then became a SAS company and took venture capital investment um which was one year ago um and then we read at that point we raised our seed seed around so how much did you raise in the seed uh two million okay 2 million and most folks are are selling between 15 and 20 percent of their company and their seed round is that the same for you uh something in that ballpark yeah okay so you raised it like a 10 million post money valuation something like that in the ballpark 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 evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations 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 okay was that the Looking Back Now is that the right decision it's definitely the decision and again like I believe I've seen any sort of round you go and race even if we've just raised like one proper um I think it's more about as well who you're partnering or partnering up with um so again like we we had the we're thankful to have as well Lifeline which uh which was the company who Venture Capital company who invested in us very good okay so you raise two on Ten and um how many it sounds like you have co-founders how many of you guys launched the business so it's me uh and one other co-founder as well um and and yeah that was us too who started and then yeah were you nice at the beginning you just put it 50 50. no because we had two business angels as well in the beginning um so so they they as well played a part and and not only invested um they actually worked part-time for for the first year to to get the business how much do they invest that was really like small amount it's in the like amounts of tens of thousands so that they invested so and then after that sort of I mean after that yeah two angels was two co-founders at the start but ignoring I'm just curious how the co-founder split the equity where you guys split equally or no yeah equally yeah with the coast oh okay okay and then how much did you give the two early Angels what percent of the business twenty Thirty fifty um like the amount originally on the cap table something like 10 and 10 something in that ballpark interesting 10 today of your company right is worth a million bucks you just raise it a 10 million valuation why couldn't you I mean it sounds like you had a successful agency why couldn't you use 50k from the agency Revenue to fund the software business and keep that Equity from those angels that's definitely what we did after starting the company and again like beyond the equity itself the money like we wouldn't I think I...