How Mobal CEO Jakob Wikström grew 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 really saw the value of business angels um in the beginning when they joined the company because it was more than Equity it was network uh it was both successful in building their own business that was definitely a part of the the agreement as well um and yeah I would say that's my like that's my take on on the angels and and as somebody said like there's never a perfect cap table um and and I think but but I would say I'm I'm really sorry Jacob as a billion dollar company and I own a hundred percent that's perfect well that could that that's perfect in a sense but again but in a sense it's perfect but again I think sharing your victories with others is like what what is it what the whole story is about as well yeah yeah yeah you're a nice guy I mean I'm kidding I enjoy that too you want to take a good chance let's just say this a cap table with no uh Equity investors on it only your team that would be very cool all right um talking talk to me more about your your size today how many customers are paying you customers are a bit over 300 um not in total yeah and so can I take it we're like we're we're like Europe uh and the US um and and really yeah we're really in the beginning like we're still building the foundations to what we do and again like on a like the mega Trend that we're working in and what I what we know that is happening already is that if you get all the information from the listing let's say that you are gonna go to a restaurant you don't go to the website anymore you just go to the listings so the listings are becoming the new version of the website if people still use search engines as their way to consume info and that's the really interesting part of what we're working with can I take 300 customers times the five thousand dollar your average contract value you guys are doing about a 1.5 million dollar run rate today oh yeah I'm something in that something hit the ballpark yeah okay that would be about 120 000 a month last month is that right something in a ballpark again and help us understand growth if you're around that today where were you exactly one year ago one year ago um I think yeah now again I don't remember exactly the number but something closer to a 200 percent uh growth okay so you were you were like around 35 40 000 a month about a year ago something something in that ballpark yeah you're really interested in the numbers I think that's good businesses are driven with numbers Have you listened to Have you listened to the show I have okay well then you know that I always ask numbers right it's good I get bored otherwise okay I don't know yeah it's good all right very cool um got it so so I guess walk me through how you're growing today how are you signing up new customers so we're signing up new customers mainly like we're trying to get everyone to talk to us first it's an interesting like model that I believe in like the whole self-serve plg model as well but when you're early and we're really trying to listen to the customers good as possible um I think doing that manual in the beginning works and that what we've that's what we've noticed the work so again really like SD to go into a practical term like SDR activated uh demos all the way okay interesting so how many folks on the team today and how many are sdrs folks on the team are talking about the sales team just your whole team the whole team the whole team we're 31 today how many sales reps and sales reps uh were five and do they all carry a quota uh yeah and different obviously quotas uh depending if you're on the SDR or an AE what's the SDR quota SDR quote ice in meetings how many um it's a good question I think it was when I think it's 20 meetings that we have as our quota yeah or a month or week month per month interesting and then what's the AE Target quota um again it's dependent a bit on the market uh it's abandoned uh dependent on like which companies you're targeting um but it can be anything again depending on ramp up on Market but let's say between one and and four kmr so each each month the AE has to convert the SDR meetings that gets set up into one to 4K of new mrr yeah dependent on the market uh okay so so they add 4K every month for 12 months they're adding 48 000 a month to the business or approximately 600 500 600 000 a new ARR per a but you only have it sounds like one or two of them yeah very cool all right um You Raised about a year ago or any plans to raise this year um I have we haven't thought about it at this point because again we're building so many foundational things to the company to actually scale effectively with capital like well that's the name of the game is is today but we've always had that approach to to have a really red line of sort of how we use Capital so no not today but by the end of the years yeah who knows why don't you have more than 300 customers I mean one thing you can do is obviously scrape listing websites and then reach out to every single founder it feels like an outbound strategy here could you guys just be printing money yeah no I think it's a really really good point and that's a part of as well like building the Machinery that we're where we're gonna do I think there's a lot of potential but still a lot of the sort of sales work is done manually because at the same time I think we we still have a lot sort of to figure out with the product and how we'll like maximize the customer value so so that that would be like my answer even how much I would like to scale endlessly um I mean as quickly as possible I think we first had to really dig out and understand all our customers and when you look at how secure customers are what is your net dollar retention been over the past 12 months it's been something about 100 it's been a hundred percent yeah okay and what are you willing to spend in terms of CAC to get a new five thousand dollar a year customer again that's that's changing so much so I I can't even give you give you a straight answer to that it depends on like like looking two months back it's very different than it than it's today so all right fair enough Jacob on that note let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book Ray dalio's principles that's a good one number two is their CEO you're following or studying well that one I'm following at the moment and a new one is Stephen barley the with the podcast number three what's your favorite online tool for building mobile favorite online tool I would say sales Loft number three how many hours I sleep to get every night I would say weekday seven week and nine fair and what's your situation married single kids um I'm in a relationship yeah but I'm married and not married any kids no kids okay and how old are you Jacob I'm 31. 31 last question something you wishing you when you were 20. that's a good question um well to make more mistakes maybe that would be like what I would have wanted to know guys he's grown 200 to you over a 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 two 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 Jacob thanks for taking us to the top thank 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 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their 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 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