How Mobal Reached $1.5M ARR and 300 Customers with 200% Growth (Interview with CEO Jakob Wikström)

Intro and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, he's grown 200% year over year doing about a $1,500,000 run rate today. That's up from just 35 ish thousand dollars a month exactly one year ago when they closed their first round of funding, $2,000,000 on around a 10,000,000 post money valuation. Before that, they just had two early angel investors that put in a couple, you know, 10, 20, $30,000 a pop. Otherwise, him and his cofounder split equity 50-50 for their tool, mobal.io, which helps businesses keep

00:22their metadata updated across many, many listing sites, whether that's Google Places or some other app exchange. Hey, folks. My guest today is Jakob Wikström. He is the founder of mobal.io. That's m o b a l. It helps with business profile automation. Jakob Wikström takes to the top.

Jakob Wikström

00:38>> Yeah. I'm I'm happy to be here.

What Is Business Profile Automation

Nathan Latka

00:40What does that mean, business profile automation?

Jakob Wikström

00:43>> What business profile automation mean? 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, opening hours, anything. It takes manual clicks to actually update it. Well, our software automates a lot of that updating in a nutshell.

Nathan Latka

01:04So it's like metadata updates across many different listing sites?

Jakob Wikström

01:08>> And many different listing sites, yeah. And we believe like that sort of the world is consolidating into these bigger platforms. So again, Instagram, Facebook and really soon as well Apple is where we're integrating with the platform.

Nathan Latka

01:22You have a lot of energy. Does that mean you're rich? Do you have a lot of customers already?

Jakob Wikström

01:27>> No. I don't know. I I think it's part of my personality. But but things are going well to answer your question also.

Nathan Latka

01:34That's very cool. Okay. So what are you charging companies on average to use this technology per month?

Target Customers and Use Cases

Jakob Wikström

01:40>> So it's a good question. So again per month it changes dependence 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 restaurants, car dealership, cafes, different retail companies, brick and mortar and so forth because customers use the search engines or maps to

Pricing and Average Contract Value

Jakob Wikström

02:07>> actually find some kind of hyper local information. So yeah the pricing to come back to that again how we price 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.

Nathan Latka

02:27But Jakob, just give me an average real quick. What's the average customer pay you per month?

Jakob Wikström

02:31>> An average customer, I would say like, again, it depends on the locations, but let's say if it's one location, it could be everything between 40 and 60 depending on the automations. But then if it's 300 locations, it can go well under €10 as well per location.

Nathan Latka

02:48Yep. Okay. But Jakob, make the math easy. You add up all your customers and divide by your revenue, right, what's the average customer paying per month?

Jakob Wikström

02:54>> The average customer paying per month, like are you talking about the whole customer base that we have?

Nathan Latka

03:02Yes.

Jakob Wikström

03:03>> The annual the average contract value, I think it's about 5 k at this

Nathan Latka

03:09Per year. Yeah. Okay. 5 k per year. That's great. And that average, what is that? For five locations, 10 locations? What's your typical user?

Jakob Wikström

03:17>> 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 foot traffic has to go into to the location itself.

Nathan Latka

03:28And put this on a timeline for me. When did you launch the company? What year?

Company Origin and Services-to-SaaS Journey

Jakob Wikström

03:32>> We launched three years ago. 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 points what the customers actually needed. Then we built a tool for ourselves to update the listings even more effectively ourselves and then customers started to ask us well-to-use it. And from there we became a SaaS

03:57>> company.

Nathan Latka

03:58So how much revenue did you do in your best year as just a service business before you launched the SaaS company?

Pre-SaaS Revenue and Early Team

Jakob Wikström

04:04>> As a service business, it was something closer to 1,000,000 that we did with the service business. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:10And who's we? When you did 1,000,000 in revenue that year, how many full time employees did you have?

Jakob Wikström

04:14>> At that time, I think something maybe closer to 15 people before we then became a SaaS company and took a venture capital investment, which was one year ago. And then we at that point, we raised our seed seed round.

Nathan Latka

04:29So how much did you raise in the seed?

Jakob Wikström

04:32>> 2,000,000.

Nathan Latka

04:33Okay. 2,000,000. And most folks are are selling between 1520% of their company in their seed round. Is that the same for you?

Jakob Wikström

04:40>> Something in that ballpark. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:42Okay. So you raised it like a 10,000,000 post money valuation, something like that?

Jakob Wikström

04:46>> In the ballpark. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:48Oh, 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

05:11your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what 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 gonna

05:36get 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 is

05:57not 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, 1,200,000 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 you're

Seed Round and Valuation

Nathan Latka

06:23going 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. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

06:45you 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 into the

07:11interview. Okay. Was that the looking back now, was that the right decision?

Investor Lifeline and Co-Founder Equity Split

Jakob Wikström

07:16>> It's definitely the decision. And again, like, I believe as in any sort of round you go and race, even if we've just raised like one proper, I think it's more about as well who you're partnering partnering up with. So again, like we we had the we're thankful to have as well Lifeline, which which was the company who venture capital company who invested in us.

Nathan Latka

07:36Very good. Okay. So you raised two on 10. And how many it sounds like you have cofounders. How many of you guys launched the business?

Jakob Wikström

07:42>> So it's me and one other co founder as well. And and yeah, that was us two who started and then two business.

Nathan Latka

07:49Yeah. Were you nice at the beginning?

07:50You just split it fifty fifty?

Jakob Wikström

07:51>> No. Because we had two business angels as well in the beginning. So so they they as well played a part and and not only invested, they actually worked part time for for the first year to to get the business.

Nathan Latka

08:05How much did they invest?

Jakob Wikström

08:07>> That was really like small amount. It's in the like amounts of tens of thousands so that they invested. So and and then after that sort of Two main after that yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:14Two angels plus two co founders at the start, but ignoring that, I'm just curious how the co founder split the equity. Were you guys split equally or no?

Jakob Wikström

08:21>> Yeah. Equally. Yeah. With the cofounder. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:24Oh, okay. Okay. And then how much did you give the two early angels? What percent of the business? Twenty, thirty, 50?

Jakob Wikström

08:31>> Like, the amount originally on the cap table, something like 10, 10%. Something in that ballpark.

Nathan Latka

08:41Interesting. 10% today of your company, right, is worth a million bucks because you just raised it at 10,000,000 valuation. Why couldn't you mean, sounds it like you had a successful agency, why couldn't you use 50 k from the agency revenue to fund the software business and keep that equity from those angels?

Jakob Wikström

08:55>> 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 in the beginning when they joined the company because it was more than equity, it was network, it was both successful in building their own business, that was definitely a part of the agreement as well. Mhmm. And yeah, I would say that's my like, that's my take on

09:20>> on the angels and and and as somebody said like, there's never a perfect cap table. And and I think but I but I would say I'm I'm really sorry

09:30>> table is, a billion dollar company and I own a 100%.

Nathan Latka

09:32That's perfect.

Jakob Wikström

09:33>> Well, that could that that's perfect in a sense. But again Perfect. But in a sense, it's perfect. But again, I think sharing your victories with others is like what what it what the whole story is about as well.

Nathan Latka

09:44Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're you're a nice guy. I mean, I'm kidding. I enjoy that too. You wanna

Jakob Wikström

09:47>> take a good seat with people.

Nathan Latka

09:48Let's just say this, a cap table with no equity investors on it, only your team. That would be very cool. Alright. Talk me talk to me more about your your size today. How many customers are paying you?

Current Customer Count and Markets

Jakob Wikström

09:59>> Customers are a bit over 300 in And so can I take And we're like Europe and The US and really yeah, we're really in the beginning? Like we're still building the foundations to what we do. Again on a like the megatrend that we're working in and 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

10:26>> 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 are working with.

Nathan Latka

10:40Can I take 300 customers times the $5,000 your average contract value? You guys are doing about a $1,500,000 run rate today?

Jakob Wikström

10:49>> Yeah. Something in that something in that ballpark. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:51Okay. That would be about a $120,000 a month last month. Is that right?

Jakob Wikström

10:55>> Something in the ballpark. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:57And help us understand growth. If you were around that today, where were you exactly one year ago?

Jakob Wikström

11:02>> One year ago, I think yeah. Now again, I don't remember exactly the number, but something closer to a 200% growth.

Nathan Latka

11:12Okay. So you were you were like around 35, $40,000 a month about a year ago?

Growth Rate and Monthly Revenue

Jakob Wikström

11:18>> Something something in that ballpark. Yeah. You're really interested in the numbers. I think that's good. Businesses are driven with numbers.

Nathan Latka

11:23Have you listened to have you listened to the show?

Jakob Wikström

11:26>> I have.

Nathan Latka

11:27Okay. Well, then you know that I always ask numbers. Right?

Jakob Wikström

11:29>> It's good.

11:30>> I I get bored otherwise.

Nathan Latka

11:31Okay. Don't Yeah.

Jakob Wikström

11:32>> It's good. Alright.

Nathan Latka

11:34Very cool. Got it. So so I guess walk me through how you're growing today. How are you signing up new customers?

Sales Motion and SDR Strategy

Jakob Wikström

11:42>> 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 customer as good as possible, I think doing that manually in the beginning works. And that's what we've noticed to work. So again, we really like SD to go into a practical

12:05>> term like SDR activated demos all the way.

Team Size and Sales Quotas

Nathan Latka

12:09Mhmm. Okay. Interesting. So how many folks on the team today and how many are SDRs?

Jakob Wikström

12:13>> Folks on the team are are you thinking about the sales team?

Nathan Latka

12:17Just your whole team? The whole team?

Jakob Wikström

12:18>> The whole team. We're 31 today.

Nathan Latka

12:21How many sales reps?

Jakob Wikström

12:23>> And sales reps were five.

Nathan Latka

12:25And do they all carry a quota?

Jakob Wikström

12:28>> Yeah, and different obviously like quotas depending if you're on SDR or AE.

Nathan Latka

12:34What's the SDR quota?

Jakob Wikström

12:37>> SDR quota is in meetings.

Nathan Latka

12:40How many?

Jakob Wikström

12:42>> It's a good question, I think 20 it meetings that we have as our quota.

Nathan Latka

12:46Per month or week?

Jakob Wikström

12:47>> Month.

Nathan Latka

12:48Per month, interesting. And then what's the AE target quota?

Jakob Wikström

12:53>> Again, it's dependent a bit on the market. It's dependent dependent on like which companies you're targeting. But it can be anything, again, dependent on ramp up on market, but let's say between one and and four k MRR.

Nathan Latka

13:07So each each month, the AE has to convert the SDR meetings that get set up into one to four k of new MRR?

Jakob Wikström

13:14>> Yeah. Dependent on the market. Okay.

Nathan Latka

13:16Yep. So so if they add four k every month for twelve months, they're adding $48,000 a month to the business or approximately 600 500, $600,000 a new ARR per AE, but you only have it sounds like one or two of them. Yeah. Very cool. Alright. You raised about a year ago. Any plans to raise this year?

Jakob Wikström

13:34>> 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. Well, as the name of the game is today, but we've always had that approach to have a really red line of sort of how we use capital. No, not today, but by the end of the year's year, who knows.

Nathan Latka

13:53Why 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. Feels like an outbound strategy here could you guys just would be printing money.

Jakob Wikström

14:04>> 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 we're gonna do. I think there's a lot of potential but still a lot of the sales work is done manually. Because at the same time I think we still have a lot to figure out with the product and how we will maximize the customer value. So that would be my answer. Even how much I

Net Dollar Retention and CAC

Jakob Wikström

14:27>> would like to scale endlessly, I mean as quickly as possible. Think we first have to really dig out and understand all our customers.

Nathan Latka

14:35And when you look at how secure customers are, what has your net dollar retention been over the past twelve months?

Jakob Wikström

14:41>> It's been something about 100%. It's been the

Nathan Latka

14:45A 100%? Yep. Okay. And what are you willing to spend in terms of CAC to get a new $5,000 a year customer?

Jakob Wikström

14:54>> 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

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

15:04Alright. Fair enough. Jakob, on that note, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Jakob Wikström

15:09>> Favorite book, Ray Dalio's principles. That's a good one. Number two, is

Nathan Latka

15:13there a CEO you're following or studying?

Jakob Wikström

15:15>> Well, the one I'm following at the moment and a new one is Steven Bartlett, the with the podcast.

Nathan Latka

15:22Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building mobal?

Jakob Wikström

15:26>> Favorite online tool? I would say Salesloft.

Nathan Latka

15:30Number three, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Jakob Wikström

15:33>> I would say weekday seven, weekend nine.

Nathan Latka

15:37Fair. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Jakob Wikström

15:40>> I'm in a relationship. Yeah. But unmarried.

Nathan Latka

15:43Not married. Any kids?

Jakob Wikström

15:44>> No kids.

Nathan Latka

15:45Okay. And how old are you, Jakob?

Jakob Wikström

15:48>> I'm 31.

Nathan Latka

15:4931. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Jakob Wikström

15:54>> That's a good question. Well, to make more mistakes, maybe that would be like what I would have wanted to know.

Nathan Latka

16:02Guys, he's grown 200% year over year doing about a $1,500,000 run rate today. That's up from just 35 ish thousand dollars a month exactly one year ago when they closed their first round of funding, $2,000,000 on around the 10,000,000 post money valuation. Before that, they just had two early angel investors that put in a couple, you know, 10, 20, $30,000 a pop. Otherwise, him and his cofounder split equity 50-50 for their tool, mobal.io, which helps businesses keep their

16:25metadata updated across many, many listing sites, whether that's Google Places or some other app exchange. Jakob, thanks for taking us to the top.

Jakob Wikström

16:32>> Thank you.

Nathan Latka

16:33One 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, 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 Central.

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17:43for that @nathanlatka.comslashslack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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

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