How Monite CEO Ivan Maryasin grew Monite to $627.3K revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

monite.com launched back in 2020 did a Million Dollar pre-seed Round 0.72 third prime came in after that through 2022 started lending their first customers really late 2022 scaling today 20 customers on board to the platform with real net dollar retention opportunities in the future as they scale volume and usage but doing 20 000 a month right now on revenue from basically nothing a year ago they've got over 50 folks on the team 40 Engineers or product folks of which 25 are based in Georgia so some labor Arbitrage there which we like but look at the scale here nicely in a sustainable way over time we'll see what they do next hey folks my guest today is Ivan Morrison he's the CEO and co-founder of monite the API first fintech company that helps SAS products platforms capitalize on hassle-free financial automation Finance automation for their clients at the company he's responsible for driving product strategy customer acquisition and business growth under his leadership the startup already went live with a number of high profile customers and raised more than 10 million in fronting from season VC firms third prime 0.72 Ventures alongside angels from Big players like karna Mali nayum played and PayPal Ivan you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely yeah thanks for having me today you bet and just to be clear you're also a co-founder right correct yeah I have a technical co-founder thanks God you can't build an API first company without a genius Tech Guy which my co-founder Andre is what year did you guys launch the company uh so we launched three years ago um and it was like and I like a good accident all the good things in life happened accidentally we both came from New Banks we had a grand idea how to change SME finance and here we are three years later all right so 2020 launch give me a story today of a company or a customer that's using monite yeah absolutely so I think uh just to give you a perspective of we typically serve B2B platforms that have you know if you sell them to SMU users list um right and for example the biggest customer we um signed so far is actually capital and tap I'm a credit card provider for smes in the UK and they already have all this like 300 SUV customers and so what they're doing is they're saying look these guys already using our credit cards but they could do more Finance processes with us so let's for example how plant-based suppliers more efficiently and this is how they basically become a build.com like provider for their clients and all of this functionality for payables automation is provided by Monarch API while capital and sap has full control over their interface how it looks how it works how it works for specific segments of users so we sort of like give them all the functionality and they make sure it's a perfect food for their user and with that they earn more per customer they get more transactions volume and of course this means that their user base is a lot more engaged and sort of more locked in than before let me repeat this back to you for my audience maybe so let's say someone's listening right now running a SAS company that helps sales teams and that means that sales person is obviously probably sending an invoice at some point sitting very close to the payment flows if that B2B status company listings they wanted to launch more fintech products they might look to Mo Knight to help power those apis and launch things like invoicing bill pay and B2B payments inside the application that's that's exactly right like so you theoretically you could just like combat the invoice issuance into your CRM system so that the sales person can one click Send the invoice monitor its paid status etc etc or you could like take an smino bank and give its user to super app capability where they can manage invoices and payables and expenses all in one place so if anything would give people the capability and they can play it in many different ways and so with this product suite and product set what is the average customer paying you today to use this API tool a different sort of uh types of products we sell in different bundles I would say we typically sign deals now ever everywhere above 30 000 per year and will be growing this um very very quickly as we grow in customer accounts and obviously the value of those deals are in hundreds of thousands but what we do is we basically give people an easy way to start get the way to start the justifies integration costs on our sides and locks them in for at least 12 months of usage which is our minimal commitment okay when you look at your current customer base so would you say it's fair to say on average those contracts are called 30k per year contracts for some number of API calls uh we so we don't price based on API calls we price per active SME customer per module per month so it's basically a scalable SAS model and then if people buy payments and some financial services from us we also have a take rate in that so essentially this is how we make money um and the idea is that as they get more active usage they pay us more so it's strictly aligned in terms of incentive only when they make more money we make more money explain to me on the take rate works if I'm a B2B SAS company I use monik to power in-app invoicing and invoices for 100 bucks it gets paid how much is my not going to take for that yeah I think it depends on a specific Arrangement right but we use for example stripe rails in the background for invoice payment links and then there is basically the cost of acquiring money on the cards so depending on specifics of like which card it is ETC for our take rate it could be like zero it could be negative it could be a few uh percentage points the most important thing is that we give a fixed takeaway to our partners so for example who would give them payment for whatever like 2.6 Blended rates and they would say to their client look it costs you three percent each payment which is the market Standard that QuickBooks charges and then they would always on earn 0.4 and so what we do is we fix their earnings but our earnings really depend on how much transaction costs and we run our own risk in that regard 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 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 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but when you look at your history right over the past couple years that your average customer today are they paying more like a thousand bucks a month or two grand a month is that a fair statement yeah absolutely so we usually don't sign anything to face less than that it just doesn't really make sense for us uh we rather look at people like capital and tap that already have hundreds of thousands of clients and those contracts always to go into hundreds of thousands per year in terms of minimal commitments right um so that those are the perfect customers who are targeting yet we make the M3 easy for smaller platforms well starting uh or guys who are just starting up...