How Mopinion CEO Kees Wolters grew Mopinion to $3.7M revenue and 120 customers in 2021.

hello everybody my guest today is udesh janna ningsing he is the uh ceo and founder of a company called mopinion after finishing his master in business at the university of amsterdam he worked as a consultant in the digital space he's got a strong track record in digital marketing with a focus on customer experience before launching the company his co-founders and himself had their own web and app development agency the lack of qualitative website data inspired them to create in opinion before 2017 it was 50 consultancy and 50 software and then in 2017 they went pure sas and launched the first ai platform for digital feedback and a new version of the platform and business model was actually ready to take us to the top yeah of course go ahead all right so so first off help us understand when you guys are all in the when you're in the agency kind of work in and you're doing kind of one-off retainers one-off projects you have to sell every month right to actually have revenue there's no pure sas stuff when did you when was the moment where you said ah there's an opportunity to build a sas product yeah so before 2017 we were just selling like uh consultancy stuff so yeah like you say um our rates and all of that stuff of course in combination with uh with the license revenue but it wasn't like 100 sure pure sass so what we saw happening was that one of our competitors they uh were offering uh a product but we thought hey we can do this better because they only focus on one part of the whole feedback spectrum only data collection we were like well it makes sense if we can come up with a platform that can actually turn that feedback data into useful insights so we started developing uh the current platform and launched that in 2017 uh sas platform right yeah this house platform and that's why we switched the whole business uh from uh what it was to what it is today so um selling uh uh subscriptions uh yeah the whole sas thing basically so a lot of people that are building an agency have issues switching to peer play sas because they have to essentially give up the agency revenue to focus their time on the sas help us understand i mean how large did you grow the agency to or was it actually fairly small i mean was it doing more than a million bucks a month on the agency before you switched or what no i was below a mill and also because we were already doing uh 50 technology so we had the knowledge of software and that was also of course what we liked most um and i guess we invested quite a lot of money in redeveloping the platform from scratch so we also had a race like an early stage around in 2016 and everything was just focused and centered around uh relaunching the business so how much have you raised to date um so so far we uh up to date we just did a small early stage round of half a mil and this year we'll go for a series a round so we're actually working on that now so total raise to date is how much uh half a mil oh it's just that okay half a million got it and then yeah and then take okay so take us back 2017 you launch and then what are customers paying for this on average per month yeah so average deal size is uh i would say between three and 4k uh annual and uh of course you have like the the the the the depends on a couple of uh variables so the more uh bigger customers they pay up to seven to 10k annual and then the smaller ones they pay anything between three and uh uh let's say two and five k yeah um and also in 2017 we launched something new so basically the monthly subscription plan before that we were only offering annual uh contracts and we were still doing uh consultancy um but in order to generate more leads we said well let's also uh come up with a monthly plan and see how that works and that's actually working uh working quite well in terms of uh so how many how many customers are yet today so currently we have i think around 220 uh paying customers worldwide so we're not only focusing on the netherlands of course and actually uh 60 of the revenue is coming from countries outside of the netherlands okay that's quite an interesting thing so if i take 120 of those customers times a 3 000 kind of acv on the low end that's 250 bucks a month you're doing what about 30 grand a month right now um in terms of uh mrr so i think um or you can annualize it annualized it's 360. yeah so so this year also we started focusing on some um well basically half of 2018 started focusing on launching some large enterprise deals so those are like the bigger the bigger deals and actually that is uh adding a lot of uh meat to uh to our our ar so the pro the forecast for this year is well it's not the forecast what i just want to understand the baseline where you're at today so you're if you have 120 customers at a 3000 ac today that means you're doing about 30 grand a month so we have um the 120 customers i think uh i think i think let's say 10 10 or that are enterprise clients and they pay you more and um so you could we can solve this really easily so what's a what's run rate today run rate today well i guess what we're doing at what we're working on focusing on this year is hitting the two mil you know what are you at today and that's what we're heading at so that's that's quite a yeah and for us ambitious ambitious focus but uh i'm pretty convinced that we get there and now we're up to uh 1890k in the mr and um so i guess on average you could say it was growing on i think 80 percent something like that and ar yeah yeah so just do this just to be clear so you're doing about 90 000 a month today across 120 customers that pay somewhere between 2 000 and 10 000 a year in terms of acv and you're hoping to basically double that or up to 2 million an ar by the end of the year yeah that's the challenge that we have for this year so in terms of in order to get that we also uh of course expanding the team raising another round and focusing a lot on uh uh yeah the whole lead uh bottom and top of the funnel so yeah it's quite exciting times that we're in now yeah just to be clear though i wanna i wanna i wanna pinpoint this down i mean you're not really doing these smaller two to three thousand dollar acv deals most your deals are nine or ten thousand dollars a year well that's something interesting that we just found out that actually the would attract a lot of small companies but actually we also see that our users are mostly at the bigger companies and then we attract them with a with a smaller price plan once they are in we are doing the upsell and that seems to work really well and um i think also now the whole feedback market has gained a lot of interest because recently um one of the qualtrics they got acquired they're not like a direct competitor of ours but they're definitely uh doing some things in the space that we are in and a lot uh and more things but because of that acquisition they got we have now a lot of interest in this in this market so more companies now are actually looking for tools such as opinion so um and that's also the strategy for this year to have more uh sorry just i don't mean but to be clear i mean he's doing they're doing a quarter of a billion in arr and they'd raise about 400 million i mean they do so many things any there are thousands of companies ceos that can say yeah we're in the space of qualtrics and the eight billion dollar acquisition is going to help us too i think what they're doing uh because of that the whole customer feedback and customer uh analytics market has gained a lot of uh interest so yeah i think i think i think that's fair i think that's fair um me understand growth today so if you're at 90 grand a month today in terms of in terms of monthly recurring revenue where were you exactly a year ago um well 2017 we we launched it no just just a year ago so today it's january 2019 and january 2018 what were you doing per month um we were around i think uh so we grew this year 80 so was that like 20 30 and uh our i think we were like uh yeah around four or five hundred in uh in our and then we doubled it this year sorry that was really complicated just to be clear if you said you grew 80 over the last 12 months you're at 90 000 a month today that would mean you write about 50 000 a month a year ago january 2018 is that accurate some something around that yeah okay i guess so okay well what do you mean you guess so what'd you grow it over the past 12 months yeah i'm just converting the whole euro dollar thing but i guess we also got it yeah we're right now we're pretty close in terms of the exchange rate not a huge difference yeah i guess oh yeah yeah so we still have a lot of uh uh uh uh challenges ahead of course what's up what's the team size today uh team size now currently i think we're running with a team of uh 17 peeps in total and remote or is everyone in person in person yeah where uh so we headquarters in rotterdam and we in source so we have people from uh uh england france and us because we basically try to run everything um from rotterdam so we...