How Nailted CEO Jose Andrés grew to $5M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jose andres he's building a great company called nailta.com which is in helping guiding companies to improve their culture jose you're ready to take us to the top yeah okay so the website is n a i l t e d dot com what's the product do yeah and ltt is a employee engagement software we help companies to improve their cultures so we get a better environment for the people so the people are happier so they are more motivated and they stay longer on their companies so the idea is is that to help companies to get a better employee engagement and how do you monetize is it pure sas yeah we charge four euros per month per employee okay that's that feels super cheap to me yeah it's maybe here in spain it's uh you know considering the the environment here i i guess that's uh we are going to raise money because uh to raise the prices uh because we are we are uh only for a few months here uh in the market uh we are eight months now so we are standing with our very first customers and later on when we move to uh another countries we we may rise our pricing okay how many customers do you have today uh 50 okay five zero is that 50 seats uh sorry you charge per seat so do you have 50 seats or 50 brands companies 50 companies how many seats yeah i'm around four thousand four thousand okay four thousand seats and you're charging about sort of four euros per month so people can do the math you're doing about sixteen thousand dollars per month in revenue yeah um a little bit less because we have a few enterprise companies uh which we made a custom pricing for them so if we uh lead at lower uh mrr but more or less like that okay got it so so how do you do your enterprise discounts if someone says hey jose i want to put 500 people on this what sort of discount could i get yeah depends on the on the company for sure but our conversation mostly are about how are they going to use the product and uh the the thing is that not every company we have used the whole product so maybe we can uh you know do some discounts by set on how many main modules or main features are they using and also depending on how long the contract of the of the subscription it will be for example if we have companies that have the annual plan so they have a discount typical such discount of two months for free and also and the most important one is basic on volume and volume meaning that if the company has more than 200 employees or so we kind of discuss the price uh more on a one-to-one meeting like that i see i see and have you guys raised capital to build the company or did you choose to bootstrap yeah we did bootstrap at the beginning uh until we reach we reach uh to 2000 i guess mrr but at that point uh we see the opportunity on all three founders comes from technical and startup background so we decided to go uh for a little bit of money out there so we raised around 200k in dollars i guess it was uh last december okay so 200 000 and was that the right decision do you regret that uh so far so good because i guess there is not much pressure uh for now i guess because uh you know it's the the first uh the first round the investor did invest in mooring like an idea on uh they are like betting you know so they don't uh talk i mean they don't bother us too much they are very useful resources for us so so far so for now it's been a good decision and you did this in madrid which which means your documents might be a little different than a raise here in the united states did you raise on a convertible note or a priced equity round yeah with this a compared to another note and i guess in that case is more than the same than in the u.s okay but yeah then the next one if we did uh uh capital you know it would be like more different i guess when did you launch the company what year uh sorry again when did you launch the company what year uh yeah the past year uh well the project started uh at june of the past year into 2019 and the but the company itself was funded in october so we are about to make one year since our existence so started really going in june of 2019 the product was launched in october of 2019 so we're coming up here on a year of the product being live yeah but uh not exactly because the the product providers like launched also in june i mean i i built a prototype but it wasn't so you're more than a year old is the point yeah yeah yeah okay okay so a year old you raised 200 000 bucks to build the company doing 144 thousand dollars in terms of an annual recurring revenue run rate today tell us the story jose of your first five customers how did you find them yeah i was talking to contacts i mean i was i was called in this prototype it was just two days or so because it was writing in uh basic on google drive so it was like very fast thing to do and uh with that i went out and i tried to reach contact and contact of contacts to uh ask for feedback and that's it uh what title like how did you actually do that that's super generic what titles were you targeting what kinds of contacts uh at the beginning i was talking to other ctos because i was previously a cto so to see they also care as much as i did for the teams and it it was you know uh the same thing this was uh then we can say we have a conversation about this and they saw interest so they start to prove their their prototype from their own teams i see okay good so that got your initial traction and then how many how many companies are you adding today per month uh well not so many uh maybe three or five on average okay meaning customers paying customers uh because we are not doing marketing at all right now uh we've been doing acquisition only by uh you know prospecting reaching companies but uh still we are still on a low profile yeah yeah okay so adding three to five uh per month uh in terms of customers and tell me about your team how many people uh we are uh three founders and uh we all three have technical background javi's our cto uh which is like he has uh you know development skills jesus is also technical but comes from more from the design area he's our product guy and we hired [Music] three people another developer so we are now like very technical team and we also have laura which is in charge of marketing and she joined us the past month so we she's starting doing things right now so how many how many people are total on the team today uh the three of us and another three okay so six that's great so six total three engineers uh laura has just joined the churn is critical in a sas company have you lost any seats across customers yeah we lost a bit uh i guess our absolute number in turn is now is seven companies that have turned uh but uh you know i think five of them wasn't a great fit for us uh most of them comes from the you know the the early the yearly steps uh trying to reach companies that doesn't fit on on our world and then the other two was more like um i'm still trying to figure out why they leave us yeah but uh i don't know because they were like great fits uh but they told us that they are looking for something like bigger more that do like a lot of things and we want to do like a lot of things we want to do uh feedback and uh very very good so so so with that with that sort of team and the customer base today and the churn in your economics are you profitable today every each month or are you burning capital we are burning capital but uh we is this is a conscious decision we want to uh grow faster and for example right now we have started doing marketing but we can you know keep growing organically as we did before but how much how much are you burning per month i guess around uh i'm telling you in uh euros is like 9 000 euros per month more or less the last time i checked so it's about 12 000 us dollars something like that yep yeah okay got it and you mentioned you might raise additional capital if if so how much would you raise and when uh this is a good question because we haven't decided it yet we always had the idea of raising more money at the end of this year or maybe at the beginning of the next one but we haven't decided yet because we want to find first our uh you know the the the levels we need to touch to grow faster because right now we are like testing channels uh we fight we figure out some of them but uh since we are not in a hurry in terms of gas uh we are still discussing that we don't have yet an idea got it very good jose let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh okay that's a good question uh the last one i read it uh not sure it says business but um obviously awesome how to position product products uh it's one that i read lately and uh well like uh revealing for me number two is there a founder that you're following or studying uh not studying but i'm uh like following or i don't know how to say that but uh um i i i i have my sorry because my english no you can say none no none is fine okay no but i'm like following the the i from personi which is a german startup because i met him in my previous companies and i really like what he's doing number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company the online tool oh well maybe for me it's like linkedin but okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh sorry i didn't catch that how many hours of sleep do you get every night ah okay around seven or eight yeah okay and jose what's your situation are you married single do you have kids uh i'm single but i live with my girlfriend okay and how old are you uh i am 31 31 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old uh when i were 20 maybe that i can't i didn't have to wait for 10 years to start my own my own company maybe that i don't need to know that much and that i can't that i can learn in in the in the way guys there you have it nailted.com has about 4 000 seats paid seats on their platform across 50 logos they're doing 12 000 a month in revenue they've raised two hundred thousand dollars burning twelve thousand dollars net per month team of six three engineers they look to scale about fourteen percent gross churn annually seven out of fifty customers have turned so far they're less than or about a year old might raise here in q4 of 2020 or q1 of 2021 we'll see helping again teams drive engagement among their employees so that the whole company can move forward faster jose thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we 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