How Odoo CEO Fabien Pinckaers grew Odoo to $552M revenue and 11K customers in 2025.

hello everybody my guest today is fabian pinkas he is the founder and ceo of a company called udu fabian are you ready to take us to the top yes all right open source business apps tell us more about what you guys are focused on at udu so we basically do a suite of business apps from crm website builder accounting manufacturing inventory those are individual business ads but if you install several they fully integrate to each other yeah we have a sas version as well as an on-premise version okay and if you break down your last 12 months revenue versus sas versus on-prem how much was sas uh it's more or less 50 50. oh 50-50 but i would say that even the on-premise our sas it's just hosted by someone else so both kind of both sass modern can you give me a general sense of scale today what are you doing per month we are in mrr we are 2.6 million per month or 65 per year okay sorry you cut out there so you're doing 2.6 million per month yes in mrr and and you and what were you doing exactly a year ago in december of 2017 uh in billing for the year will be around 44 million sorry what was your growth over the past 12 months growth is 64 okay 64 so you were doing about 1.5 million per month exactly a year ago something some something like that yeah and then and then grew that you said 64 yes that's great very good where did help us understand uh kind of more about where this growth is coming from how are you signing up customers um um we we do have two channels one is direct so on all platforms and we sell with the partners who offer the product on premise okay so what did you grow this morning what kickback are you paying partners is it a 20 30 50 commission uh it's ranged from 10 to 20. okay the smallest f10 and the largest have 20 percent 10 to 20 interesting okay and put all this on it before we get too much into the numbers here put this on a timeline for us when did you launch the company what year oh i launched the company 13 years ago when i went back from the university oh that's great so 2005. yes and i bootstrapped the company so it was very slow at the beginning i was alone second year i was alone then two people then four and eight so it took a lot of time how many people today 600 no 580. 580 and where's everybody based um 50 are in belgium 30 are in the u.s san francisco we also have an office in new york and the rest across asia and middle east okay very good so belgium u.s new york city and remote locations and are you still bootstrapped today or have you raised capital now we raised uh 10 million euros so 12 million okay 12 million bucks and and uh and why'd you decide to raise i mean it sounds like you've had a lot of success growing it basically i mean with little capital in the company when you decide was the right moment to raise so when we were 100 people we were doing 1 million in revenue per year we wanted to switch the business model because we started as a service company doing implementation service to uh our direct customer in belgium and then we had to we wanted to switch to a more vendor style business model selling subscription instead of selling services so we had to stop all our service activities from one day to another and focus on building the partner network who would do the service for us yep so it was quite risky and at that time so we raised four million dollar to do the pivot interesting and what year was that it was in 2010 2010 okay and so how many customers do you have today 11 000 okay 11 million would be a lot we actually have four millions of users because we do have a lot of free users because of the open source nature of do yeah so if i take if i take your 2.6 million you're doing per month today and i divide 11 000 customers into that that means each customer is paying on average 200 or 300 bucks a month is that right yes yes okay and and your current run rate i can take 2.6 million times 12 you're doing about 31 million an annual run rate right now now we do more because we have non-recurring revenues i see but just recurring 31 million yes yeah and the non-recurring what it what is that installation fees for the on-prem stuff yeah it's implementation service so import of the data training coaching customization interesting walk me through how you scale that how many people on your 580 person team are in charge of kind of the onboarding one-time revenue stuff um close to 120. 120. okay interesting and is that a lower is that a low do you run cohort analysis on people that do have professional services on their account versus not in other words is lifetime value or churn lower when you do like have implementation fees on an account yes it changes a lot how much um the if they don't have a service we have a churn of 30 on the first year if they do if they do use the service we are closer to 15 20 depending on the size and blended together what's your annual revenue churn sorry blended blend all your customers together what's your annual revenue churn uh it's close to 20 okay and and what's decreasing a lot because we changed the business model of two years ago so most of the customers which one today are based on are the ones who purchased based on the old business model yeah okay so 20 revenue churn i assume that's gross annually do you have any expansion revenue yes it's 30 so the nation is around minus 10. got it yeah so 30 net expansion which means if i take 30 net expansion minus 20 churn you have 110 net revenue retention yes where's most the expansion coming from what are you up selling um two things more apps so they expand in the company so they would start with a crm and then they they want to use the website or accounting or inventory and the number of users usually they start small and put more people on board one of the things that's remarkable to me about your business model is i mean you have apps for email marketing and invoicing and a crm but you could say okay how do they beat mailchimp on email marketing how do they beat freshbooks on invoicing and how do they beat hubspot's free crm on the crm because these are companies built basically exclusively around those things would you credit your success really to the fact that it's all in one yes if you need one application you have a lot of competition like on you as you said if you need task management you will have trello and that kind of things but if you need two or three apps there is nobody more you have to go to the erp like scp or microsoft dynamics who are very complex so as long as you need two or three apps uh it's much easier to use or do rather than trying to integrate different apps together yeah when you when you go out and and sign up a new 200 or 300 a month customer what's your fully weighted cac look like uh say that again what's the what's your fully weighted customer acquisition cost oh it's it depends if it's if it's direct or indirect okay if we sell directly it's 2000 euros or 2.5 2.4 thousand dollars if it's through a partner it's 1.2 okay now does that 1.2 include the kick back to the partner uh it's included yes it is the commission of the partner okay and what percent of your new sales are direct versus indirect uh it's 50 50. 50 50. okay so if we did get to a blended number it'd be something like one you know 1 800 us dollars for but even though you have two very distinct cohorts direct and indirect yeah so worst case 2400 bucks you're going direct your payback period there is what about 12 months to get your money back um yeah actually it's as we said per year most of our contracts we with the payback is quite it's instantly that's great yes i want to dive more into where you're spending that money when you do go direct but first i have to ask you you said you listened to the show right yes what why why do you listen and you know what you're getting into why'd you agree to come on i'm enjoying this by the way but i'm curious why you agreed to come on um i think i was curious curious about what you want to say is nathan a nice guy no i never did the show so i wanted to know if i could do it or for me it's more an experience for myself i think well listen how do you feel you're doing um the question is for you actually i think you're doing i think you're doing great i think the audience is gonna love it you know it's my job a lot of people come on and kind of spout random stuff like we're the best or we're number one it's much more viable when someone like you comes on and shares numbers and then lessons on top of the numbers so let's continue doing that 2400 cac where do you spend that money typically what's the growth channel you use uh we don't spend a lot in marketing compared to our competitors we do spend a lot in the products so usually the best marketing impact we have is when we release a new version every time we release a new version from one month to another we have an increase of the lead by 20 okay and when you say new version you mean you're adding like a new app like invoicing or you're re working the whole architecture a big new version so all the apps are improved at once we do that once a year so once a year...