How Oitchau CEO Lonny Szneiberg grew to $5M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is lonnie schneiberg he's a serial entrepreneur working online since 1998. investing.com is one of his companies on its way to becoming a privately funded unicorn with offices around the globe and over 300 employees and 60 million bucks in revenue his other company oichau is a time and attendance solution which started in brazil to solve the problem of three million annual labor law related lawsuits in the country alone lonnie are you ready to take us to the top definitely okay so so are these investing.com and oyshow are they separate companies are they tied together somehow no they're separate companies uh some of the partners invested also in ciao but uh these are two separate entities and one is running brazil and the other is an international uh monster actually where we're uh growing pretty fast uh we surpassed we just surpassed bloomberg in traffic recently with 100 million uh sessions a month on the site alone so it's it's a it's a very it's a major operation so okay so that's investing.com 60 million bucks in revenue compare that to oichau i mean what's oil doing right now in terms of revenue uh that's a good zero is a baby but growing very fast there is a there is a big issue in brazil which is related as you said there are three million lawsuits a year peop business owners don't necessarily know the extra hours that their employees are doing and then they found out at the end of the month they need to pay a few extra salaries because of these extra hours which they're required to pay by loss so okay um so is it i mean is it it looks like based on the website you're essentially kind of time tracking for employees and managers pay for this correct uh it's a time and attendance uh application uh but it's it's a very smart application so we know we know to identify the where the who and the when uh when people punch in and or punch out how much time they did the the all the extra hours that they did notify about any problems problem which is outside uh what the manager configures in real time to the manager so you don't need to wait for the end of the month to find out you have a problem with an employee you you get the information in real time the next day you can already invite the employee chat with them and solve the problem got it well yeah i mean you never say you have a dumb tool so it sounds pretty smart uh it's obviously a good thing when managers are signed when managers are signing up for this i mean well what's a typical kind of company paying on average per month for the two well to be honest what happens is that the employees actually they take the tool home with them and then they can manage the uh the cleaning lady or the creator profile and manage the cleaning lady and the babysitter on the other side and we have uh various uh companies with over 5000 people and um some of the actually the government is also looking into it uh testing some tools we're running some pilots so um covering a pretty big scope of the businesses okay yeah but um what i'm trying to do is understand pricing so maybe on a per seat basis what are people paying on average for this well uh to convert it in dollars uh you know the real has been moving so much so let's take the last few days uh so it's a few dollars a few dollars for employee uh and um the price it just depends on the amount of employees you have and uh and the actual plan that you choose we're also launching right now a solution for um hold on hold on lonnie sorry i don't i don't want to get off that subject because i want to understand it because i'm still not here um if we look at your entire kind of base and all of the seats on your platform whether it's someone managing their cleaning lady or someone managing 5000 employees on average what's the per seat price and reels is fine on average it's about a hundred and a hundred and some dollars uh and sometimes again like if you if you look at the majority of of the companies we're looking at small businesses but then you have major companies with thousand employees and up which uh would change the average completely so uh but but the majority in terms of amount are the smaller businesses okay so the average company is paying 100 bucks per month to use the tech yeah more or less something something more sure yeah but yeah that's the nature by the way of an average you take your total customer's revenue and you get an average right i totally get that you have power laws happening here yeah okay and and so put this on a timeline for me when did you launch this company uh well we launched it in uh in august uh 2018 okay so this is so like this year for about a year sorry yes you launched it this year a couple months ago correct correct we've been working for quite a while we already have had many customers participating in the beta but uh the official launch was in the co in an hr conference here in sao paulo in august uh 16. okay and how many customers have you scaled to over the last couple months well we have uh we have a few hundreds and uh i'm not i'm not i can't really go in the specifics i can't say that we're expecting the current growth rate to reach a million dollar a year revenue by uh august next year if the current rate continues well it definitely won't continue because going from a dollar to five dollars is a super high growth rate and doing that same growth rate day over day or month over month becomes virtually impossible with the law of large numbers correct uh there is a legislation issue in brazil which works in our favor so actually the the government is pushing the businesses towards these tools and there aren't many out there uh and and not not familiar with another tool that offer the same complexity as ours so currently we actually months over months we're we're growing and the demand is continuous to expand so uh i don't think we're gonna reach that level of like uh it's gonna take a while a few good months until uh the growth will slow down from what i'm from where i'm standing sure by the way growth is relative but going from like a dollar in month one to a thousand bucks a month in month two is a thousand x month over month growth if you do a thousand x for another month and a thousand x another month and another month you had a billion dollars in revenue in four months the growth rate won't stay that high yeah i'm referring to what i said previously which is the one million uh dollar a year which is the the first goal yeah no total it makes complete sense makes complete sense when you say a couple hundred customers today you're talking like two three hundred something like that um okay yeah so and then what i'm trying to understand here is you have a free kind of a free plan as well so what is it like i mean how many freezers do you have on the platform and and where do you show them the pay well sure so it's a it's actually it's not a free plan it's a trial uh just a 14-day trial um after that we asked them if they want to if they want to continue with us to a paid plan okay does the free trial require a credit card at the beginning or at the end no uh at the end at the end it's not it's not a premium model okay got it very good and then look i i love the kind of focus on getting to a million bucks in ar that would be call it 83 grand per month it sounds like if you've got two or three hundred customers today at that arpu you told me about a hundred bucks you're somewhere around call it 20 30 grand per month today is that accurate uh like i said i don't want to go especially specifics because we have various companies some of big which screw the um the average a little bit but in some government clients which is a complete completely different size of contracts but uh the goal is a million a year in august yeah just be clear lonnie i'm just multiplying the numbers you gave me you said 100 was an average obviously when you give me an average it means are people doing more and people doing less and you said a couple hundred customers so i'm simply multiplying are you generally doing about 30 grand per month right now uh i'm not going to the numbers because as i said there are just way to understand a company if you if you do them if you multiply then a company with five you take one company with 5 000 employees uh or a few of them you completely change uh well obviously the average and and the growth plan so i'm not going to go into numbers right now but yeah lonnie sorry that number has to be wrong then i asked you what is your average per month so you said 100 bucks per month meaning there are some companies with 5 000 employees that might pay you 10 grand per month and there are a bunch that pay you two dollars listen uh we're talking about future plans until august okay i'm saying i don't know i'm not talking about future i'm talking about what you currently have so i currently i'm not going to go in specifics it's just not something i'm going to review what's you gave me then because i said is that your what's your average and you said 100. so if that's wrong what is it like what's wrong okay so your average customer today is paying 100 bucks per month more or less yeah okay that you could have just said at the beginning why'd you make that so difficult uh i wasn't trying to okay yeah so just be clear moving forward you're working with governments you're working with 5 000 team plans you might be signing much larger deals in the future but today you've got a couple hundred customers paying 100 bucks per month call it 30 grand or something like that per month in revenue uh more or less very good that's helpful to understand bootstrap review uh well we have some angel investors uh we're not we're not currently looking for extra funding and uh um uh we're hoping to well we're gonna not hoping we're gonna reach profitability before for any any additional uh investment okay so and why did you make the decision to raise capital why not you know try and bootstrap so you hold all the equity uh well market conditions we wanted to move fast grow quickly and this is the uh it's a very complicated tool to build because of the the technical part all the statistics and the calculations so um it was just a decision of how fast we want to grow uh where we want to be in a year um and what is the capital required for it okay so i mean you said you raised a couple hundred thousand how much have you raised to date into the company we have um i didn't say we were raised until now uh 1.6 okay and was all of that equity or was some of that like government grants and things like that no no government grants all that was uh equity angel investments okay very good and then um walking me through some you know some of the other economics you know at a price point like this this kind of tool churn is obviously something you have to watch closely what is your turn today and how do you think about minimizing it so sorry you're breaking up can you repeat the question yeah what is your churn today and how do you focus on minimizing it okay so the only training with that's that's the amazing thing uh people don't wake up in the morning say okay i'm going to change my time and attendance solution if it works you just stick with it so the only number the only uh companies leaving us were actually the ones that uh went out of business for some reason decided to fire uh most of their staff um which happens by the way i mean you say that like it never happens it happens all the time no no of course of course i'm saying that i'm saying that the companies are not leaving uh the tool to move to a different one or for any other reason than that i'm just stating it um we had uh about uh until now uh eight companies okay kind of eight and so if you look at that at a percentage is that like two percent logo term per month or higher or what yeah two um uh yes somewhere in the area okay are you is it just too early you're not really measuring turn yet uh i'm imagining i'm just it's not uh i wasn't expecting to to going to dive too deep in the numbers at this call so i i'm just uh i'm trying to think what i want to reveal and what i do well look the purpose of the podcast is to educate people on sas right and interview sas ceos so the easiest way to do that is to understand the data and then have you explain how you either having success or or why you feel like you're not having success yet and so that's why i asked the numbers right otherwise it was just a fluffy interview so so so are you churned today how are you driving turned down what do you know you have to get users to do within the first kind of session they install the app to make sure they stay sticky well um first of all we're uh in terms of the support and the guidance of the of the users we're very um hands-on and trying to be more uh proactive and reactive so we're very well well aware of what's going on in the system and if we see some sign of people stop punching you know something happens that we can prevent we we actually uh contact the customer and uh try to figure out if there's a problem so this is uh that's been really helpful this kind of this kind of strategy okay but again what are you doing when the employee first installs the application what are you doing in the onboarding to as quickly as possible get them to take x action which you know makes them very sticky like what's the action and how do you get them to take the action right so we know that once they install the application and invite um invite over uh seven employees uh the demo usually uh continues for a while like there's no uh the people don't stop the demo and it helps us to get to the conversion point so the the goal for us is to get to seven employees actively punching on the application i see and is most this growth kind of coming organically or are you doing any kind of paid acquisitions and really what i'm asking is you know when you look at your cat from a fully weighted perspective how aggressive are you being uh we're uh not being very aggressive on paid marketing uh most of it is organic and partnerships okay uh we're start but however we are planning to start shortly to be much more aggressive on campaigns in order to scale uh to scale the growth so whether it's a paid campaign or a kickback to a partner or something like that what are you willing to pay to acquire a 100 a month customer uh well we're still measuring that i don't have the exact numbers several campaigns bring different kinds we're still in the testing process well ignore what your actual data is i'm just asking about you as the leader how aggressive are you willing to what are you willing to pay for 100 a month customer uh we still um we still test it's a good question uh we still don't have uh uh those numbers because actually you know lonnie sorry you're not hearing my question i'm not i'm not interested i'm not looking at your data i'm not interested in what your current data is i'm just asking you personally like what what would you feel comfortable spending to get that customer um probably um and the customer acquisition probably the first two three months okay so so you're happy with the three month payback spend two or three hundred bucks to get the customer more or less uh because again since we started in august uh we have a very low churn but on the other hand we still need to understand more the the life expectancy and the the customer value uh over a year how much we're able to upgrade so so we're still measuring everything and trying to get to the right numbers yeah that makes sense you're early how many how many folks are on the team uh well we have 14 people okay and where's everyone based in sao paulo and some are based in manaus which is uh north of brazil okay so but everyone's in brazil yes that's great very good all right um before we wrap up so so i mean you put in your bio very like actually you led within your bio that investing.com you know is going to be a unicorn and 300 employees 60 million bucks you're breaking up lonnie can you hear me clearly i can hear you right now yeah okay yeah what i was saying is in the bio you kind of led with you know you've working online since 1998 investing.com on its way to be a unicorn 300 employee 60 million bucks in revenue but something doesn't check out to me because if that was the case you'd be all in on building a unicorn not going off and distracting yourself with a sass product so what is your actual involvement with investing.com um guidance uh for several areas where i'm where i'm strong and i can add value we have a very strong team including uh including two co-ceos uh and uh i'm helping wherever i can uh with anything i can and in context and ideas for innovation uh yes sorry lonnie were you actually there like at the founding you were there with like college buddies you were on the founding team or like they brought you in and gave you a small percent of equity to help as a consultant i mean i like you you're uh i like the question so well lonnie just to be clear like the reason i ask is because like you you can't like you just throw people throw like big these big revenue numbers and without understanding what your actual role is like i don't know what to learn from you about versus what to ignore so that's what i'm trying to understand is what your role is i understand so we started the company in 2007 my role was product and marketing um i had um uh i had three other partners uh the cto the the person who became the ceo and the person was responsible for administration and finance and uh being very original back in 2007 we were able to grow the company uh and reach profitability after seven months okay yeah so again my my overarching product my product in marketing yeah so my overarching question is if like so if it's a unicorn why leave like something happen where you're not actively involved 100 anymore you're doing this other company on the side why okay i understand the question no so i actually i i was i was in israel at the time i got married to a brazilian uh we decided to move to brazil and uh nothing and there was no major event or nothing happened i'm still uh in very good terms with the partners i'm still involved with the company um things are going very well and that you get to a certain point at a certain size that you have a lot of very good people and um you're now able to to direct and advise rather than work on the actual day-to-day okay yeah it's a very it's a very lucky situation actually yeah but you under you understand why i'm asking this question right something seems off okay it's a cinderella story but like it's it's i haven't heard the story uh a lot uh but uh we've been very we've been very fortunate to reach where we are today uh with the kind of numbers that we have uh so yeah yeah i just don't understand if something if something is a rocket ship you wouldn't get off the rocket ship that's what doesn't make sense to me okay i understand it doesn't make sense to you and so that's what i'm trying to understand is to understand in your in your head like what happened did the other founders you didn't get along on something so you said i'm leaving and moving to brazil and getting married or you know taking my equity i'm heading out it was it was a very natural process it's been already what it's been already uh eight years in the company the company is growing the direction is very clear i'm able to do my job already and help in any way that i can uh or without being in the day-to-day got it on the other hand there's an another challenge and a social problem to solve in brazil so that kind of that's a very interesting thing for me to do yep seems fair very good all right we're out of time here let's let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um business book uh well to be honest i like biographies uh of business people nothing comes to mind is the favorite one what's the last biography you read uh elon musk okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying currently uh well actually that's the guy i guess that's why i like it so much is definitely a favorite number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company well um quite a lot uh has to be a favorite tool probably google analytics all right number uh number four how many hours of sleep you get every night good question about um since since about five and a half six okay and uh situation it sounds like married any kiddos yeah yeah two kids oh two okay full house so and how old are you uh 34. 34. last question lonnie what do you wish your 20 year old self knew to know to know to uh balance better um to take uh to take a little bit more breaks during uh during work because it's it's a marathon and it's get very very intense so you need you need to kind of take care of yourself and not not just do the 24 7 thing guys there you have it oy chao launched in 2018 really focused on the brazilian market helping people understand again time tracking across their employee base so they can avoid surprise salaries they have to pay at the end of each pay period he launched the company just this year now a couple hundred customers paying 100 bucks per month so call it you know 30 grand per month right now on revenue 1.6 million raised three percent logo churn per month or around that in terms of you know scaling up paid spend he's happy to spend call it 200 300 bucks to acquire a customer so a two or three month payback period team of 14 people based down there in brazil building this up with the goal of hitting a million bucks in arr in the next 12 months or so lonnie thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much