ORGOS revenue, CEO Rajan B, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hello everyone my guest today is max bauermeister he has followed his studies at kcl in london and his first experience of scaling at a rocket internet company all the way to ipo initially worked as a consultant for a boutique consultancy which focuses on procurement and restructuring where he was also involved in hr and reorganization projects today he moved to help scale sorry two years later he moved to help scale and ensure tech organization from 15 to 160 employees within three years supporting their international strategy during that experience he discovered a gap in the market for a one-stop tool to scale companies and digitize hr now he's focused on orgo s to solve that problem max are you ready to take us to the top yup i'm sure i'm ready all right and for those of you following along the website is orgo s dot io max what's the company doing what's your revenue model how do you make money okay so the company itself is basically an eight drop platform so um it's designed to digitize all your hr needs from recruitment to off-boarding to onboarding to your holiday processes or adr processes and basically yeah we we have a it's a licensed licensed model so perceive model essentially right now it's pretty straightforward it's actually 5 euros per employee per month exactly and you can customize whatever modular because the the orgo has basically built up structure in a modular structure so you can say i want only recruitment or only onboarding or only holidays or whatever you want to do or your surveying tool um yeah and max what is the the typical team the average team that sends up with you how many employees or team members they typically sign up yeah so so right now i think the majority of our customers are actually high growth startups so there's somewhere between let's say 30 and about 120 employees and they're looking to scale within the next few months or a year okay so 30 employees at a five kind of euro per month price point puts you at about 150 160 united states dollars per month kind of on an average logo is that about right that's like the minimum basically that's where you would start right it wouldn't make sense below lower 30 employees you can still handle that with excel or any other would you say that's a fair average across your base or is it closer to 200 or 300 a month so so right now the average average users uh per customer is probably about 60 70 i would say oh wow okay good all right so we could we could essentially double that then and get up to call it 300 bucks a month minimum something in there yeah that's great put this on a timeline for me what year did you launch company in yeah so we launched in 2017 in february actually uh that's that's the original founding date okay and have you bootstrapped the company or raised uh so we raised okay how much have you raised to date so we raised uh just shy of a million i would say all together in a uh in an initial race we raised around uh uh just shy of a half a million uh to build a product essentially and then we raised another just shy of a hundred uh 500 um thousand this year so um yeah and since this year we were basically live and launched the product in in april with the first customers and all equity or was some of this debt convertible debt some of this second round was convertible debt interesting so walk me through why you made that decision to do equity for the first 500 and debt for the second 500. yeah for sure so um basically it was it was the easier solution for us right now right we we didn't want to spend time uh through all um you know going through all the with all these sort of sort of bureaucratic uh hurdles of of having to uh you know basically go through and also we weren't sure what the what the current valuation was really like and we didn't want to force us or the angels or the syndicates into a situation where they would have to basically evaluate what the company is worth so we wanted to we wanted to have the the professional investors basically uh give their indication uh next year and then the angels and um the syndicates sort of um a fair chance to jump on board right now um and um you know not have to guess some sort of valuation right now but but your first 500 was priced so there was a value they're like they're usually people do is they they raise debt or control note to avoid the valuation conversation but you you already set the valuation in the first round so was it a situation where you needed more money you couldn't raise it unless you did a down round so you did debt instead uh no no basically it was it was just it was just that we didn't want to have the bureaucratic um hurdles of raising so so the first round we we had we gave away equity right um but in the second round it was a convertible uh note essentially um and yeah that was just uh for ease of the process right because we don't have to basically um run it through the notary as in germany here's the case for example and so i see i see very good and then how many customers have you scaled to today so right now we have approximately between i think it's about 700 800 end users essentially consisting of approximately 25 b2b customers that's great so 25 logos uh paying i think you said earlier about 300 bucks per month so you guys are doing about 77 grand a month right now in revenue yeah somewhere somewhere along those lines right so we with some of course some really early adopters we have different deals but around about that number okay that's correct and about a year ago where we're at were you pre-revenue at that point in october 2017. for sure we were pre-revenue all the way um until march of this year actually very good so good zero to 7 500 bucks a month and caught four four or five months months isn't that bad talk to me about churn have you lost any customers or any downgrades not right now right so the customers that we onboarded we had had clear expectations from both sides some of them were better customers as well um so we had no churn so far and walk me through you know every founder when they're launching you know getting the first 10 customers is tricky how'd you get your first 10 customers yeah of course so uh me and the other the other co-founders we have quite an extensive network uh so so what we did was we reached out to to our networks and and and really looked at the type of companies that we had on our network and whether they were and they were ideal for what we had back in the day so we had an mvp that was that was very unique so you need to look at okay what do i have as an mvp and um what type of customers or potential customers is are in my in my network and so that's how we got the first uh customers on board really yeah it's great all through trust and friendship and is it just right now you and your co-founder or what's your team size today no so right now so there's actually about uh four founders um two are very technical so they're ctos um and uh one of them is david who's the ceo and i'm more on the commercial side and i'm there for like uh yeah the business side of things so the accounts and the prospective accounts and and the sales basically um and right now we're there's about 12 of us um spread across berlin and madrid okay so 12 and that's including the four founders okay across berlin madrid okay that's great and um talk to me about uh you know when you when the founders aren't just calling up their friends ask him to sign up have you guys tested any like paid advertising or or paid acquisition to this point yeah for sure so so we're constantly also testing with with adwords for example um but uh the first sort of deals we did and and how we got was through affiliates so actually we went through comparator sites for example um a lot and that was what was quite a good sort of initial step to get two leads um if you can i would even do acv deals right so percentage of acvs uh then you basically don't even have to pay for a lead um and that can really help through testing getting validation even if you're just demoing the product and someone doesn't buy it initially there's always a lot of value in talking to prospects what percentage were you giving to affiliates you're saying 30 of lacv or what no we were talking like fifteen percent acv one three yeah fifteen oh fifteen one five okay good very good and um and uh okay so fifteen percent of acv and if they're paying 300 bucks a month so they call out what 3 600 bucks per year you'd give them you know what is that about 450 bucks for a new paid customer that's correct yeah so let's say you paid out on day one right the customer signs up for 300 bucks a month you pay out 450 bucks for the affiliate immediately what if that customer cancels in the second month no we do it we do it on monthly basis right so we say um there's basically there's a it's kept on a year anyway on so only first year your acv deal and only for what the customer pays so um you know as soon as the customer leaves of course we don't pay uh this part but yeah it's monthly it's monthly billing right so that's what you have to be aware of you basically have to pay their affiliates on a monthly basis very good all right let's wrap up here with the famous five max number one what's your favorite business book uh it's grip by angela duckworth...