How Party.Space CEO Yurii Filipchuk grew Party.Space to $623.1K revenue and 42 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is yuri philip chuck he's a ceo and founder at party.space he's a professional opportunist financer and investment banker with six years of experience in crypto and traditional capital markets also loves barbecue a big enthusiast based in ukraine western part of ukraine again building a business yuri are you ready to take us to the top yeah hey there thank you for inviting me again you bet i'm excited it's been a while huh yeah yep hey so so before we jump in obviously sensitive situation ukraine where are we rooting for you are you safe your team's safe are you good oh thank you for asking yeah we are safe uh we work party space is operational but the situation here is indeed hot and uh really like i still can believe that uh it's a full-scale war in 21st century going on here so i the majority of my team relocated from the places where they lived uh now we are in western parts of ukraine uh and we do whatever we could to help ukraine we we're running fundraiser events we are donating and uh helping as much as we can well we appreciate that i hope those of you listening if you love what yuri is building you'll go sign up for his product check it out again it's partyspace.com yuri what's the product do so now uh party space is the metaverse for remote teams and online communities and yes we're gonna ask right now that metaverse is the buzzword what's behind that and i can tell you that metaverse is the environment for engaging events right in your browser engaging corporate or community events in immersive 3d environment where people can meet speak we have video conferencing tools for the communication we have immersed environment and game mechanics to entertain everyone and and help me understand customers that are paying you today what are they paying you an average per month so uh we are still charging our clients on prevent basis so when we talk last time uh i was barely aiming to do the subscription uh but it took uh a year and a half to build the cell service produ product because 3d and metaverse is is not a joke and it turned out to be a much heavier task but now we are uh in alpha stage we have 42 testers who are running their microverses that's how we call those smaller metaverses they have created for themselves and their communities and we'll also run in one of events for big companies so i can name drop a lot if you don't mind so zapier slack grammarly uh they are our customers mm-hmm and have you can so have any of the 42 converted into paying customers uh so our beta test is currently free of charge uh and uh but you told me last time you you had generated some revenue right you generated like 100k or 200k from was that a one-off thing uh so uh when we talked uh we generated 200 k from 30 clients with the majority for one big client uh last year uh we or we also we generated 200k over over the course of year with 60 clients conducting events with us and now just in now we are generating 200 k per quarter and we have like 2 million dollars in pipeline uh that's 80 deals right now there oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview that's great 200k per quarter is again 800 000 yearly in terms of run rate so you're growing nicely what are you learning as you add new customers uh sorry sir oh what are we learning so uh we learned uh actually uh everything changed for us last year when people started calling 3d products inventors and then we decided we should build something that we can show to our customers because corporates are not very open about disclosing what we built for them and we created dodgy temple yeah you could see it here so it's a virtual temple dedicated to dojimim and that was the beginning of our collaboration with communities so doji community doji fans they started gathering regularly there for community events community calls etc and at that moment marketeers and people for managing communities decided that metaverse is the next big thing for marketing so we started selling our product to hr's people experience managers but now uh we have the majority of our revenue coming from marketing budgets from marketing budgets yeah marketing budget and uh so at the moment like we are like the metaverse market is really young and everyone is still figuring out what's going to be the best use case for it so i can tell for sure that the wow effect is something that works really well uh and marketing people pr people they want to impress the customers and that's why they're looking for participates now last time we chatted there was eight people on the team how many are full-time today oh we are 26 26 and have you raised additional capital oh yeah in total we raised almost two million dollars uh so so you had 160 000 raised when we chatted in 2020. so you raised another what 1.9 million last year oh yeah we raised 1 million uh last year and uh this this year we raised more how much did you raise this year so this race were uh this year we raised 500k 500k and and would you consider that like a series a or a seed round uh i still prone to call this a precede uh and uh we are quite comfortable with it actually we raised our last 500k from uh web 3 people from the dow of 70 funds they invest in tools for taos and communities and they brought in those 42 alpha testers like that so we see a lot of traction from battery uh market and i can say like metaverse is the preferable ui for web3 products right as the crypto markets crash right now is that impacting you at all oh yeah for sure we felt that so uh we we work with the community and marketing budgets of daos and huge protocols and last month they immediately just cut all the costs there leaving just very small uh thing to cover salaries and the crypto marketing is on pause uh but i cannot say that about all projects because we still have uh some other crypto projects and then a lot on their community spaces microverses and stuff we work with nft collections dows protocols and guilds can anyone listening right now that's just a b2b sas company could they use you or do you have to be in web three oh no so no so uh that's the problem actually because uh when you do the content and marketing for businesses web three people won't uh even look there and when you do that for web through people that's not of interest for the traditional businesses that's why we have like we are working on dividing that into sub brands where we're gonna continue working with businesses and enterprise clients and i can say that we see increase of uh like we work with larger corporates right now so uh probably 200 employees is the smallest number of people in our client right now very good well we're certainly rooting for you and it's nice to see you growing about 4x 3x since the last time we spoke uh people want to check out the tool they can go to party.space right yeah yeah exactly please go there test it out check it out sign up for demo yuri let's wrap up here with the famous oh glad you want to add something else all right yeah i wanted to add that last time we spoke with you uh after that in just two weeks we received 250 emails uh of people who were interested in the value proposition of at at that moment of the data during corporate culture so uh we talked to a lot of them uh and that was really helpful so nathan thank you a lot uh that provided a lot of value for us and help us to figure out our ideal customer profile well i love that i'm glad my audience is supporting you and trying you out and again i think this is the really the future and you've built in really incredible i mean halloween themed corporate themed you know cafeteria theme sort of event spaces and we're excited to see what you do next so let's wrap up your yuri with the famous five number one favorite book oh still senzu the art before number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh not yet not yet like a lot of them you're busy number three what's your favorite online tool for building party space uh notion and my room and number four how many hours of sleep to get every night still eight hours uh okay that's the only way to keep rolling and situation married single kids uh now i have a civil relations and i have a girlfriend uh that's just here with me hi girlfriend all right so not not married no kids and you're 20 20 you're 30 now yep i'm 30 and i've missed the forbes 30 under 30 list unfortunately uh am i gonna do something like that well that's why there's a 40 under 40 lists your last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh still something about bitcoin that would be a moonshot but why not yep guys party.space is where everyone in web3 is hanging out virtually but it's also applicable to your b2b sas business virtual events on top of things like hop in or zoom webinars or things like that check it out at party.space they're doing 200 000 bucks a year back in 2020 now on track to do 800 000 this year working with 42 customers it raised about 1.7 million bucks to build this out doing this all from ukraine so he's not only building the business but also supporting the country as they go through this uh this war with russia obviously rooting for you guys yuri yeah we helped raise uh 800 ether for ukraine in cooperation with the meta history which is the uh digital museum of war uh so yeah we we're trying to do our best uh but still if you can support ukraine please do and also uh together with g2 we have the uh collaboration so if you leave review for party space uh g2 will donate 20 bucks to ukrainian humanitarian funds guys there you have it you know what to do go support this guy yuri we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you nathan 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 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we gotta push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is yearly philip he is the founder and ceo of a company called party space he's an ex finance pro four years in bc in private equity with tech focus investment firm cyfrd and he's keen on hustle culture and b to be sas here are you ready to take us to the top yes here i am okay so the link if you want to follow along is party dot space what's the company doing how do you make money uh so we have started from virtual patches and now we feel the data-driven corporate culture for remote teams okay and so how do you do are they paying a subscription fee as a consulting business uh at the moment uh we haven't released the products for messages yet and we don't have any subscriptions yet uh despite some clients already asking us to provide them with such an option so uh what we do we have uh we ran and hosted number of parties some of them were on our basic products and some were and something completely unbelievably cool and i'm gonna tell a little bit more about that so just to be clear your pre-revenue today you're planning to launch here in january of 2021 like this month is that accurate uh yeah january february we're gonna have a release uh but we have already earned something in 2020 something like uh 200k okay and what did you make that money from uh so we ran uh one of events for tech companies oh so you run so tech companies hire you to run events and you're their events team uh so where will i call their events on our platform uh sometimes we partner up with event agencies uh for bigger events sometimes we host them uh like solely How many customers do you have how many customers did you uh did paid you something in the past 12 months um probably around 25 okay around 25. so they so they each pay you sort of eight or nine thousand dollars a year or that or no no no the distribution is not that even so we have uh one big client paid us uh almost 200 000 euros for one off event and we have like a very bigger number of smaller events for uh 300 each What are you waiting for what are you waiting for i mean you know hop in just you know is growing like i mean this is right now as a time to be launching a tool like this why aren't you guys out there in the public like right now why are you waiting yeah so hoping inspired us to start party space in may we saw that virtual event space is going to be hot uh but in september uh we have found we identified that corporate events are also going to be huge uh because companies clearly lack and instruments to preserve and even to build a corporate culture for distributed teams and this september so we had a prototype of 2d product of party space uh and it was clearly something that was good enough for people to treat it not as zoom but as a party space yeah uh but one uh tech giant leading stream service uh challenged us so guys can you make us a virtual party in 3d and they said so it went gonna be on the same in like third of december it was two and a half months and my technical team uh how many people on your team so uh i have two technical co-founders and uh we have hired like five more people uh to support this event so there's eight total yeah and then and the three co-founders did you guys split 33 33 33 yeah yeah something like that okay great okay it's almost like that uh yeah so the tech giant challenged us to make the party in 3d and uh we took this challenge and delivered it and we saw that engagement numbers are like 10 times better measured by what what does that mean engagement i mean uh level of participation of uh people in activities so uh virtual events for corporates uh in this case it consisted of like main show group communication for teams and group games and we saw that vast majority of people participated in almost all activities old games and some people even communicated to more than hundreds uh 100 people during the event how many employees from this big tech company showed up for the event so it was a set of three events and uh in total it was like uh three and a half thousand people oh wow which tech company was it uh i cannot say it right now okay uh maybe maybe when's the time of the interview you're going to be a liar we will be allowed to tell this in public so when you right now if i go to your Pricing page pricing it says request a question quote i i guess you're probably experimenting with this right now when you do release pricing what do you think you'll price this at uh i was truly amazed but i saw that uh for our 3d project companies are ready to pay uh 100 per visitor for which for one event uh so when you're in amazon and you would like to throw a end-of-year party for your employees you can budget that much so Corporate events you think you're going to cater really to internal team events not like you know out coachella these sorts of things uh yes and the idea behind that is when you let people who know each other to meet online uh level of engagement level of satisfaction going to be much higher because those are your colleagues and that's the corporate culture how much money yuri did you guys spend on building the mvp uh so mvp was built from scratch for zero and uh in this year so uh we were almost uh in a break-even situation uh taking into account this client mm-hmm okay so and what revenue what revenue do you think you'll do next year oh i hope i'm targeting for hoping like uh objection next year so hop in just crossed a 20 million run rate uh up from about a million dollar run rate 18 months ago you think you can break 20 million in revenue next year up from basically nothing this year uh yes we can do that uh so we are in a their situation like uh when we go not from the bottom down to corporates but from the top and the list of companies that are looking for our solution is now uh amazes me how many leads do you have currently uh so currently uh we have like uh so if you combine our 2g and 3d products it's uh around 30 uh really good qualified leads what do you consider qualified lead more than how many employees uh yeah so for us qualified lead is a client that can potentially buy the subscription so one of events are not sexy the sexiest part is providing a subscription and for subscription we are developing a set of uh like smaller products that uh human resources people experience culture team gonna use to engage in place and those are like games quizzes uh onboarding tools uh instruments to manage uh alumni and what's the cost of the subscription uh so we are now in price discovery for subscription and uh i hope we can end up on twenty dollars from play but uh ten dollars now seems to me pretty how many employees do you want companies to have in order to like talk to you at all or you think you can add value uh so uh our current pipeline uh should give us like 300k in uh irr so sorry my question is for a company that's using you how many employees do you want them to have where they'll get real value from your platform uh i think it's both good fit for smaller companies and biggers but i i see the sweet spot in companies for 500 people because they start suffering from losses from lack of culture mm-hmm interesting now have you built all this bootstrap have you raised uh we have raised like tiny angel financing uh part here in ukraine and also we have angels from the us so they work for google and like bigger companies so how much sold did you raise uh we raised uh also under 200k so it's uh 160. okay so with the angel Financials investment of 160 000 plus the 200 000 revenue you had about three 360 000 to work with this year obviously you're going to release the product pricing early 2021 and hopefully grow up to a healthy run right on your subscription product yeah exactly so we have three months of runaway and uh i hope clients also gonna make some repayments uh in january so you have three months of runway right now so what does that mean how much cash is left in the bank um it's a little bit more than 100k okay so you're burning about 30 grand a month oh it's actually not it it's actually 180 k yeah so uh we're burned around 60k per month okay okay got it so burning six okay so about three months of runway left um that's that's not a long timeline you have to feel a little pressure there i imagine uh that's the way i live because if i let myself myself relax we're gonna stop hustling and we're gonna stop making cool opportunities like one of lifehacks what we did we have offered uh european uh waci funds to conduct christmas virtual parties at party space and now after they're gonna have good time on our platform uh i don't think we're gonna have problem how many fundraise how many of them have actually run an event on your platform uh so uh two of them are committed for christmases uh two funds already made the virtual happy hours and uh i think we can add three more to the list Beating Hopin and and what makes i mean this is like a cheap shot question but i think it's an important thought exercise i mean do you feel like you have some advantage some unique acquisition channel distribution that will allow you to beat hoppin in other words if they just copy your code and it's just a game about distribution can you beat them uh so we don't compete with hoping because hoping is not providing corporate yeah but why can't they just hire five developers and build what you've built in like three days uh because uh first like the we have proprietary streaming tech uh box solution was way too expensive for us so we have decided to make it from scratch and uh it came out to be like flexible enough to fit a needs of event organizers because uh when it's a conference everything is very plain and simple but when it's a 3d venue nightclub uh in virtual space you need to really make it creative otherwise it's going to be boring okay makes sense well listen we're rooting for you that's for sure let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh right right now i'm looking for uh hr blogs and uh like gitlab is doing probably the best job and say human resources number three what's your favorite what's your favorite online tool for building the business uh prospecting ireland what's up prospecting i haven't heard of that yet prospecting okay uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh i sleep eight hours and what's your situation yuri married single kids uh single a little bit fundraising and uh fully committed all right so no kids and how are we just space all right 28 28. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh i wish everything stays the same so it's not something you you want to change just a piece of information you wish you knew uh probably i wish i knew more on bitcoin but that's very cheap shot guys there you have it party.space a corporate version of hopkin that sounds like a lot more fun they bootstrapped with sweat equity three founders own about 30 percent each they raised 160 000 an angel did 200 000 in revenue this year on sort of a custom deal but they're moving into peer subscription next year they look to scale i have 30 corporations on their lead list looking to charge you know thousands and thousands of dollars per se for for these events charging on a per attended seat model we'll see if they can scale thanks so much yuri for taking us to the top thank you nathan 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 release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya