Party.Space Revenue & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Yuri Filipchuk. He's a CEO and founder at party.space. He's a professional opportunist, financer, 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, you ready to take us to the top? [00:19] >> Yeah. Hey there, Nathan. Thank you for inviting me again. [00:22] You bet. I'm excited. Years. It's been a while. Yep. Yep. Hey. So so before we jump in, obviously, sensitive situation Ukraine. We are rooting for you. Are are you safe? Your team's safe? Are you good? [00:34] >> Oh, thank you for asking. Yep. We are safe. We work, party space is operational but the situation here is indeed hot and really like I still can believe that it's a full scale war in twenty first century going on here so I the majority of my team relocated from the places where they lived now we are in Western parts of Ukraine [01:07] >> and we do whatever we could to help Ukraine we we are running fundraiser events We are donating and helping as much as we can. [01:16] 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? [01:25] >> So now, party space is the metaverse for remote teams and online communities. And, yes, you'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 environments where people can meet, speak. We have video conferencing tools for the communication. We have immersed environment and game mechanics to entertain everyone. [02:02] Mhmm. And and help me understand customers that are paying you today. What are they paying you on average per month? [02:08] >> So we are still charging our clients on per event basis. So when we talked last time, I was directly aiming to do the subscription, but it took a year and a half to build the self-service product because 3D and metaverse is is not a joke and it turned out to be a much [02:34] >> heavier task but now we are 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 are also running one off events for big companies. So I can name drop a lot if you don't mind. So Zapier, Slack, Tremorly, they are our customers. [03:00] Mhmm. And have you can so so have any of the 42 converted into paying customers? [03:05] >> So our beta test is currently free of charge. And But you told me last time [03:11] that you you had generated some revenue. Right? You generated like a 100 k or 200 k from a was that a one off thing? [03:17] >> So when we talked, generated 200 k from 30 clients with the majority from one big client. Last year, [03:29] >> also we generated 200 ks over over the course of year with 60 clients conducting events with us and now just in now we are generating 200 ks per quarter and we have like $2,000,000 in pipeline that's 80 deals right now there [03:48] oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect [04:12] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [04:36] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [04:58] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [05:23] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but [05:45] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into [06:12] the interview. That's great. 200 k 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? [06:22] >> Sorry. Sorry. Oh, what are we learning? So we learned actually, everything changed for us last year when people started calling 3D products metaverse. 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 Doge temple. Yeah, you could see it here. So it's a virtual temple dedicated to the Doge meme and that was the beginning of our [06:54] >> collaboration with communities. So Doge community, Doge fans, they started gathering regularly there for community events, community calls, etc. And at that moment, marketeers and people who are managing communities decided that metaverse is the next big thing for marketing. So we started selling our product to HRs, people experience managers, but now we have the majority of our revenue coming from marketing budgets. [07:23] From marketing budgets? [07:25] >> Yep. Marketing budget. And so at the moment, like, we are like, the metaverse market is really young, and everyone is still figuring out what's gonna be the best use case for it. So I can tell for sure that the wow effect is something that works really well. And marketing people, they are people, they want to impress the customers. And Mhmm. That's why they're looking for part of this piece. [07:48] Now last time we chatted, there was eight people on the team. How many are full time today? [07:53] >> Oh, we are 26. [07:55] 26. And have you raised additional capital? [07:58] >> Oh, yeah. In total, we raised almost $2,000,000. [08:03] So so you had a 160,000 raised when we chatted in 2020. So you raised another, what, 1,900,000 last year? [08:10] >> Oh, yeah. We we raised 1,000,000 last year, and this this year, we we raised more. [08:18] How much did you raise this year? [08:20] >> So this raise were this year, we raised 500 k. [08:24] 500 k. And and Yeah. And was would you consider that, like, a series a or a seed round? [08:30] >> I still prone to call this a pre seed, [08:35] >> and we are quite comfortable with it actually we raised our last 500 ks from web three people from the DAO of 70 funds they invest in tools for DAOs and communities and they brought in those 42 alpha testers like that. So we see a lot of traction from Web3 market and I can say like Metaverse is the preferable UI for Web three products. Mhmm. [09:07] Right now, Yuri. As the crypto markets crash right now, is that impacting you at all? [09:12] >> Oh, yeah. For sure. We felt that. So 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 thing to cover salaries and the crypto marketing is on pause. But I cannot say that about all projects because we still have some other crypto projects and a lot on their community spaces, microverses and stuff. We work with NFT collections, [09:50] >> DAOs, protocols, and guilds. [09:53] Can can anyone listening right now that's just a b to b SaaS company, could they use you or do you have to be in Web three? [09:59] >> Oh, so no. So that's the problem actually, because when you do the content and marketing for businesses, web three people won't even look there. And when you do that for web three people, that's not of interest for traditional businesses. That's why we have like we are working out 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 like we work with larger corporates [10:30] >> right now. So probably 200 employees is the smallest number of people in our client right now. [10:38] Mhmm. Very good. Well, we're certainly rooting for you, and it's nice to see you've grown about four x, three x since the last time we spoke. If people wanna check out the tool, they can go to party.space. Right? [10:48] >> Yep. Yeah. Exactly. Please go there. Test it out. [10:52] Check it out. Sign up for demo. Yuri, let's wrap up here with the famous oh, go ahead. Do you want to add something else? [10:56] >> Yeah. Yeah. I I wanted to add that last time we spoke with you, after that, in just two weeks, we received two fifty emails of people who were interested in the value proposition at that moment of the data driven corporate culture. So we talked to a lot of them and that was really helpful. So, Nathan, thank you a lot. That provided a lot of value for us and help us to figure out our ideal customer profile. [11:26] Well, I love that. I'm glad my audience 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 themed sort of event spaces, and we're excited to see what you do next. So let's wrap up here, Yuri, with the famous five. Number one, favorite book. [11:44] >> Silks and Zubayar Takor. [11:45] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [11:49] >> Not yet. Not yet. Like, a lot of them. [11:53] You're busy. Yeah. Yeah. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building party space? [11:58] >> Notion and Miro. [11:59] And number four, [12:01] how many hours of sleep do get every night? [12:04] >> Still eight hours. [12:05] Okay. [12:05] >> That's the only way to keep rolling. [12:07] And situation, married, single, kids? [12:11] >> Now I have a stable relations, and I have a girlfriend. [12:15] That's great. [12:16] >> She's here with me. [12:17] Hi, girlfriend. [12:20] Alright. So not not married. No kids. And you're twenty twenty. You're 30 now? [12:26] >> Yep. I'm 30, and I've missed the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Unfortunately, I gonna do something to that. [12:34] Well, that's why there's a 40 under 40 list. [12:38] Yuri, last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [12:44] >> Still something about Bitcoin. That would be [12:48] >> a moonshot, but why not? [12:50] Yep. Guys, party. Space is where everyone in Web three is hanging out virtually, but it's also applicable to your B2B SaaS virtual events on top of things like Hopin or Zoom webinars or things like that. Check it out at party.space. They were doing $200,000 a year back in 2020. Now on track to do 800,000 this year, working with 42 customers. Raised about $1,700,000 to build this out, doing this all from Ukraine. So he's not only building [13:11] the business, but also supporting the country as they go through this this war with Russia, obviously, rooting for you guys, Yuri. [13:17] >> Yeah. We we helped raise 800 ether for Ukraine in a collaboration with the Meta History, which is the digital museum of war so yep we we are trying to do our best but still if you can support Ukraine please do and also together with G2 we have the collaboration. So if you leave review for party space, G2 will donate $20 to Ukrainian humanitarian funds. [13:48] 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. [13:54] >> Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. [13:57] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 one [14:21] p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two 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 SaaS world, whether it's [14:43] 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 wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You wanna 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 [15:05] saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and 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 [15:24] those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.

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