How Piwik CEO Michael A. grew Piwik to $21.3M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is matcha zava zinc oginski he's building a company called piwik pro p-i-w-i-k dot pro it's a privacy-friendly alternative to google analytics matcha are you ready to take it to the top yes uh thanks for having me competing with google analytics is not easy so help us understand why are you different why are people switching to you uh sure so uh uh the shortest way we can uh call piwik pro it's a privacy friendly analytics uh platform uh this alternative to google analytics and we fight by giving the users control over the data and uh complying with the privacy rules very cool now give us a sense of growth here how many customers are on the platform today um we work primarily with enterprise uh customers and we have over 200 of uh large organizations as our customers and what does enterprise mean what are they all paying you per month on average um so uh i i would say let's start with the organization size so typically these are organizations that have more than 5 000 more than 10 000 employees uh sometimes they have hundreds of thousands but let's say that's a probably minimum size of the organization that i would call enterprise and uh our average contracts uh is way above 20 000 annual requiring revenue okay and what did you do or what are you doing right now in terms of monthly recurring revenue um so in terms of monthly requiring revenue we do uh somewhere in the vicinity of uh 525 530 1000 us dollars yes that's in us dollars okay and where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth rate um so we uh if you take a look at the year over year ago uh that's uh somewhere around 30 percent uh that we did compared to the last year okay what does that mean i mean do you know what your revenue was monthly about a year ago um so we start uh it was uh somewhere around uh 400 400 something uh monthly requiring revenue that's cool this is great growth so where is where is most of the growth coming from are you expanding old customers or finding brand new customers um so we have both so we have actually uh quite nice success last year with our net retention rate so we we did over 110 and we are on track to do more than 110 this year as well congrats that's big um so uh we are like of course uh this includes churn and upsells so what were those percents how much turn and how much upsell um i don't have this number at hand but probably around uh less than 10 churn and then uh more than uh 15 percent of uh absence that yeah 15 20 20 upsell 10 turnover 110 net yeah yeah yeah okay and um what are you upselling so why would someone pay you you know a thousand bucks a month versus two grand a month so there are a couple reasons but the the largest uh two uh contributors were the traffic increases and as covet 19 unfolded we have seen a lot in the government sector finance sector healthcare sector which are uh among our top sectors when it comes to the customers so our pricing is volume based so this increases we also increase our pricing plans itself for the new business which had some impact uh also for the renewal of the contracts and uh we do a bit of the absence of the modules but currently you have just you know uh the analytics platform or analytics platform with cdp uh so for those customers that don't have cdp yet uh we upsell them uh additional module well this is a great stream module i want to get more into pricing in a second but first tell me how capital efficient have you been have you raised additional capital outside of the 2 million in 2017 so we actually our story is that we uh spin off piwik pro as a product business from our services business and this services business contributed over the years around two million uh as well so in total uh of the the capital uh that we rise uh that is somewhere somewhere in the vicinity of four four comma one million uh but the two million raised in 2017 it was from investors not the services from investors that was outside new money and the two million were basically the profits from the services business uh that's uh where we spent this company how much did the service business do in 2017 in total revenue um i mean this is i i guess this is not related to revenue to public process i understand that but the profits feed into pick pro that's why i won't understand so er the services business was doing anywhere from uh half a million to uh one and a half million profit per year and is that still going today or you shut it down no no we we spin it off and it's still going wrong it's it's actually grew it's it's doing even better now what's the website to the agency ah clear code occ clear what clear code uh like a code code clear.cc okay yeah and this is the component that specializes in in building custom advertising and marketing technology and because we had this experience in their marketing technology space uh we started investing in the product and we built piwik pro and then finally at some point we spin it off as a separate component makes a lot of sense now does clearcode.cc own equity into it pro and no okay so how did you put two million from the agency into creation that's a state from now but it used to own the equity um when we were adding the capital but we right now we after the spin-off it's uh same shareholder structure pretty much uh but uh it's uh this is a completely separate entity magic how much equity do you own currently in viewing pro um so i i own uh over forty percent uh with uh additional voting rights uh that's that gives me the company so you control you control the company who owes the other 60 of the equity though uh it's uh employees of uh former founders as well as investors how much do investors own um we have uh uh investors uh own somewhere around 20 percent okay but it's not only for the primary but they also did some buybacks from inactive founder as well as we uh we have a sizeable employee pool of okay ten percent there so ten percent employee option full matrix you and more than forty percent investors own twenty percent uh that's seventy there so former founders still own about thirty percent yes yes so there's uh there is still one uh inactive founder that don't uh uh it's probably i i probably there is some miscalculation but yeah he still had like a double digit uh percentage in the company understood and the two million you raised in 2017 do you remember what valuation you raised that at uh we raised it at um uh i would have to recalculate it to the us dollars because it was in polish zlotys but that was in the vicinity of seven million free money seven seven half million free money okay interesting and then are you looking at raising capital today or no uh so actually we we we got uh uh quite nice offers uh term sheets uh for our next series but we decided because we we've just launched our freemium model and we want uh we see a big upside potential in that in accelerating our growth uh we decided to use depth facility from our existing investors uh to accelerate this growth and rise at at much higher value so existing investors put in more than the two million dollars uh no they haven't put but they we have an uh option to rise debt from them right now for the next year how much debt would you raise if you did do it um we will rise probably so this would be some some bridge between the now and series b um and we'll probably need another two to three million uh to accelerate the traction of our serial of our freemium model and then we'll rise proper series b next year and and what value what would you value the company at today what are some of the term sheets that you turn down um so i think i will i will leave it up so that the multipliers were uh in the vicinity of 10x annual requiring revenue uh and we feel that we can rise at much higher valuation if uh we execute flawlessly on the premium model so you feel like i mean those offers are the 10x multiple then you're trying like 65 to 70 million dollars premium yeah yeah exactly exactly very interesting now if you did raise debt um what what interest rate would you pay on that debt from investors um so the uh the debt would have the component of uh interest as well as convertible if we don't pay it back um and then interest rate is super uh super attractive so it's under under eight percent under eight percent interest if someone gave you debt at ten percent but you didn't have to like there were no no covenants no warrants no crazy terms would you look at a little higher interest rate for cleaner terms or no um i think we might and we we we actually spoke with a couple companies about that and that's uh that's probably so we have uh uh actually three options for that um so we have this option from our existing investors we have a bank uh financing that is uh quite attractive uh because we were pretty much break even for the last uh 12 months um so uh we're quite cautious over the copied with spending uh but still to group uh well and uh the the last option would be the the loans based on the monthly requiring revenue which i think you are referring to yeah the bank financing though they typically only do loans against a big cash chunk sitting in your bank account i mean i assume you operate around breakeven i mean you don't have millions of dollars sitting in the bank do you um we still have uh...