How Planyard CEO Ekke Uustalu grew to $240K revenue and 45 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is ek ustelo he's the co-founder of plan yard with background and b2b software and cyber security now tackling profitability and forecasting in larger construction companies to make sure they don't go out of business due to insufficient visibility follow along at planyard.com okay you ready to take us to the top yes let's go all right now did you come from construction or do you come from finance um i mean i pay my background is um i.t so so software engineering and cyber security but but basically we we really we had friends and that acquaintances were in the construction industry and the pain that we got with our whole team like with our from our acquaintances the pain that we felt in the industry um we just decided to tackle the problem interesting so tell me sort of about a customer that's sort of paying you today and what they get when they pay you so in let's say main contractors or general contractors usually they they have the biggest problems because their projects are the biggest they they often work on projects that are um that takes years to complete that's many millions of and hundreds of millions right and they really just don't have any idea what's happening on their project right and and there are of course software solutions out there but some of them are so complicated that they are not used in the end and the companies end up using excel right so basically to know whether they are profitable or not and they just do a lot of complicated exercise make mistakes there and in the end many companies go bankrupt because of this and so what are these general contractors paying you on average per month to use your technology uh it really varies right so um it it goes to up to tens of thousands uh and some of their customers even we think will go to hundreds of thousands um so it's very it depends really on the company profile and their revenue and so you said sorry 10 sort of maybe 10k per year up to three you know a couple hundred thousand per year yeah depending on the company size now i see and what do you mean by company size so someone paying you a lot of money they have more projects more head count like what's the value metric um yeah so usually it really depends the the companies are run very different to it so some of them have their own forces some of them have a lot of employees but some of them just have huge projects right so they're building i don't know shopping centers worth of hundreds of billions so it's really we as a startup always pricing is very difficult so it really it's a combination of all of these things basically okay but i imagine when you get into negotiation with a large general contractor they say what's your pricing you can't sort of say like we want to figure out the price again so that we can make the most amount of money right what's like your standard is it number of square feet they're constructing in a project is it the project value is it number of their full-time employees is it timeline to complete what's the um yeah so let's say let's say the biggest one is really the revenue or the volume of the project and then maybe the head count as well right how big the t i see it comes on board i see so so it's sort of based off the pr shopping mall is going to be expensive to build it's based off the the price to construct whatever the project is the bigger the price the more they pay you exactly and the more projects the the more also i see i see interesting okay very cool um and i guess again 10k to you know 300k per year is a massive range i understand you have people on both sides but what would you say your sweet spot is is it like 100k per year um to be honest with these bigger companies there's a lot of works actually the sweet spot is it's the lower end because often times then we can really implement the customers very quickly right the very big um very big tickets are a lot of work so that's actually not the switch but okay somewhere in the lower medium and rather um so most customers most most posters customers paying you know 20 30 000 a year then something like that 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 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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 founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 okay give us the back story here uh what year did you launch the company um i think when we fully launched 2018 or so uh i would say at some point uh when did you write the first line of code though yeah maybe like the first nfp 2017 we we did some experiments right and some very basic um i think google sheets are like google and presentation mock-ups with the customers um but yeah somewhere around there so 2017-2018 that's awesome and then how long did it take you to get your first customer we had actually um so we we don't do very extensive contracts with our customers so we try to keep the legal part simple um so but we had basically one of the first leads we had was already before we started doing anything so we never went into a full-on agreement with them like a full-on like they're our customer but we never made a contract with them in advance but they were willing to pay before we did anything right so that shows also how big the problem is um so we can say 2017 basically 2018 from that's awesome that's great so then i mean were you able to use their money then to continue growing the business are you able to bootstrap or do you have to raise capital um we are bootstrapped um i mean yeah we used the money for various uh we had some um we had more kind of employees and the interns interns working at some point in the beginning which we used the money for because we all the founders basically had like side jobs since we're bootstrapped we needed to do something on the side so we used money for that but um yeah i would say the customer the revenues have made it possible to bootstrap so that was your first customer 2017. how many customers are you working with now today um i think it's around 40 customers 40 50 customers something in that range okay cool and then you mentioned early interns and obviously growing the team trying to be capital efficient how many folks are on the team full-time today so it's a complex topic so we're now actually only three people again so we didn't raise money we're in the process of probably raising money soon um we are three three co-founders and we have um kind of three let's say i don't know how to give a title like consultant slash advisor is also on board who work with us okay so many of the people who started with us um it was a long process with bootstrapping so many of them got very good offers in like kind of let's say the big uh equivalent to the big three or whatever uh startup so i or it's not startups but the big tech companies and i understand their decision to go from a slow tech uh slow growing startup to uh do you do you and your three co-founders do you own the equals amounts of equity it's 33 33 33 um it's pretty close to that there's a slight deviance but it's basically that i see i see and you guys are all full-time right are you doing side gigs exactly exactly okay okay so can i mean can we take 45 customers you know paying on average twenty thousand dollars per year that would put your monthly recurring revenue at like eighty thousand dollars ninety thousand dollars a month or about a million dollar run rate that is uh let's say that is the ideal case um our pricing we're really in the process of figuring out the pricing so um construction is kind of a periodical business and we have been experimenting with kind of project-based pricing right so so they bring on one of the projects that they start um on the platform but not the past ongoing ones so many of the customers are are in the process of let's say upgrading right so they're not the potential revenue is the number i told you but like at the moment they have a lower number because they just have one or two or three projects okay okay so what are you guys doing more like you know 10 20 30 000 a month in revenue exactly between 10 and 20. 10 and 20. okay that's so nice traction for a three-person team when you look back in in last year in 2021 it sounds like you have maybe recurring revenues but you also have like project-based stuff as well if you add up your total revenue from last year what would you would you get above would you be good question um i think it's uh i think it's under 200k okay around that but i mean it's growing all the time and and between the i mean yeah since it's smaller numbers it's easy to double or triple them every year up until some point but there's something in that range that's great okay and so if you were doing sort of you know 200 000 ish in 2021 do you remember what you guys did in your first year of business back in 2018 um yeah very little because we the process we didn't nail the biggest pain point i think right away so it took us a lot of time to kind of uh prototype and to test stuff so i think it's really in the range of maybe 10k 20k something in that range really but that must have felt really good right your your first thing getting your first 20k of revenue for sure yeah i mean the the we we have a very international client base so every kind of new continent or or uh country we achieve i think those are even more somehow fulfilling than maybe the first customer almost if i'm honest now you mentioned you sort of hinted at you might be considering a raise right now why would you do that when you've bootstrapped so far and had some success um it's slower right um we we are not at the point to hire people we have a lot of problems the customers are having we have basically we have like mockups of validated solutions we have kind of we we in most cases we know where to go but it's just we we cannot do it with the three of us right it's um it's just too slow yep yep no understood uh makes a lot of sense so if you did go on raise capital how much do you try and target um i think i think around a million or so but also like we want to keep the percentage low that we give away but we'll see we'll see with the first round how realistic it is what do you want to keep it under in terms of how much you have to sell i mean as little as possible so under 10 50 would be ideal but i don't think it's realistic so we'll have to see how it is and yeah it's tough right now to raise capital obviously really tough environment so where are you based so we are um i'm living in switzerland but all of the team is from estonia so it's very close to the to a very very very good neighbor so it's a bit tricky now uh with the discussions that we've had we should celebrate obviously getting past 200 250 000 bucks uh in revenue that's not an easy thing to do so we're certainly rooting for you but in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five uh number one favorite business book um predictable revenue number two is there a ceo you're following are studying yes um there's a there's one guy um he's doing like a payment payment thing on linkedin he has very let's say is that america is a very socialist uh same i don't remember his name i think you're thinking about gravity payments founder with the long hair exactly exactly exactly yeah number three what's your what's your favorite online tool for building plan yard um i mean for engineering side it's school cloud but um but let's say actually yeah google and google presentation tool um to make very simple mock-ups number four how many hours of sleep you get every night as much as possible eight nine ten okay good and situation married single kids um between single and married let's say okay not not married okay no kids no kids okay and how old are you at 30. all right okay last question here something you wish you knew when you were 20. um always ask questions guys there you have it planner.com launch because you had friends that were having issues forecasting their construction projects launched in first code in 2017 first customer 20 right when they started basically they had a customer pre-launch they passed caught 20 000 bucks of revenue in 2018 they did around 200 000 last year now doing about 20 you know between 10 and 20 000 bucks a month in revenue with a team of three so pretty darn capital efficient bootstrap today serving 45 customers those customers are usually general contractors that use plan yard to plan their construction projects looking potentially right now and raising some capital would like to sell something between 10 and 15 of business for around a million bucks we'll see what he decides but acne in the meantime thanks for taking us to the top 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 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 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