How Planyard CEO Ekke Uustalu grew Planyard 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...