How Quickorder CEO Mrinal Linga grew Quickorder to $5.7M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is mads better cop he's building quick order dot io they help you turn your visitors into regulars madrid it takes to the top yeah close dude all right so hey it's been fun sort of tracking your progress uh how's copen impact in the business um actually positively um especially uh so doing lockdown uh we were kind of the solution for the restaurants to do takeaway uh under their own brand with their own apps and kind of help them thrive in the new normal now nordics see everything opening up again um we've seen a huge spike in demand and also revenue so first we had a gigantic spike doing kerbit and then that spike got another positive bump uh after reopening so it's just been crazy 18 months really that is incredible i mean you came on back in june of 2019 uh and you remember the number you told me you were doing 20 000 a month back then and then you came on last year in september and said nathan you're not going to believe it we're doing like 370 000 a month or almost a 5 million dollar run rate it was incredible to me seeing that growth but that was good so what's happened since then yeah since then um we grew in malls and now we are at plus 500 per month uh our that comes both from new business but it also comes from our existing clients growing so our average revenue per client is up to above 500 us dollars per month whereas last time we talked it was just below 300 if i recall correctly so so that grew so annual contract value obviously grew um we kept our double digit growth um all the way from september until now every month um and yeah we we're getting very close to getting ready to raise our next round which will be in q4 q1 let's talk more about that in a second but so how many total contracts are you working with now today so we are plus uh 1200 now um so so a lot of a lot of clients across the northeast nordics and we are looking into expanding into to the rest of europe and that's also what uh what the round would be for yup now uh when you talk about rounds you have to remind me your your history so i think you you raised 200 000 back in 2015 and then you raised a wait sorry sorry sorry you raised 1.5 million in 2019. have you raised since then yeah so um we raised both in um in early 2020 and late 2020 um around the same amount both times um and then that that's kind eight um so a total of i guess calculated two us dollars it's like somewhere between four and five million uh dollars total how much in total u.s four to five million dollars total forty forty five total got it so you basically did like four two five so four somewhere between four and five okay got it as you've raised a significant amount since we last spoke got it so so you kind of you basically raised like 2 million like twice in 2020 to drive and feel this growth mads i would argue you've been very capital efficient because your your annual occurring revenue is greater than the total amount you've raised i would call that a capital efficient founder how have you sort of i know this is such a stupid question but it's important most founders could not resist vc's reaching out saying mads please let me invest you've resisted the urge to do that how have you been able to um so we've been able to grow without um and we we did a merge with a norwegian competitor last year in late october early november and when you when you merge two companies at that stage um you kind of have to get everything right um and there's a lot of like uh both technical depth that you have to solve on both performance and you have to get your bi straight again because when you merge two companies with two different bi setups it's always a big pain and a big headache to kind of merge those and that's what we've been spending the past eight nine months on and we wanted to get that right before we we took on too much money um so um that has kind of got us to to the point where we are now and we we're kind of ready um to at least after summer we're ready to to start racing because now a bi setup is in a good spot that's great and and talking about the team today how many people full-time yep so we're 60 people full-time there um and we're growing the team with two to five new employees every month um so it's the good moms are five employees and that's when we can find the talent and that's kind of the goal um but we don't want to hire for every price we want to find the right talent that's the right cultural fit so yeah in the bad months we only managed to find two people and it's mainly in product that we're hiring but of course also some commercial roles so how many engineers are on the full team today um so we just surpassed which so i think we had 27 now um yeah so nearly half of the company is engineers so a couple places i want to take here i want to talk about how you almost doubled our poo i mean that's that's driving that dollar attention i'm sure through the roof i want to talk about that i also want to talk about merging right so so what was the step i mean did the merging company take more than 50 of quick order like how did the sort of cap table dynamics work there so a bit more than 50 but it was roughly 50 50 split um and um so so the the driving up who um comes a lot from the merch uh because they brought on a more sophisticated um online ordering and dining solution um for guests to kind of sell folders on their phone um and that has made us able to upsell um to our existing client portfolio um so in norway where they origin from they did not historically have the whole restaurant os with the point of sale and scheduled planning and table table reservation like we did so we could upsell that part of the suite to their original clients um now our clients and on the other hand the danish clients we could upsell the norwegian product too so we kind of had this possibility to to double the value basically um of of both sides of the company's clients and we've been doing that and it's been a great success now matt talk to me you know it's it's tricky for two founders that have surprised to merge together to figure out like what the structure looks like afterwards so are you sort of still are you sort of leader ceo and where's the other founder or ceo so um i actually stepped down uh to become ceo um and uh andy who was the ceo of reorder as it was called um is now the ceo of the entire company it was quite an easy decision really because andy is the founder of tidal uh which was sold to jay z the music streaming service uh so he he has a lot of experience so so just getting to work with a guy like that and tapping into his brain and learning from him was a great experience for me only being 25 um and only done quick order uh and then my management team was basically me and then our cto they didn't have a very strong cto so that decision was also easy and then we didn't have a cfo i was basically a hybrid when i was ceo and they had a really talented cfo with investment banking background so everything was just a really good fit and it's kind of unbelievable how good the merge has been because it was like we just supplemented each other on every front even on management the only kind of thing that was doubled was me and andy and even that decision was easy so how much equity do you still own today a range is fine um so i said it between five and ten percent okay and but but really i mean again i remember you being a young guy i mean you're really just operating right now to learn right yeah yeah uh 25 now turning 26 in october that's great yeah so so you mentioned prepping for a series a how much do you think you'll you'll go out and try and raise um so a minimum of 10 million us dollars but indications right now is that the market with um with the right multiple is willing to put in between 20 and 30 million us dollars um so so it would probably be plus 20 um and in this rant we kind of have the philosophy that we take what they're what what's there and what is there and let's say you get an offer for 20 million what valuation do you think that might be on uh plus 100 plus 100 okay interesting um very cool and then so how do you and andy sort of work through this together right like let's say andy's out getting term sheets he says mads i have one i like how do you guys sort of pick a decision on the right investor partner all that yeah um so i'd say we we're lucky that we have a really really good board that is of great assistance in in kinda helping us choosing the right uh right term sheet we have a professional board consisting of both a couple of of our bigger investors but also external people that all have great experience both with racing bc but also in the pe game funny thing is that in the restaurant tech industry where we are a lot of peas are starting to knock on the door um and and wanting to consolidate uh the european market you've already seen in the in the u.s with both square and toast um kind of consolidating the markets and and we we we're seeing the same thing happening in...