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 europe now um so that's also a part of our strategy no matter if we go vc or end up going some sort of pe route then the future outlook is to consolidate yeah interesting now would you prefer to be eaten by someone that's really talented that you can learn from or be the company that eats other companies we are going to eat other companies that's the quote take it to the bank that's the show headline we're eating other companies yeah all right very cool i like that matt hey last few questions here as we wrap up how many quota carrying sales rep do you guys have today so we expanded so that's six now six okay and what quarter do you have them on annually um so they do three times their uh annual salary encoding okay so what was that about a million quarters something like that yeah yeah roughly okay okay interesting very cool anything else i missed about the business where you're like i gotta share this um no i don't think so so we we use maybe just to give a quick rundown um we get data from all of the different sources that our products are supposed and also the the guests and that get is that data that kind of helps the restaurateur turns with this visitors into regulars so obtaining the spent from the visitors and their kind of preferences we use machine learning to to kind of help the waiters give the guests a better experience so that they come back i love this would you ever consider buying a company that installs wi-fi at restaurants so when you sit down and consumers connect to the wi-fi you actually get their email address when they connect it's obviously a massive data play would you ever look at any other iot devices yeah we definitely um we're looking in to all sorts of ways to gather data we're also speaking to to a lot of the psps that provide card readers right now to kind of right away card readers yeah so if you can somehow digitalize the guest that pays offline then then you have come a long way in digitalizing all guests and that kind of kind of is our goal to make 100 of the restaurants guest digital yeah yeah how many how many guests are in your platform right now across your customer base uh more than a million wow so that's that's a lot of guests um and of course primarily guests from the nordics right now but tourists do come to the nordics so so there is also some foreigners in there yeah very good let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh blitz scaling um yeah honorable mention um from impossible to inevitable by aaron russ number two is there a founder mads that you're following or studying yeah reeve hoffman number three what's your favorite online tool for building quick order um still google sweet uh but slightly i will mention you're very cuz i always do this and sometimes founders give different responses you're three for three right now uh next one how many hours of sleep are you getting every night always uh eight or that has actually changed a bit because i got a daughter so now it's a bit harder but uh then i then i gotta do a nap later later during the day because so i got a private lead to be on top of my game i love it all right four four four last set of questions you're married single kids yeah so i'm still not married but a girlfriend and and one kid one kid and how are you good good good uh 20 20 50 yeah i'm 25 myself and she's five months very cool i was gonna say i know you're not five months but that must be very exciting 25 year old ceo you're learning a ton from andy you're building a great company got a young one on the way that's great last question what do you wish you knew five years ago when you were 20 um so i think i was done up cap tables when i was 20. um but i think besides up cap tables i think the most important thing that i wish i would have known is the importance of not making everything at the democracy in the business and sometimes as a leader you've got to make decisions you can talk everything out so be more decisive and we kind of had a tendency you know in the early days with my founders that we talked about every decision um and that kind of it's fine in the beginning but when you get a bit further it starts to slow down business um so you gotta get to the point where the c level makes decisions even if not all founders are unsealable guys quick order dot dk watch out they've had a lot of data on restaurants they're helping over 1200 locations turn visitors at the restaurant into regulars they we're doing 20 000 a month in 2019 they broke 350 000 a month last year and this year they're now over 500 000 a month in revenue or a six million dollar run rate now looking at potentially going out and raising a 20 to 30 million dollar series a at north of 100 million evaluation we will watch closely mads thanks for taking us to the top 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 1pm 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's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is mods better cop he is the 24 year old ceo and co-founder of quick order he's been leasing since the age of 17 where he led a sorry leading and led a sales team of eight people at 18 he was in charge of 120 people he found a quick order at age 18 and it sends from the company from five co-founders to 40-plus employees majority takes the top yeah let's do it all right five co-founders man what's that mean you guys each have like 20 percent of the company on day one yeah so each 20 um and been equally shared ever since you guys don't fight you get along we get along yet so i'm the only one left in management the other guys are in operations today um but yeah it all has always worked out really great so what tell us about the product what is quick order yeah so quick order is an all-in-one sas solution for restaurants and cafes we call it a restaurant os so it consists of point of sale schedule planning for staffing table booking and most important the online ordering and in-seat ordering from the consumer's phone in the restaurant so everything is combined and on top of that we use the data to generate custom engaging insights and operational efficiency inside the restaurant now when you came on back in june of Currently serving 1300 locations last year i believe it was you guys had raised about 2 million bucks you told me because it just passed i think about 20 000 a month in revenue uh had about 305 customers obviously cobit has happened since then where's the business today so kobet crazily accelerated us so we are now at 368k monthly occurring revenue 386. yeah free yeah free yeah six eight three six eight three sixty eight three hundred sixty eight thousand a month yeah you can grow new us dollars okay um we are as you know um 40 plus people and we were in just around 14 at the time where we talked last time mm-hmm um so just be clear you guys are doing like more than it's about a four four and a half million dollar run rate yeah yeah right i mean that's incredible growth that's crazy growth over 12 months you went from nothing to 4 million run rate under 18 months yep correct um we're very very happy with that um so yeah it's been a crazy ride um our aipc also went up after we added the nc and online ordering to the business so we are now at 283 us dollars per location and that puts us at just around 1300 locations all across dynamics so thirteen hundred locations and are those individual customers or are they sometimes there's four customers yeah so sometimes it can be ten locations for a logo okay okay great um and okay so ten locations per account so how many are unique so over 300 uh locations how many are worth a unique brand so i actually don't have an exact number for that because we count locations um but a good guest would be just around a thousand so it's various and garden groups so 1300 locations across a thousand sort Monthly recurring revenue of different brands and they pay about 280 per location that's how you have four and a half million dollar run rate today yeah okay so how i mean this is incredible my incredible story here mads how did you i mean how did you go from you know you know nothing i mean you basically remove four million in revenue very quickly where are you getting these customers how are you setting them up um so part of it came from a merch with a norwegian partner um not competitors in any way but they were doing online ordering um and of course they brought in a lot of synergies to the business so we were able to accelerate the growth a lot on by bringing those guys in and the other part came from us being really really fast to react to kovid so when kobe started back in march we were the only post in the nordics basically um especially in denmark norway had a few competitors but we were one of the only ones in the nordics that had both posts and integrated online takeaway for for their homepage and the ability for the guests to order from the table with their phone and that just created a huge spike in demand because then the restaurateurs would actually continue operating instead of being shut down by the government but which of these mats i New products mean when you when you look at your website you have a new you feature four products you have cder which is table booking that's obviously out the window of code because no one's coming in and sit down right yep quick manager salary and shift schedule i imagine that's not as popular now with covet you have quick serve which is the handheld terminal for waitresses to use at tables i imagine again that's not great if there's no one sitting you don't need that and then you have the quick pos cash register system i imagine that's the product that's building and growing the fastest yeah it's the post um and the post capabilities of doing online ordering um so the post has a consumer facing side to it um unless you're saying accelerated everything so a restaurant brand could take your old sort of quick point of sale system which is a cash register system you have a version of that they can just the restaurant can put on their home page and then consumers can order via the home page and feeds into their system yeah correct um so they don't have to handle a card reader or cash for that sake and it's just in general very very cobit friendly everything is insurance phone the way that comes to the table with with what's ordered and paid so there's also minimal interaction between the waiter and and the guest and that of course keeps physical distance which is really great in covet times so of the 368 000 you'll do or you did last month did you have any profits or were you cash flow negative uh still just cash flow negatives um just but very very close to break even um Raised so when you say i mean you're like you're burning five thousand dollars a month or something small yeah it's very small it's it's less than 10k a month okay and have you raised additional capital or still have the two million um we raised another 1.5 million ish um so danish it's just around 10. so 1.5 calculated into dollars and that basically put us at the spot where we are now so you raised total 3.5 million dollars yeah are you planning to raise additional capital now to double down on the growth you've seen no not now um we're actually waiting for the market the vg market to kinda find its feet again um we are in the fortunate position where if we just keep doing what we do we will hit rate even within a few months and that and that is with additional highest so we can kind of play the waiting game and let the vcs line up that's great so 40 folks on the team how many engineers so that is oh we've it's been so fast so just around 20 20 engineers okay and any quota carrying sales reps or no uh yes so we have that's three now but if you include ces who also have a quota um it's ten ten why do you why do you give your customer success reps a quota i see customer success as a sales position um it's not an a cost it's an investment our quarter quota aren't as far as high as a sales rep but all of customer success reps are in charge of cross-selling um and upselling an additional plans to to existing clients because they know the best which clients can have use of other parts of our product which they might not be paying for today what quota do your sales reps have so the way we we um calculate it is that we take that base salary and we want them to do four extra base salary and annual contract with revenue every month okay so let's let's make up a number let's say i'm one of your sales reps you're paying me fifty five zero thousand dollars annually what you're saying is you want me to close two hundred thousand dollars in new ar every month um no it's a um monthly salary times for in annual revenue every month so if you do 10k a month a base salary i want you to do 40k annual annual contract value every month i see so yeah so just to get so we're talking about the same lengths of time for each if you're paying me 10 000 a month base as a sales rep you won't be adding 40 000 a new acv which is equivalent to about 3 500 of new mrr yeah yeah correct i see interesting and has that sort of work do you think you can scale with those sort of ratios yeah that them that's working very well um our leads are super cheap um so with that ratio we've been able to to now have um four guys selling and we expect to to get that to 10 within the next 12 months um sorry give what to 10 the product bearing sales reps so from four to ten within the next 12 months into oh sorry in terms of hiring more yeah yeah yeah okay got it you said you get leads very cheap what's it cost you in terms of fully weighted attack to get a new you know 3 500 a year customer yeah so if you factor everything in with um salary and onboarding and ad spend um our right now is two thousand dollars two thousand okay so about 10 months 11 months pay that period yeah yeah and it's actually a bit shorter because we have an upfront fee um from our clients which kind of cuts down that payback period a lot what's the opportunity so that's just around a thousand us dollars and what is that first setup or something yeah that's what set up yeah interesting so like helping them install your checkout system on their home page yeah exactly okay churn's critical in a sas company last time came on you said it was about 18 annually what's it today in terms of revenue um so growth were you asking about growth uh sorry sorry revenue churn annually yeah so annually we are around 10 10 and do you have expansion revenue as well yeah so net revenue retention um is actually 131 Customer Success okay so so you're churning 41 annually you're expanding sorry you're turning 10 annually you're expanding 41 annually so net revenue retention is 131. yeah how what's the most effective way that your customer success reps are driving expansion revenue is it selling into new products or is it upselling a utility-based usage metric so the most the single most efficient one is actually making the restaurant choice implement the loyalty scheme of our online ordering product um in order to generate more online orders because we have a revenue kickback on those orders so that's the single most efficient one then the second most efficient one is upselling no not obviously selling um so that we make sure that the clients have the full product suite super smart very good man you're building you're building an animal here man you should be excited yeah i am it's it's amazing and all the co-founders uh they're still in the company so they all still have about 20 yeah yeah so everybody still in the company um everybody owns equally um of course we diluted after funding um but we we own equally um that's that's great and how are you uh 24 and the other guys are between 22 and 30. that's great all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh blitz scaling by reed hoffman number two is there a ceo you're following or studying reid hoffman number number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um so easy answer would be slack um but i would go with g suite i think it's uh it's so powerful as number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight hours 24 years old i assume you're single no kids uh i'm actually not single on living with mrs um not married but we expect a kid to library oh that's super exciting got it so married and one kid on the way that's extremely sorry sorry not married but one kid on the way yeah yeah and very that's exciting you're gonna have a lot of you're gonna have a startup baby and a real baby here soon yeah yeah all right last question take us back four years what are you wishing you knew when you were 20. how not to up a cap table um did some really toxic rounds early on and had to fix that luckily i did but learn the funding game from exposed talk to somebody who's done it before Toxic Rounds sorry i should have asked questions about that i didn't know you went through a painful experience there what happened early on where you just you wouldn't do it the same way again um we took in way too much money on a too early stage which led to too much dilution so when metro accelerator came around a couple of years then and one desert was on we actually went to the selection day but got turned down because of a cap table in the end um and had to fix that so basically to being a toxic investor who didn't know anything about sas we didn't know anything about startups took too much money from them and about captain and had to fix that mads how much of the company did you sell for two million dollars um so to so that's post that um so today we dilute it by thirty percent uh total um but prior to that before i fixed that i got what i did really early on and we were diluted like nearly half it was like money takes close to half of the business for 400 k dollars for 100k or 400k 100k what year did you do that round in that was in 2015 um but we we fixed that a couple of years later okay got it so Selling 50 of the business you sold i mean this is early on you didn't know what you were building right so you sold 50 of the business for a hundred thousand dollars in 2015. you then realized oh my gosh we messed up tell me how you got out of that um basically we were lucky that this yahoo disagreement was uh something the investor basically got from the drawer um and it was really really badly constructed so we were able to use that to our advantage and basically we could sit on our houses and do nothing for as long as we wanted so we kind of pressured him out in the end he accepted to take the money he put down dollar by dollar and gave us all the shares back what year was that so he put it in 2015 you gave the money back in what year 2017. okay so he basically had 100 grand locked up earning no interest no return for two years yep okay well hey at least you got it fixed man yeah we did we did we had to take the bank but [Music] guys quite a story quick order dot dk you'd think because they said the restaurant industry covered would hit them hard they've actually like quadrupled the business more than quadruple they were doing just 20 000 a month about 18 months ago now they're doing almost 380 000 a month the 4.5 million dollar run rate serving 1300 restaurant locations the number one product the ability for customers to check out on restaurants websites actually obviously a great feature to have during cove but they raised 3.5 million dollars to do it they're almost profitable team of 40 20 on the team 10 quarter carrying folks between sales and customer success mods thanks for taking us to the top thank you 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 backend 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 gotta 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