How RaccoonCare CEO Svitlana Malovana grew to $150K revenue and 20 customers in 2022.

guys raccoon care is helps rehabilitation centers rehabilitate folks she's now pivoting to corporate she's got 10 Pilots running for these corporations who want to use the raccoon.care app to help their employees stay active especially if they're singing a desk every day her Engineers are working out of bomb shelters in Ukraine she's in New York running the company 12 full-time they did 150 000 in Revenue last year hoping to break a million this year hey folks my guest today is felana malinova she's a proud Ukrainian former I.T lawyer and big fan of Technologies and digitalization with 10 plus years of I.T experience she's a contributor at Forbes Ukraine being named as the one the top 25 I.T women in Ukraine and then her passion is helping human capabilities and productivity she's fighting the sedentary lifestyle by developing digitized physical tools her most recent project is raccoon dot care it helps you increase physical activities Svetlana are you ready to take us to the top yeah sure hello everyone very good I'm glad you're here first of all are you safe are you in Ukraine right now how are you uh I'm good I'm safe I'm in New York uh and our back office is in Ukraine but they are working sometimes out of bomb shelters but today I save I hope well I I'm I I work we have all of our support I'm glad you're safe I'm glad your team is safe as well thank you very much yeah we are very appreciate that's amazing so tell us what the company does who are you selling to um actually like what what we do is we fight inside into the lifestyle with the help of our SAS like app and at the moment we are selling to corporates with the office workers so like from 100 to 500 office workers like as employees uh as a fitness as Wellness benefit and it's like a fitness app but actually that help people who are sitting all the time near their laptop to do active breaks to do like uh different stretching even a workplace in in costume and also like different challenges to to actually get it done because we know that people are too busy with their life and they have don't they don't have time actually for their health and Svetlana so what do these companies pay on average per month to use your technology to help them keep their employees Physically Active you mean like what is the business model what does the average customer pay you per month uh well actually like um annual uh subscription is 120 dollars per employee it's like basic fee and the rest depends on what kind of reports companies want to get so taking all that into consideration what does the average company pay you per year um we are focusing like for example uh 100 employees so like in this case they are paying us like 12 12 000 of uh of dollars annually okay so your average cost your average paying customer today is paying you twelve thousand dollars per year um with the post because actually we just pivoted from physical rehabilitation field when we sell to rehabilitation centers to corporate Wellness so we just did this like transformation this Autumn and before that we starting from 2018 we were selling to rehabilitation centers and there we actually got like this inside that there is one common thing between like an orthopedical neurological cases it's set into the lifestyle that's why we decided to help people to be more healthy more efficient being active on daily basis yes I think the product makes total sense to me I'm trying to get an understanding of Economics so what does the average customer today pay you per year uh right now we have in this like model we have uh 10 pilots and we are discussing the annual agreements in the area like uh subscription for 12 000 a year it's this is totally okay your pre-revenue today on the new model on the new model yeah I mean I it doesn't sound like you're doing much on the old model though right that's why you pivoted uh actually we see that here we can Bridge more value so like it was medical the previous one model it was medical product that uh like need a lot of support my I mean like certification uh evidence and so on so that's why we decided to go and to solve one very easy problem actually exciting to the lifestyle 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is 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from the old business model I mean you're doing under five thousand dollars per month in revenue is that accurate yeah so like if we are talking about like monthly it's like ten dollars per month per one employee this bit Lana how much how much revenue did the whole company do last year all year uh 150k and what's your goal for this year sorry what's your goal for this year 2023 so this year for 2023 we want to get at least one million Revenue I love that goal ambitious all right and last year with 150 000 in Revenue how many customers was that from uh um zip for previous year in 2022 how many paying customers did you have uh we had 20 rehabilitation centers who actually used the product uh and it uh we calculated like per number so in total uh we helped to rehabilitate more than one thousand people that's amazing and then go back to 2021 if you did 150 000 last year what'd you do one year before in 2021 uh in 2021 we were getting medical certification so not zero right yeah so how did you support the business you said you launched in 2018 how did you pay bills between 2018 and 2021 when you were pre-revenue uh we like in total uh we raised 1.5 million dollars with like around 60 percent we spent on medical certification evidence we also had like devices uh so also on manufacturing those devices and if we are talking about how we get those money it was our own money so from my uh like legal business in Ukraine we raised Investments and also we got like fun grants for for medical actually one of the grants is like Horizon 2020 uh like European grant program uh also for medical uh medical stuff for medical so the one the 1.5 million you raise that was in 2021 uh it was like from uh 2018 till 2022 so it's in total okay how much of the 1.5 million was not grants it was Equity you were selling a part of the company uh uh less than one million okay so almost 1 million all right let's just say one million so how much Equity did you have to give up to raise a million uh right now 75 percent of the company belong to co-founders me and my co-founder oh amazing okay so you only had to give up 25 of the company when you did the equity raise okay so it was a four million post money evaluation and sorry who did you say your co-founder was who my co-founder you have two you have two Founders you and one other person me and another one co-founder yes did you guys put it equally at the start or did you negotiate uh we like uh negotiate uh but uh I bet you got more you strike me as tough you're hard to you're hard to negotiate with I bet um I think I have like a couple of persons more just for investors to see like who is the decision making to be sure that there is one person like to talk to but uh we bring like uh I think like half and half uh resources and nothing money and so on that makes sense how many people are full-time on the company today uh 12 people 12 people it's like how are you paying 12 full-time salaries today when you're basically I mean you're you're under a hundred thousand dollars a year in Revenue uh we actually have 12 people and we did we decided not to like fight them because of the war in Ukraine but in 20 uh 2021 actually one of the reasons why we decided to Pivot it was actually war in Ukraine because like in the beginning of the year we had clients like rehabilitation centers we get subscription for them but we still need to raise more to uh to get like some extra medical certification but uh to like VCS they just like consult our contracts in February because the war starts and that's why we decided uh to Pivot because like we didn't have a lot of sorry just I feel like we're on a team my question was just today how are you paying 12 full-time people are they doing it are they actually full-time are they Consulting what's how are you doing that um they're full-time but uh we also like give them impossible so we are there full time working but they also have some extra things to do to to get like extra money for Living but but how do you what how where do you get the money yeah how do you pay them when you're doing under 150 000 a year in revenue or under about ten thousand bucks a month in Revenue you can't pay 12 people full-time salaries with 12 with 10 000 a month in Revenue can you uh we still like have some like revenues for out of my other business so yeah we pay them actually salary oh so you are putting more money into the company every month as you pivot yeah oh I see okay that makes sense to me um okay great so as we wrap them here I want to talk about these Pilots because you just pivoted you've got 10 Pilots set up how do you structure the pilot to optimize the likelihood that they actually start paying at the end um actually we start looking for clients with some like not uh not scaling like models so we start not focusing on some digital process of leader generation we start looking for their focused customers to use our Network to find this like test pilot uh and uh we right now have uh like doing trial period together with them and after this trial period with a part of the team we are implementing into the full company and suggest them as a subscription on the subscription basis like the SAS model didn't answer your question well most people when they run a pilot they'll say we'll do this amount of work for you for x amount of time and if we generate y results then you start paying us twelve thousand dollars per year right do you have that kind of structure set up in your your pilot legal agreement um with first like Pilots not because actually we had to test if they like the product if they like their um like um customer success and so on so but uh free last actually pilot we start with the model where they have like uh one month uh trial period and after that they're selling like full subscription I see I see very cool all right let's wrap up here with the famous fives that a lot of number one what's your favorite book uh my favorite book uh is uh leadership of Manchester United something like that about like Management in Manchester United number two is there a CEO you're following or studying sorry is there a CEO you're following or studying uh following name a name a Founder you're following um um let me think I don't know okay we'll skip that one number three what's your favorite online tool for building raccoon care um actually live click up I saw like your interview with them and uh I really like uh actual CEO I think also will be the person who I'm following because like I try to bring a lot of that product and of their like strategy and culture everything understood all right number uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night sorry how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh at least seven okay and what's your situation married single kids a single okay and do you mind me asking how old you are uh yeah for 42 so three two 32 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um well listen guys raccoon care is helps rehabilitation centers rehabilitate folks she's now pivoting to corporate she's got 10 Pilots running for these corporations who want to use the raccoon dot care app to help their employees stay active especially if they're singing a desk every day her Engineers are working on a bomb shelters in Ukraine she's in New York running the company 12 full-time they did 150 000 in Revenue last year hoping to break a million this year or certainly certainly rooting for Svetlana Svetlana thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 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