How Raffle CEO Suzanne Lauritzen grew Raffle to $3.1M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is suzanne laritzen she's professionally brought up in the tech consulting and dot coms of the 1990 she's the founder of log buy in the early 2000's an employee engagement platform which was fully acquired in a split sale back in 2016-2017 at which point our co-founder uh and her were the sole owners today she's the ceo and co-founder of venture backed raffle.ai inventing the future of enterprise search based off ai suzanne you're ready to take it to the top yeah all right so this is your second or third or fourth swing at it with some successful exits in the past correct yes it is okay okay what does it mean to empower your search with ai search for what who's using this employees are using it customers are using it on the website of our customers uh so it's basically just the search they can find what you need like google can find what you need for consumers we make the same search available for corporates okay very cool and remind us i believe you founded this way back in 2018 right yes okay and do you remember i i didn't ask you last time we spoke do you remember back in 2018 what your total revenue was your first year in business oh no it was very very limited no i think we had maybe a bit of uh pocs going on but it was very limited yep yeah okay very cool and then um tell me about um customers today right so you told us about your customers back in october 2020 but nate can you name any customers paying you today yes uh we have uh we have a co-op as a customer we have ian it's customer we have visma it's customer we have ilva which is like ikea um so we have yeah we have lots of different kinds of customers both within insurance banking b2b software and an e-commerce and how many total paying customers today we have around 50 total uh you know big corporates uh we have more customers than that but paying customers and big corporates like enterprise customers are 50. it's impressive suzanne you i don't know if you remember back back in october 2020 you told me you had about seven so you've significantly grown since then now has has your average contract value changed as well or is it still about 35 000 a year on average i know the contract value today is about 25 000 euro oh no sorry dollars dollars 25 25 a per year yes okay so maybe going down market just a smidge is that an intentional strategy or that just happens to be the customers you closed no yeah it's intentional i think we'll probably even go further down because we are targeting also the medium segment today and not only the enterprise markets so so that's intentional now if you have the 50 customers at a 25 dollar acv that means you're at doing what about 1.2 million in terms of run rate right now yeah a little less yes yeah yeah 950 a million something like that you're about to pass a million dollar run right we'll put it that way oh yeah we have parcel million yeah okay you're past a million fair that's very exciting so you've done this i bel i do believe you've also raised some capital tell us about your last funding round well our last funding round was about uh three million um dollars uh but right now actually we're in the middle of an a round i can't tell you anymore about that but i can on wednesday so it's closing on wednesday next week 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 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they'll end up being for uh range and and just to be clear too we're recording this on january 12th this will go out on february 25th just for timing purposes yeah but the thing is i don't know if i can if i can reveal that until wednesday so i i know that's um i don't know what i can reveal but but i'm happy to to tell you later on and then you can clip it in or whatever you know that's no problem we would love to do that let's talk about the strategy behind the raise what do you why do you need the money that obviously comes with delusion yes uh we need the money to scale uh european-wise or first of all it's actually going to mean american uh it's it's a u.s um venture capital firm uh so eventually we'll also go to the us but i think we'll wait one year to do that and just scale in europe for now so that's what we need the money for it's basically sales yeah and most most folks suzanne and their series a are selling 10 to 20 to the business were you sort of in that same range yeah okay and and do you have to set up an employee stock option pool afterwards or did you already have one set up anyway we already have one night we do have a warrant program an exit warrant program i don't know what that is how does that work it works the way that you have you have the option to oh you have warrants that will be released um the day that we actually exit which is the day where we sell more than 50 of the company so you have to stay to the end so to speak or to the day that we exit to to get value for that money if you don't stay you will lose it uh so it's basically a way to say to people that we really want to stay on board for you know for the long run um yeah and what are those called sort of what warrants it's a it's an exit warrant program hmm interesting i like that i have not heard that before so that's interesting it's just a warm program and it's just exit based so i think i i think yeah exactly most most people would probably just say it's a warren program yeah fair fair fair i like your idea better though that's kind of fun um yeah okay talk to me about the customer growth how have you gone from 70 to 50 where are you getting these customers uh it's it's uh in the nordics uh primarily but uh we've just i mean we've just scaled the business we have been much more clear in the mission now we have a product now that can scale very very pro very rapidly and and also we can now implement the customer within two days uh which we were maybe two months um doing you know just one and a half years ago it would take us two months to actually implement a customer so it's just it's just more rapid now it's it's um it's a clearer vision so and how many folks are on the team full time uh 20 20 is on the team full time and then we have eight part-time uh employees as well how many engineers we have 12 engineers now back in october of 2020 you told me hit about 23 on the team did you have to let some people go but still have that revenue growth maybe because of covet or something no i think what we what we calculated that point was also the part-time employees so we haven't we haven't scaled that much we have scaled about five full-time employees since then and then some part-time...