How Render CEO Anurag Goel grew Render to $898.4K revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is marius yatan he has a technical background and started as a software developer he co-founded his first business in 2001 he's been an entrepreneur ever since went from startup owner to executive in a multinational company then back to startup founder now he's the ceo of render street backed by advanced tech and dedicated to reducing the stress levels of 3d artists and studios worldwide marius are you ready to take us to the top yes i am okay explain to us how your product works and what's your revenue model how do you make money well uh we are we have a service we are preventing a service to 3d artists and studios basically what we do is we take their projects and we use the power of the cloud to render them faster this is in a very nutshell uh our revenue model is uh mixed we have a subscription as a service and payers go as well okay and what's the average company pay you per month for your tech would you say uh it's difficult because we have a number of different categories of customers we have big customers that pay us in the thousands and we have small customers that pay us between 50 and 200 dollars i mean so what would you say a fair average is though just because we don't have time to talk about every cohort if uh we did the average for everybody i would say it's about three or four hundred okay and so let's say i sign up today and pay 300 bucks a month what am i going to get for that sorry if i sign up today for 300 bucks a month what will i get for that depending on the plan that you sign up for you get either unlimited rendering for less than 300 per month or you get a number of hours to render your projects uh with the pay-as-you-go plan so so is this i mean when people think rendering are you talking about like movie studios or big engineering companies where they need additional computing power to render like results and you're essentially leasing them or sending them computing power oh yes that's correct so the verticals are quite a lot of them there are architects product designers departments of big companies people that do advertising animation movies and so on interesting when did you launch the company what year um yes we rentable uh 2013 13 that's great and have you as you've grown the business did you do in a bootstrapped way or have you raised capital uh we'll bootstrap to this day that's great i love that congratulations thank you and how many customers have you scaled to uh we have about 10 000 customers at the moment okay those are all just to be clear those aren't free customers those are all paying customers yes okay so 10 000 customers paying 300 bucks a month means you would be doing about 3 million bucks a month right now in revenue is that right not really no we the number i gave you is the total number of customers in this business the project cycle is a bit long so which means that an artist has to work to develop his project to model it to animate it and after that they come to us to render it this is the life cycle of the 3d project this means that not everybody comes and renders the project every month so the number of people rendering monthly is a lot lower than that is actually around uh three between three and 400 people okay so if we do 300 times 300 bucks a month that's about you're doing about 90 grand a month something like that uh give or take now actually uh no because again no because the average uh so what i give you the average is for considering the large customers and the small ones uh the large customers have even longer product cycles of the so we are right now at about between 30 and 40 000 per month okay revenue 30 000 per month and where were you a year ago so we can understand growth rate uh we were so we had a growth of about 130 this year i mean 30 percent uh this year compared to last year uh it's not a large amount but what we did was uh we managed to switch a lot of our customers from the payers who go uh planned to the monthly subscription so just to be clear today that thirty thousand dollars a month that's all subscription monthly correct no it's from buying a subscription just subscription sorry what's just the subscription uh so the amount for just subscription is about uh 50 uh 15 to 20 000 per month okay 15 000 per month okay that makes sense and then just the subscription a year ago what was that at uh let me let me think it was at about eight to nine thousand okay that's great so driving nice growth there um help us understand where you found these customers how are you landing new deals um so our first uh channel is world of mouth and then we do inbound marketing quite a lot okay and so and what's your team size today uh four people four yes okay so when you say inbound marketing who's the one doing the seo the keywords the writing the content etc uh yes okay and is everyone remote are you in one office uh no uh everybody's in the office which office at where are you based in bucharest romania romania very good and talk to me about churn i mean what what do you do you measure churn today and what is it we do measure churn uh again because of the long project cycle it's a bit difficult to to put it in terms of a regular sas business uh but uh we have a return rate of approximately 80 of the customers annually so sorry annually or monthly annually okay so you have about 20 churn per year yeah okay that's not that's not horrible and then um walk me through your fully weighted customer acquisition cost so to get a new customer that's going to pay you 100 bucks a month what will you spend to get that customer uh i think between 50 and 150 it depends again on the software they use and so on so between 50 and 150 okay so somewhere between kind of a year sorry a month to a two month payback period something like that interesting do you have any plans to raise capital or no uh not actively so we don't pursue any raising capitals at the moment if there's an opportunity that comes our way we won't say no are you burning capital right now marius uh no we live off of revenue so you're just break even uh yes you operate right kind of right at break even everything that goes to the bottom line you reinvest yes interesting very cool uh what's what's the startup ecosystem like in romania do you have a law there are a lot of people like you or no uh they start to be yes so we the community just uh the things have improved quite a bit in the past five years before that there wasn't quite a lot of movement but now it's it's really growing yeah i'm glad to hear that marius let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book [Music] um i'm i'm into marketing right now so i would say fanatical prospecting by uh jeb blanc fanatical prospecting very good number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh yes uh jack ma of am good uh number alibaba number three uh what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh i would say slack and what's your situation married single kids uh married not married in a relationship long term no not married no kids and how many how many hours of sleep to get every night marius sorry how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh between seven and nine okay and um last question or second last question how old are you 43 yesterday all right oh congrats happy birthday take us home what do you wish your 20 wish your 20 year old self knew [Music] uh i wish he knew how to invest more in soft skills in self development and soft skills yeah invest more in soft development and self skills he launched render street skills soft skills yes that's what i said yeah invest more in soft skills is that what you said yes okay very good again launched in 2013 uh has about 300 customers doing each paying caught 50 60 bucks a month doing 15 grand a month right now in revenue uh that's up from eight thousand bucks a month just a year ago that's pure play sas there operating at break even because he's bootstrapped team of four based in romania 20 churn each year spending anywhere between 50 to 150 bucks to acquire a customer so call it a one to two month payback period as he looks to again lease computing power back to our studios that do a lot of rendering whether it's a movie studio or an architect marius thank you for taking us to the top thank you