How Restworld CEO Luca Lotterio grew Restworld to $1.7M revenue and 95 customers in 2024.

guys restworld.i.t launch in 2020 they're doing 33 000 Euros per month day in Revenue up from 8 000 just a year ago so nice growth rate uh they've raised small seed rounds to be very Capital efficient from their customers most recently at 265 000 seed round at 3.2 million evaluation today investors own 20 of the company and the other four co-founders own the other 80 split evenly they've got 12 on the team today three Engineers looking to scale their servicing restaurant owners with between 1 and 20 employees who need to hire that's what they go to rest world uh to do and to use it for hey folks my guest today is Luca loterio he's a 29 year old CEO managing the evolution of restworld.it which helps match workers and Employers in Eureka that's in uh that's in Italy all right uh Luca you ready to take us to the top um are you ready to start yeah absolutely great so how do you guys make money is it a SAS company or is this a Marketplace so basically we understood that we were still not a SAS model exactly but we are still a Ras model that means not software accessories but the recruiting as a service this means that every time that a customer needs our help they used to pay um a subscription like a monthly subscription quarter subscription Android subscription but they've got not a service that is a software that they can use alone but they got the help of our customer success managers then manage their researches we used to match our work is to match people and companies to work together so we help restaurants and bars to find stuff so it's more like uh as it as it already it's a recruiters and services like if you have an Outsourcing of the recruiter what is the average customer then pay you per month or per year to use your service okay so in per month normally is a restaurant is a little restaurant between 1 to 20 employees that they need just a research so they start a research over one month they find the right person they hire the person and they leave so they quit the turnover the chain rate is really high against in this part but it is a momentum item this means that after two or three months they come back because they need the service again otherwise it's completely different into chains franchisees how much do customers my question was how much do customers pay you per month or per year okay between 200 to 400 euros per month per singles a lot there's a lot is the number of the available researches that they got simultaneously so we got customers that paid 2 000 Euros per month as well but the average pays 200 Euros per month the the average actually is 350. 350 and how many customers are you working with today actually 95 to 10 is 95 opener 95 can I take 95 customers times 350 Euros per month you're doing about 33 200 Euros per month in Revenue absolutely more or less is um congratulations where were you exactly one year ago in terms of Revenue so we can calculate growth rate so one year ago we were making revenues 8 000 Euros oh well congrats on the congrats on the road and when did you launch the company what year Well we launched the company one week before the pandemia started of the covet so we spent our first six months without any Market uh so it's 20 20. yeah yes and we actually started making revenues at the uh during the hour of the 2021 and um have you done all this bootstrap or have you raised capital we raised Capital we raise Capital At the beginning from restaurant owners how much did you raise in what year at the beginning for in 2020 42 000 Euros in 2021 100 000 Euros in 2022 it's 200 250 000 Euros more or less that's great okay and um are you raising that money on convertible notes were they priced rounds uh so it was always inequity so directly directly into the company so how much Equity did you sell last year when you raised 250 000 so the the last round was about 2.8 million uh now we are closing this week another round uh for 265 000 Euros for 3.2 million 3.2 million that's post money valuation yes no that's spring man evaluation sorry post money evaluation means okay 3.5 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 because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is 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valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so I love that you're raising money directly from your customers that's obviously a great way to build a company do you come from the restaurant industry how did you have this idea um I was studying psychology actually um psychology of work that means human resources and the name while I was working as a waiter in different restaurants to pay my studies so I just mentioned the two things when my thesis was about how can we improve the recruiting in hospitality and talking with restaurants they started to ask to us if they if we were able to help them to find stuff but we were just students I mean we didn't have any expertise into recruiting or worrying people so we started me and a friend of mine as a game so we started making as Freelancers to help restaurants to find recruiters and at some point we decided we said okay maybe we should we should do some business on this not that we were completely unable to understand which was the rules of the of a business never at the startup never had people in our family working in the entrepreneurship board and we matched with two engineers an ID engineer and management engineer and then we started the company that's amazing so there's two of you two co-founders we are four actually the two engineers and Tube psychologists did you guys split Equity evenly at the start with that we started splitting the equity as interesting and so today how much of the company do investors own uh the the investors have the 20 of the company with the round that we're going to close the next week okay so they own 20 which means you guys each also own 20 the four co-founders today yes very cool talk to me about how you grow how do you get to a million dollars a year in Revenue what's your growth strategy so actually our growth strategy is every time um we we catch we collect leads of employers from basically from advertising so advertising is busy and we converted it really well I mean our cost per lead is something like three or four Euros and we used to convert one of five leads into customer that pay already so this means the back is something like 25 Euros yes if you include the cost of the sales so speak with the person accelerates something a bit more but still under 100 euros and they used to pay 350 on average per month so I mean in the first month we have already the money back the second thing is that obviously when you have more customers we need to scale the recruiters team because as I told you the customer success managers still manage all the the relationship with the customer so every single customer cannot open the age of positions or they um that they cannot sponsor their job positions alone they need someone in our team so every time that we put one sale and we grow a bit the the deposition the the the the the budget in advertising we grow the number of customer success managers so this is like a cycle that makes a lot of sense you mentioned churn is very high restaurants notoriously go out of business what is your turn today so our turn today is throughout an average 50 percent per month yeah but is is if we have a look to this into 12 months this is just 15 because as I told you the little restaurants who are opening a a monthly subscription then they charge because they fix the problem but they come back in after two months or three months or four months because they need another person yeah that makes sense so we can say that we have an exact chart rate we got different kinds of Chardonnay if you want to have a look to the monthly rate yes it is 30 if you want to see that the unnatural rate is about 10 50 and what's your team today how many people are full time we are 12 people and engineers there are three Engineers including the two co-founders um one of them yes because it's the NIT the other one is the management engineer so it's the CFO the group so no we got a front end in the back end and we are now adding the fourth the default one of the engineer very cool well listen uh we're out of time let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book uh talking about startups zero to one from zero to one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying a CEO that I'm following um hundreds I mean a lot of uh I don't know I don't I don't have one actually that's okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building rest world Google Calendar number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh eight and what's your situation married single kids I I live with the with my girlfriend but um we're still not married and I don't have kids still and how old are you Luca I'm 29 29 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old when I was 20 years old what I was wishing to do something you wish you knew something I wish I knew um when I was 20 years old if if it was when I was 15 years old I was I was studying the economy at a school at the at the at the ike school and then I never studied so I had to study two times now so this was the first one when I was 20 I don't know I was I was quite happy about my 20s so um I mean nothing there's nothing here the question is is there something you wish you knew when you were 20 you're saying there's nothing there's nothing you wish you knew when you were 20. okay yeah well I think yes I got one uh to know that I was able to create a startup because I was thinking to create a startup into the psychology sector and to have psychologists online and today is a cool Trend I don't know if I can say but anyway it's a it's a good Trend and there are companies raising thousands of hundreds of billions I had not a lot of money in in this sector and we had the idea but we we didn't have the execution so guys rest World dot a i dot i t launch in 2020 they're doing 33 000 Euros per month today in Revenue up from 8 000 just a year ago so nice growth rate uh they raised small seed rounds to be very Capital efficient from their customers most recently at 265 000 seed round at 3.2 million evaluation today investors own 20 of the company and the other four co-founders own the other 80 split evenly they've got 12 on the team today three Engineers looking to scale their servicing restaurant owners with between 1 and 20 employees who need to hire that's what they go to rest world to do and to use it for Luca thank you so much for taking us to the top thank you Nathan 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 remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their 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 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