How Revastaff CEO OJ Lopez grew Revastaff to $1.6M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest my next speaker is Filipino by birth and Architect by training a gamer by heart and a family man by commitment does a lot of public speaking and also humanitarian by choice study to architecture is now building revastaff.com real estate visuals that sell OJ you ready to take us to the top yes sir sir you are welcome yeah so I had you on about a year and a half ago you had about 20 customers doing it's charging 75 uh per month on average um and talk to me a little bit about uh the product back then I don't know if it's the same it was today but tell me what you're working on now today what's the product look like well the the core product is still the same uh we were still very much in the real estate but before we were we're servicing a lot of of Real Estate photographers but uh we pivoted and went and go after the real estate agents themselves so because we we were we were made aware that only 30 of real estate agents actually use photographers and you know 70 of that uh actually just shoot their own photos and and uh uh for for your audience to know we are actually doing post-production work for a lot of these uh real estate visuals from your photo editing video editing floor plans no 3B CGI things of that nature and so hey OJ are you a Marketplace today then are you SAS company we're still serving photographers uh but it's kind of pivoted uh to to going after really a SAS use case for for these Realtors going after the Realtors to to spend uh uh in our platform rather than going through a photographer and and take shots of the properties and things like that so OJ just to be clear you you if it's a real real estate uh folks Realtors can pay rabba staff to do all of the photo editing and everything for their new unit uh themselves you used to though connect them to a photographer and then relied on them to manage the photographer now you just do all the work internally yourself is that right yeah that's right we still do the Real Estate photographers as I mentioned earlier only about 30 of of Realtors actually use professional photographers so those there's a big chunk of realtors that doesn't use real professional real estate photographer so they take well there's their their visuals or their phone photos and things like that and then and uh so right now they would be able just to upload that directly to our platform and uh we're building a SAS model uh with that starting with with twenty dollars a month uh and using our platform uh for how many Realtors are paying 20 bucks a month our right now uh very few because we we still are like half you under 10 under five no we we have about 2 000 realtors that are paying us uh it's not that consistent hence we want them to subscribe to play because right now it's it's a paper service so they are in the pay as you go model but we have 2 000 of them doing pay as you go some of them spend 100 bucks some of them spent 10 bucks right so 2 000 of them they'll paid you last month at least a dollar uh last year last year for for one year uh from 20 this year there's about 2 000 of them who have gone through the platform and paid us something 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 valuations inside of your frowner 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 going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what 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 valuation 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 and how much do they pay you on average [Music] pay us like a hundred dollars a month OJ we have to simplify this or we're going to lose the audience I'm just I'm just trying to get a sense of how many customers are going to pay you something this year and what's your gonna be your total revenue this year all right so for this year we're gonna hit about 300K uh Revenue okay I can't I can't average out because it's fluctuates right so that's fine so 300 to stick with 300 000 in revenue from how many customers two thousand yeah around 2000 customers okay and and how many have already paid you to date how many of the two thousand what percent everybody yeah paid at least you know at least five bucks just to repeat this back to you I said how much are you gonna do this year and you said 300 000 in revenue from 2 000 customers my then natural question was well there's still two months left in the year so how many more customers are gonna pay over the next two months and you just said none they've already paid you right right so we have about about 2 000 customers that's already paying through the platform a hard order through the platform rather how many are going to order over the next two months it's really hard to say because it's gonna be winter right so so a lot of them probably won't order in the next two months because it's going to be winter time yeah got it all right I won't push that further so 300 000 this year and that's up from how much last year uh we we did almost 200 last year okay so 180 000 last year 300 000 this year if there's there's what I'm hearing you in your voice and sort of your body language is there's not a lot of predictability around this because they take photos one month and they don't take any the next month right so that makes it really hard for you to hire and build a business because there's no predictability or consistency right so how many full-time employees do you have today full time we have about uh five employees full-time and uh the freelance starts to work for us would would be about 30 Freelancers okay and and you mentioned did I think last time we spoke you said you were raising a pre-seed round but you hadn't closed did you end up closing that last year Yeah we actually just uh raced this year uh and then we raise uh our pre-seed this year how much did you raise 300 okay so 300 000 pre-seed and was that on a note yes that's right it's a convertible now got it so most pre-seed notes these days have a cap of like you know two or three million today is that what your cap was that's right okay so two million cap and why do you need the money why is this an expensive business to build Yeah so basically we will be building towards the SAS model and uh well we have actually uh investors that are very interested in us helping uh to build a web 3 model which is we have the capability with our 3D artists to do like metaverse stuff right so so the environments and things like that so they're looking into that as well and there's a lot of a lot of side projects going on and not just in real estate and they're looking into other verticals as well as long as about visualization no photos video 3D CGI with our artists uh here on the other side of the world can do uh that's something that we are actually looking forward to doing but there how many of the five employees are engineers oh just two there's two in the engineers and then uh uh two account managers handling sales and things like that...