How Revastaff CEO OJ Lopez grew 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 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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 and how many Freelancers have like photograph photograph editors have you used over the past year to do all the work of editing uh OJ hello hello yep OJ we can hear you fine OJ there guys as OJ is reconnecting here again this is one of those models a lot a lot of predictability but has 2 000 customers that have paid at least a dollar this year potentially built an opportunity here to build a SAS company but he's got to get more engineering resources two Engineers not enough to build an MVP here so so uh let's see if we can ask him more questions about that if he reconnects OJ there all right OJ you good so my question is my question was I mean obviously you're trying to Pivot more into a SAS model but it's hard to do that with two engineers and it's really hard to build software that can edit photos right what's the song I don't understand what the software opportunity is here yeah so so so so basically it's it's still very Outsourcing related so so people that has jobs there in the US they would visually Outsource the less hence the platform is a very basic ordering platform right oh got it so it's not software to edit photos it's software to manage contracts to get those 2 000 realtor exactly yes that's right that makes a lot of sense okay and I cut you off what were you saying yeah so so the the model right now is to convert the users that we have to use the platform us they're they're centralized workflow management tool that means that they would you know pay us 20 bucks a month just for the privilege to use the software whether to hire editors or even use the the software as a a media storage so instead of of of uh paying uh all these uh uh storage they would just be able to store all their media files in our platform and then as an add-on they can actually Outsource that to the network of artists that we have so that's going to be the play moving forward hence it would be more predictable and and that's our pitch to our investors that's that's what what we're going to be working on in building that model understood how much Capital you're burning per month right now uh not so much not so much probably about 20K a month okay does that make you nervous you've only raised 300K which means you have you know 10 months of Runway 11 months of Runway yeah well well we we're actually also Revenue generating so the 20K burn is actually just building up that platform and then sorry when I say burn I mean net burn not not all your expenses what what how much is your bank going down every month well it's not really going down because we're actually generating Revenue okay there's plenty of companies that generate Revenue but are not profitable so their Bank goes down right so what do you mean what do you mean I'm asking you are you profitable or not not if you're generating Revenue no no no no no no no we're we're at zero we're at zero so every month we're not burning and also we're not profitable okay got it so do your preceding investors I'll just give you 300K say OJ spend faster we just give you this money you're not investing it that's right so so they're actually investing uh so that we would be able to build that platform that that SAS model OJ you just said your break even which means the 300K you just got on the pre-seed round is now sitting in your bank doing nothing how are you not getting pressure from those investors saying OJ burn money invest the 300K we just gave you yeah that's right that's right that's why we were actually we just recently raced that's uh we haven't burned anything yet so the 300K is still in the bank yeah that's right that's right all right well we're rooting for you we hope you use it to grow in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book still email all right number two is there a CEO you're following or studying number three what's your favorite online tool for building revastaff uh recently HubSpot it's been very helpful number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight hours all right in situation married single kids married two kids and 36 today yes that's right all right last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. guys rev establish Johnson 2018 they're helping real estate agents get their photos edited faster quicker and more efficiently over 2 000 agents have paid them at least a dollar over the past year they'll do 300 000 in Revenue this year up from 200 000 last year just close to 300 000 seed ran out of two million Cap all the money's still in the bank as OJ decides where to reinvest it team of five today gonna double down on software moving forward OJ thanks for taking us to the top thanks Nathan appreciate it 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 the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to count on them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is oj lopez he's a filipino by birth architect by training salesman by vocation catholic by faith and family man by commitment humanitarian by choice after three heartbreaking business failures in his 20s in the construction construction and outsourcing industry he founded revastaff.com in 2018 and now things are growing nicely oj you ready to take us to the top yeah sure well thank you so much for for inviting me on your show nate has been serving so what is what is revastafin and how are you guys making money yeah so rambostop is a two-sided marketplace we have photographers in the platform and we supply them with the post-production staff like editors and floor plan artists and cgi artists and things of that and mostly these are people from the philippines vietnam and india and most of these real estate photographers are in the us so we have about about 20 photographers in the platform and about 30-ish editor staff on the editor side and the drafter side things like that so one side of the marketplace are the photographers and editors who is on the other side of the marketplace who's hiring them the the other side of the market is the the u.s uh side real estate photographers on the other side of the market is the editors from the philippines vietnam in india and then we just match uh the requirement of these editors whether it's going to be photo editing in photoshop or drafting floor plans uh and at the end the end user is actually the real estate agent who would market all these properties so we're kind of in enabling uh the the photographers to streamline their process to outsource their post-production work so that they would be able to shoot more houses during the day and and we take care of all the back-end stuff for them and yeah and we we charge them for per photo per floor plan per render uh and then it's just half and half for for the the guys on on the back end so we take a commission out of that let's use a specific example a us photographer who who's photographer taking pictures of real estate here in the us takes a picture they want that one picture edited by one of your editors in the philippines what did you charge them for that one picture to edit it's a dollar retail so now if you're a new customer we we charge you one dollar per photo and each house is usually like 30 to 40 photos each house so it's it's about 30 to 40 bucks for the photos and then if they would want to add floor plans with that it's ten dollars per floor plan usually three three floors per house or three plus so the average would be around 50 bucks okay and last month how many photos were processed through your system uh last month about 5 000 photos oh wow okay and how many floor plans well so so that's uh that's about five divided by Currently serving 20 customers uh i don't have the number on top of my head but it's usually about 400 houses 400 to 500 houses each month so 400 to 500 floor plans yeah that's about right or times two of that so it seems average about two fourths two floors per house one thousand floor plans Monthly recurring revenue got it a thousand a thousand floor plans at ten bucks a pop is ten grand a month in revenue plus 5 000 photos at a dollar each that's another five grand so you're doing about fifteen thousand dollars a month in revenue yeah and then plus the va side of things because uh we do have supply them with virtual assistant uh and then the 3d renders and things like that and 3d virtual tours vr tours that we do also the editing so it would round about 20 22. and and this is impressive i mean you know getting both sides of the marketplace is really difficult how did you sign up 20 photographers in the u.s well it just started with one and i was just the one making the floor plan for that guy and that guy uh started to hire uh photographers under him and ask who is that guy how did you know him uh it's the upwork so we started like a freelance gig uh just me i have an architectural background so i just do the floor plans for for for that photographer and then we offer it and then when when we have like enough team photographers i mean enough team of editors now a few photographers turned and now i wanted to uh to to give more jobs to those editors so i just started marketing by myself called calling no photographers in the u.s and and uh don't call emailing them doing you know facebook groups uh marketing things like that and then that's where we got a few accounts in new york few accounts in in north carolina and now we have a new client actually very exciting stuff uh just last week we just landed the client in california that would like triple our number overnight but they have about 44 photographers in in their in their system we're serving like four cities but that's pretty brand new so just keep it back to make sure i understand you were freelancing on upwork saying marketing your skills to edit floor plans one person found you and then before you know it he's referring a bunch of other people and you take it off and you start building this marketplace yes for sure yeah that's what happened very recently we we started our own platform i just got a cto about six seven months ago and built the ninja rava staff that app which now streamlines all the processes before because before we were using third-party software like dropbox for ftp uh google calendar for scheduling so right now it's going to be all in one place streamline all the processes from when the photographer shot the house and then upload that on our platform and then the editors will be able to get that on the other side of stuff and then edit it on photoshop or lightroom and and re-upload that and then uh just one click it will now be sent to the realtor which is the end client and then the end client would now ask uh would now close the job or accept the job from the photographer the photographer photographer yeah i totally understand a product that makes complete sense to me um to understand that the size of the phone you built on upwork can you quantify that in 2020 how much revenue did you personally do the upwork well upwork was just 2018 and then everything was uh 2018. 2018 we did about 20 20 grand in revenue uh but we started mid of 2018 and then 2019 we doubled that uh uh 40 grand and then uh 20 20 uh within about 120k all the upwork no no all uh organic like cold calling cold email facebook groups okay let but i just want to get this story here so you you launched in 2018 on upwork you did 20 grand in sales you then saw an opportunity you moved yourself off of work launched your level staff and you did approximately 40k in 2019 and 120 grand in 2020. that's right i see what do you think you'll do here in 2021 uh we're we we project about 100 250 k but then with the new client coming in as i said we triple our our head count overnight what's that again what's headcount today uh we have about 30 freelancers on our platform how many are full-time employees building row at south every everything is is contractor but about about 20 of them are working full-time but uh they are considered contractor not as full-time employees okay how many of the 20 are engineers uh we have one cto and one guy helping him out so just a couple so okay so what are what are the team people on the team doing if they're not engineering uh they're the ones doing the work photoshop and doing no no won't include the marketplace that'd be like uber calling all their drivers employees which is not the case i'm just curious how many people are on your team building rubber stuff not the editors not the photographers right all right gotcha so so we have one cto and then one guy helping him out like a product project manager kind of thing and then a couple of va's so like four people the four okay got it that's great and have you bootstrapped us or raised Bootstrapped yeah we've been bootstrapping it's very hard to race in the philippines man so i'm being on your show hopefully you will be able to get some american dollars coming over here why why do you want to raise capital well the market is so huge i mean we're just serving about 2 000 realtors and there's about 2 million realtors in the us and we can leverage obviously uh what we have here in the philippines because though our our people are are doing full-time work and they are getting paid american dollars and it's still like below minimum wage u.s but here no it's like tries uh three times the the minimum wage here so it's it's it's uh uplifting their quality of life and we saw this opportunity that we've been able to to you know scale this to many uh too many filipinos vietnamese and in in people from india who can just go to the platform have like a full-time uh career just making photos and editing photos all day long and they will be able to to have no quality of life working from home and things of like that and and during the pandemic obviously we have like people just saying yeah we are life savers no we got uh uh we got laid off from from our you know our companies and then we have we saw this platform and now we were able to take care of our families and things like that so so given that opportunity i i would be good because we're already earning a 200 k uh us and living in the philippines it's like you know we're living like kings right but uh and living by the beach and things like that but seeing this this opportunity that this can really scale uh with uh also working with photographers i don't mean to cut you off but again i want to get a lot in a very short amount of time so so if you did like if you had another fifty thousand dollars today where would you spend it um marketing um what specifically are you talking ads or what yeah yeah ads and sales people so right now it's just me just me like call calling closing deals uh so maybe if i would be able to duplicate myself like three ojs that that would you know uh what would that cost you in the philippines to hire another oj um i would start with probably just a thousand dollars a month for for somebody to to like do all those things that i can do yeah i would look at doing this deal but but let me ask you a question before i do this if someone wrote you a fifty thousand dollar check how much equity would you going to give them um we we did uh ask we basically did a shark tank show here in the philippines and we asked for 100k for 10 percent okay so so value business at a million bucks which seems fair it's about 4x revenue uh currently now did you deal there or no no no because they they wanted more and it's not it's not like a start up here so that's why the ecosystem here in the philippines is not mature enough that they would want more equity on their side and uh the deal was kind of like getting us as in-house team of the real estate companies something like that yeah we've already done deals with founders in malaysia and the philippines i believe that if you're building a sas company it doesn't matter if you're in silicon valley or the beach in the philippines a sas company is a sas company um i love what you're building so the way we think about a deal like yours is we take your monthly occurring revenue 15 grand multiply times three so it's about forty five thousand dollars if you go to founderprep.com today and sign up we can essentially get you that in under under a day so so i'd love to look at that we don't take any equity i mean it sounds like the valuation you just asked for you'd be willing to give me five percent of the business for 50 grand i'd give you 50k you'd have to pay it back over a year but i would take no equity wow wow wow yeah definitely we're going to do that deal all right well let's talk we'll talk more about it after the show so so you hire sales people to scale you um how do you sign up more are the editors all fully booked right now do you need to onboard more editors or no yeah well the market is actually just a facebook group a lot of editors out there just looking for jobs so if you have like overflow work i would be spammed by editors just asking for work yeah great so you you really that's how the marketplace is solved you really need to get more photographers in the real estate space using your platform that's right because most most photographers especially the ones that are starting it out they would want to edit their own photos but uh we want to tell them that you know you can actually get more work and just outsource editing so if you they are doing like one or two house a day and they could get like four or five and and you know get rid of all the back-end stuff and have ram staff take care of that for them how many of the 20 photographers put at least one picture or floor plan through you each month like the past six months in other words is it sticky do they keep using you yeah yeah every time the photographer would use us uh they would use us at first they would use us for floor plans because they want to edit their own photos and then they would my question is though is it sticky are they coming back every month and giving you floor plans and new photos yeah for sure for sure so we just started with i said one photographer then five then ten then right now it's about twenty amazing you're building something special man let's let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book i'll go old school uh e-myth number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh right now it's going to be elon musk number three what's your favorite online tool for building rubber south uh ravastaff.com besides your own uh dropbox number four how many hours of sleep you get every night ah 17 and what's your situation married single kids uh wife two kids very cool and how old are you i'm 35 35 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. i was 20 that everything will be okay guys he started on upwork did 20 000 in revenue in 2018 helping real estate agents edit their floor plans and their pictures he then built his own platform revistapp.com did 120 grand in 2020 on truck to 250k this year in 2021 has about 20 photographers that are spending on average 75 dollars per month on the platform so 15 grand in mrr ask for 100 grand for 10 of the business ultimately turned down we'll see if we get a deal done on founder path oj thanks for taking us to the top thanks ethan appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 arpu 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 pm 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 the 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 the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan laca.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya