RevOS Revenue (2024)

guys he sold his first company elastic. and now is building rev os. to help you do things like customer scoring his his temp for customer scoring went viral they got a thousand leads from that and that really springboarded them to their six first paying customers that pay on average 500 bucks a month they're doing 3,000 a month day in Revenue totally bootstrapped wrote their first line of code in November and now plan to scale from here we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is or not zubar off he's a Serial founder and CEO with a successful exit now on a second Venture building an AI Revenue operations system at rev. it's his second interview uh on the show and we're excited to jump in first company was elastic. or not you ready to take us to the top oh yes really happy to be here again I'm excited to have you close the book on elastic because you've been on many times over the years so did you sell the company you shut it down what happened yeah we sold it we sold it to a strategic buyer it's like a publicly traded company here in Germany and uh they acquired it to really build up product expertise as a product revenues obviously more high quality or at least perceived as high quality on the public market and that was basically the plan for that yeah and this sale occurred I believe in 2021 right yeah it's quite a while ago two years ago I think we completely exited it and we did a little bit of burnout at the end but we stayed till the end and then also exited successfully did you keep any Equity because the reporting said that coia AG acquired 51% of the shares did you guys keep their 49% or what happened to those no no we we're completely out me and my co-founder eager we completely out oh I see okay okay got it and then the earnout was for what a year two years uh three years three years okay did you earn you know a lot of Founders they sell their company they say Nathan how should I think about the earnout am I actually G to make it or not well you've done it did you actually make what you expected uh yes yes yes I mean it wasn't easy earn obviously some risks right and uh the many things changed right uh the company also grew and but there's also different different you know once you exited the company right you're no longer in a driver seat and this change obviously the Dynamics right it's no longer your compan no not not not anymore your baby right and there obviously sometimes you make decisions which are not it couldn't really affect in the in the new role let's say so yep well you were this wasn't a small company I think you'd scaled it to five or six million bucks of Revenue right so I guess uh is that right or no it's I don't think no it's I think the number is correct we do not publish or we don't announce the official numbers on that but it's smaller I thought we okay so you were you were smaller than five million in an ARR okay yes all right let's move forward to revos did you learn anything out it like did you learn about the idea or come up with the idea for revos while you were at elastic or how did you come with the idea you know me and a cofounder at lastic we were like engineers and I think you also have a number of Engineers here on your show who are like startup Founders entrepreneurs and every entrepreneur believe like so that we just need to build a great product and then they will come you know but what we learned also the sales is actually very very important part of the exercise but what we also got to learn that sales is actually it's not it's not an art you know some people believe like okay you need to really hire a great salesperson and then he will go and sell everything you give to him or her but the sales is just like a process it's not a it's not an art it's a science and this was like a um a part of what we now believe in re and what we actually bring as reos to the market because we see this Revenue operations and this Revenue process building is essential for every company and this is actually where we're going in with our new product are you pre Revenue share do you have customers we do have customers we actually wrote the first line of code in November last year um and uh right now we have uh I think total around about six paying customers oh great we did this year around about 200,000 Euro that's great um how much monthly requiring Revenue are you doing today I think we are currently AR on about 30k so out of 200k we did this year 30k is is the current okay got it so 30 30,000 USD per month across six so this is these are large contracts with these six customers no no no so 30 30,000 ARR an annual got it it's less okay got it so so six customers paying on average 400 a month something like that 4400 $500 a bit more but it's like you know the variance is bigger so this age number but it's more than so actually the the the variance would be bit higher yeah but this is I think the right the right direction 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 287 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 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 founder paath 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 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 realtime valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22% 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 the 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 valuations and what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 founder path.com products SLV valuations or if you go to founder path.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 okay but generally you're doing $3,000 a month which is about 30,000 or $35,000 of ARR okay if that's the case today but you said you did this whole year you did over $200,000 how did you do $200,000 if today you're only doing three grand a month um we're also applying our learning from the previous company remember the saying from I think Paul Graham who said like do things with Del not scale uh we are working such on such an such an urgent problem for every company so we actually charge our customers for the for the additional provider for additional Services we actually deliver to them and they're happy to pay us this money so you did you you sold some Consulting and services this year which is how you generate Rue okay what did those look like did were they required if they paid you services to then buy the recurring software on the back end um it's actually transformative like like many also companies on your podcast right who are actually combining this agency and software and transforming between them we follow this path I think this is also a very good path because first of all we learn real problems you know where people pay real money and then we replace our services with software as would software along the way yeah no that makes really good sense what kinds of things and questions are you asking during the services delivery process to identify what software to build oh oh that's um basically very simple it's like what is the most precious problem we actually wanted to solve now and what are the kpis you want to see that the problem is successfully solved and then we try to build a software and also build the systems and infrastructure to deliver the let's say the solution as fast as possible and then make sure the solution is can be produc ified so it's not like you know one off or One customer but really like a repetitive product sell so what are they what are you hearing when you ask them what's the kpi you care about what are they saying oh that very very good very good question so many people like asking us okay how can we how can we sell more how can we increase efficiency and Effectiveness in our sales customer success and account management processes how can we make sure that our salese know exactly what to do for with a customer at hand with a deal at hand with a lead at hand and with a customer existing customer for customer success and what are the best possible actions they should do now with that particular customer to make sure that e as opportunity is close one or customer does not turn or customer buys more of our stuff yep how did you land Henry shine simplifier f24 how did you get them as customers um mixture of like Outreach so um LinkedIn um I think LinkedIn Network um some of automations like you know like Apollo I think is very good Tool uh we use it a lot hopspot is also very good support as well as a Content actually so we um we actually did a lot of interviews in the beginning of reos and based on this interviews we created like a a spreadsheet for customer Health scoring I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept it's like how to score the customer relationship like in numbers and this customer Health scoring spreadsheet is now the most widely used customer SC Health score model on the internet so like it's downloaded over like 2,000 times already where can we view that oh you just go to revos Ai and then just scroll down you can see it over there and download it there's like companies like Microsoft what is it though is it the customer the customer Health score course uh no it's customer Health score template template it's in your footer yeah okay got it let's dive deep into this for a sec so this is just a I mean it's a it's a glorified effectively Google sheet but you're saying like how did you so you build this and then you post it on LinkedIn and then it went viral and then you put a landing page up or what was the order of operations correct Yeah we actually build the landing page we did a lot of interviews with customer success people then I build the landing page and put the knowledge into this there's like a over 60 different criterias how you can score your customer Health scoring and then it just went viral you know like downloads like downloads every day over the last year or so you know how many total downloads oh I don't actually I don't have an exact number but it's definitely above 1,000 interesting so is this your number one lead gen Source right now um it is yes it is I think this is like a starting of the conversation and there we see like intent and also people when download it we reach out there's a sequence behind that and then we'll definitely get into the conversation yeah this makes a ton of sense okay so six C customers today you you're using these landing pages to get new customers how do you go from six customers to a thousand customers yeah that's a very good question um we are currently experimenting with search engine optimization you know we are big Believers in this like you know validating and testing hypothesis fast fast and cheaply and this is actually where we now invest our resources and time to really see like if we could possibly um generate some um compounding effect on the infrastructure and also resources we actually deliver and additionally to that we um launched our product which is now available I think we launched it on Dublin by the way where we last time at um we uh launched it on the conference and uh and also open the registrations for it so actually we have like a free plan where everyone can build its own customer Health score like a minutes you took the C customer Health score concept and then Al also launched a udemy course how is the Emy course doing oh um that's a good point um we actually did like a interesting pre-sell to that I think we earn maybe some few thousand dollar of Revenue with pre-sell of this course however the course itself I would not do it again to be honest because it's actually mostly um it's very hard to promote it it's actually not very workable in a sense and we're actually going to close it or do it for free or give it give away it for free on UD we um a German company and UD has some very complicated taxation forms we need to fill and all the revenue there is like maybe few hundred bucks right now so we're just like hey you know what we just better open it and just maybe push it on our website instead of UD did you get leads from from UD me or no um we are not actually legally allowed to approaches people who are buying a course in Legally uh in udmi um we didn't expected that to be when we started this discussion uh but I think the content we generated is very valuable so we're definitely going to generate more leads with this content you're in the HubSpot Solutions partner program do you get leads from HubSpot uh not yet actually we just launched uh last week um a new program where we um delivering um like a customer success Solution on top of HubSpot uh we see this as a significant white spot in the market where people are buying themselves like a second CRM like totango or zero or plan hat you know and then fight with the data integration challenges and all this kind of mess which is created by second CRM in in operation and we believe that we can just deliver the best possible experience out of hopspot and this is actually the new thing who is doing this the best I mean you mentioned turn zero there's a lot of companies that sort of say hey score your customers but who do you think is doing this the best right now um I think there's this a good question yeah so the Ros is definitely on top but um I think there's definitely um very few players right now on the market which actually can do it um scientifically proven good you know the problem with health score is like it's very much biased right in the sense that when you build it you just build it on top of your gut filling and very few people can definitely validate it and you need some data science expertise to validate it but uh we see a lot of interesting approaches definitely from companies like vital um and totango is doing a very good job in content uh they are very very very nice but tatango is rather old system you know it's bit clunky you know it's developed like M 10 years ago I think you had like a founder of tangu here yeah um they doing an excellent drop in in this like educating Market but what we see there's definitely a merge between this customer acccess management system as a separate system like a separate Silo and the revenue stack in general so we see many companies once they advance in the development they establish a revenue function on top of like individual silos therefore just individual Solutions making less and less sense yep we're not we're out of time here but some quick questions for you did you raise Capital here are you bootstrapped uh we're completely bootstrapped actually it's all funded by my own money we love that okay let's wrap up with the famous five number one your favorite uh your favorite book oh it's actually I have two books for you I prepared uh first one is Thinking Fast thinking slow this is also the same as I mentioned on the previous interview oh like and the second is never split the difference from Chris WS yep number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um I really like what people what guys um what Alex and Bastian from telonis are doing I'm sure you didn't have them here in the interview but this are like one of the most interesting startups from Germany which I saw um and I spoke with with basan like a few few weeks ago in New York um really really interesting company number three what's your favorite online tool for building Revo OS uh we're using notion a lot also notion AI now so it's very nice very nice tool love it number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh about six about and situation married single kids uh still married still three kids but oldest already out so he's studying in Munich right now ah amazing and how old are you uh 43 43 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 um I think what I wish to it always takes longer than you think that would be like my my vice VI advice to myself for 20 yeah guys he sold his first company elastic. and now is building rev. to help you do things like customer scoring his his temp for customer scoring went viral they got a thousand leads from that and that really springboarded them to their six first paying customers that pay average 500 bucks a month they're doing 3,000 a month day in Revenue totally bootstrapped wrote their first line of code in November and now plan to scale from here we'll see what happens next we not thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you n one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 p.m. 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 backend dashboards their expenses their revenue CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1:00 p.m. central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m. central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe 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