How Roivenue CEO Pavel Šíma grew Roivenue to $1.4M revenue and 31 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is pavel shima he is the ceo of a data driven attribution provider helping market leaders and innovators like orange acts of vodafone and a whole host of up-and-coming e-commerce businesses increase their marketing roi and grow faster he's also a best-selling author marketing podcast producer and overall marketer lover his company is called roy venue all right pavel you ready to take us to the top sure sure thing yeah let's do this all right so the domain is actually spelled roi venue.com so what's the company doing how do you guys make money yeah actually that's no coincidence uh because we are all about roi so we help digital marketers and cmos to really understand what is their roi on the different channels that they're engaged with and how can they improve that right so uh the best the thing that we're most known for is something that's called data driven attribution and that's something that using machine learning helps you understand which touch points and which channels help you drive uh sales and revenue and what's like what's that average customer paying per month for this tool yeah so we're right now the rpoo is 1400 usd 1400 usd that's great and when did you launch the company what year well basically um the mvp was around since 2015 first clients were 2016 but we actually spun it off uh when we got some traction in january 2018 so there's there's multiple multiple starting points okay so okay 2018's when you spawn it off now are you majority shareholder no i'm not uh um uh because there is five of us actually there's five co-founders yeah holy mackerel how do you get anything done it's a long story man uh yeah i mean basically we we need to talk to each other and and uh and really yeah i mean i'm i'm the only business uh kind of dragon co-founder andy then we have a three technical co-founder section okay and so walk me through between you know spin out in 2018 and today um how many customers have we scaled to uh so basically right now we're at the 31 customers and we had 100 revenue growth from the previous year oh nice okay so 31 customers paying 1400 per month means you're doing about 43 400 today is that right uh it's about 50k yes about okay so what you have more customers or higher rfu maybe a little higher up we'll move these 450 or something okay okay got it and i know you're doing conversion live so i appreciate that um and if you're growing 100 year-over-year that means you were doing what about 25 000 exactly a year ago uh yeah yeah per month yeah do you remember what you closed out 2018 with in december of 2018 how much did you do do you know um i don't recall that that's okay that would have been like six months ago um walk me through growth right so how are you signing up these customers where are you finding them uh so basically we uh have we headquartered in prague actually and then we have a significant position in win within ce region and then we are on the top 15 attribution vendors list globally and just to give you an idea there's 12 u.s companies and then there's one from israel one from switzerland and then us right so we kind of build out from cee from products so we consider czech and slovak our home markets and then we slowly uh branched out to other markets so right now we're in warsaw also in uk and how we do a acquisition is is a situation to be self-really talking to clients doing both inbound and outbound and then personal meetings and and closing your deals what are you i mean but i mean those are very generic answers right you're doing things specifically in each of those categories sign up customers right so how are you i mean are you using things like linkedin search or conferences or how specifically are you finding new customers yeah true uh so about 40 percent is inbound and what i mean by inbound is conferences uh it's our content it's a demo request on our site what's the last conference you went to uh we tend to go to e-commerce conferences so it was uh and actually birmingham out of both places okay now do you pay for that placement or you just go as an attendee yeah we would usually rent a booth okay and how much did rx cost uh usually we are able to get a boot for a 1k or 2k so we we are pretty efficient on that that's good now how many leads will you get from that conference so we from a conference we will get about 100 leads but you so last quarter we actually got about 700 leads in total from all the activities that we were doing [Music] and we closed eight new clients okay that's great now so you'll get about close one client for every 100 leads yeah that's i mean that obviously works now have you done this all bootstrapped or if you raised capital so we for a long time we were bootstrapped with uh running from founders money etc and then last year actually in september we got uh seed round uh to x to have the capabilities and two new territories okay so how much have you raised total okay uh we raised uh i think it was 0.6 euros so that would be a 800 uh 800 000 yeah yeah yeah that's good now did you do that on a convertible note or did you sell equity no it was uh through equity okay good so like what percent of the company did you guys sell five percent ten percent uh it was like it was more than that uh i wouldn't disclose the precise number but it was more than that less than 50 though yeah okay just making sure all right and what's team size today uh we're about 25 30 people 25 rounds where most people in the head office obviously yep yep uh now walk me through churn what's your turn today look like uh we are in logo turn 2.5 which is pretty good uh uh i i assume your next question would be net expansion revenue what's revenue trend you know revenue turn uh so net um 2.5 logo is revenue turn equal to logo turn about 2.5 percent yeah you bought that yeah yeah and then um you must have listened to the show before because you know what i'm going to have because you know what i'm going to ask so net what do you have you listen yeah you know i listened to mission i'm actually a fan of your work man that's something i wanted to say uh and it's very impressive what you do all not only with the show once with the magazine your presence on the conferences the book obviously and all that i think you found a nice niche and and you're really expanding on that you're delivering value and you're building businesses around it yeah and i'm trying and i appreciate it i i know listen i'm having fun and it means a lot that you say that you know sometimes i feel um a little bit i'm just thankful that founders see the value in coming on the show because a lot of them will be like no he's just mean to ceos and he beats them up but honestly the reason i try and get the data that i get is because i can then help ceos like all private equity firms all vc firms listen to this show so i can help the founders get more of what they want so i sometimes struggle with getting that balance right but will you find a way how to give it structure that's nothing really important well i appreciate that so uh so okay walk me through net revenue retention uh it's about 100 uh but um it might actually go down this year um because our product is not very expandable i would say uh there there's obviously features that we can upsell on and tears we can we can push clients on and i think really need to work more on that going forward and and i mean to get a new customer paying 14 15 1600 bucks per month do you know what your fully weighted cac is yeah uh it depends so in our whole market uh it's only about three 4k really usd uh so the the payback period is only less than three months which is awesome and great but in the new territories where we're actually heavily investing the money that we raised and where we didn't have that many acquisitions yet uh the the the numbers are much uh worse so their the the payment back here will be about 20 months uh so we need to uh wait and see if the new south suburban synthetics will deliver right and once they start delivering what they need to be delivering then we should stabilize and um you know the idea is to get to get to a similar numbers like on our home market uh in in a year or two as well yeah that's good talk to me about profitability so are you guys i imagine you're burning because you just raised capital how much are you burning per month uh so we are burning about 50k maybe 50 70k something okay so that's good that means you have like 15 16 months of runway assuming you do no revenue right yeah yeah yeah plenty of runway uh which means so if you're burning 50 grand and your revenue is 50 grand as well that means your kind of total expenses are about 100 grand per month uh yeah a little north of that somewhere about there that's good very good all right um any plans to raise additional capital here in the near future or no yeah actually we will be probably raising a a bridge round uh before we do series a mm-hmm and how much of that bridge around before uh probably another 600 um 700 let's see and what do you hope to raise that at like valuation-wise 6 million pre-money 7 million we actually want to do convertible so we'll kind of push that question further down the road and we'll see it series a but series a uh we...