How Sastrify CEO Sven Lackinger grew Sastrify to $31.1M revenue and 70 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is sven leckinger he's the seat co-founder at sashtrify the leading procurement service for sas subscriptions before the company he had already founded the parking startup evo park which was acquired in 2017. heals a degree from whu and worked for goldman sachs the bcg and baines then you're ready to take us to the top yeah of course thanks for having me so what you guys had too many subscriptions to manage at evo park and you said my next company i'm going to solve this problem is that how it works yeah it's pretty much exactly what got us started so my co-founder is the tech guy i'm the finance guy that's i guess exactly where we had the link and then uh once our past company got acquired even our acquirer which was a much larger company at the same issues so that's kind of like what got us started last year um tell me real quick let's just close up the evo park story did you bootstrap that business before you exited or no no no we actually raced we were the first ever uh startup that porsche the car manufacturer invested in um so there was a lot of like uh yeah more or less corporate we see three angel rounds and then we got acquired back in 2018 um with one of the leading like parking manufacturers um they basically handle everything that you can imagine that's in the car park so payment machines stuff like that and we were like the logical addition to that and so how much total did you raise that business we raised um like single digit million back in the day so it's like different like smaller agent rounds and just like yeah not more than like two or three million in total so okay quite a quite a easy easy cast there and how many years like when did you launch that business before you sold it uh we launched it in back in 2014 um so it took us about four years to lax it um and what did you end up selling the business for that i can't tell unfortunately but it's uh was it enough money for you to take some to put into sastra yeah we basically took like everybody took money off the table and i think it also made a lot of sense for the for the acquirer um but uh yeah it was i always like to say it was no facebook uh so that's obviously what we are we're rather up to now but you sold for more than three million dollars cash up front otherwise everyone you'd be stuck okay great so tell us about that uh you bring your co-founder you bring the your same team from there now into this new business did you guys split equity 50 50 in sastra fire you did something weird no we actually i don't know i'm not sure if it's weird so we were like four guys at evo park uh so all of the other two got five percent each transestrify um and we did the same thing with their new business um so we kind of like cross-invested each five percent at the beginning um so the original cap table was basically 45 45 and then five uh twice for the other guys okay got it so original at saturday is you 45 your co-founder 45 and then the other 210 yeah yeah okay very cool and then tell us okay so tell us about the business right so who are your customers who are you helping here so we basically start with any tech company that's above 100 people that's more or less what we look for so 100 to a couple thousand people um really anybody in that tech space obviously um as we're based in germany like most of our customers around europe right now singapore and some other asian countries and now we're basically building that um towards the rest of the world and what's the business model what are these companies paying you an average per month to use the tag so we uh suv is around like 25 25k more or less um so we have basic sas model that's tiered upon the the total spend of sas they have um and basically what we do is we help them really end to end on the process in terms of finding the right solutions comparing them getting the right prices for them actually having a structured buying process so how to bring software into the enterprise and then in the end like also managing the contracts over the long term right because i think for for sas the the real interesting part is you also like what do i have when you switch up for renewal to really like have a long-term perspective on that um so that's kind of like how we you can think of us as a virtual procurement department uh for sas and so is that flat fee to twenty thousand dollars per year no matter how much you save them on tools yeah it's actually um so what we found is i mean it's obviously quite the young companies about 12 months old uh so nothing is launched 20 20. yeah so we launched like i think we we kicked off the i think we actually launched february this year more or less but we we hired the team around like november last year so that's kind of like when we when we got started with the whole thing okay so so and tell me about the first customer you brought on um yeah the first customer is actually right in the sweet spot for our customers right now um so it's around like three four hundred people by now um yeah typically they name them sven are they comfortable being published no that's good it was ambos a company from berlin they do a very like famous uh training app for for uh um medicine students um like crazy among really cool company um and they like yeah basically we started with them figuring out on how they buy software and how to optimize that and you keep mentioning number of team members but do you price against number of team members or or you know total amount of you know total software spend in 2020. yeah we reprice against total software spend um but then again it's not like you can't pinpoint it down to the euro or the dollar right and that's why we always try to give her because if you if we ask prospects what's your total software spent um then the typical answer is i have no idea um and if i ask and okay how many people are you then it's much easier to categorize what is don't name this customer obviously but today what's your highest acv customer like what's your highest plan uh ron 60k 60k okay and so for them you're doing everything full suite like how much do they spend on software annually millions like millions okay yeah but then they are like yeah again uh i think what we found is that it's too cheap that we are too cheap still which is a good thing because typically like within like the first couple of couple of weeks actually um we we uh we saved them like three four times of that okay so almost was your first company you've got large enterprise accounts and sixty 6000 acvs already how many total customers are you serving today around 70 bit more than seven seven zero yeah seven zero so it's been quite a year for us yeah i was gonna say this is probably significant i mean can i take 70 times 2 000 bucks a month on average i mean that's 140 grand a month in revenue pretty much that yeah oh wow and what were you exactly a year ago do you have nothing yeah that's pretty much it so we had like one or two test customers um but we really kicked it off like from january february this year okay so i mean you don't have to tell you this you're from the space i mean that's super impressive growth did you do this bootstrap or did you raise no we raised um a precede in uh november last year when we hired a team and then we raised the seed round uh three months ago um of about seven million dollars to now basically yeah just grow all over europe um that's kind of like the next step tell me real quick about sort of why you chose to do this way so the pre-seat around last year how much was that for 1.3 million dollars and was that sort of on pretty standard terms like safe 5 million cap password deal yeah yeah so we i think we're like we did a price round that a bit more than should should be like six million dollars well you priced it right on the start yeah we prices right on the start well why there's like some yeah there's some like german applications to that in terms of yeah subsidies and whatever you get so there's like it wasn't too big of a difference and as we know like most of the investors we onboarded were actually investors from from evo park um as well because we just loved to work with them um so it was also like yeah super easy structures and everything already they said sven you're young we backed your first business you must let us write a check in your next business yeah everybody was uh quite keen on backing that as well okay so six million evaluation last year and then the seven million you just raised what valuation was that at uh yeah about 27 free something like that what was that process like i mean would you change anything did it feel like a fair evaluation um i think it was a decent one so we didn't push it too much we were rather looking for the right partner and one thing that we also did which was not smart was we raised in july um which which i cannot recommend to every anyone because apparently people love to do holidays in august um so that was kind of like uh the yeah the only drawback but in the end we ended up with a partner that we want um with hv uh from from berlin in munich and uh yeah they're great like really great...