How Scalestack CEO Elio Narciso grew Scalestack to $1.4M revenue and 12 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is elio narciso he's building a tool called scale stack dot io he's passionate about technology and making the world better and having fun while doing it the tool is a b2b data platform to help you accelerate your sales elio you ready to take to the top yeah sure all right you bet yeah but you're on data is a tough space and everyone buys everyone else's data it seems like it like repackages it do you have any unique data source you're using uh i would say that um it's not just data it's tools that we build on top of data so for instance uh we use like uh sources like uh linkedin crankspace pitchbook but what we do is that we build tools on top of them so for instance for our customers we listen to their ideal customer profiles um we model it and then we put like a scoring system on top so uh you know like the ideal customer pro profile provides the inputs uh the data sources uh provide the output but they are then scored with our proprietary tools very cool and so what are customers paying for this on average per month uh most of our customers pay between two thousand and six thousand dollars per month and do they stick they stick yeah we usually have like a three-month paid trial um so that they can like you know we both like uh see if the model makes sense for them and like uh and you know sort of like uh they can check if the icp gets uh matched and then they switch to an annual contract i would say like you know um 90 of our uh three-month trial uh convert to annual and very cool but very little sure how many customers today today we have 12 customers um and i would say that there are like two groups of customers one is like um nasdaq listed type of technology companies that uh have like uh already experienced at-scale massive pain points in having their sales people uh you know search for data on linkedin crunch phase and so much that uh there are stats that says that uh 60 of salespeople time is spent researching and so they need to solve this problem at scale the problem of finding like targeted account and prospect list um and so i would say like large tech companies already ipo'd and then the other group is the series b type of startup that is already starting to get like obviously product market fit but most more than that like they're starting to structure their b2b sales ops um and so those are the two groups to where we're having lots of success typically tech companies and like uh companies that sell to you know to other enterprises so can i take those 12 customers times 2 000 a month you're doing about 25 grand a month right now in revenue it's actually higher than that uh we are doing uh almost 40k okay 40 000 bucks so almost half a million dollars a year run rate that's great when did you launch the business we launched uh last year early 2020. okay and what did you finish last year with in terms of mrr last year it was only like around uh 9k i would say so 9 000 and monthly revenue in december this past december right right wow this is great growth i mean you've almost 4x over the past eight seven eight months did you bootstrap this or raise capital totally bootstrapped that's great congratulations yeah thank you yeah my co-founder and i have experienced the pain point that we are trying to solve but skills like at other companies uh and so yeah and did you guys just put equity 50 50 yep that's very nice of you uh we you know like we feel that uh even like growing the company forward like you know transparency and equity in the form of like you know being equitable to everybody uh are two key values that we want to continue so like indeed we are this year we're looking into profit sharing for our employees how many employees total uh we have eight people right now and if you did launch profit sharing people always wonder how would you actually structure that how are you thinking about it yeah i mean we haven't figured it out yet because last year we weren't profitable but um you know like uh i would say that uh i would i would create like tears this is what i'm thinking um tears of profit sharing depending on like uh you know like how long the person has been at the company so like how long has been able to impact the business and then company performance measure by what measure by like you know the metrics that we look at are like uh renewals meaning like uh switching from the trial to the annual contract um or like extensions or like upselling um so all of those are the um metrics that we look at what is churn today well i mean since uh inception i mean like in having these 12 customers one customer has left on a revenue basis though how much churn is that that was uh one of the smallest customers so what we've learned from that is that um like uh companies that are like uh you know sea stage to seri series a stage so they haven't yet hit product market fit are like uh really tough um how much revenue are they paying a grand a month two grand a month more yeah less than two less than okay guys so grand a month is you know what you were at that time like 10 20 grand so okay interesting and do you have expansion revenue and if so what do you upsell metrics do you like upsell against number of seats number of leads something else uh it's a combination of uh seeds for our chrome extension features um and then it's like on top of that it's uh you know different data sources that we can activate for our customers and different apis to facilitate uh the injection of the data that we provide into existing workflows the way we look at our product is similar to zapier so like you know we they create workflows for simple like uh you know like uh processes that people need to do like you know take like yeah yeah yeah we intersperse them here right so then we do that for b2b sales data take like linkedin data uh enrich it with some of the uh you know pitch book or um you know like crunch base and then like uh create and add the scoring system uh to see how close um that company resemble uh an that requires technology of eight people on the team how many are engineers three three okay any sales reps no we're just not just you yeah all right good and um so so how do you go from where you are today so you know about 100 grand a month or 300 grand a month um well i mean like a hundred grand right now like uh seems uh you know within reach uh with our current pipeline um in the next i would say six to nine months um and then for the 300 um i think it really depends on how well we can grow the existing customer bases our top customer has like now doubled the size of their like monthly billing what's your top customer pay per month uh with the renewal they're now going to pay 7 200 a month okay that's great yep that's really good very cool so what's the next product line here i mean this is something that you know people would argue data is a commodity today you're making money on it right now but what's next product line it's all about like uh i mean tools that you build on top of the data i agree that data is a commodity and so like but what you do with that data and how can you integrate that data into existing workflows is where like we see the value that we can generate i mean like something as simple as the scoring system is you know scoring as in like is this account close to my ideal customer profile generates tremendous values of value for our customers because i mean their sales people can start targeting from like the highest scoring companies and then go down the list yep yep totally understand well we're gonna watch closely as you go build that hopefully keep scaling doubling revenue any plans to raise capital or you want to stay bootstrapped uh not for now i mean uh eventually yes um but not for now all right i think that we're fine like we are on that note elliot let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book um guns germs and steel number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um i'm studying like uh like the career of jeff pizzas i'm reading the book that they um you know recently released number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business uh we like glenn list a lot so i would say that number four how many hours i sleep to eat every night six and a half okay in situation elio married single kids married with kids how many kids two one upcoming in october oh very exciting and how are you i'm 46 46 last question want something you wish you knew when you were 20 um have more fun [Music] guys there you have it scale stack dot io helping you understand and uh get custom b2b data right at your fingertips your sales team fingertips so they can be more effective they went from nine thousand dollars a month uh you know very recently up to now forty thousand dollars a month about a half million dollar run rate all boots drop 12 customers team of eight uh three engineers they're not raising we will see what they do next in our product line elio thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan 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...