How Selecteev CEO Alban Dumouilla grew to $299.7K revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is albin dumouya he's a developer who started his career in the us and discovered the startup world when he came back to france in 2015. he worked in structures that helped entrepreneurs with projects while starting his own projects on the side one of those projects to merge as select eev and that has been growing organically now for five years is now getting a marketing boost to actually grow to its full potential we're gonna jump in today albania takes the top yeah all right five years as a side project why didn't you start pouring the gas on this bad boy earlier well basically it's um it's a pretty long story it's it's a project that's a spin-off from another job like an older job and and it's been growing organically um i've got a lot of side projects and this is one of them and and it started uh growing a lot more uh this year so we're getting into marketing and and maybe a bit of sales okay and so we want to jump into why it started growing more this year but first people don't know what this thing is yet how would you describe it what does it do so basically it helps structures like administrations corporations or incubators accelerators uh to select candidates so any type of calls for applications um it can be for events it can be for uh specific programs to get in something like universities could use it for example um and yeah basically it's anything that's not an hr candidate uh we could we could use it for hr candidates but it's not really made for it um basically anytime you need to evaluate a candidate with different evaluators that's where we can we come in to help now you have a bunch of different pricing plans based off number of candidates how many evaluations you know and customization feature-based upselling chat support etc but if i forced you to give me an average what would you say the average customer pays you today per month uh basically it's about 200 euros a month that's the the standard plan is the most used by far um usually what the customer uh takes is about three to four months for one call for applications and usually they do it twice a year so it's it's about six six to eight months a year of um olaf pricing and is it sounds like the most critical usage metric for you is number of uh like number of candidates processed would you agree with that yeah i guess the main difference between the first two plans are uh there there's a few um options that you can use in the standard plan like file upload multi language uh things like that but yeah mostly the biggest metric is is the the number of candidates um or the number of evaluators as well well that's a pretty big one and so a lot of yeah sorry in in uh in april uh here of 2020 how many candidates were analyzed in april of 2020 last year what do you mean okay um i would say in total on our customers i would say about 10 to 15 000 something like that wow okay and that's across how many i guess you call them evaluators um that's something i i don't really know because the we we're not our our heads in the in the platforms because the customers manage everything so we're we're assessing platforms um so i would say less than 100 evaluators less than i guess across how many individual customers uh yeah that would be around 30. okay so you're very we've got two pretty big customers that have more than you know 5 000 candidates per call for applications uh oh wow that grows in numbers so is that a good or bad thing to have that kind of customer concentration risk it's uh again it's a it's a side project uh that's so that's why we're searching for more customers um because right now it can't really become a company until we find a lot more and and we're going for international as well uh we've got a few customers in the u.s we've got a few customers in india mexico germany um but yeah it's it's something we just need to set up a strategy to to go get more because we actually solve issues for these guys 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 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 evaluation 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 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 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just use verbage like when it becomes or to become a real company right what does that mean it means so i'm in a startup world now so whenever we go for you know fundraising or whatever you you look at the size of your market um i'm not sure that selective can uh go for fundraising for example because the market is pretty small and temporal it's like you need to find the people who will be having a calls for application in the next year or so uh that's not that like it's not that many companies in the world compared to people who need to sell something and if you if you do a platform that helps selling then your market is a lot bigger um so i guess that's why for now it's stated sorry site projects why do you correlate being a real company with if you've raised funding or not there are way more real companies that are non-funded yeah it's just an example i was taking uh just to to to give you a market size which is which is something that's really really important for fundraising i'm not talking about genuinely always fundraising it's just like um i want to know for you not not not a vc or someone you're trying to raise funding from for you what does it mean to be a real company as a side hacker with a lot of projects yeah i would say be able to pay people uh okay right now i'm able to pay one person uh not more than that so there's two of you guys full time right now well yeah and and we've got freelancers uh so that that that makes the team to about six people um but yeah what i would call a real company would be like six full full-time people in one office type of thing so two full-time four freelancers yeah and alvin a lot of folks when they get going obviously to keep costs though they use freelancers but a lot of people fail miserably they burn through freelancers because they don't have to manage them properly explain to me what those four freelancers do for you and how you get the most out of them the most productivity well basically each of them is pretty uh much on their own space so we've got one that's doing mostly marketing like content marketing the other one is good doing mostly uh linkedin growth um and the two others are organizing uh webinars so it's called emailing uh and i'm the one giving the webinars but they're they're doing the entire uh marketing process around it um so yeah everybody has this space and and they decide whatever they want to do we just have you know specific directions that the company wants to take uh but for that the the the rest of the job is basically they have paternity on what they're doing we're not sorry what's the difference between the first two you said marketing growth what's the difference between the two basically marketing is mostly around content seo uh how do you drive inbounds uh traffic and the growth is more about um you know reaching out to people on linkedin email you know multi multi diffusion well and then start with let's start with the marketing seo content how did you find that person did you use a a marketplace or a friend yeah basically a freelancer marketplace and i i benchmarked a bunch of people and talked yeah i guess it's the biggest french freelancer marketplace um and yeah yeah it's it's oh my god um it's basically you you just need to to find a good fit that that's for me it's it's the most important one now alvin no you said something very specific which and this is like playbook 101 for managing freelancers which is you said you sort of measure the quality across a bunch of marketers before maybe picking one so how did you structure that did you put together like a one-page project and give it to 10 of them and then pick the best one to do full-time or how did you do that no i i just had conversations on how they would see the strategy for the actual work um and you can you can tell a lot from that now did you use malt to find the growth person and your two webinar people i know the webinar people i think i found through linkedin or recommendations i i really i can't remember because it's been a while but uh the growth and marketing guys yes okay very cool and then again put this on a timeline when did you launch when did you write the first line of code for selective that was actually in my job three jobs ago so 2015 2017 i would say 16 or 17. uh because it's it was an internal project basically i worked in one of the biggest french startup accelerators uh and and we had a lot of incoming uh startups that wanted to enter so we had to build something to filter them and they had no problem with you spinning it out and you didn't have to give them a bunch of equity or anything no i don't know basically the when i left the company the product was dying if uh if i didn't take it and so the deal was that i would take it and they would use it for free for life and then i would do whatever i needed that's amazing so you own 100 equity today yeah yeah ah we love that okay so if we i mean we can maybe do some math here right you said 30 customers average rpo of 200 euros 230 us dollars that would put you at around 7000 bucks of monthly recurring revenue right now is that about accurate yeah yeah and just so we can understand growth where were you exactly one year ago i would say half of that uh okay yeah or unhealthy and you you almost sounded surprised at the beginning of this interview about the growth that's happened recently like like it's it wasn't a result of your inputs it's just like magically happened what happened well you know kovit happened so that's why i'm surprised uh because we we had a pretty big drop because we had a bunch of customers who had events and the events just goes down so whenever you need to select speakers or or you know have a price or whatever in your event then you just don't do it anymore so we lost a bunch of revenue on that uh and now it's coming back very interesting okay no i guess the most surprising thing is like we don't have a lot of turns um so all their closers that that stopped during kovid are coming back while we have new customers that that showed up oh i see i see interesting very interesting okay so what you mentioned though that like growth so so besides just people coming back like the outbound people doing webinars and stuff explain me is that an effective strategy for you do you think you can grow to a thousand customers using webinars i would hope so uh i wouldn't think so but i would hope so the webinars usually we have around 30 people per webinar so once a month and and right now i'd say the conversion rate would be one one customer per per month uh so because it's it's very temporal so that that's a complicated part it's that the first time they hear about you they already have a tool or they're thinking about changing or they haven't organized the call for applications ever and so they don't know where to start and so from when you start talking to them to when they're ready to actually get started there there can be a year interesting okay so webinar strategy is working doing one per month you sign up 30 people um they're doing outbound to get people signed up for that and then give me like the headline what's the headline of the webinar it's basically how to manage your call for applications and simplify your life during evaluations interesting so you have some copywriting skills inside of there you make it you make that a sexy title for a tool that some people might find be very boring yeah yeah i mean it's it's it's the goal it will it's a boring tool but it's it's not as boring as an excel spreadsheet right yeah that's how usually it works it's like our main competitor is google form so basically people get their candidates on a google form and then they have this excel spreadsheet that they have to share to everybody and manage evaluations by email or pdf or whatever you can think about and we're just like okay we have this little star system where you click on stars and it grades your candidate and and you wait the answers as you want and if you want to do an evaluation funnel then you can uh so it sounds sexy to the people who suffered the excel spreadsheet that's it interesting very cool hey this is a heck of a story we're rooting for you let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh that's not something i have in mind uh i i'd say something like steve jobs uh you know biography but number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying of course ellen musk like pretty much everybody else because it's just a weirdo number three what's your favorite online tool for building selective um online tool uh what do you mean by online uh i would say figma figma yeah that's what we mean all right number four how many hours of sleep to get every night eight eight okay and what's your situation married single kids uh well not married but not single either like i don't know no no kids no kids all right and alvin how old are you i'm 34. 34. last question something you wishing you back when you were 20. um how to make money um on a website that i had that was really working out well guys there you have it selective.io it's a tool that helps you analyze and evaluate candidates launched back in 2017 spun it out of an accelerator actually his former company was working at he owns 100 equity it's bootstrapped doing 3500 an mrr a year ago now up to seven grand a month or about 82 thousand bucks in terms of run rate and he's going you know what there might be something here let me try and build this has one other full-time uh partner here and then four freelancers currently growing the business mainly using webinars we'll see what happens next album thanks for taking us to the top thank you 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 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