Selecteev Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Alban Dumouilla. 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 emerged as Selecteev, that and has been growing organically now for five years. It's now getting a marketing boost to actually grow to its full potential. We're gonna [00:21] jump in today. Alban, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Alright. Five years as a side project. Why didn't you start pouring the gas on this bad boy earlier? [00:28] >> Well, basically, it's 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. I've got a lot of side projects, and this is one of them, and and it started growing a lot more this year. So we're getting into marketing and and maybe a bit of sales. [00:51] Okay. And so we wanna 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? [00:57] >> So, basically, it helps, structures like administrations, corporations, or incubators, accelerators, to select candidates. So any type of calls for applications. It can be for events. It can be for specific programs to get in something, like universities could use it, for example. And, yeah, basically, it's anything that's not an HR candidate. We could we could use it for HR candidates, but it's not really made for it. Basically, anytime you need to evaluate a candidate with different evaluators, [01:32] >> that's where we came we come in to help. [01:35] Now you have a bunch of different pricing plans based off number of candidates, how many evaluations, you know, and customization and feature based upselling, chat support, etcetera. But if I forced you to give me an average, what would you say the average customer pays you today per month? [01:49] >> Basically, it's about €200 a month. That's the the standard plan is the is the most used by far. Usually, what the customer, 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 of, [02:10] >> all of pricing. [02:12] And is it it sounds like the most critical usage metric for you is number of, like, number of candidates processed. Would you agree with that? [02:19] >> Yeah. I guess the main difference between the first two plans are there there's a few options that you can use in the standard plan, like file upload, multi language, things like that. But, yeah, most mostly the biggest metric is is the the number of candidates, or the number of evaluators as well. That that's a pretty big one. [02:39] And so last [02:39] >> So a lot of yeah. [02:41] Sorry. Go for it. In in, in April, here of 2020, how many candidates were analyzed? [02:48] >> In April 2020 Last month? You mean? Oh, okay. I would say in total on our customers, I would say about 10 to 15,000, something like that. [03:00] Wow. [03:01] Okay. And that's across how many, I guess, you call them evaluators? [03:06] >> That's something I I don't really know because the we we're not our our our heads in the in the platforms because the the customers manage everything. So we're we're a SaaS platform. So I would say less than a 100 evaluators. [03:24] Less than I I guess, across how many individual customers? Of course. [03:29] >> Yeah. That that would be around 30. [03:31] Okay. So you're very targeted. [03:33] >> Pretty big customers that have more than, you know, 5,000 candidates for a call for applications. [03:39] Oh, wow. [03:39] >> That grows in numbers. So is that a [03:41] good or bad thing to have that kind of customer concentration risk? [03:45] >> It's again, it's a it's a side project. That's so that's why we're searching for more customers because right now, it can't really become a company until we find a lot more, and and and we're going for international as well. We've got a few customers in The US. We've got a few customers in India, Mexico, Germany. But, yeah, it's it's something we we just need to set up a strategy to to go get more, because we actually [04:14] >> solve issues for these guys. [04:16] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [04:40] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [05:04] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [05:26] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [05:52] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but [06:14] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.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. Alright. Let's jump back into [06:40] the interview. Now what is the I mean, there's a lot of my listeners that are exactly like you. They're engineers that can also market. Right? Maybe a little bit, maybe really well. They have a bunch of side projects. This whole idea of like, Oh crap, one of my side projects is kind of taking off. Should I kill the other babies and go all in on this? This is a big decision, right? So you just use verbiage [07:00] like when it becomes or to become a real company. Right? What what does that mean? [07:05] >> It means so I'm I'm in a startup world now. So whenever we go for, you know, fundraising or whatever, you you you look at the size of your market. I'm not sure that Selecteev can 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. That's not that like, it's not that many companies [07:33] >> 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. So I guess that's why for now it's stated side projects. [07:45] Why do you correlate being a real company with if you raised funding or not? There are way more real companies that are nonfunded. [07:52] >> Yeah. It's it's just an example I was taking 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 it's just like [08:10] I wanna 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? [08:18] >> Yeah. I I would say be able to pay people. [08:21] Okay. [08:21] >> Right now, I'm able to pay one person, not more than that. Mhmm. [08:25] So there's two of you guys full time right now? [08:27] >> Well yeah. [08:28] >> And and we've got freelancers, so that that that makes the team to about six people. But, yeah, what I would call a a real company would be, like, six full full time people in one office type of thing. [08:44] So two full time, four freelancers. Yeah. And, Alban, a lot of folks when they get going, obviously, they keep costs low. They use freelancers, freelancers. But a lot of people fail miserably. They burn through freelancers because they don't know how 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. [09:02] >> Well, basically, of them is pretty 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 LinkedIn growth. And the two others are organizing webinars, so it's cold emailing. And I'm I'm the one giving the webinars, but they're they're doing the entire, marketing process around it. So, yeah, everybody has this space, and and they decide whatever they wanna do. We just have, you know, specific [09:33] >> directions that the company wants to take. But for that, the the the rest of the job is basically, they have autonomy on what they're doing. [09:43] Not asking What's the difference between the first two? You said marketing growth. What's the difference between the two? [09:48] >> Basically, marketing is mostly around content SEO, how do you drive inbounds traffic. And the growth is more about, you know, reaching out to people on LinkedIn I see. Email, you know, multi multi diffusion. Well well [10:04] And then start with let's start with the marketing SEO content. How'd you find that person? Did you use a a marketplace or a friend? [10:11] >> Yeah. Basically, a a freelancer marketplace, and I I benchmarked a bunch of people and talked to [10:17] What's it called? [10:18] >> It's called Malt, m a l t dot f r. Malt. Yeah. I guess it's the biggest French, freelancer marketplace. [10:28] >> And yeah. Yeah. It's it's Oh, Malt. [10:30] M m a l t. [10:32] >> Oh, m l l t. Sorry. Yeah. [10:34] Yeah. [10:34] >> 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. [10:43] Now, Alban, 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'd you do that? [11:00] >> No. I I just had conversations on how they would see the strategy for the actual work, and you can you can tell a lot from that. Mhmm. [11:11] Now did you use Malt to find the growth person and your two webinar people? [11:16] >> I No. The webinar people, I think I found through LinkedIn or recommendations. [11:23] >> Believe I can remember because it's been a while. But the growth and marketing guys, yes. [11:28] Okay. Very cool. And then again, to put this on on a timeline, when did you launch? when did you write the first line of code for Selecteev? [11:34] >> That was actually in my job three jobs ago. So two thousand fifth 2017, I would say, '16 or '17, because it's it was an internal project. Basically, I I worked in one of the biggest French startup accelerators, and and we had a lot of incoming startups that wanted to enter, so we had to build something to filter them. [11:57] Mhmm. And they had no problem with you spinning it out, you don't have to give them a bunch of equity or anything? [12:01] >> No. No. No. Basically, the when I left the company, the product was dying if 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. [12:15] That's amazing. So you own a 100% equity today? [12:18] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [12:19] Ah, we love that. Okay. So if we I mean, we can maybe do some math here. Right? You said 30 customers, average ARPU of €200, $230 US dollars. That would put you at around $7,000 of monthly recurring revenue right now. Is that about accurate? [12:32] >> Yeah. Yeah. [12:33] And just so we can understand growth, where were you exactly one year ago? [12:38] >> I would say half of that. Okay. [12:41] Yeah, around And you almost sounded surprised at the beginning of this interview about the growth that's happened recently. It wasn't a result of your inputs, it just magically happened. What happened? Well, [12:53] >> you know, COVID happened, so that's why I'm surprised because we we had a pretty big drop because we had a bunch of customers who had events, [13:02] >> and and the events just goes down. So whenever you need to select speakers or or, you know, have a prize or whatever in your event, then you just don't do it anymore. So we lost a bunch of revenue on that, and now it's coming back. [13:15] Very interesting. Okay. [13:16] >> And the no. No. I guess the the most surprising thing is, like, we don't have a lot of churn. So older customers that that stopped during COVID are coming back while we have new customers that that showed up. [13:29] Oh, I see. I see. Interesting. Very interesting. Okay. So 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? [13:44] >> I would hope so. 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. 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 [14:14] >> 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, they're that can be a year. [14:27] Mhmm. Mhmm. Interesting. Okay. So webinar strategy is working, doing one per month. You sign up 30 people. They're doing outbound to get people signed up for that. And then me, like, the headline. What's the headline of the webinar? [14:38] >> It's basically how to manage your call for applications and simplify your life during evaluations. [14:44] Interesting. So you have some copywriting skills inside of there. You make it a you make that a sexy title for a tool that some people might find to be very boring. [14:52] >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's the goal. Well, 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 Forms. So, basically, people get their candidates on Google Form, and then they have this Excel spreadsheet that they have to share to everybody and and manage evaluations by email or PDF or whatever you you can think about. And we're just [15:20] >> like, okay. We have this little star system where you click on stars and it grades your candidate and and you weight the answers as you want. And if you wanna do an evaluation funnel, then you can. So it sounds sexy to the people who suffered the Excel spreadsheet, I'd say. [15:36] Mhmm. Mhmm. Interesting. Very cool. Hey. This is a heck of a story we're rooting for yet. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book. [15:43] >> That's not something I have in mind. I'd say something like Steve Jobs, you know, biography. [15:52] But Number number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [15:56] >> Of course, Elon Musk, pretty much everybody else because he's just a weirdo. [16:02] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Selecteev? [16:06] >> Online tool. [16:11] >> What do you mean by online? I I would say Figma. [16:13] Figma. Yeah. That's what we mean. Alright. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [16:17] >> Eight. [16:18] Eight. Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [16:22] >> Sing well, not married, but not single either. It's like I don't know how you say that. [16:27] No no kids? [16:28] >> No kids. [16:29] Alright. And, Alban, how old are you? [16:31] >> I'm 34. [16:32] >> 34. [16:33] Last question. Something you wish you knew back when you were 20. [16:37] >> How to make money on a website that I had that was really working out well. [16:44] Guys, there you have it, selecteev.io. It's a tool that helps you analyze and evaluate candidates. Launched back in 2017, spun it out of accelerator actually. His former company was working at. He owns a 100% equity today. It's bootstrapped doing 3,500 in MRR a year ago. Now up to $7,000 a month or about $82,000 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 [17:03] other full time partner here and then four freelancers currently growing the business mainly using webinars. We'll see what happens next. Alban, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you. [17:13] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM [17:38] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [18:01] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [18:23] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We [18:42] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.