How Sentione CEO Kamil Bargiel grew Sentione to $6.1M revenue and 450 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is camille bargo he's a serial entrepreneur and startup evangelist with expertise in internet and social media since 2012 he co-founded and he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called centa one an ai powered social listening and engagement platform camille are you ready to take us to the top yes sure let's start very good all right sent to one so what's the company do and is it a pure place sas revenue model well it's actually a pure sas we started as social listening company meaning that we listen to billions of conversation about brands people products online and we deliver this knowledge to um small medium and large companies that want to have an advantage in social media okay and what do people on average pay for this per month would you say yeah so our average uh revenue per account it's 350 dollars okay so not maybe small business but definitely not kind of mid or enterprise you're kind of in the middle there um uh let's put all this on a timeline when did you launch the company what year it was 2011 october okay 2011 and then over the past kind of seven eight years how many customers have you been able to grow to so right now we have uh over 450 customers but we have been tested by over 20 000 different brands that's great okay so 450 customers at that 350 a month price point that would mean your mr is what around 150 grand a month something like that yeah that's exactly what we do oh that's great and what does growth look like so if you go back a year where were you a year ago in october of 2017 so we are growing on average uh by approximately 30 to 50 percent in the last six years okay so about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars per month exactly a year ago something like that yeah exactly okay and this is great so um i wanna dive more into the product um after i understand this last question here have you decided to bootstrap the company or have you raised capital well we have raised initial capital seven years ago it was two hundred thousand uh euro because we needed servers we basically needed to gather a lot of data when we are still students uh without that amount of capital so we have raised the first money from seed investors and private private angels so total money raised to date is that just 200 grand no no today we have raised a bit more it will be a total of five million dollars already okay and when did when was the last round of funding it was one and a half years ago okay that means you're either raising right now or you're in the middle of acquisition talks with somebody which one is it actually we are raising we still believe a lot in the company we think that we are now in the uh late uh late seats stage of our company we have managed to see that we have the product market fit but we uh test a lot of things and we are still finishing our product portfolio so now we're raising about roughly six to seven million dollars okay and you might do you mind me asking in your ideal world what valuation are you planning to raise that at well we believe that it should be somewhere between 10 to 12 arr you sorry you think your valuation will be 10x your current ar uh yes okay so that would be a basically a 22 million dollar free money valuation yes exactly yeah okay good so 22 million bucks if you're raised kind of six million what's that mean you're selling what is that like 20 maybe 10 20 something like that of the company yeah we we aim to sell 20 at this point and probably do some buyouts of the first initial uh seed investors so that we don't delude ourselves yeah that's smart now as you as you think about this round of funding i remind everyone where you're based are you you're over i believe you're in uh you're in poland right well the r d center is based in poland but the uh sales offices are based uh well in munich poland uh prague and budapest so a couple of countries okay and and what is the funding environment like over there and the reason i'm asking there are there's a lot of companies leveraging venture debt right at this kind of stage are you looking at venture debt or do you just want to do equity well we are looking at both basically because we are we are also talking with european investment bank that has this uh this uh tool this is the denture debt and we think this could be a potential nice leverage for for series a investor so we're also looking into this thing yeah maybe you know race four million bucks in equity and two million in venture debt yeah yeah that's smart now the bank you're working with is it like a silicon valley bank do they require personal guarantees and covenants and warrants or no no it's actually european investment bank do they require covenants and warrants and personal guarantees no that's the advantage they don't require that okay that's interesting i've never actually heard of a bank uh investment bank doing a deal like this at interest rates that are actually maybe the interest rate's not reasonable but at reasonable interest rates and not having some kind of warrant coverage well that's public money which is backed with this this this bank so they don't simply require they treat it as a tool for us supporting young young entrepreneurs from europe into you know going global so that's so what i mean are we talking like five percent interest rate or like ten percent typically uh it's four to six percent which is i think fairly pretty good that's really good what's the do you want me asking the firm since they're public what's their name uh it's a european investment bank oh it's actually called european investment bank yeah got it okay very good um you can go to the online and look for venture that at european investment bank okay yeah no i'll do that that's great um let's talk more about the product so so help us understand more about what the product actually actually does [Music] so basically starting with 71 so the first step is you you register our website then you type in your product or brand name and you instantly get the first mentions from social media blogs forums portals in real time so you can follow the conversation online about your brand next step you can use our tool to integrate yourself to start providing customer service and communicate with customers online so that's the second point and the last step you can apply this is quite a recent development you can apply it artificial intelligence that will automate the the responses and the the discussion with your brand and your customers okay so this is like if someone i'm an airplane i'm an airliner that uses you guys if some if uh a message we always get is um uh you know when does my flight take off or why is there a delay you can have essentially an automated response that says like the weather's bad today really apologize like you know hopefully the sun comes out soon right and they can send it through your platform exactly but that's the simple scenario scenario we can do a lot more complex scenarios like transferring the money for for your bank and stuff like that oh interest so if i tweet bb t like your site's not working transfer 10 grand from what first off i don't know that i'd ever tweet that but if someone did would that you could process that you probably couldn't do that via twitter but you can do it via messenger of that bank or you can go to their mobile app or website and use that and include it or embedded chat and you can do it via their chat where you can authenticate do you own that chat or you're tying into the api of the firms you sell to well it's both we can do both so you own you have a chat product yourself they've been installed with like javascript products interesting uh churns critical in a sas company what's your revenue churn per year so the revenant sure is quite good i think last year was uh four and a half percent this year it's less than four it would be three and a half it's like uh 12 months average churn mr harder so just to be clear that's 3.5 churned over a year or each month over a year okay so three point five each month on average from the last year uh it will be three point five percent sure sure yeah so three point five annual revenue turn and is that a gross number or a net number are you adding back expansion it's not we are adding actually we are adding expansions but it's it's new char it's new mrr minus uh downgrades and the lost number plus expansion yeah so just to be clear give me the actual gross number just how much revenue do you lose it's obviously higher than 3.5 percent yeah so probably that would be uh let me count it and i had it's five to six percent okay so five to six percent gross which means you're expanding two to three percent those same accounts and that's how you get net net 3.5 yeah okay good and then talk to me about customer acquisition how are you how are you signing up these new customers so we have the of course inbound and out down sales the album sales team works with big accounts and enterprise customers there they are like the almond sales is located in a couple of remote locations in europe we are starting with uk this year as well and it's it's less said we just let our scheduling the meetings doing the stuff like that but in the inbound scenario we are doing a lot of uh online ideas seo uh influencers some um remarketing and stuff like that and we have a team located in poland which is uh delivering online demos to all people that sign up for our trial got it and...