How Serviceform CEO Iranthi Gomes grew Serviceform to $3.7M revenue and 420 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is arante Gomez she is she was born and raised in Sri Lanka now based in Europe she moved to Melbourne Australia for University then ran and sold a mobile coffee catering business she found another business problem and built service form she's now grown up to a team of 52 people and raised 3 million USD a Harry Potter fan she builds Legos for fun and took up golf reselling again now building serviceform.com which helps you get rid of bad customer experiences around here are you ready to take us to the top Yes sounds good very exciting all right what does that mean tell us an example of a customer using you and how you help them get rid of bad customer experiences okay a good question so um with whatever we have done so far Nathan it's been that anything that we've offered is being around website conversion so that has been basically the main focus and something very important to highlight is our customer audience has always been the traditional business so I don't know how much you know of the backstory of how service form was born but you know the idea was that we were working with the traditional businesses in the hospitality space and we saw what year was this when did you launch this was in we actually started in early 2018. okay so before that we had a little a coffee catering business in in Melbourne then that's how service form was born so when that happened we were working with hospitality partners and you know these people are very good at what they were doing very good at events running a catering business but knew very little about technology or even what's out there available in the market so our customer audience is basically the traditional business so if you think someone like so it is your coffee shop it's your your coffee shop your mobile coffee caterer coming was it would be a great customer for service form exactly perfect that's amazing and then help me understand how you price right so are you selling 10 bucks a month 100 bucks and what's your average customer paying per month right okay so with even though we are SAS we are more service model Source right and the fact that we're working with the more a traditional business around real estate Automotive anything in the service industry uh so we do have the typical assassin monthly subscription so our pricing starts from about 250 euros upwards a month yes okay what's the average customer pay would you say that's about 300. okay and your biggest customer pays how much yes I was getting to that uh I didn't pay about almost four thousand uh per month per month yes and why do they pay so much more you're giving them more leads or getting more product they have more seats why do they pay so much so it's a mix of a lot of things it's a mix of so because when we start working them it's because we have a whole sort of conversion tools that we use and right now we've actually gone out of the space we've gone into management meeting scheduling all of that so when we start working with them it's always to do with conversion and with a few tools that you know can actually help them get started but then more time goes on we add in the other tools depending on the size of the business and then comes in more seats because we have a live chat so a software we have our uh a meeting scheduling you know seats um so all of that and then also it depends a lot on the size of the business very cool I love this okay so uh that's helpful you launched in 2018 your your your company was your first customer sort of your mobile Coffee Company how many customers are you serving now today so right now a bit over 400 around 420ish okay and then if you look at it in in sense of like because we work with a lot of Partners other tools alive in about maybe over 2500 websites that's okay so one of your go to markets is through Partners definitely okay let's talk about that in a second if we take your 420 customers though at the average price point of 300 a month that would put you at about 120 000 a month right now in revenue is that about right actually it's more it's about 150 000 I mean mrr now so your RP is a little bit higher then yes this is great 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here 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 not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path 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 if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash 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 all right let's jump back into the interview okay so if you're doing 150 000 a month today in Revenue help us understand growth around the what were you doing exactly one year ago so I think last year I remember when we ended because at that point was when we arranged our big funding round a big seed route of uh 2.2 million so at that point I think we were about 65 000 in mrr so I think growth wise it's now been 8.5 to 9 month on month that's incredible so 65 000 a month a year ago up to 150 000 a month today you mentioned a seed round so you closed that last year it's 2.2 million you said it was early this year so we started Commerce like the whole discussion late last year and we closed it early this year interesting and and um 2.2 million preceded around I mean most folks are selling 15 to 20 to their business in pre-seed routes were you in that same range um no we are much more than that in terms of the uh wait I don't understand the question yeah so someone give you a check for 2.2 million bucks most pre-seed rounds that Equity investor is going to get 15 to 20 of the business yes absolutely it's around that you were in that same range okay very good so we could take 2.2 million then times like six or seven you raised it like between a 10 and 15 million multiple valuation valuation not multiple evaluation you're you're hitting figures all right very cool why did you I mean look dilution's dilution right you just give up 20 of your business so why'd you need to give up that amount I mean why can't you build this and bootstrap it well multiple things it's it also comes down to like let's say because me and you are my co-founder it's just the two of us who started and now we are almost team of 16 based in both countries six zero six zero wow I know right uh so we started in Finland because he Spanish we were operating you know the coffee business in Melbourne but then we realized if you really wanted to do business globally it would make sense maybe if he moved ourselves into Europe so he's finished and that's when you know we opened up the actual business in Finland but then we were operating in the finished market and if you have operated in the finished Market you would know a lot of companies don't tend to go outside so like everything that we were doing everything we were learning was very much towards the market and we and we realized it was time for us to step out and then that's we thought hey it might be nice to bring in people you know who have done this before get new ideas move into different markets so with that in mind and then and then...