How Sheetgo CEO Yannick Vaartrault grew Sheetgo to $1.7M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is janak rolt he's a ceo of sheetgo which allows spreadsheet users to automate workflows and he's doing this while advising other startups as well yannick are you ready to take us to the top sure all right so tell us about this business i mean it sounds a lot like air table well yeah uh the difference would be that we work with the legacy systems at companies rather than have to implement something completely new aka excel google sheets tell me more about how that works so if i use google sheets already what would i add on where she'd go uh you you use this basically as a layer so you can automate your workflows uh currently uh being able to automate with others information flow of spreadsheets we are now in early release uh that you can actually implement it with docs and gmail so you can actually automate the entire workflow well there's a lot of potential customers here all those things have a lot of users so it'll be interesting to see what wedge you use when did you write the first line of code for the technology ten years ago oh wow this is an older company now it's only from 2016 i could only start company in 2016 because i was in another company the first idea happened in almost 10 years ago and the first concepts actually happened about a year later but i couldn't really get out of my previous engagements until 2016. when did you have your first paying customer what year uh that 2016 is when we everything got started oh okay got it so first customer then who was the first customer do you remember good very very good question or who were you targeting back then to get started we were we didn't know we knew that this was useful for anyone and what we wanted to do is just put it out there and see how many people would actually start using it and we just had bets on our uh on a window door as to how many uh installs we'd have and eventually hey maybe we should charge for this and see if anyone paid for it we didn't really uh we really wanted the market to tell us okay so uh what are customers paying you today on average to use the technology uh about 500 600 bucks but then we moving more into a customer centric kind of company and that's going up that's per month 500 per month uh per year for single users and now we're having more and more team users that spend two thousand ten thousand a year okay very cool so you get your first customer back in 2016 how many customers are you now working with today uh we have more in the in over a thousand okay over a thousand and are those individual seats are those logos and then there's a bunch of seats below them those yeah those are logos those are logos okay cool and are people the logos that are signing up who's usually the one signing up is it the cto or the head of marketing or something else something else always someone that's trying to manage some process in their company so what we'll get educate us we don't know your business who is that who is it you're not helping me out here man who is that youtuber i know i know um cool um so it could be someone that is wanting is managing a budget and is wanting to interface with other departments and have the information be automated in terms of updating how information flows to the budget holder and to actions versus budgets it could be someone in managing sales and wants to update the the field sales um and it could be someone managing inventory or company managing airplane parts of inventory in the us and these these align with a bunch of the templates you have on the website as well inventory management you know cash flow grade books the teachers use you a lot teachers use this a lot they help we help them a lot with attendance tracking grades i've seen some districts work with street go so that they can create student cards to see so that the 130 000 students have a profile of what's happening with them so that the professors teachers and districts can follow what their students are doing uh we we've seen a lot of cases around that as well so if a district signs up that's one of your 1000 logos but they might sign up a hundred seats for like all their teachers how many seats is a logo usually signing up for what's the average you're seeing i mean right now it's a range so we've moved from a user perspective to a business perspective so we really thought about the end user until let's say last year we started really thinking about accounts uh late last year we're now really expanding on that um so so yannick the question is of the current thousand like are they usually signing up for just one seat are they setting up for thousands of seats what's the average seats number of seats no it's uh the average is in the in the it's above 10 below 100 really depends we're still not moving up market uh to that far level yet and each ce says that one user license is about 500 bucks a year right uh yes of course when there's uh companies the prices change when we have company licenses yep obviously you give probably volume discounts once people are signing up for hundreds and hundreds yeah yeah now can serve really can i do the math though a thousand you know a thousand logos at five seats a pop or ten seats a pop at 450 bucks a month i mean are you guys doing what about 500 500 000 bucks a month in revenue [Music] no we're not there we're not even close to that just yet okay when you think you can break that yeah uh so we right now we've been really really focused on product uh and um and i'd say that we're now set up for growth uh so the idea is 2022 really focus on commercial team we are i'd say that two-thirds of the company's engineers and we only have a less than a handful of folks in the commercial team including marketing and sales and so so what is revenue today that is more like 50 60 000 bucks a month yeah it's probably a a little bit more than that but in that ball range well you know 83 000 bucks a month is a big number that's a million dollar run right are you north of a million dollar run rate yet uh we're uh just we're almost done okay fair enough and help me understand growth if you're around that today how much monthly recurring revenue are you doing exactly a year ago uh we're at a we're about um without really focus on the commercial side we are at about sorry about that it's very late here in europe um we're at about uh about a hundred percent so got it so you're doing about 35 000 bucks a month uh about a year ago [Music] yeah i'd say that's that's the number yeah got it and it's clear to me how you're growing you're sort of adding more seats i understand that tell me more about your team how many folks are on your team today we are 19. 19 all remote mostly remote yeah oh yeah actually but today everybody's remote we used to have a hybrid now we're all remote got it and now have you guys bootstrapped this or did you decide to raise capital we raised a little bit of capital uh and here in in well in spain the team is divided between brazil and spain mostly we raised a little bit of capital in spain uh not much so we're actually run as a profitable company how much have you raised today total uh about a million okay and when was the last round uh the last official round was 2018. uh we've we've had some convertible notes that came in um but their last round was 2018. okay 2018. and how much did you raise back then we raised the in dollars around 600 000 okay and and would you do that same thing again do you regret raising capital could you have bootstrapped i i think i i do regret raising that amount of capital i think we should have raised money in the u.s i i live in europe and i'm american so we should have raised in the us and a lot more capital for the kind of market we're going after and i'm glad that you kind of put on the table air table at the beginning of this call but the kind of market we're going after is so big that i think this requires a lot of capital and i would want to have been able to uh put more resources into commercialization so with two salespeople today uh there's only so much you can grow and so when you raise six hundred thousand seven hundred thousand in 2018 what valuation did you raise that uh so we raised less than i would have wanted um i'd say uh south of 10 million and why do you say that's less than what what you would have wanted i think that first we should have raised a lot more money because i think the value of what we do is is very very high um that's the reason well just to just to play devil's advocate yannick you launched in 2016 and it's taken you know it's taken five years and you're still under a million in revenue that's really slow growth if you want to be a venture-backed company and play that game sorry i lost you for a second can you hear me now yeah i was saying being devil's advocate um you launched in 2016 and it's taken you five years and you're still not doing more than a million revenue that's very that's too slow growth to go be a venture-backed company if you want to play that game i agree i agree that's why it's not enough money so what we needed to focus on is well you raised all that money though and you weren't able to get that's what i'm saying is you raised 1.23 million and you weren't able to get growth why would you why why is the answer throw more money at it because the kind of product that we're creating is so scalable that we needed to put a lot of focus on product and technology um and so i'd say that that's probably the reason i do think that focusing so far so fast on um on commercialization when the product's not ready is not a good idea and i'd say that we probably focused we started taking too many shortcuts on on the product and the tech i have seen other companies that have gone stealth for a while getting getting traction active users and then going after clients and i think that's a good good approach for this kind of size market got it are you what's your turn look like today uh we're about 100 net retention but peel back what's gross churn look like um we're at about industry average which is at uh three percent or so net three percent it grows monthly got it so you're turning about 36 percent annually and you're expanding 36 percent for net of 100. that's right interesting okay very cool what about getting new users are you doing any paid ads right now or what's the number one growth channel it's all mostly organic seo and marketplaces which marketplace drives you the most leads per month that's google google what you're in the google app exchange uh no it's called it's called the google workspace marketplace how many leads do you get from there each month oh we'll get a decent amount i mean i'd say it's uh probably half uh or so of our leads i don't know how many leads total you get yeah i'm not previous to say sorry you don't want to share how many leads you get why is that confidential you've already shared revenue and valuation [Music] uh yeah i think motivation mostly most people can discern from the information we have already and um you should revenue that was in revenue most people call revenue way more sensitive the number of leads you're getting i'm just trying to figure out why you wouldn't share how many leads you're getting per month yeah um because i think i feel i'm not trying to feel completely comfortable in sharing as much information as as as you're asking i don't think i was privy to no no i don't think i wasn't privy to all the information you were going to be asking before this call okay we've published about 3 000 episodes one a day since 2015. did you listen to any of the other very short episodes before green to come on i have to not listen to your episodes no then i totally understand why you would be surprised um sorry about that i'm surprised you agreed to something without a little bit of background i know what you're jumping into i think yeah i think you're right you have you and i have been going back and forth to some emails and the emails were interesting in terms of the kind of information you were you're sharing um and and i was providing um so so yeah i think you're right uh but understand i'm not putting as much time into this as i said well i won't i won't push harder than on the lead stuff we'll wrap up here yeah yank with some easy stuff with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i'd say losing my virginity is there a common one that uh that i'd like to share number two ceo you're following or studying uh i'd say elon musk like most people number three what's your favorite online tool for building sheetgo [Music] online tool for building sheetgo correct a tool that you use in what says building what specifically sorry no problem we'll skip that question number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh between six six and a half or so i have five children okay well five kid okay so are you married with five kids yes wow holy cow how old are you 45 45 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 i wish i would have done when i was 20. just something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh um to become an entrepreneur apparently earlier um yeah that's probably it became an entrepreneur at 30. guys sheetgo it enables you to use google sheets to get way more out of uh out of your life in terms of productivity templates for inventory management cash flow income statement and other stuff launched in 2016 they raised caught about 1.1.1 million issued 700 thousand 600 000 back in 2018. 19 people on the team today two sales folks call it eight or nine engineers as they look to continue to scale they're doing about 35 000 bucks a month in revenue about a year ago now over 70 thousand dollars a month as they continue to grow yannick thank you for taking us to the top all right thanks 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 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas 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 for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode 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 got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya