How Signal CEO Tor Rauden grew Signal to $7.6M revenue and 70 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is tour walden called the sigan he is the co-founder of signal signal uh which is the world's first spoken influencer media monitoring service dub the google voice by tech media they analyze millions of sources every day thanks to ai-driven voice and text analysis the company is offered as a yearly subscription attracting clients such as toyota sony music and volkswagen and helping them to understand why and when they're mentioned all right tour you ready to take us to the top sure all right be here yeah you bet so you've you've made a change first after the name so what's the new name the new name is all ears all ears very good we changed the name from signal signal to all airs uh by january 1st this year that's great so walk me through what the com what the platform does um uh is and is it all pure place ass or is there any other revenue mixed in it's pure sas and um it's a subscription-based media monitoring service for spoken channels okay and so what do people pay on average per month for this pay on average around 4 000 euros per month per year per year sorry okay got it per year that's great and then put this on a timeline for us so when did you launch the company what year we launched the company back in 2016 and uh back then we were just me and my co-founder jorgen bora who's the cto as well and since then we've grown the team to now uh 12 people and we're based at rose.com okay so 12 people stockholm launched in 2016. right and what about capitalization do you guys bootstrap or raise capital so we joined an accelerator called sting which is called like the y combinator of the northern europe and we got a small small investment from them uh back in 2016 and then we raced a an angel round in 2006 2017 so how much total have you raised uh total around six or seven hundred k euros okay so seven so it'd be about 750 000 or something like that um and uh and obviously that's funding on to your growth now over the past two years how many customers have you grown to so we have now 70 customers and almost all of them are big famous brands and their communications directors 70 brands at 7-0 paying 4500 usd per year that's 375 bucks a month would put you guys current mrr at about 26 250 is that right it's actually a little bit above that but in in that sort of landscape yes okay so so what's the actual number it's um i think 29 000 uh euros 29 000 euros and where were you so we could understand growth rate where were you back in january of 2018 in terms of monthly revenue so i think it was about half that and where did most the growth come from was it new customers or upselling old customers uh absolutely from from new customers and so so break down that for me i mean getting new customers paying four or five grand per year is not easy where are you getting new customers what's the growth channel look like so my background is from the pr agency uh industry so i used to work for a couple of big agencies and the communications agencies and so i got to to understand how these buyers in that field what kind of services they want and i also use these media monitoring services myself text-based media monitoring services and we learned a lot from that and i had this big network so we understood how to to deprive the product and also we got some partnerships with some other big media monitoring companies from a very early stage and learning from them how they are charting their customers and how they are doing their packaging and has this been effective are these customers that you sign up are they staying sticky what's your turn today the churn is quite low is somewhere in between um 15 20 which i believe is low for this early stage that's monthly or annually annually annual revenue churn or logo churn um pass i'm not sure about that okay you mean you don't know what those mean or you don't measure them uh i'm not familiar with the terms yeah that's okay so 15 percent is that representative of the amount of money you've lost or the number of customers the the logo count that should be the logo count okay yeah so annual logo churn is about 15 um that's great and obviously that's not a that's not a problem as long as one of those turned customers didn't make up some big chunk of your revenue uh do you have any you didn't lose any like big huge enterprise accounts did you not really i mean we've been growing uh from medium sized accounts and we have a few accounts that are uh maybe two times or 2.5 times larger but many of them are in in the 4k uh area but so no customer makes up more than say five percent of your arr no got it and then walk me through cac so to get a new customer that pays you four or five thousand dollars a year what are you spending on fully weighted customer acquisition so the cac is around two three four k uh a little bit depending on how you are counting and also the swedish market is quite special uh we have this uh industry holiday between uh july and august so almost none of the customers are buying during those months which makes all of this a bit more complex than than if you have a market which is buying the same amount for for every month why would that impact what your calc is because the cac is of course rising a lot when we have those months when when nobody's uh in the office wait but that's just one that's one month of the year which was back in june we're recording this in january so your your cac outside of that one month you're saying is about three thousand dollars to get a new four thousand dollar your account yeah likely okay and where are you spending that three thousand dollars uh it's uh i mean the big the big cost pool is from salaries from our sales people so we do enterprise sales uh mostly and we are moving towards a low touch model uh but we aren't really there yet yeah and then um you've raised capital obviously you're growing revenue nicely are you guys break even today are you burning money so we could go break even and we did for a couple of months ago but right now we've hired more people um and uh where right now very many money okay so when you say burning like how aggressive are you being you're burning like ten thousand dollars a month or a hundred thousand dollars a month um so we're burning like 20k uh a month i believe right now uh but it's been as i mentioned almost um break even for a couple months ago yeah so so what gave you the con the confidence because a lot of people go through this thought process what gave you the confidence to go out and add fixed expenses right to your to your monthly cash flows in the form of salaries um like what how do you know you can handle 20 000 of burn for a couple months right so we raised pretty much uh money uh a while ago and uh we've been planning to raise more money during this spring so we have this confidence that uh that would go very well and we have some really nice indications on that as well so we've been uh adding on more costs as we are seeing more and more progress in the sales and um yeah of course that makes you more confident yep um okay it makes good sense let's wrap up here tour with the famous five number one uh what is your favorite business book [Music] i believe it's still actually the walker isaacson book about steve jobs and in particular the chapters when things are not going that well when mr jobs is between the two big apple um parts of his life i think that's very interesting and to see how he's coping with that number two name a ceo you're following or studying so um when i run my previous startup i had another founder as an advisor who's called henrik bergen and he was then running a company called readmill he's now running a company called steadyhealth and so it's called henrik berggren same on twitter great number two what's your favorite online tool for building the company so i mean of course we are using hubspot and we're using fellow and all that but recently i've been using a tool called you can book me uh for scheduling meetings uh and uh yeah reminding people that you have meetings and i think that's really really efficient number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night around eight eight okay good and uh what's your situation married single kids [Music] uh so i have a girlfriend and soon kids as well oh great okay now you have a kid on the way yeah oh congratulations how many months uh so it's uh scheduled for mid-may oh that's very are you excited that's exciting absolutely all right tauren how old are you uh i'm 33 right now 33. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um i just wish that i would know that things were going as well as they did and to keep on on doing what i loved and i think i did that to quite large extent so i'm yeah i would just push on for the same values guys keep doing what you love tor launched this company back in 2016 after coming out of an agency it's essentially a text monitoring tool or text listening tool that allows brands to understand what's being said about them and why they've got 70 customers paying 375 bucks a month so 33 000 a month in revenue up from fifteen thousand dollars a month just a year ago they raised seven hundred fifty thousand dollars burning twenty thousand dollars per month with a team of twelve in sweden fifteen percent...