How Slidepresenter CEO Sebastian Walker grew Slidepresenter to $16.3M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today sebastian walker he's the ceo of slide presenter at digital knowledge transfer software he studied business economy and worked at major consultancies before the company is now looking to revolutionize the internal knowledge flow for corporations globally founding the company in 2011 an intuitive solution that empowers any employee to create training videos within minutes sebastian are you ready to take us to the top sure all right good so i think the company kind of is clear you know these videos help us understand what the business model is how do you guys make money right we provide a software as a service actually world's most easiest way and most fun way to capture knowledge from all kinds of people inside the company especially for corporate knowledge and our clients pay annual licenses based on either the amount of video footage they create or on the uh based on the amount of users so we have two kind of models depending if you want to go for global knowledge transfer which means you have a global license and we charge you by your success like how much content is created or on the other hand like based on the number of authors so what would you say what would you take on the average customer pays per are we talking like 10 bucks a year a million a year um it's more than 10 bucks like um all of them are enterprise customers um so what does it mean it means that um they pay larger amounts and a lot of them have global licenses a lot of them have huge departments that produce content so um it arrives dramatically yeah yeah sebastian what's it just because i know you have a lot of different customer codes and we have a limited time i mean are we talking i was being facetious there when i said ten to a million that's a huge range i mean are we talking like 10 grand or yeah it's usually it's more than 10 grand it's like let's say between 10 and 100 grand um for what they use currently if someone's listening right now and they want to get started is 10 10 grand what they got to spend to get started uh a good point for starting with slide presenter if your team is like 15k per year okay okay got it that's helpful to understand that's where you guys are currently focused on onboarding new customers yes it's a land and expand strategy so we start entering the companies and then it grows inside what what what can you predictably kind of rely on in terms of expansion so if i set up with you today for 15 grand a month what do i expand to in year two probably um it depends on like uh it mainly depends on how the adoption inside the company is uh how large the cooperation is and well it it often also depends on how companies see these topics like the more agile and more innovative the more digital they are the faster it spreads so um if you look at them uh who is our customer base um like we have customers that are all large successful corporations with more than 1 000 employees so that's our current focus target group from across all industries mostly from pharmaceutical endurance and financial industries and um so yes so sebastian the ques the question is i understand what what it's dependent on but what is yours today what is your kind of expansion year one to year two typically um [Music] it's it can double uh if if the customer is successful it can also stay on this like with this 15k customers already have something they can really use the broader base it's like it could be around as an average maybe something like 50 percent five zero or one five uh five zero five zero okay yeah the so the reason i'm asking it sounds like you're pretty sophisticated in terms of what you're measuring when you look at your cohort that signed up a year ago right if you look at a total cohort all the revenue that signed up in december 2016. you can basically look at what expansion was right on that account so you're saying that cohort will grow by about 50 percent that cohort those who would stay because they're asian enough they would grow by 50 okay well so let's talk about the this the situation where they might potentially leave so what's revenue churn annually today and if they do leave why are they leaving um if customers leave they may leave because um like people might be afraid of being on the video and stuff like that because what we do is like we help them to to create everything they do based on knowledge with videos audios if there is a how to say cultural cultural issue with that if the leadership makes fun of people who are on videos for example then this this is a major problem looking at our churn rates we have a negative revenue churn um but if you only look at the chun it's like a like 1.5 percent um per month or per year per month okay so 1.5 percent revenue churn per month okay which would be about 18 per year so eighteen percent of the revenue turns per year but that's that's if you only count uh yeah if i finish there if i finish there what i was gonna say is that's 18 gross churn you didn't have expansion so when you add them together your net revenue retention is how far over 100 percent um it's about 100 uh yeah actually this number i don't have with me currently okay you measure it the opposite way it sounds like which is net negative how far negative are you um yes same number it's like i don't have a developer no you don't know you just know you're you just know you're above 100 retention okay well if you do have 50 expansion on the cohort and there's 18 churn on the cohort net should be about 132 percent it's true but customers are have different sizes and so on so this is also that doesn't matter if you're looking at cohort analysis based off time do you measure it a different way um not so far like um we just like we implemented a new pricing uh beginning of last year which changed a whole lot of things so we don't have final number for now let's let's dig into that lesson so why change pricing uh because we found out that um like we came from a user-based pricing um which leads to the situation um that uh some customers might have like 30 licenses for example and those 30 licenses might be used by 25 people and five people might not use it but in the company there might be 100 or thousands other users who could and would want to use such kind of workflow workplace 4.0 application to create content to to avoid that they are subject matter experts have to repeat themselves but they don't have a license so what we did is basically we changed it so we enable companies to start with the slide presenter based on a global license where we don't count the authors we just counted the number of hours they produced but yeah yeah exactly so do you have no per seat pricing now no we still have it because some companies want to start a very very small departments and for them it's yeah it's better to start a lower amount let's sebastian put all this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company what year we launched uh quite a while ago we launched in 2011 and then we first we went to the wrong direction and we did a heavy pivoting and since we did the pivoting successful we we are quite successful now um and uh yeah we had like looking at the the last year um for example october to october um we uh had a slow growth because we worked with some um yeah organizational topics and stuff like that so the overall uh revenue growth from then to today like one year was 60 for the 12 months is and um yeah and uh yeah so like this will increase again um from now because we hired uh several team members and now we staff marketing which we didn't have before what's the team size today sebastian uh the overall team size today is 28 people 28 yep 28. and where's everyone based we have two locations it's germany frankfurt and ludwigsoften and another location is in ukraine where we have some uh development team production germany and ukraine and over the launch in 2011 over the past seven years how many customers have you scaled to um as i said at the beginning we scaled fast and in the wrong environment like we went for conference organizers and stuff like that because we thought okay cool they have a lot of content that can be scaled and that was the totally wrong assumption and as we fixed this um we went to the e-learning space and knowledge transfer space and now we have around 100 corporations like large corporations and some minor small customers we're experimenting with s p pricings um but we don't count them at all because they are just a small part of our revenues you mentioned 60 year over year growth rate i think you went from october to october so where were you last october um yeah those numbers are uh like our investors forced us not to to mention them publicly so uh let's say well your investor come on sebastian your investors shouldn't force you to do anything give me a range if you're more comfortable with that yeah okay so fine um we're seven digits we're not eight digits yet and um we're not in the highest s seven digits area so yeah okay so seven digits you're talking about annual run rate yep okay great i mean look i can take you said yeah yeah you said about a hundred customers today you said a hundred customers today which are kind of the right customers after the pivot and you said that earlier you have about a 15 000 kind of point is a good point for you in terms of acv so if i multiply those two numbers together that puts you about 125 grand per month or about if i multiply by 12 about 1.5 million per year which matches kind of what you just said seven figures but not pushing eight is that directionally correct um that that's the starting point you were asking for the starting point the average is uh much higher than this okay so like i mean what's your what what's a goal i mean what's the next big revenue target you have i mean when you break 5 million in ar um this year or not that's pretty much closer to it than what we had before i know but do you think you'll br do you think you'll break five this year either you know there's 30 days left or do you think that'll be a 2019 goal you cut out sorry earlier than the end of 2019 yep okay so yeah sometime in 2019 how are you driving most the growth how are you signing up these customers right so um [Music] after the change the the biggest value comes from actually existing customers now um but on the other hand uh like if you ask for sales processes we mainly do direct sales and active sales like a lot of events and stuff like that as those are enterprise customers um this is what works best for us um [Music] and uh of course recommendation and all the stuff because the whole learning development scene is quite small and people talk um but we can say that uh different than before uh a lot a lot of additional revenue comes from existing customers and what was the last time customer success what was the last conference that you uh that you sponsored uh our own actually it was uh day before yesterday it was awesome uh in frankfurt uh but before that like we have conferences like everything that's around e-learning like future personnel learn tech and stuff like that got it events like learn tech great and then we also we have partnerships where we also attend to events with large learning management system providers that's great and now when you launch the company you've pivoted now you're 28 people have you bootstrapped to raise capital uh actually we bootstrapped at the beginning or we did and then we quite early did an age around and then we went to the wrong direction um and then we actually pivoted after that like uh we we bootstrapped after that because we didn't want to make a new round until we have better kpis and so we made those better kpis then we raised around and we but we're very very capital efficient okay so how much capital and how much how much total have you raised to date uh we have raised a total of 1.5 million okay so 1.5 million dollars raised today all of that was equity or was any of that debt uh it's equity it was equity that's great okay so so that's actually not a i mean if you have 28 people and you're saying that four or five million is closer to what you are in terms of ar i mean it sounds like you're probably profitable casual positive today yeah so like we don't have uh cash burn that that usually okay if you don't if you don't cash burn either break even or cash or positive both good places to be that means you have a lot of leverage are you looking at raising right now um we think about it and and yeah so so teach us what do you why would you do it why would you not um we would not do it because we still have a lot of potential to increase our kpis before we do it um we think about doing it because time is time is market share and we believe that the time for our topic is actually is now and um yeah so that's currently in a discussion so we will have a final decision on it probably beginning of the next year we don't have time pressure about it but on the other hand uh like you want to take up speed um but it's good to have some hypothesis already validated before we start and for example the whole s b market is an interesting space for us currently we're mainly in the german speaking region and we have first customers in the u.s and stuff like that but we want to extend that because we know it drives valuation how aggressive are you being in terms of customer acquisition when you look at fully weighted cats so to sign up a new 15 000 acv account will you spend that whole first year acv to acquire them uh i didn't get the full question the question is about your fully weighted cac if someone signs up for 15 grand a year will you spend that whole amount up front to acquire them um we would spend that whole amount to acquire them but we have a very much higher lifetime value so it's yeah it's roughly one year crack okay yeah it's one one year payback yeah but it's like um yeah it's it's a small amount regarding this the custom life number and what do you assume customer lifetime value is [Music] um it's uh yeah that's taking an account that we didn't want to disclose the the revenues like uh yeah you could cut it if i if i tell you so like it's well by the way i can already calculate it cause you give me a revenue churn so it's very easy to calculate lifetime value many times higher it's many times higher it's like yeah some like many many times sebastian the reason i ask the question is because it's the most valuable way for my audience to learn how a ceo thinks about lifetime value so you're not helpful when you just say many times higher how do you think about lifetime value um i think about lifetime value is the key and uh because at the end of the day um you can fix everything with the cash if if you don't like there are other companies who burn all the all the lifetime value to or two year acbs on on sales and i think that's that's not ideal you can do this for a short period of time but you should at the end get to a point where you somewhere are profitable with what you do at least from an operative point of view which doesn't mean that you have to earn money to you should invest into growth but generally um yeah as a as you already found out like if they start at the beginning with a relatively low amount of 50k um it's uh it's already everything that comes on top is for sure profit and if customers stay around for example for years and increase just acvs then it's pretty good okay let's wrap up here sebastian with the famous five one word answers if you can number one what's your favorite business book um that's a good question um [Music] there are so many that come to one might know um the last one you read uh the last one i read like the last one i read was uh why it's about recruiting and i think recruiting everything about recruiting what's the title of the book it's called why just why why okay so yeah number two is there a ceo you're following are studying um there are many cool ceos in the software industry um i still believe in microsoft what billing tool do you guys use um [Music] as we have enterprise customers billing is not important as important to us as like for other companies like we don't use aura something like that we use a local variant for the small and medium-sized business it's called monsom it's a german vendor one sum m-o-n like monsoon the rain like with an m at the end monthly sun you could yeah okay m-o-n-s-u-m great mon some s you up great and number four how many hours i'll sleep to get every night how many hours of sleep do you get every night um it depends on between five and eight this really depends on the time and how much load there is so we'll say six and a half on average and sebastian what's your situation married single kiddos uh single no kids no kiddos yeah no it changed recently so i in a relationship but no kids okay not not married but in a relationship no kids and how old are you 39 39 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um i would probably um [Music] a lot of things but one of the main things is i'm a single founder i would probably take someone else to the team at the beginning first of all second i would probably be more hypothesis driven at the beginning when i found a company so i could avoid this pivot baby at the beginning those are maybe the two main things guys make sure you sign up a co-founder coming from sebastian founded a company back in 2011 called slide presenter employees use it to create training videos now 100 enterprises using them paying anywhere between three four five six grand a month usually on annual contracts doing somewhere in the three four-ish million bucks in terms of ar range today hoping to scale to five million sometime in 2019 growing 60 year-over-year you know caught break even today on just 1.5 million bucks raised so pretty capital efficient 28 people on their team between germany and ukraine 18 gross revenue churn annually uh net revenue retention north of 100 willing to spend up to first year of acv to acquire a sorry of lifetime value to acquire the customer looking up maybe raising if they want to get more aggressive after they prove out some additional data points here in the next couple months sebastian thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much