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...