How SocioEvents CEO Yarkin Sakucoglu grew SocioEvents to $1.6M revenue and 400 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is yarkin sakotrullo he is the co-founder and ceo of event management platform socio originally from turkey he knew that the us was the place he needed to be for career and technology in just over a year the company has scaled to more than 400 customers including google microsoft pinterest in nearly 50 countries all right you are can you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right what are all these customers paying for they are paying us around four thousand dollars a year okay and tell me more about what exactly how they're using you well we are like you said we are an event management platform what we do is we help so large enterprises optimize their events so let's say you're microsoft and you're putting on 60 events here you will use our platform with your entire events team to put together these events and make sure that you're getting roi okay and 400 folks paying four grand a year would be about 300 bucks a month or about 130 grand a month right now in terms of your guys's revenue is that accurate from an mrr perspective yeah it's it's pretty close okay and where were you exactly a year ago just so we can understand growth rate we were less than 500k in arr a year ago okay so 500 and ar would be about 41 000 a month so you've about tripled year over year is that right yeah that is correct that's great i want to dive more into the backstory here when you launch the company may 2016 is when we incorporated the company okay and when was the first line of code written you know from may 2016 to two times like basically late 2017 or like let's say january 2018 it was all about building the product we had to pivot a few times and i would say the code was written in like june 2017 okay gen okay january 2017 and when was your first uh when was your first dollar of revenue coming in probably too early 2017 but like i said we had to pivot a few times so the way i describe it is we found our product market fit in late 2017 and we started selling to the right ideal customer profile in january 2018. well i guess the question i'm trying to get to is uh how much did you spend on your nbp before your first dollar revenue i we were completely bootstrapped honestly i had two co-founders that were technical i was technical so there was no i i believe he had like put in nine thousand dollars into the business that started so maybe 9k but it was most of yours time writing the code absolutely that's very cool okay so 2016 you get going you start growing the company 400 customers today now have you done this bootstrapped even to today or have you raised capital so as of last month we haven't we have announced our six million dollar series a before that we have had angel investors get in but it was all bootstrap no ec money okay so how much angels so how much total in the company today 740 000 dollars in angel investment lifetime and we have recently raised that 6 million so 6.7 million lifetime yep no that makes good sense all right good and then what's your team size today how many people we have today we actually own more than five new people so we are at 45 right now oh that's great okay so 45 folks and what's the breakdown between engineers versus quota carrying sales reps we have 12 engineers at the point at this moment and we have well with this new five people almost 15 16 uh sales folks oh wow okay interesting more sales folks than engineers what do you set quota at for the 16 folks well it depends on their icp like whichever customer profile that they're going after can you give me can you pick one and tell me a deeper about that one i i would not i i don't think i have the most up-to-date numbers at the moment okay do you know what you generally try and set the quota target at relative to full comp so like sales person profitability is 5x or 10x or i i think we do around 5x is our internal goal okay so just to repeat that back to you if someone if they earn their full commissions their base plus commissions let's say are a hundred grand a year you're saying you'd probably set their quota around 5x that or about 500 grand yeah yeah 500 grand would be good internally like i said depending on the customer profile it could be lower or higher yeah okay cool how did you get your first 10 customers it was all outbound and i was the str i read this book called predictable revenue and i have literally copied the entire model in and it was just cold emailing for the first i would say like first 40 was pure cold emailing okay and how did you i mean so tell me tell me who you looked up what the job title was how you found their email i remember pulling up linkedin recruiter i i got a try i got a free trial so i had to work very hard on it to make sure that i fit everything into that free trial and what i did was i looked at event planners in companies that had more than i don't remember the exact number like 500 employees or something like that so what i did is i used the plug-in i do not remember the name of it to export that to an excel sheet and i use artreach.io to run them through a sequence and i booked them using hubspot's calendar tool and back then i was the str as well as the account executive so i took the demo as well and closed them as well as the customer support rep back then i love that okay so you did all this how much revenue did you close yourself before you hired your first sales person uh i think we had around like less than 200k i would say in arr uh when i hired our first sales person who is now our vp of sales that's great okay good now you know moving forward today you know closing sales is great but keeping customers is even special uh or more special what does churn look like over the past 12 months yeah uh so the trailing 12 our net revenue retention is actually negative negative negative nine nine point seven so you're trying to get the negative 10. uh from a gross gross revenue perspective it's around 20 percent okay so gross revenue eternist about 20 annually uh that would mean you have to have 29 expansion to get to net revenue retention about 109 or the inverses net negative churn of negative nine percent that is that sounds right yep okay interesting the thirty percent about thirty percent expansion revenue where is it coming from what are you upselling against yeah uh a few ways we can upsell so first of all we have three products usually customers will get into the door by buying one and by the time they are into our platform fully deployed we will usually see them adopt a second or even a third product so that's a huge one the second thing is since these are events right you can't mess them up so usually our sales cycle starts by a trial with a single event or a few events and if they like everything then they deploy to their entire events which which happens to expand quite a bit of the 400 customers today how many of them pay for more than one product well we have launched the products two months ago i would say around currently 15 of them are using multiple products but that's increasing rapidly as it has just been a few months okay so if about 50 customers use multiple products today wait so am i reading you right you just launched product three three months ago so yeah two two to three months ago we have launched two new products in addition to our core products oh got it got it got it okay yeah that's what to say you went from nothing to a hundred and sixty thousand dollars an mrr on three and that would be pretty impressive all right yeah that's not the case okay good now you raised some capital obviously to drive some of this growth so i assume you're being aggressive in terms of burn help me understand what you're comfortable with sleeping at night are you good with 100 a month burn or more we actu we actually do not burn yet that's something that we are currently working on like i said we have announced our fundraise last month and we did not raise money because we were burning we raised money because we we are planning to burn yeah starting so you're cash to a positive today then yeah or are you casual positive like meaningful like 10 to the bottom line or you basically break even we are breaking when we try to keep it break even uh we don't we don't want to be too profitable that that just means we are not investing enough to grow yep no that's right very good and then talk to me about bringing customers in the first place so to get a new four thousand dollar your account what will you spend on fully weighted cac uh we spent nine hundred and fifty two thousand dollars uh to to get them through the door and wait sorry how much 900 900 dollars to a thousand dollars okay i thought you said 952 thousand dollars and i said wait wait wait i i i might have said that 950 dollars to a thousand dollars of cache okay good so you got about a three to four month payback period there obviously that math works who are you competing mostly against yeah just just to correct you all of our customers pay us upfront so we actually recover immediately on a cash basis yeah on a cash basis yes on a cash basis yes from a recognition perspective yeah three months is what it takes uh we compete mainly with sieven yeah they are the uh big veil in our...