Solides Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

guys solo days today is doing 2.6 million dollars per month in Revenue that's a 31.2 million dollar run right up from a 15.6 million dollar run rate a year ago Alessandra believes they'll finish 2023 at a 60 that's 60 million dollar run right but it wasn't all easy he launched in 2010 pivoted to a subscription model in 2015 and then it took him four years to hit his first million dollar year that was 2019. he just finished last year raising a series B for about a hundred million dollars at around an 800 million valuation is looking at making additional Acquisitions in hopes to IPO in a couple years once he breaks 200 million dollars in Revenue hey folks my guest today is Alessandro Garcia he's the founder of solidase the number one HR tech for small medium companies in Brazil the company provides a basic holistic talent management software where you can attract develop and retain Talent using people analytics artificial intelligence and Behavioral Management Alessandra you ready to take us to the top yes um that's just for having me here thank you very much you bet so just to be clear you're not a traditional recruiter that takes 30 to first year salary you're a fixed SAS fee monthly correct yes it is that's great so tell us more about a customer that's using you today and how they use you sure we have uh almost 20 000 companies as subscribers and uh they used to implement the AGR process in the the company uh regularly the smaller media companies doesn't have a job process already in the company so we help to introduce the process of hiring talents developing and retaining and engaging talents to increase productivity and reduce your number costs and so just to be clear so you've got 20 000 paying customers today yes 20 000 paying customers small limited companies in Brazil that's a that's amazing and how many employees those 20 000 companies manage via your platform close to two millions wow 2 million okay so we could take 2 million employees divided by 20 000 customers the average team size there is about a hundred is that right exactly okay tell us more about the back story here um when did you launch the company what year yeah the company was launched in 2010 but we run a very traditional way of selling software at that time it was a transactional service so in 2015 we dropped everything out in the start the business again with a subscription change the the way of doing marketing and sales and since that we started to count the customer from one in 2015 uh and with triple triple double double in almost double in the 50 year uh we run four years uh bootstrap in the fourth year we got the investment from dgf so how much how much how much did you this would have been in 2019 how much did you raise in 2019 it was uh close to four million dollar uh it's a very small round we were able to not have a great delusion at that time and it was a lot to to grow company to continue to grow the company to to last year when we made a series B and that series B I think was for 103 million right yeah strong a lot of people's 100 million dollar 100 million dollars and most folks in their Syria you know most series bees last year companies were signed you know around 10 percent of the company were you in that same range a little more uh because we are planning to the company uh very close to the IPO phase so uh it was to make a lot of sense to us to go with this uh giant investor uh a little more yeah far so 100 million raised at a little under or sorry you sold a little more than 10 percent of the company that would mean your post money value yeah on the first round you'll see yes yes 100 million raised and your series B last year you sold a little more than 10 to the company which would mean your post money valuation was somewhere around like 800 million dollars exactly I see okay and then take me back because I think you did did you do a series a or like a two or three million dollar round in 2019 the three million series a in 2019 what valuation was that at do you remember well maybe 15 million uh million dollars I think that's something like that oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview well then you're you are quite the Enterprise Value Creator going from a 15 million valuation to an 800 million dollar valuation last year help us understand what drove the growth how were you what was your growth strategy in terms of getting new customers during those years uh uh the product itself is generating a lot of uh impact in the small ability companies so it make it make for us easy to to get customers and uh and generate results uh on that just to have an idea uh on average we save close to 700 000 Rises maybe 107 000 a year in savings on uh turnover costs and the customers pay us close to eight thousand dollars a year so there's a lot of saving and the the argument to to sell our software is very good and today we don't have other players uh providing a job software for small ability to composition Brazil in U.S you have a bamboo in jar and you know the players but here we are playing this this game alone so we have to to explore this opportunity and run fast as well as we can so Alessandra did I hear you say the average customer today pays you eight thousand dollars per year yes so could we take that would be 650 per month on average if we multiply 650 dollars times twenty thousand customers it puts you at about 13 million dollars of ARR is that accurate is less than that because there is two groups of software and when we talk about this redution of the turnover costs we are talking about the the whole platform and we have a group of uh close to 10 000 customers using the scheduling point it's what's up from a company that we acquired last year uh called tangerino they deal with uh scattering time and uh and uh patch clock electronic bench clock it's like that so uh there is two groups in that group we have the holistic platform we safe uh close to to 700 000 rise and they paying us eight thousand uh dollars a year well I guess just to be clear so so monthly recurring Revenue today across the entire company you said is a it's about a million dollars a month or is it more uh more more okay got it yes yes so the average company that is not paying you eight thousand dollars per year they're paying you something much higher yes they pay less just to be clear I have this those customers use the whole the whole platform and half of them use just a piece of the software uh to take care of the scheduling times no I understand Alessandro but but if you take it just because to keep it simple the the across your entire company the average customer today pays you about how much per month oh let me check it uh okay it was our arpu is 100 130 dollars a month okay so I'm some some I'm doing some kind of math wrong if you have 20 000 customers paying 130 per month that means you're you're doing you know 2.2.6 million per month is that right yes oh that is correct okay yes okay so if you're doing 2.6 million a month today where were you exactly one year ago so we can calculate growth rate um oh wow how how did you do that well Facebook ads inside sales team what was your go to market strategy there uh using important marketing and inside sales uh the whole process and we have a major portal where we can get a lot of the job professionals uh searching for content and how to to deal with things and we have also uh an academy where we provide uh courses in HR to help people uh in both smaller media companies to press the HR in the company and generate results because uh the companies the the job professional doesn't have a lot of information and they don't are very experienced in running uh we can help them and teach them uh how to do the HR and we can introduce our software in this process that makes a lot of sense so going back to the early days do you remember what year you hit a million dollars of ARR Ange oh no I don't but it was uh two years ago curious from now yeah I think it's that it's a 20 2019 yes wow okay um so 2019 a million now last year 15.6 million today you're at a 31.2 million dollar run rate the one question I've got for you because you're unique obviously you're not based in the US but in the U.S a lot of employees that had options valued at last year's valuations are now underwater right because valuations have come down if you were doing 15.6 million last year when you did a 800 million post money valuation that would put your multiple over to 51x which today would seem very expensive how do you manage employee morale if they feel like their options are underwater uh today we're not have this problem even with this uh lower of the multiples in valuations uh because with real a lot since from them so uh we don't have to deal with this problem we have a lot of problems but not least are you thinking about an IPO yes uh maybe in three years we are trying to to build a solid business to to offer this in the public market and would you go public in Brazil or in the US or somewhere else we don't know we don't know yet what do you think you have to hit from a revenue perspective in order to have a successful IPO foreign close to close to 200 million uh dollars uh a year yeah before you IPO yeah so I I think we have a business if we open the company in Brazil we can do that a little less maybe 150 could make sense for us yeah and if you're doing a 31.2 million dollar run rate today we're recording this March 22nd 2023. what do you think you'll finish at this year in terms of Revenue our expectation is to do well again it says you want to finish this year at a 60 million six zero million dollar run rate yes uh 80 percent death will come from organic growth and uh we are looking to inorganically to do the m a um but close to 20 percent of the growth will become from a minute and Alessandro how many folks are full-time today at your company 700 wow how many of them are engineers a little more than 200 okay and tell me more about how you've structured your sales organization how many people carry a quota uh today we have uh maybe 150 uh sales person they are divided in schemes we have an expansion team um medium business team and the small medium and we are trying to uh vs be a very small business uh this thing is running very well but I don't know why because does that company from 15 to 30 employees so uh basically the the owner take care of the managed people so uh that the churn is very good 2.1 for a very small business in the that's monthly or annually okay so 24 gross churn annually but how much expansion do you have uh in this uh field I I don't have this information on the BSB okay uh in general it's close to five percent uh in expansion so a 105 and uh match also so as a company you've got 150 105 net dollar retention annually but as a company what's gross churn per year oh uh 1.9 per year no no sorry at 1.9 per month or okay so 24 gross churn annually which means you've got 30 expansion so net revenue retention is 105 percent yeah wow okay those numbers work that's very exciting um yeah we have a lot of opportunity in growth from 105 to 130 we are working on that uh on this place we have a lot of opportunities to explore as we wrap up here you mentioned Acquisitions how do you think about what companies to go acquire uh sorry I didn't get the question uh talking about companies that you want to go buy Acquisitions how do you think about what companies that you could potentially go by awesome uh we are looking to we have opportunity on products that are very hard to build and we reward we would lose a lot of time if we expect to to make to develop the starter so uh and we also are looking to opportunities in cross-selling and between the companies so it was very important for us in The Next Movement very good well Alessandra we're out of time let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book now I like every time I use the the 48 Laws of Power that's a good one Robert Greene number two is there a CEO you're following or studying okay I am trying to understand uh Parker from uh Ripley he are doing a Nelson job Parker Conrad number three what's your favorite online tool for building solidase I use every time a Google Calendar number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh eight dollars I don't have much problem with that and Alessandra what's your situation married single kids I married uh two kids uh over 10 years and 15 and how old are you 45 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old in terms of business uh stand uh to know the power of the the subscription model I think this is this is very interesting and I could exported better my friends guys so it is today is doing 2.6 million dollars per month in Revenue that's a 31.2 million dollar run right up from a 15.6 million dollar run rate a year ago Alessandra believes they'll finish 2023 at a 60 that's 60 million dollar run right but it wasn't all easy he launched in 2010 pivoted to a subscription model in 2015 and then it took him four years to hit his first million dollar year that was 2019. he just finished last year raising a series B for about a hundred million dollars at around an 800 million valuation is looking at making additional Acquisitions in hopes to IPO in a couple years once he breaks 200 million dollars in Revenue Alessandro thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much much it's nice to talk to you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 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