How Splynx CEO Alex Vishnyakov grew to $3.3M revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is alex fishkinoff he's the ceo of splints a sas platform for internet and voice service providers that helps companies get their operations under control from a single place that means billing and payment collections ticketing job scheduling and network management alex ready to take us to the top thank you thank you for inviting me you bet so give me an example of a customer that's paying you and help us understand what they're paying you for what do they get um we work with small and medium-sized internet providers that usually operate on emerging markets and at the moment we have around 700 companies working with us so it's a business to business those are paying customers yeah paying customers sustained customers and so we are currently on three million dollars annual revenue and we started six years ago and bootstrapped completely so we started with my with my with my friend and my business partner and so on and yeah the as i said the companies that we work with they are quite small so they are not that big so monthly they pay us around 350 us dollars so it means like four thousand dollars annually and yeah but we have clients from 50 different countries so at the moment do you listen to the show yes have you have you listened to the podcast before yes of course no i'm like this is great you're giving you you know all the questions i'm gonna ask so you just give me answers i love it i'm like i don't have to do any work this is great so no the math makes sense 700 customers paying 350 bucks a month is about 250 000 a month in revenue which is three million dollar run rate if you're doing about 250 000 a month today where were you exactly one year ago uh we were on 2 million so so nice growth yes the growth the growth per year in the last two years is around 70 percent so of course taking the first years yeah i would say take us back one more year do you remember what was revenue it was um it was 1 million then we went to 2 million so we doubled and always in the previous years we also doubled the revenue so we started with like 80 000 doors then we went to 250 then we went to 500 and we went to 1 million 2 million at the moment awesome 3 million yes this is what we are heading now so far that's amazing well look a lot of my audience might not be familiar with sort of internet companies and emerging markets right so why do they need you what are they paying you for um because they try to compete with large players so because we work with internet and voice providers so the companies that provide internet connection to end users and you know you can compare so for example att is a large operator vodacom all these big players but we work with the small guys they try to beat these big operators and these small players they need software that will work efficiently and that will help them to manage their business and grow and compete and be this large competitors so what we bring them is that kind of software that does everything for them so we manage everything in one single place you know this billing payment scheduling network management plenty of things that all the areas actually of internet provider uh that's uh we just bring it in one place and that really increases a lot efficiency on the company so this small company then is able to to work well and and to compete and get uh get the market sell their services from your website splinx makes it easy to sell internet connect build customers and support your customers right yes now what got you into this space are you an ex-internet guy yes i started as a network architect or a network engineer but also i was working as a project manager product manager for some online companies in czech republic and then in 2014 i went i was invited to south africa to work as a network architect there to help one local company to build a quite large network so i was helping them and meanwhile i found out that the market is emerging and there are many new players coming there in south africa and in all other african countries as well and when i came back when my contract ended so i came back 2016 and we decided to write a software that will start helping these companies to to operate efficiently so that's that's how it started all 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 raised 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 valuations 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 valuation 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 it's amazing and how many folks are on your team today full time we have 50 members at the moment five zero yeah how many are engineers um at least three five twenty five okay three five now i imagine your churn is very low once someone signs up they can't just turn you off right what is your turn like today very well very well so if i can tell you that if we if we gain 15 customers per month we lose maybe two customers but mainly it's a new companies that we're not able to onboard for example so we made some mistake or they had no time to onboard so usually if company signs up so they do not leave it because the whole operations of their company is just linked or is completely connected to our software so and when you say our software are you the sole founder or do you have a copy yes yes yes i'm a co-founder and managing director that's amazing okay so how many founders are there uh at the moment we have four founders four okay did you guys just split equity evenly at the start not that much but more or less yes there is a one main developer who who started it all and then i joined and then we took one more partner that helped us a bit to finance the whole process okay so it might be like the bigger one owns 30 and the other three sort of split you know 20 percent 25 percent each something like that the biggest one has 48 then me and my partner we have 20 24 and there is one silent partner with eight percent so i see how do you guys think about and this is a question i get a lot from bootstrap founders how do you guys think about building your personal wealth using your sas company do you pay yourself dividends per year or how do you think about that yes we pay some dividends but actually we try to reinvest so but we pay we pay dividends yes of course we have some salary also that we pay and we decided to to pay dividends i think three years ago and we haven't increased this amount because we decided it's okay we just need to get some money from that but we would like to reinvest to the business to grow because there are plenty of things still to do and we are growing in this year and i think we'll be more than 50 people till the end of the year so i'm planning to have 80 people on my team and in one year i want to have 100 because we have launched also several new products or sub products that help us to operate in them in more areas let's say in different markets in different countries as well so it's not only emerging markets but now we are getting also many requests from united states because as you know united states also is plenty of uh there are plenty of areas that are not covered by uh internet rural zones and there are many providers that require services like or software services like three years ago when you paid out some dividends the co counters how much how much are we talking like 100 000 or more or less 200 000 more or less 200 okay and that you guys split amongst the four of you right yes yes exactly interesting and so how do you when team members sign up today do you give all team members some like some amount of options or no not yet okay okay interesting and so um moving forward you're reinvesting everything you're driving growth help me understand what the growth how are you adding so many questions you have 700 today you're adding 15 per month where are you finding these customers um we put a lot of efforts in in the marketing so i mean we try to to build a brand from the day one so we we try to convince people that this software is exactly what they need and not competitors so we do spend a lot to to online i mean a lot of efforts maybe not investments to online tools but a lot of effort uh i think i have quite a good marketing team two people there working very professional so and sales is also performing very well so do you spend any money on paid ads uh yes we do we do but not that much because uh you know we have the niche is very is quite small so how much last month do you spend on paid ads i think around like four thousand dollars okay so not a lot at all yeah yeah and then tell me how your sales team is structured do the sales people have quota yes of course they they do have so they they do have some fixed salary and then based on on the sales that they bring or they process uh we pay them uh some percentage on uh annual revenue first year of the annual revenue of one percent so uh three percent and up to five percent depends on on their involvement three to five percent okay interesting and how how how much how many deals do you expect reps to close what is their annual quota um there is no annual there is a monthly quota that they need to to to get and it's uh based so at least um at least they must bring us uh like the minimum is everyone should have like one thousand dollars monthly revenue the new one so yeah if they if they make it then we start talking about some kind of bonuses but um yeah usually yeah it's just that way so they yeah so how do you make that math work right so if you have a sales person that's adding a thousand dollars of new monthly recurring revenue every month over a year right they're going to add 12 000 right times 12 months so about 150 thousand dollars of arr do you are you able to pay them way less than 150 000 so that you actually make money on that sales rep yes what we um because they are employees of our company you know so they are quite they have very strict rules you know how they work so it's not they are a bit limited in what we what options they have so we have this strict policy they need to reach this 1000 and if they reach it so that we pay them uh that three to six percent three to five percent of um i understand that yeah what's the what's the base though you would pay like if i join you today and i used to a thousand dollars a month of new deals what would you pay me as a base um that would be not that simple because you are from united states so it depends on the country where my my accounts they work from from the countries with a lower income would say so that that's why i'm asking yeah how low how low can you get this talent um well with all the bonuses what they have they have around three thousand four thousand three thousand dollars monthly salary okay okay okay got it so you could have a sales rep that's making 36 000 per year if they hit 150 000 of new arr closed a thousand dollars a month for 12 months usually they make more they make like two and a half thousand monthly okay you know so so it means i'm saying that 1 000 is a minimum when we say that they work and they perform so in in general they make around 2.5 uh monthly one each each of them you know so that's i see and how many are there how many quota carrying reps at the moment we have two two okay and how many folks are marketing just two two marketing guys counts okay cool and then uh that makes a lot of sense this is very cool well listen this is a heck of a story here uh do you plan to keep bootstrapping or are you planning to raise uh we are thinking about it at the moment uh-huh so probably probably yeah because as i said we launched several products and we are also actively now starting working on the markets that we were not presented where the competition was a bit uh tougher so now we need to touch it first see first two three months how it will perform how we will go there and uh if everything will work well we'll probably think about raising some money and how much would you look at raising you think um [Music] not in our plans at the moment so haven't thought about it just uh need to get the numbers first you know to get yeah get the first results of this new product that we are launching and the new markets and then alex you're on an exciting journey man i'm certainly rooting for you in the meantime though let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh what my favorite book is war and peace from leo tolstoy that's good number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yes i have i'm following a few ceos of and one ceo that runs quite big um company in in russia at the moment and so his name is alex yanovsky so he is one of my teachers so and i follow him um numbers he does number three what's your favorite online tool for building splinx online tool we do plenty of things that we built ourselves we use springs for our own operations as well so that's very uh interesting to do to to help uh jira basically jira we use for for everything so all right number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i can't save the game how many hours of sleep do you get each night uh eight hours i tried seven six last week it was five or four hours and what's your situation alex married single kids um yeah married spirits any kids yeah four kids at the moment oh my gosh you're really busy yes four kids how old are you i'm 39. 39. last question something you wishing you knew when you were 20. yeah get some advisor you know get some person who can who helped me in this like a business trip or business uh journey guys splints helps local internet providers compete with the big guys like at t and emerging markets they broke a million dollars in revenue in 2020 2 million last year in 2021 and right now last month they did 250 000 in revenue so they're at a 3 million run rate today helping 700 again of these internet providers and emerging markets that pay on average 350 per month they're bootstrapped today they only paid out some dividends you know three years ago to help the founders make some money but they're 35 engineers on the team today out of 50 total just now ramping up their sales team with two folks there two folks on the marketing as they continue to bootstrap uh and are learning if their new products gonna take off if it does they might think about raising we'll see what happens alex thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 arpu 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 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya