How Splynx CEO Alex Vishnyakov grew Splynx 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...