How Studyo CEO Renaud Boisjoly grew to $1.3M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Reno Bush re he has 19 years of experience as part of the Apple education team in Canada and started helping schools implement technology programs focused on learning outcomes working with public and private schools alike he build a reputation as an industry expert giving talks at different local events such as the education digital summit in Montreal in 2014 he founded his company studio which quickly became a new standard in helping students get organized in middle and high school now they've got 40,000 years in Canada and the US the company's the only EdTech tool to be used by all students in his school all day and across subjects throughout the year in studios schools only 38 percent felt organized before now 86 percent with the tool feel organized which is an essential skill for college and career readiness or no are you ready to take it to the top hey absolutely ok so is this just a free tool or do you guys make money oh we do make money ok is it a SAS model it is ok very good all right let's take a step back so you're giving these talks you're kind of in part of Apple at this point you use this kind of get a lot of exposure at what point do you realize I got a split out and build my own thing actually in 2010 when Apple launched the iPad it really transformed the way schools were implementing technology what they were doing is that before I was you know complicated and slow they were rolling out laptops not a lot of schools were doing it the iPad made it possible and then shortly after the Chromebook as well I saw that as an opportunity to help those schools and decided to go off on my loan and do that very good and what year was that you said 20 well point of 2011 20 and 11 okay very good and walk me through kind of how you price I assume you're not selling to the students are you selling directly to the school system we are exactly so it's not an easy sale oh no definitely not but actually where we're getting some good traction the way we're doing this is we're approaching mostly independent schools for now it's still our go-to-market strategy there so that makes it a little bit more possible to do it you're saying this is code word for budgets are more flexible there yes decisions are more flexible it's not really the decision process is is definitely less tricky than districts in Reno so what's the average independent school system pay you to get access to your technology it varies you know typical contracts are between 7 $10,000 a year a year okay good and and how many students will that cover usually that's typically somewhere between 500 and a thousand students okay great now you launched in 2011 how do you bootstrap the company erase capital we did bootstrap for awhile then we went through an accelerator program in montreal called founder fuel which really helped us craft our pitch make sure that we had a you know larger vision to what we were doing as well erased a little bit of cash there raised a convertible note following that and that really kicked us off who did you raise the note from the BDC which is a publicly owned bank if you like part of the government program so is it I was gonna say are these folks actually potentially sitting on your cap table are these really grants unique to Canada well the this was actually yeah the BBC ended up converting into equity stock equity but they're not they don't actually have a seat at the table there for now but they're on the cap table they are yeah yeah okay so how much have you raised today total a total about close to two million now okay very good and then round out your team for me how many folks today we're nine people five of which are both my CTO and the dev team the rest is all focused on sales marketing okay and where's everyone based we're all in Montreal something something's in the water up there I'm hearing a lot of CEOs building great things in Montreal oh there's some great programs here to help companies build a technology team there's a some credits basically tax credits that you can apply for that almost pays half from the salary of a dev so that really helps out a lot no it certainly does now what I've been able to scale to in terms of total customers using a platform definitely there are spooned out the schools available to us who we're basically available worldwide so you know just looking at the US independent schools there's about close to 30-some thousand independent schools how many do you have today though we have a total of 50 schools today this school year we have ten of those are in the u.s. including st. Francis prep which is maybe you know in New York City they're the largest Catholic private school interesting okay so 50 schools in the platform today pan on average call it 10 grand a year that puts you at about 4045 grand a month today in revenue is that about right that's about right and can you help us understand growth where were you a year ago about two-thirds of that so we're like it okay like 27 ish yeah per month that's great and now most the growth come from up selling additional student seats to the same independent schools or adding new independent schools altogether it's mostly adding new schools but we do get about you know maybe 10 to 15% growth from existing customers that grow you know some schools will go you know grade sevens this first year then increased 8 9 and 10 and etc because that's those are the levels we're at so it's kind of 15% year over year expansion in terms of a CV from year 1 to year 2 will that continue into 2 3 3 4 4 5 we're aiming a lot higher the lattice the the last round we raised was really aimed at sales and marketing we didn't really have a sales team before how we have three people focused entirely on outbound sales they're a real machine based on some some pretty good sales so ever you know I was talking about the expansion revenue so how do you think's a 15 percent expansion can happen as the customer goes from one years to two years to three years to four years to five oh definitely and what so eventually though they are paying for all their students how do you keep driving 15% upsell kind of expansion revenue after they have a hundred percent penetration we do have extra services that we also layer on top of the basic service so those are you know and we're creating new ones every year so that's another way what are some of those so yeah besides seats as your pricing axes what else do drives expansion so we do have for example the Administrative Tools that are available for you know managing your school if you want to do that yourself and we're just coming out with a dashboard now that allows the customer to see student progress and how they're actually getting organized that's on top of the existing connectors we have two variety of LMS a--'s and SIS system so learning management systems and student information systems so as we expand that and we increase some of those tools that gives us an extra opportunity and and training is also another one that's that's really important when you look at a revenue turn over the past twelve months what's that been revenue turnover you mean renewals you know over the past twelve months saying so including lost customers or downgrades how much revenue have you lost okay very little we have 95 percent retainment of customers so that's maybe twenty four and five grand okay so maybe you lose four or five grand in terms of M RR it's always a our we don't have monthly in the sense that schools buy for the whole year there's no partial contracts so then how could you have four grand or five grand of churn when your average contract coming in as ten grand a year I mean overall overall the customers yeah I know but my point is churn would have to be in chunks of 10 grand if customers are paying on average 10 grand per year unless you can't have a customer half churn I mean unless they downgrade ms they downgrade its because the customers we have typically lost or smaller customers that's the average price but you know a some schools have smaller and those are a little harder to retain because they're not as involved in the platform we also have revenue from pilots when we do a full a year pilot those are harder to keep so those are the ones we typically lose but the margin are you measuring like net revenue retention today or is it too early it's early to do that there's still a lot of movements in in the way things are done though so I mean you basically don't have any churn are you too cheap yeah I think we are too cheap we're we're just changing our sales model and that's proving to to be more flexible than we thought they see initially what happens that we came in to substitute for the paper agendas that schools were buying and the price for that was fairly cheap so you know they were looking for a substitution there but now as we spend the services the that value proposition is offering you know a richer experience and we're able to almost double our revenue starting this year so we're experimenting with that still right and now are you doing this profitably are you still burning the - some of the two million you raised or was still burning burning okay can I ask how aggressive your being talking 30 grand 50 grand under grand a month burning uh it's not that high actually we're about yeah fifty yeah sorry 50k a month or 55 a month and just be clear that's that's net burn not gross burn right yeah okay cool very good yep that's and when was the last round raised November oh yes you have plenty run right yeah yeah that's great what do you what do you have to where do you have to get the company to for you to go out and either hit profitability or girl raise another round we're aiming a 1.4 million of ARR okay 20 20 in order to raise a Series A okay interesting and you're doing about 500 grand annually today in terms of run right yeah yeah yeah that's good so so kind of more than doubling and then um and then series a potentially end of this year hopefully that's great all right very very good Howard last question here how are you getting the new school is what growth channels are you using we're really our number one efficient channel is outbound so we're using you know specific mailing lists and events where we're meeting with customers name an event that worked well just recently the FE TC in Florida so the future of education technology conference I've got some great leads from there another one that we really work well is the Atlas Conference ATL is it's all for independent schools really focused on that so they've been quite helpful in the past and as well in the future that's great very good alright now let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business buzz is the never split the difference but Chris boss number two is there a CEO you're following or studying I do and he doesn't know this but I'm tracking the CEO of classgraph another startup that I really admire classgraph that's correct yeah I'm gonna try and I am well hopefully maybe someday we can you think are pretty big sure of some sort are they pretty big they're not that big yet they're just like a couple of steps ahead of us okay well if you want another revenue just get their CEO to call on my show I'll get it for you okay I'll be the mean guy No number three what billing tool do you use a billing tool we're on QuickBooks right now okay QuickBooks interesting number four how many hours of sleep to get every night I try to get at least six okay in which a situation married single kids I am married with one kit one easel one kid okay very good what hopefully I'm talking you're talking bout your kid not your wife I hope yeah she wouldn't be very alright and how are you I'm fifty to fifty two last question what he was your 20 year old self knew oh boy uh grit grit grit guy's all about grit again started off at Apple now today spun out doing his own thing steady o dot Co helping students get more organized he sells directly to independent schools fifty currently paying about a hundred grand sorry ten grand per years about five hundred grand in terms of ARR that's up from just twenty seven grand a month about a year ago so nice growth growing out obviously your ear they upsell based off number of seats admin tools for managing schools and dashboards for schools to track student progress they raise two million bucks to do this burning about fifty grand a month right now but plenty of runaway team of nine people in Montreal as they look to continue driving growth alright Reno thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much