How Hosthub CEO Alexander Caravitis grew Hosthub to $2.2M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is alexander garavitas he is uh this co-founder and ceo of sync bnb since 1995 he's worked as a web designer developer project manager and team leader along with a specialist in many other areas before moving on to level positions and large tech companies in greece he wrestle recently left a managing partner position in the largest online services group in greece to start sync bnb with his co-founder petros they're now playing in the vacation rental channel management space all right alexander are you ready to take us to the top sure am let's take it up all right tell us about the company what are you guys doing and what's your revenue model how do you make money so uh sinkbnb helps vacation rental owners and managers increase the revenue manage bookings from multiple sources and avoid double bookings so it's a purely sas we charge 15 per rental per month and we offer some other services also which are you know one-off but that's our main model and alexander so how many rentals are being managed through the platform today so we currently manage uh 1200 rentals that belong to 400 different uh owners or managers so that's our user base today that's great can i multiply 1200 times 15 or do about 18 grand a month right now it's a bit less it's around 15k because uh there are some bug discounts involved but it's around 15. okay that's great and uh when's your launch company what year we launched in january of this year 2018 so we're 11 months old that's okay good i mean so off to a nice quick start i want to talk more about kind of have you how you've driven this growth i mean how'd you get your first customer so um the the story started a bit before that about one year before we launched the product where uh i first discovered the pain point so i was managing my own vacation rental i was on multiple channels and i was getting many bookings i couldn't handle i you know whenever i got a booking from one channel i had to log on to all the others and close the dates that they wouldn't get a double booking on those days so i tried to find the software that would solve this problem for me and whatever i found and i tried many was either too expensive because it was targeted towards the vacations and managers and management companies that could afford it or whatever was affordable was not working very well so um the next thing i did was try to find out if i'm alone if i'm the only one that has this problem so what it is was uh i ran a survey on 1200 vacation rental owners and managers all over the world i gathered data i saw that there were you know many people a large percentage of those uh people had the same problem and that's how we decided to start the company interesting and i mean are you developers did you start developing it yourself no i used to write some code back in the day but it's been many years so i needed to find a co-founder and i was very very lucky to find petros who actually came back from the netherlands where he was a lead developer for a large online bank and uh you know we're discussing the the problem and the potential and at some point he said it i'm coming back let's do this together so he came back and we started laughing you guys split 50 50. uh it's 60 40 but we we run it like it's 50 pieces that's awesome and what's the rest of the team look like just you two right now no actually uh we i know you're going to grill me for this but we've raised some money so how much i managed to uh well we started with uh 200 uh thousand dollars last year uh before we launched the full product and we raised another round another note a few months back for another 380 to help us expand and grow faster so we're nine people right now and we're all based in our offices in athens okay so nine people 580 000 raised but all debt notes notes yeah notes okay so so burning capital today um yeah we uh our burn rate is uh what our expenses every month are around 30k uh so we make about 15 so it's about 15 billion yeah your bank account is going down by 15 000 each month but you have plenty of runway at least 10 months but uh you know the the concept is to raise again in a few months and grow even faster yeah churn have you lost any customers yeah we do uh the main reason is that uh it's uh for many of our customers it's a seasonality thing so they rent their properties maybe only in summer or maybe all in winter depending on what type of property it is we have an eight percent monthly churn uh it's just a local basement revenue yeah yeah it's both logan you listen to the show don't you i'm a big fan so to say you you know all the things before i ask them this is great why do you listen most people say it's too aggressive um i i don't think if it's a people uh you know concept of you know wanting to listen into what's going on around the world uh maybe it's just curiosity or uh maybe it's just fun watching you grilling people with the speed of your questions that's great now i know i didn't know you listen to the show i do know that you read that you got the magazine so i'm looking forward to you getting uh getting that but okay good i'm waiting for that it hasn't arrived yet okay very good yeah those ship we send that out to about 10 000 b2b sas ceos they ship on the 15th of each month and because you're in greece that'll probably take about 14 days to get to you so look out for it it'll be there soon okay sure will eight percent logo churn uh per month right now uh it's seasonal which is why there's churn um walk me through do you have any upsells yet or is it just 15 bucks per parentals all i can pay you it's still early so we're focusing on the core product we want to do that right and uh the plan is to start introducing some uh added value services maybe later in 2019. yeah do you know what your cac is like what do you have to pay to get a new 15 a month rental yeah sure um it's uh average about uh 60 dollars per customer okay um so we do uh some paid uh campaigns on google adwords and facebook and what is your most successful facebook ad what's the headline sound like uh we're running a b tests on various different uh top you know titles and uh creatives the one that has been attracting uh the most uh clicks has been the one that starts with are you an airbnb host interesting so yeah it just triggers the imagination of what comes next on the ticket to find out what comes next that's great that's really great okay good uh 60 cac 15 a month about a four month payback period uh a little bit less last time i calculated it i think it's around three months or something okay very good and uh you mentioned that you want to raise additional capital in the future i mean how much are you looking to raise in your next round and what do you want to grow revenue to before you do that our aim is to grow to 50k five zero uh when we raise our next round and we hope it will be uh an equity round uh of uh and raise maybe 1 to 1.5 million something like that interesting very good and what valuation do you hope to raise at i mean do you have an idea if we get a 10x multiple i think it's going to be great yeah yeah do you think you'll get that is there a lot of funding opportunities in greece actually it's one of the best times to start a startup in greece because there's a european program called equifund that came out last year and it has put about 300 million euros in eight different funds so it's a fund of funds so 300 million has been divided into eight funds that have been investing that money into startups and uh to be frank the you know the startup community in greece it's it's grown a lot in the last few years but it's nothing you know compared to uh silicon valley or other european uh startup cities so it's one of the best times to start a business in greece right now that's great all right alex let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book i'd have to say the bible of startups which is uh the lean startup yep number two is there a ceo you're following are studying right now [Music] i'm sure you get this all the time but it's elon musk i love it there number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company can i say too sure okay intercom and google sheets intercom google sheets good and how many hours of sleep to get every night um as many as the two little ones let us have so maybe six or seven okay so you have two and you're married yeah married ticket okay and uh how old are you 45 okay last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh start sooner it took me a long time to start my own business i would have started sooner guys start sooner sink bnb helps you manage your rentals he's currently working with 1200 rentals which each pay about 13 14 15 bucks a month doing 15 grand per month right now in a revenue up from nothing just a year ago you know he had issues doing this with his own company with his own rental unit basically built the tool for himself split at 60 40 with his development co-founder now raised 580 grand his team of nine in greece are building this out burning about 15...