How Taia Translations CEO Marko Hozjan grew to $3.4M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is marco hojon he's building a cool called taya a trans a tool that helps the translation via the combination of ai and human translators he's a manager and passionate about leadership and business operations he's been a serial entrepreneur for many years with many companies founded and exited he's also an experienced sailor he's the book and he also bookworm in the topics of leadership and business and a person with very liberal views marco you ready to take it to the top yeah sure so firstly yeah how did you come up with the idea and if people want to follow along it's t-a-i-a-i-o exactly so actually the idea came from a language school that me and my partner mattia had before this business so we started a language school and it grew it grew and we soon realized that we cannot scale it so at that time first demands for translations came within the language school we started first we we called it a traditional translation agency or within the field they call it the lsp language service provider and we quickly saw that we could only compete with price and the the the whole market is competing with price and then the market is really outdated so uh with our tech knowledge and with our business knowledge we actually combine this together and when did you learn creations marco in 2017 and then ty was then born into 18. got it so 2017 the agency launched and how much revenue did the agency do in 2017 um almost nothing like a couple of 10 000 okay call like 30 000 or something you then launch the technology in 2017 and walk me through what are customers paying you today on average per month to do these translations oh it really depends so we have uh translations is as a product is very very complex and very very different so we have customers that order one time for 100 euros and we have customers that order a couple of 10 000 euros per month so it's very different our focus of course is b2b so medium to big size companies that need a lot of translations but anyone can come to our platform and order any kind of translation okay what do you price off of is it number of words exactly so we have two products so the whole platform actually is a one-stop shop for any translation need that you have from machine translation up to advanced human translations but within the platform we have our own sas tool which is subscription based so the the everything else is word proper word based but the sas part is subscription based this is catapult and the main function of it is for you to translate on your own i see so so how many customers do you have paying either for catapult or your machine learning service three thousand oh wow there's a ton of customers and where were you exactly a year ago how many customers um less than a thousand okay so there's been a lot of growth did you do that organically or have you raised capital we've raised capital so yeah yeah when did you raise so last year october 1.2 million and before that 200 case all together one point 1.2 plus 200 1.4 altogether so um yeah this is for european standards actually a lot yeah when you raised 1.2 million last year what valuation did you raise that at 6 million was that or was that a good valuation looking back yes was that pre-money or post money pre-money so 7.2 post interesting and and what was the company doing in terms of revenue and when you do the round so in 220 300 000 and our plan for this year is 1.5 mil what did you do last month oh good question around 100 000 wow okay interesting and how many people are on the team today full time 30 how many engineers um okay let's say 12 at least so because engineers you mo people mostly mean developers and similar or with machine people that work on machine translation but we have engineers in we have linguists we have marketing gurus and so on so i always call them engineers as well how did you grow from you know on average twenty five thousand dollars per month last year to now a hundred thousand dollars per month this year where's all that growth coming from actually the growth was mostly due to old school cold call sales and but now we want to really scale it up by transforming this this funnel old school funnel into an online marketing lead generation marketing automation and so on so to really optimize the sales and to move it towards the the marketing funnel not so much the sales funnel of course the the big fish so the bigger customers will still have their own bdms which means that uh pdm takes over because they are not a one-time customer they they just you usually need to sign a contract you have a procurement process and so on when you say cold calling customers walk through that process how do you get the list of phone numbers and from you know of the right people to call sure so firstly we chose the industries the industries we chose based on what we do best and which in some industries are more interesting when it comes to translations than others then you have to have many types of software for now lately we use zoom info before we use many others so that's it otherwise linkedin as well but these the softwares where you can get this kind of the data we have what were the top two industries you picked um one is we call it business services where you have finance banking insurance and similar so business services and the other is manufacturing these were the first two that we picked because they had they were the best fit because we were focused at a time for document translations but now we're converting more and more into rising category service categories which are e-commerce software and gaming so what job titles at the insurance company will you go after the phone numbers of in zoom info it really depends how big of an insurance company if it's big they for sure have a localization manager otherwise uh heads of departments for example mostly marketing they are mostly responsible for texts and similar stuff otherwise heads of different departments for example it's really really interesting how different it is from company to company when it comes to decision making decision making for translations in most of the companies that they don't have decentralized with localization management each department orders translations on their own got it and um how much do you pay zoom info each month to get access to all the phone numbers uh we pay yearly about 10k is it worth it oh a difficult question because for now this is the third software that we use and we're not satisfied with with any of it really who'd you move from apollo and who was before that oh i can't remember the name it was some uk software i can't remember the name and why is zoom info not why are you not happy with it what are they missing just just the quality of data so for example you get a phone number you call and they say the person is not working there anymore or you get an uh an email and it should be accurate but it's not yeah just the quality of data the most important thing that they should have yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense now obviously you're at 3 000 customers now doing about a 1.2 million dollar rate are you profitable or burning burning still we could be profitable but we're burning so we have enough for until the beginning of 2022 so that's why in autumn actually now we are starting our new round to close our next round in uh the first quarter in 222. so how much do you uh in the bank do you have right now uh half a mil okay and how much are you wanting to raise this is not clear yet it depends on our uh results this next six months but around three million and how what valuation are you going to try and raise out again not clear it depends on the the better the results next six months the better the evaluation so yeah you know so what would make you happy evaluation would make you happy a chicken an egg so um really difficult so for example at least times to what we did but now you caught me a bit off guard that i would say this time you mean you raised at a six million dollar valuation you want to do at least 2x that on your next round now are you the only founder do you want 100 no we are two founders me and my co-founder mattia we have okay did you guys put up 50 50 at the beginning yes and and then the new investor took what about uh 15 12 13 of the business uh 20 the the 20 of the business so with the six mill 20 of the business got it so the investor currently owns 20 you guys each on 40 yeah yeah interesting okay um what's next on the product roadmap what are you guys going to build next so we're mostly focused on the sas part so this lsp part is built so it's actually a very much automated platform where you can order any any type of translation but this part is not so scalable as the sas part but it is very necessary for the sas part to have more fuel so now we have the catapult a tool where anyone can translate by themselves using the power of machine translation keeping the formatting intact and so on uh next we're going to continue with building empty products so we see the future in machine translation machine translation is going to go everywhere but not as a we want to to offer it as a professional service which means for example if you use google translate today you have to copy paste formatting is not intact if you need additional services you don't get and so on so machine translation for advanced users and then we have tons of tons of opportunities within the integration part because this problem is not solved there is a big pain there is no standard when it comes to translating software web pages and so on and we want to become the standard so which means we want to be one platform that solves the translation problem how do you measure churn uh what is it or how do we measure it how do you measure it i don't know i should ask my cmo i'm not sure okay let me ask you what is charm today uh a good question again i'm not sure what our churn is i ask purpose because your model it's hard to measure because you have a usage based model and then a sas based model so people love the product and they keep increasing usage that sort of looks like net revenue expansion if they decrease usage it looks like contraction and that's very different than a sas model where they're paying a flat fee per month to do something right yeah later we will we're gonna have to do we're gonna do matrix for both separately because they are even though they're a part of one platform and then you just choose you want to outsource the word you want to do it yourself because this is how we do it now when we have a customer we ask them if the customer is a company do you outsource or do you trans do you have your own team because the trend is that the companies translate more and more by themselves the the reasons are technical knowledge seo optimization uh security and so on and machine with machine translation actually you don't need such good translators anymore because you just post that it's something that that's good last questions how much did you spend on paid marketing last month um not so much because we're yeah okay let me give you a number around 30k this number is increasing month by month and how many new customers did you have last month now this is another tricky one because you asked customers we because our we gained approximately 300 users but it's not necessarily that each user becomes a customer you know because some you they some users just just come on the platform this will see so i would say that about eighty percent of users definitely become customers so call it 200 new customers on 30 000 spend you spent about 150 roughly 150 to get a new customer yeah yeah are costs when it comes to sales acquisition are still high why do you say it's high your rpu is about 40 50 a month per customer on average you're paying 150 so you get paid back in three or four months i don't know when i read the comparisons with other or with similar with our um with our competitors or with similar companies these numbers were usually lower interesting well it's the right place to focus let's wrap up here marco with the famous five number one what's your favorite book never split the difference number two is there a ceo you're following or studying no number three what's your favorite online tool for building a taya online tool for building tire yup this is a tool that you like just give me a second because there are many oh a good one for building tire just think about what you used this morning um i used revolut online banking but it's not for for building tire we use transferwise uh as a bank instead of a bank account for example there we go number four how many hours is how many hours of sleep to eat every night last night five hours uh otherwise about seven and what's your situation married single kids yeah like uh not married but uh in a relationship with uh one boy and how old are you with one little boy yeah um i'm 38. sorry one one kid and you're 38. yes and i'm gonna stay with one kid this is my this this is our decision one is enough very cool last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 uh to have a mentor in which books to read guys there you have it dot io they help you translate your stuff you're localizing your website things like that they pay they have a model where you pay per sort of word translation and also then a catapult model which is basically sas service they have over 3 000 customers doing 100 grand per month in revenue today up from 25 grand a month just a year ago so nice growth they've raised 1.2 million on a 6 million valuation last year looking at raising at the end of this year early next year three million on maybe like a 12 or something higher we'll see what happens over the next 12 months mark when his co-founder split the equity 50 50 at the beginning so healthy capital management as they look to take over the space marco thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan 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 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