How TOOTRiS CEO Alessandra Lezama grew TOOTRiS to $720K revenue and 100 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is alessandro lazama she is the founder of a company called tutrus as a service provider secure affordable quality child care in real time the company is available online or by mobile app and provides search by location schedule budget and specific program distinctions along with virtual tour capabilities enrollment and pay-per-view payment processing ready to take to the top absolutely thank you for having me here today you bet so first off on the show we usually feature exclusively sas founders software service you are applying software to something but it's really productized service would you agree well it's a sas product in and of itself except for we have the back end as well so we have an operations team that helps enable uh placements when parents and or providers are not connecting based on their requirements but ultimately this is a hundred percent a sas application uh that is also accessible by mobile app that's right and are parents ones paying or child care providers neither isn't that a beautiful thing it's a hundred percent well what we do is we work with employers to incorporate child care as a benefit solutions so employers pay us a fee a subscription fee so that we can incorporate a search based on the requirements of their workforce and ensure that we have inventory ready for placement of those children okay so what does an average employer pay you for that service 19.97 a month per participating employee so and how many employees work to pay on average for a company um you know the surveys typically come in at about 40 percent participation and that's primarily because we're focused on the zero to five age group however uh due to the pandemic and based on this remote learning uh i'll call it opportunities for children to stay home and go to school what we found is that learning hubs is a solution that we could extend to parents through extended child care for school-aged children so i guess bridging the gap currently through covet 19 we're not only supporting zero to five age groups but also school-aged children so alessandra the question i was getting at is how many seats or employees is the average company paying you for well that would depend right on the size of the company so 100 that's why i'm asking the average all right so on average 60 60 uh seats per organization okay so this is sort of reaching middle market potentially pushing sort of enterprise this isn't for a small company with 10 people that have two people that need child care this is for any organization that has a need for it to be honest because there aren't any minimum required seats and currently we are an early stage organization so we've recently launched market actually when uh the first uh ordered the um you know the lockdown in march that's when we came out to market so uh we have exponentially grown the the scope of our services and the delivery of our services through the pandemic and we're we're really scaling up in terms of the size organization that's adopting our solutions so how many unique employers now pay you for your service for one seat or a thousand um if i had to just throw a a dart i would say around 100. okay wait why do you have to throw a dart i remember when i first found my first ass company i was looking at new customers every single day i knew the number like the back of my hand i knew their families their personalities everything yeah well it's a it's a great problem to have because we're on boarding every day all day long and because we're also providing non-standard care and 24-hour care and uh you know weekend care so um we're adding uh subscriptions all day long okay but you think about 100 employers right now and on average one employer signs up for about 60 seats correct that would be on average right so we we have it all over the map you ask for an average that would be that would be the average so 100 companies 60 seats on average would mean you feel you've got about 6 000 paid seats on your platform currently correct 20 bucks on average per month correct which should be about 120 000 a month in revenue correct so you've gone from nothing to 120 000 a month in revenue over the past 12 months now granted this is all yes and so these are subscriptions that will activate over time that means that as soon as the parent is active in our in our platform they will start paying for that subscription they don't start paying for the subscription in advance so they this is an on-demand platform which is a beautiful type of solution for our employers because they can stretch like an accordion right so they can they can uh drop seats they can add seats as those are are uh warranted yeah the flexibility is important so how many paid seats would you say you didn't have today i think we just did the math didn't we nathan i think you just said though that they're not all onboarded correct they they would be so how many are onboarded probably half that okay got it so you're signing up with an employer for maybe they'll say hey alessandra we love the tool yes we've got 30 that we need it for right now but we'll maybe scale up to 60 over 12 months so sign a contract for 60 but only pay for 30 seats until they onboard the full 60. as they they are using the service correct got it got it got it fair enough so you've got about 100 employers with 30 seats on board on average today so you're doing more like 50 60 000 a month in revenue still super impressive nothing to that in short amount of time correct and and the commitment though that we have and the the forecast that we have is that while employers come in through a survey that is a needs analysis it can always scale to higher uh requirements right covet 19 has thrown a wrench into every aspect of of the business and employers don't really know how to ascertain that as they're trying to recall their employees back to the office when when needed and or to the different activities and important to note is that i think that earlier in the lockdown a lot of folks were ecstatic to go home and work remote and i think that as uh you know as we have evolved in this in this pandemic there are more and more employees that recognize that their productivity may not be the same at home so uh what we're seeing is that the need for child care while earlier in this process it was it was um somewhat conservative what we're seeing now is that the demand is returning uh to the market and that's that's also good for the providers because a lot of the providers lost their uh enrollments right a lot of parents pulled out their children not knowing uh what was best for for the little one if you operate in a state like california providers right now are not allowed to operate you can't have people in a physical space that's not true child care providers have the ability to operate and stay open and take in children there are cdc recommendations and there's guidelines that have been uh published right by uh licensing by uh the department of social services that that add layers of scrutiny to uh hygiene and to the protocols right uh the the social distancing and and that but providers are allowed to be open they're let me rephrase there's a lot of parents that will not send their kids to a provider because the risk of that child picking up kovid in an asymptomatic way with 10 other kids of the same provider even if they have all the precautions following and then that child coming home and the parents sick is too high they'd rather be more unproductive at work and keep their children home how are i mean are you seeing that as a trend and if so how do you sort of pivot so that doesn't impact your business model in a negative way well i think that education has a lot to do with it and transparency of safety protocols when we bring a provider under the tutors scope of services and into our network we have a relationship with that provider so we have an ops team that vets the provider has conversations with the provider and we have an internal process by which we also qualify their protocols and in this case the safety and the um you know the cdc recommended protocol so if you go on our site for example and run a search for covid uh safe programs you'll see some that are tagged right they have a tag right on their uh profile to uh to disclose the protocols that they are following and i think that that adds some sense of um you know peace of mind if you will for parents what geographies do you cover right now all of california with a high emphasis in san diego because our proof of concept was san diego and this is where we had the most interaction with providers so we have the entire uh scope of uh of california lit when we say lit that means that we have uploaded the database of licensed providers we are engaging with them to build the relationship and to verify them we have a category in teachers which is verified or unverified provider and the verified provider goes through that that uh workflow that i was uh referring to here i just did a search in la um where do i find who's verified that you that you have a relationship with so you would see the category when you click on their profile you would see verified or unverified if you go to if you go to the easier search which is why i said uh the emphasis has been in san diego we this is where we have we ran our proof of of uh model and this is where we've started we're headquartered in san diego so where we have the most base of verified providers would be in san diego which would be a better search for you to see...