How ToucanToco CEO Charles Miglietti grew to $13.2M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is charles miglietti he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called uh of a company called toucan toco it's a data visualization software now he's passionate about data design and many other things started the company five years ago and previously founded tldr.io now 32 years old father of three building the company charles you're ready to take it to the top yep all right so the data visual visualization space is obviously hot right now with the tableau and looker deals help me understand where toucan toco your company fits in so we are very complementary to all the existing solutions that focus on data exploration as we focus on data storage and that's the same complementarity between a dictionary and a good novel which one so we focus not on technical users but on non-technical users that need the data on a daily basis okay and so who i mean who are you selling to the marketer the cio the cto we are we are selling to the cio and head of data like the bi manager for example okay and is it typically top down or bottomed up you're selling to the individual employees first but we are developing a welcome approach where people will be able to sign up for the product online okay and give me a general sense here where you're playing so the average customer is going to pay about what per month or per year to use your technology the esp is 50k euro today per year and we have contracts ranging from 20k to 500k a year one five or five zero five zero yeah fifty thousand fifty thousand dollars i'm sorry and contracts today are between 20k and 500k yeah so charles my question was just average asp in in a year is about fifty thousand dollars or about four or five thousand dollars a month yeah okay and so what do you what are you upselling against why would someone pay you five hundred thousand dollars per year why why are they paying me so much you say yeah what do you know i'm specifically what are you up selling against so there's people that pay you 50 grand a year they're supposed to pay 500 grand a year the ones that pay more what are you upselling them on we are selling on the seats and on options and for example uh we charge per seat so the char the the fees proceed is 13 euros per month per users so when we are upsetting we are observing on the number of seats also we are upsetting on new features uh for example the ability to send executive summary to embed the the product inside another application or for security features okay so do you have kind of an inside sales team that that's in charge of upsells and expansion revenue or no no it's not an insight it's a customer success management team who's in charge of upsetting okay do you do you do they carry quota no that's a very good good thing because i i have read a few things about csm and coda and today we have decided that the system should focus on retention adoption and upselling it's a nice collateral and when they detect a good opportunity they ask for an account manager to uh to under the signature okay so how many people on the team total today it's 70 people seven zero and how many of them are engineers and twenty twenty and then how many are quota carrying sales folks um one five okay interesting very good and then you know i want to kind of get more of the backstory here put this on a timeline for me when you launch the company five years ago okay so 2014. and now were you like leaving corporate at that point or sold your last startup or where was your head yeah i started to tell you that i knew just before and i sold it for a few thousand grand to indian people and uh how much did you sell it for thank you ten thousand dollars okay so that's a small set but that's the sale and um i wanted to start another company uh and at the same time my wife was pregnant so i was kinda hurry to make some money and i decided to wear my fashion wear and my passion was design data and pedagogy and that's why we started the data visualization company with microphone so how did your first four or five customers remember my first customer that is already staying here it's uh four years old yeah but how did you get the first customer sorry how did i get the different network well be specific so were you doing outbound inbound in my engineering school i had some friends and some friends were were in charge of some budget and it's not just because they were we were friends they had a need and we had the the right solution for their need so that's how we got the first uh the first uh client and another one just by hand we created a visualization online the free one and then we contacted the newspaper in france like the washington post uh for example and we reached out to them and said okay i think we need that visualization and in three months we signed the first contract with them okay and then fast forward today four years later five years later how many customers are you working with uh today we are working with uh nearly 100 customers about about 100 okay great and next question one of the things i like to ask is what you spent cash-wise building your mvp before your first dollar of revenue do you remember very few because i'm a coder i'm a senior but i am also a crew there so the the money we spent is just my time and my comforter is the design and product guy so i would say that we spent a few weeks maybe three to four weeks to build the true mvp then we got some signature and then it was a good good circle and we had some money and then we could take some more time to develop the product and this is how we have you funded the company yourselves to the state or have you raised capital yeah today we are still trapped we are we are 5 million thank you for the new business how much 5 million yep and you get five million basically again from about 100 customers paying 50 000 a year where were you exactly a year ago do you remember uh yeah uh half of that half of that okay so you're doing about two hundred thousand dollars a month about a year ago um obviously now today's scaling now because the company's bootstrapped and yeah i assume you're running at a profit you're profitable or are you putting money in every month to make up losses no no no no no i am only 32 years old and i have i don't have a family money so yes the company is a profitable break even and we invest all the benefits we have done in the previous year in the today's world okay and now we talked about your csm's earlier your customer success reps in terms of them focusing on you know retention and upgrading or what is gross revenue trend over the past 12 months the uh channel growth revenue sorry yeah gross revenue churn growth revenue so yes we lost in the past 12 months nearly 20k of mrr so 250k okay got it so 250 obviously on on five you can do the math what on a percentage basis that's like i call it under five percent turn yeah yeah and then what's expansion been uh expansion so we see that we have double in terms of sales but in terms of uh upselling uh to be honest i don't have the distribution between new sales and websites does your net revenue retention so not including new sales just upsells what i know is that i only produce so hold on let me just repeat this back to you i wanna make sure we get this right five percent gross revenue term 250 grand on five million you then have expansion on those same cohorts you're up selling those customers from a year ago by about 30 percent okay so your net revenue retention would be 30 expansion minus 5 churn or 120 125 net revenue retention exactly exactly that's right i see and how aggressive are you being to get the customers in in the first place will you spend fifty thousand dollars to get a fifty thousand dollar customer um you mean the cost of acquisition yes for a fifty thousand dollar customer yeah today uh the average uh cost of acquisition is 40k 40k uh euro four zero or one four four zero four zero uh totally if we add all the sales and marketing costs which means that the payback is uh less than a year yeah about 10 11 months uh that's pretty good and and so i mean how do you how do you continue driving growth from here how do you go from 5 million to 10 million next year good question we saw new new new contracts new contracts upsells and channel sense is also very improvising for us as we are developing new offers with the resellers now when you say channel sales is this the channel is this the thing that's already worked for you in the past you just want to double down on it or something you're launching uh both we have two partners that we have set up in the past years and we expect them to deliver more and we have new that we are onboarding can you name one or two of those two channel partners yeah uh there is a menus and there is a digital i'm sorry means our french names but uh but they're they're agencies basically yes and we're working with some accenture you know you know accenture yeah but more has a prescription yeah so so let me ask you a question i mean you know would you ever go raise capital to grow faster or no today uh we just started the in the end of the summer a fundraising term uh to go into the u.s because half of the software is built in the us and we need a partner to go into the us so how much would you like to raise from a u.s investor we are looking for 10 million yep and do you hope to sell what like 10 percent of the company for that 20 percent depends on the valuation that they did yeah well obviously you have to still negotiate that you have no idea what it'll come out to but what would you consider a really good scenario for you what i know is that in today's valuation companies trade at between 10 and 15 times the ar so you think you can get between a 50 and 75 million dollar pre-money valuation yeah so worst case 50 million right you raise 10 you get 60 after your you know you call and sell it caught between 10 and 20 of the company if that pans out when would you definitely do this as equity would you ever consider raising debt yeah to uh continue we have raised uh 2.5 million in debts oh today you already have 2.5 million in debt i see who did you raise that from uh in french in france we have the bpi which is a an organization that helps french companies to finance well if it was wti and it's bpa oh bpi and what's it stand for um i don't know okay bpa but it's but it's a government-run organization yeah kind of okay do you i mean is that free money or do you have to pay interest on the 2.5 million uh it's uh based on we have some part of the part of it zero interest and part of it uh it's a 1.5 [Music] rate okay and and when does the term end when you have to pay it back uh it depends on the loans because we have said we have subscribed loans uh we started like three years ago so part of the loans we already have paid paid them back and we have some loans that we have to pay back in two years okay so the max term is up two years from now yeah okay we have five or seven years to pay them back yeah yeah so of the 2.5 that you've taken on debt how much have you already paid back um oh okay okay so you still have most of it is still in the company yeah so why go raise another why go try and raise 10 million in equity right now to just raise more debt because we have set the maximum of uh lever that we can uh on our liabilities in other words bpi will only lend you up to you know you know 5x or 6x your mrr and that's about 2.5 yeah it's not a multiple of mr but it's the multiple of the uh how you call the proper capital i don't know how you call it in english that's good so you're coming to the us here shortly to raise some additional capital um do you have an investor you really like it be your dream to raise from them yeah today we are in discussion with battery battery venture and first mass capital these are a very good investor we really like them to have onboard why do you like battery uh because they are very strong expertise in the b2b uh software and they are investors in french companies like data companies like the taiko and for us that's a very good fit yeah very good all right charles let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um and i really like your mark sustainment yep mark suster's blog uh number two is there a ceo you're following or studying and i really like it enjoy what company are they with um from buffer you said duckduckgo yet yeah all right uh number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um i think shadow is the most amazing tool number four how many hours you'll sleep to get every night um okay and it sounds like you had a boy on the way back five years ago or a girl you had a kid on the way how many kids today three three kiddos okay so married three kids and how old are you 32. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew sorry what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. [Music] i wish to have a very good business now just what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 ah sorry i think um to code because i learned to code at the 23 24 so i wish i knew it before guys two can tocco 100 customers paying for their data visualization tool they pay on average 50 dollars a year they're doing five million dollars in run rate right now up from half that 2.5 million just a year ago uh they're bootstrapped today they are profitable they have taken in 2.5 million of debt to drive growth of the company they've already paid back 300 000 of that they're now heading to the united states to raise capital targeting 10 million dollars on somewhere between a 50 and 75 million dollar pre-money evaluation we will see if charles can get it done charles thanks for taking us to the top these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now