How Trakto.io CEO Paulo Tenorio grew Trakto.io to $334.3K revenue and 4.3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is paulo donnario he's building a company called tracto.io which is a design software for non-designers he's got 10 plus years of experience uh doing this the designs uh in the sort of the design world has worked with hundreds of clients all around the world paula you ready to take us to the top oh yeah man thanks a lot nathan it's a pleasure to be here you bet so talk us through track dough it sounds like it is a pure place sas company for non-designers yeah so let me make a long story short i was a designer my whole life i lived in many cities in brazil back in 2007 uh i got an invitation to work in the u.s so i moved to salt lake city utah i lived there working with motion design cg effects for a company called media grabbers um so i lived two years in salt lake city then i was invited to work in uh in la in hollywood working with big studios and everything else uh so when i was moving uh from city to city and talking to different professionals and small businesses everyone had a hard time uh trying to figure out how to do their marketing materials that was like back while size was us sas was just starting and uh i had no experience in startup before i had to move back from the u.s to brazil because my dad was sick so i had to move back i spent an year here and then i found my co-founder and i had this crazy idea about like all right let's try to uh come up with an edit or an online editor that's gonna make uh people's life easier when creating business proposals business presentations and so on so that's how tractor came to be and what year was that yeah it was like 2013. 2013 okay and did you did you start off i mean how to walk us through you got your first 10 customers yeah that was like uh at first we started with a mobile app for iphone ios and android uh i didn't thought about like creating a company uh my idea was just to happen having a tool to help other professionals and small business to be able to design like beautiful quotes and business proposals uh but then like i got into some accelerators uh and then people said told me hey paulo you need to come up with a business model and i was like what like why uh and then i realized that i was a startup uh so it took us a while at first we got our first like five thousand like uh uh users active users like in a week and then that how did you get the first five thousand active users in a week well it's just like branding man like going online and and hustling like on on forums be specific what so what forums yes uh so facebook posting that that was something that i did like that was a big thing before instagram became like a thing so a lot of posts on social media that's how i did where did you post where did you post on social media um so brazilian community it's a little bit different what they have it's um they have a lot of different groups and people were following my story because the where we came from which is like small city uh on the north east of brazil a poor region people were not expecting us at all so people started following me on my social media had like ten thousand people following me on facebook and every time that i posted something was getting like reposted by a bunch of different folks what was the first what was the first post you put up on your personal page with 10 000 followers that started the word of mouth oh yeah because we got a demo day competition first place and when i posted that things went like through the roof so it was like the first award that we got okay and how many now customers are they scaled to today oh so right now we have around like 500 500 000 plus users and uh paying clients we are reaching about like forty thousand paying clients so far okay so forty thousand so not not bad that was a seven eight percent conversion rate half a million free forty thousand paid yeah and uh and uh the way that we have the business model we have the b2c version uh as we call the one that you go and do do it by yourself and then we also have a white label version with our api and sdk and through that we are able to tackle two different uh markets at the same time which is uh uh it's challenging but it's rewarding as well how many customers pay you directly not through a white level partner around like 3 000 directly so that's how they pay us and through the the other the major part like comes through like big tickets so we have like an rpo around uh around like ten dollars per month um okay when we got everything else and that's ten dollars across three thousand so you're doing like thirty thousand bucks a month something like that yeah something like that yes okay and and walk me through if white label partners are sort of your largest strategy in terms of user acquisition can you sort of paint that picture who is your biggest white label partner and how do you work with them uh so uh when we talk about white label people have a misconception about what like the modern white label are uh it's basically an api and sdk that you can customize the editor for yourself so we have a big educational group that's using our api uh to be able to have a white label on my online editor so they have like thousands of schools all over brazil and what they do they use our editor to distribute their marketing materials so they create like a marketing campaign and with one push like uh some guy that manages a small school in some other part of brazil they're able to access immediately that file that prior to tractal was using a photoshop or like powerpoint to be able to customize some marketing materials so this is like one client the other ones are tech companies we have a company called mlabs which is like a social media scheduling tool they use oh sorry hold on to go back to your first example so who are you selling the white label version to and then like who's been distributing it to thousands of people like what's the name of the white label partner uh no no it's just that we are doing by yourself so this is a client that i just mentioned it's called sentient this is a a big educational group from spain actually and you name a white label partner though that's that's what i'm curious about can you name a white label partner right now i'm bringing you lots of users no no we don't have like a partners what we do we have clients so we have a white label uh uh team sales inside tracto so that's how we distribute uh our white label what do you mean by white label just it says you just remove powered by tracto yeah yeah okay got it so when you say white label you're not selling your software to like mailchimp and they're using your tool inside of mailchimp so that people writing email newsletters can customize designs when you say well you mean you have a premium plan where you can remove powered by tracto no no that's like exactly what you mentioned like they want uh like a mayushim kind of a kind of use of track though so people so who who is your equivalent of mailchimp that's what i'm asking oh yeah it's called mlabs right now mlabs labs yeah it's uh it's one of the largest like uh social media scheduling tool so we are not like selling in the us yeah uh so that's our plan for 2021 okay so mlabs pays you to white label tracto and mlabs and sells that to their customers and pays you a little cut yeah that so what they do they actually have like the editor that that their their clients are able to customize their social media content using our editor uh and then like uh we charge a monthly fee based on usage uh depending on what kind of features they want like background removal specific fonts like some kind of specific rendering so we have a specific set of uh features that we charge by usage and what is the usage metric so it's you know give me an example it's 10 bucks if they edit 10 images what's the metric yeah uh right now we are uh they have been with us like for about a year and what we've realized it it's uh some people like to get back like every day using like in a heavy uh way and some people just come like once a week and do some social media whatever like fast posting that they have so the metric that we use is active users uh people coming and creating new documents so we charge based on the creation of new documents and also proceed as well so and as as you have like an active user uh then we can scale that up with the amount of uh documents that they're creating i see got it so so weekly now today how many documents are being created across your entire platform direct customers and white label do you know yeah i have that number it's around like uh 40 uh it's it's in between like this week it's like it's it's gonna be like 48 to 50 000 like new documents uh every week um we had a month that we reached almost like a million new designs like in a month so that was good uh we have now better instrumentation using amplitude so right now that's great and and i mean walk me through sort of what your team looks like today did you do this sort of by yourself or what's your team look like and man like that's the thing like we have like a 24 uh uh people on the team including...