How Ueni CEO Christine Telyan grew Ueni to $32.1M revenue and 1.3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is christine italian she was previously an oil trader and now a graduate of harvard college the london school of economics and harvard business school she co-founded une to help millions of small businesses compete online her international team gets sole traders and micro businesses online quickly easily and at a low cost christine you're ready to take us to the top sure all right so tell us about uni and it's pronounced it's ueni.com what's the company doing how do you make money right um well it's you and i and basically we're the click and go solution to get your small business online uh easy affordable and fast uh our entry product is free it's a freemium model um you know essentially 80 of customers go online to find local businesses but only 20 of small businesses in europe and less elsewhere have a proper online presence so you know just think about the mismatch um the vast majority of business owners do know that they need to have an online storefront but they don't know how to get started they're not sure what elements are important when building that online presence and frankly they don't want to spend a lot of time and money on the project you know there are a lot of great do-it-yourself website builders out there um but most of the the businesses that register for those sites actually don't complete the journey it's estimated it's about 10 to 20 so christine just to be clear is that really what you are a drag and drop website builder it's not drag and drop it's really a do it for me solution so what we do for them is we build them a website that is responsive and relevant to their business from a to z uh it includes professionally written text about the business features information that the customers are looking for so info about the businesses services or products yeah totally got it i think my audience will know what a website is i think that's great to understand like that's kind of what you're doing are you now are you a pure place sas business though or are you an agency well this is the thing i mean if you think about the spectrum there are the the diy website builders and there are the digital agencies and we're kind of an agency for the masses because we're building we you know we ask the business to sign up they answer a few questions and then we build them a website top to bottom we get them on google my business and then we do other things for them like push their information out to other you know high traffic trusted platform so what do you charge for this is it a monthly sas fee though or a one-time setup fee definitely a good way to describe it um we are freemium so the entry product is free and we'll build them a website and they're they're google my business for free but then beyond that they can upgrade to a paid plan that will get them things like their custom domain professional email and get them listed on you know about 20 platforms where people are searching brings them domain authority helps them rank higher in search so christine just looking at your paid cohort what are they paying on average per month for access to your tools yeah well our subscriptions are very modest um 9.99 a month to 19.99 a month right now our growth is really focused on building our free base okay and and so let me put this on a timeline when did you launch the company what year uh about four years ago okay so we'll call it 2015. at the very beginning of 2015 yet okay very good and then when you say growing your free base so so where are you at today and how did you get your first 100 free users on the platform well we definitely have had an evolution in the company so when we started we really began as a b2c search platform helping end users find the cheapest nearest best rated service and we've evolved to be as more of a the b2b solution provider now to get businesses online so that focus on on the b2b side is about a year and a half going and um and today we're signing up 200 300 businesses every day and and and so and then how many of them today how many customers are you working with well as i said we we're it's really i think more interesting to talk about the the growth because um well christine just to be clear growth going from a dollar to ten dollars is 10x right so it's actually not interesting really to talk about growth my audience really cares about how you go from kind of 0 to 10 customers and then and then kind of more factual things around channels you're using so so how did you get the first 10 customers on the b2b play when we when we got our first customers we actually started with um beyond the website doing more for them like providing adwords services some more complex you know advertising products that were at a higher price point but we saw that there was a great need for many more customers to to get the basics right first and so we we shifted our plans if you will from like the more sophisticated advertising and and you know we had a couple thousand customers on on that initial um uh set of plans to what we're offering now and we really started focusing on what we're offering now last summer okay i mean that would have been just for people because people listen to podcasts all kinds of times so that would have been 2017 summer um well in 2017 summer we were really pushing still the the bigger plan so the b2b was 2018 summer that's when you launched it sure is that is that right that's what i'm trying to understand yeah yeah i mean before it was b2b as well but as i said it was the bigger tier plans um but our current business model with the freemium package yeah began summer 2018 correct okay perfect that's super helpful to understand and then you know there's a there's a special art to getting a free to convert to a paid so what is the what is the tripwire what do you know a freezer has to do for them to increase likely they convert to paid at a high level well as i said we haven't really been focusing on converting our customer base right now from free to paid as the focus of the last six months has been growing that free base okay so you're funding this somehow then if you don't care about revenue right now so are you bootstrapped or have you raised capital we have raised capital quite a bit actually how much about 15 million pounds okay um and why do you say that's quite a lot well i think it is a significant amount of money right um i think that you know we're we're we're we're building we're building a business here but for for me at least 50 million pounds 20 million dollars is a lot of money what i'm saying is relative to what i mean the three episodes before you were 50 million raised 120 raised and 39 raised so this would seem i mean it's all relative right so so get me in your head a little bit is this kind of your first startup where you said okay i'm going to raise capital i'm going to go the freemium model we're going for a land grab and market share yep got it yeah no fair enough i mean yes and this all came in waves of course like we we bootstrapped at the beginning my co-founder and i put in our own money and then we've had um yeah three three rounds of basically angel financing i guess i see it as a lot of money because this is from our uh our personal network of angel investors and we obviously feel very responsible and take take that very seriously and now christine i can tell you're extremely intelligent based off the history of schools you've been to and graduated from so i'm assuming you really have dialed in some of the metrics around free user acquisition for you obviously then go out and convince your friends to give you this money to help scale that further how do you measure what it costs you to bring in a free user well um how you measure what it cost you i mean i think that for us it's really around how do we get to a scale that we think is relevant so our target for this year for example is to be at 150 200 000 businesses on the platform and for us we work back to a cpa that we that a we can't afford and b that makes sense in the context of you know longer term monetization now we have the plans that i mentioned but beyond that you know there are other opportunities for how we can create value for these businesses and then capture a percentage of that value some small percentage whether it's percentage transaction like a credit card model or revenue share by partnering with other businesses that also cater to this kind of small business audience and how aggressive are you being though on cpa so today to get a new free user are we talking cents or dollars it depends on the market because right now we have customers in the uk spain france india uh the u.s i mean some of these markets i should be i should be clear we opened uh india spain and the u.s just this month so um you know the growth is palpable but it's it's very fresh um so we're still discovering what those cpas are but you know it's it's budget and um and lifetime value focus but we're really you know we're focused on building a very large base of business small business users and um and two to three hundred business sign ups a day uh you know is is not trivial these aren't you know customer end customers b2c business it's it's it represents something else well so christine i want to try and understand actually i mean you have to have cohort i understand you opened...