How Upsales CEO Daniel Wikberg grew Upsales to $13.4M revenue and 1.8K customers in 2023.

all right guys there you have it up sales launched back uh way back in 2003 it took him seven years to the million bucks in Revenue now doing 14.4 million in terms of run rate across 1800 paying customers profits around 250 000 per month they're publicly listed in Stockholm which is great it allows them to tap public markets recruit folks who can see his numbers publicly in his comments he feels it is a real advantage and they've done us all very Capital efficient efficiently with a Target Revenue per employee going from 205 000 today ideally up to something closer to 300 000 by the end of the year we'll see if Daniel can make it happen hey folks my guest today is Daniel wickberg he's the CEO and founder of Stockholm based SAS company up sales he started the company in 2003 to help B2B companies grow Revenue today the company is 70 people strong with over 90 percent to a recurring Revenue in 1800 countries in 10 sorry 1800 customers in 10 countries they're at 13 million euros of ARR and have a long track record of profitable organic growth which we love Daniel are you ready to take us to the top let's do it profitable and organic are two words I feel like I haven't heard in like a decade in SAS world how have you done this you're in a very competitive space no I mean I I think we've been focusing a lot on on finding the right Niche for us uh so we try to focus on on a couple of verticals where we think we can make a difference um and also in in the Scandinavian Market I think there's a there's a clear Gap in in the kind of mid market so you have all of these players for for uh for really small companies and then you have Salesforce and a couple more for for for Enterprises but companies with between 100 up to a thousand employees that that's where we really make a difference and when you say you have sectors you focus on what are some of those sectors uh so other SAS companies is it's a strong vertical for us uh we're also seeing uh strong growth in manufacturing companies um and I think also our philosophy has been to the more we focus the the the more successful we become because we we tend to to um to focus our product development efforts as well uh to make sure that we have you know critical features that are competitors don't for for the specific companies we target give me an example of that what's something you've built for the manufacturing vertical that your competitors don't have uh so for manufacturing companies for example uh you have this huge problem with um if you're selling a complex product that that you can sell in like a thousand variations um you have this huge problem with with uh proposals uh takes a lot of time for sales people to create uh and and some of the time you know you you you offer something that's that's like erroneous to the customer uh and then you build that stuff and you ship it to the customer like eight weeks on a boat and then the customer calls you and says this is not this is not working for me uh so so that that's one problem we addressed to to kind of streamline uh the proposal and and automating for for complex sales that makes tons of sense now when I had you back I had you on the shows uh about six months ago and you told me it took you seven years to hit a million dollars of Revenue I would tell most people if you can't do in three or four just quit give up and start something new why do you stick with it I mean I was 21 when I found the company so I guess you know I had a lot of energy and I didn't realize how how slow things were going um but um yeah I mean we saw like gradual success uh continually so yeah I think just uh just continue working uh not nothing more fancy than that now you have an interesting trajectory because back when you were on the show in 2019 you told me that your R poo was around 1 250 per month then when I had you on six months ago that had dropped to 600 but you had more than tripled your customer base is our where is our poo today is it still around 600 I mean I would say our customer base is a little bit distorted because we have around eight or nine hundred direct customers um and I think those customers account for like 90 plus percent of our ARR and then we have the other 50 of our number of customers which we inherited from a partnership we used to have with another company uh where we sold the white label version of upsell so we have like a very long tail of very small customers uh so I would say the the annual ACV is still around 12 to 13 000 Euros per per company looking at like the the real customers we have so to speak in the 18 yeah that makes a lot of sense oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview it sounds like there's a story there did you have a white level partnership with a partner and then they went out of business and then you took it over or what do you mean inherited no so the story was there's a Swedish company called Fort Knox that does uh small business accounting and invoicing and they used to have a CRM in in their product which they wanted to discontinue uh so we made a partnership deal where we offered up sales to to these customers who were using their own product and we had that partnership for I think two or three years but we realized that churn was a little bit too high and and the growth was was not really coming from these customers so we uh just renegotiated the contract and and migrated these customers to um to become direct customers of upsells I see do you still pay any Kickback to Fort Knox a recurring commission fee or anything yeah but it's it's like a very small part of of the of the piano I see I see and then uh Grandpa actually okay yeah and then um before we talk about future growth plans and how you're thinking about future product at up sales what is mrr today so MRI today is uh let me just say this in in your currency he did all the conversions ahead of time which we appreciate yeah it's uh it's around 1.2 million dollars it's the currency of MRI got it so that's up from that's up about a hundred thousand dollars since when we chatted six months so you've added about one 1.2 1.5 million a new AR over the past five months is that about right yeah sounds about right and where is the growth today coming from if you've shut down the partnership Channel how are you getting more direct customers so I mean we divided our our sales teams to into a new sales team and an expansion sales team and um we also we have a kind of deliberate land and expand pricing model so so I think maybe two-thirds come from from existing accounts and one third from from new accounts um and I mean we're actually spending some time now thinking about our...