How Vainu CEO Pietari Suvanto grew Vainu to $17.3M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is pi Atari suvantu he's the co-founder and CEO of vainu his mission is to generate revenue for his customers by collecting firmographic data and making it actionable by integrating it to his customers business processes such as their crms Market automation tools and data warehouses all right Peter are you ready to take us to the top yes of course let's do it so in the states folks are really familiar with maybe pitch books or CB insights or sort of some of these companies would you put yourself in that same category would you say you're different um maybe a little bit of different I think uh I'll put ourselves in the zoom in for communism clear a bit uh mostly in that category I think that's more more closer more to marketing and sales instead of uh instead of uh like Venture capitals and financial people makes tons of sense now you came on we were just joking about this back in 29 actually it came on in 2017 and 2019. yeah um so regular case regular guess well we got to catch up it's been three years so yeah help me understand today how is the product different or is it pretty much still the exact same thing um well I think 2019 we were a little bit more focused for the sales people and now we're more focused to the revenue Ops people and so how it differs in the product is really that we've built like good Integrations good connectors uh so that we are very good at integrating our data uh into into the platforms where the actual work really these days happened the other thing that has been this big difference I think we served Nordic audience uh back in three years ago we just launched a global product so now we have uh now we can serve the customers all over the world and we're very specialized specifically globally not in contact data but the firm graphic data and that specifically data from company websites to understand and analyze that and that's that's what we do globally these days and why did you use formographic data as sort of your beachhead your first thing versus technographic data or some other data set about a company but I think there's an um just to understand understood understand content from company website and then sort of categorize segment the company uh this we felt there's a space that hasn't been filled yet there's a lot of like contact providers there's a lot of technographic providers there's a lot but uh we're very good at segmenting the company giving sort of a confidence score on earn certain values and uh and I think that's that's our sweet spot on a global basis of course in the nordics uh we're like full suit when it comes to company data so that's that's where we can offer really anything so that's it's a tiny piece of the whole world so now when you came on last time I asked you what's the average customer paying and you said about 600 bucks which a month which was up from 400 bucks a month in 2017. I'm gonna guess you've probably expanded that even more what's the average customer paying per month today is the average customer is around uh annually it's like 10 000 uh so it's gone it increased a bit so not that much but if we look at the spread how much is the biggest customer paying versus the lowest and that has increased uh significantly so we have customers that pay several hundreds of thousands and then we have customers that pay one or two thousand uh so tell me that story so your if your biggest customer what pays 300 400 Grand a year something like that yeah yeah so if don't name the customer obviously but if someone's paying you 400 000 per year what are they getting for that why is it is it number of bits of information number of seats what allows you to upsell truly uh the amount of the data and then how we deliver that data and for for these customers that pay hundreds of dollars per year it's really about a lot of data and then it's delivered really to their snowflake or AWS and and some core process in those Enterprises are run with our data so for example this is CRM and they won't wanna uh form a new company or they want to send a bill or whatever they want to do that data comes from our database and it's very crucial for them so that's why and they want wanted it you know flows securely and surely and that's what they're willing to pay for it 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 valuations 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 valuation 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 can you give me an example of um a kind of piece of data you might deliver to someone's snowflake database or AWS database or servers on on a monthly basis who's paying some of the enemies for Enterprise prices yeah if I mean for uh for some cases it might be uh official data uh very like the business ID related data and for some it's really about these segmentation models I was just talking about on a global basis that uh that we deliver like continuously uh for a few million companies and that segment segmentation data uh and in the Snowflake and then they operate for example their marketing campaigns uh to the marketing automation CRM systems the data and take actions from there forward so that's that's that's really the the more the data the more they pay really the seeds how do you manage the amount of data like what is it Quantified by is it bits transferred per month or how do you we we charge uh today we charge practically per account and then per data point so I mean if there's a let's say you want one million companies and then you want like five different data points and then it has a certain certain price for it and then we don't charge uh per update we charge sort of uh per annually that we keep that updated on an annual basis so at least one update per year or something like that yeah yes or what they really pay for us is that they they feel secure that that company data is updated and never if it's 100 times or zero that doesn't matter okay I see I see that makes sense um got it and then again official I forget launched it was 2013 or 2014. uh as a company it's 2014. it was 2014. okay yeah and then um fast forward to today how many customers are you now working with this is actually a funny story I think we had uh 2500 when when we talked last time now we have 1200. so we'll do it actually because we've shift the strategy a bit and we've get rid of those customers that we felt is not good for our strategy and double down on those at work and then uh yeah and that that's the situation now so we have actually half of the amount we had last time another typical story I would I would imagine in your in your podcast but but uh it takes so much discipline to fi effectively fire customers so for someone else listening want to learn from you they might go man I don't know how to tell customers to stop paying me I don't want to piss them off and have them tweet about it how do you how do you like nicely tell people we don't want...