How Venly CEO Tim Dierckxsens grew Venly to $3.2M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is gerbert von dun bettahay after finishing his master he started his career as a business analyst and project manager working on i.t projects when ethereum launched he was convinced about the possibilities of the technology to disrupt old models and create new businesses so he started his own business with some colleagues around this new technology he's now building venly.io to help make the blockchain more user-friendly gerber you ready to take us to the top yes all right tell me who you're selling this to and how you guys make money what's the revenue model i'm sorry basically a sas company so building applications on top of blockchain is pretty difficult it's a very difficult technology and making user-friendly applications on top of blockchain is even more difficult so we actually make it more easy for development studios games for example to build user friendly games on top of blockchain without any knowledge of blockchain interesting and what are companies paying on average front to use your technology um it depends we have multiple products live so we have web wallets we have an nft api to mint and fts we have an nft marketplace and a shopify plan to create nfts and they all follow a different pricing model so based on the products that they choose to use they have different pricing well which one is the the thing that's close to a sas product um well they are all with a monthly billing for example the wallet we have a widget version um where people actually create a vending wallet using social logins um it starts with a free tier um so it's very easy to use for software developers to get started if they're successful very successful um and up to 500 monthly active users it's free to use and then it starts at 49 a month i see how many paying customers do you have today across all of your product lines we have about 50 paying customers five zero yes nice take me back to the first customer who was it and do you remember how you got them um yes the first customer was a gaming studio uh from cyprus and i had a call with the ceo and he was immediately sold by a product so for gaming studios easy customer onboarding is very important so they want to focus on game play so after the 10 minutes of her of talking to him he said yes we're gonna take it very cool okay so that was your first customer now what year was that um that was 2018 2018. you now since grown uh so help me understand have you bootstrapped the business or did you decide to raise capital [Music] um we closed our seat round in april this year okay and how much did you raise um about 2 million euros so it will be about 2.4 million dollars and um why did you need this capital um to grow to scale the team to what um well the product was already live we wanted to build out the product of it so we need to scale a little bit the product team but mainly to below the sales okay bill and so how many people on the team today and how many are sales so we were four people in april when we closed the seat round now we are 14 people mainly the marketing team has been scaled and the development team we are still looking for good business developers how many people on the engineering team um six six okay pretty good and then and then um the rest are sort of marketing sales management yeah in dts mainly marketing and management and and uh we are looking actively looking for goods um business developers i see now when you raise a 2.4 million seed obviously most people in their seed they're selling 15 to 20 percent of the business how much did you decide to sell in your seed round it will be similar to that yes okay about 20 yes okay so you guys what you raised it like a 10 11 million dollar evaluation something like that um the post money valuation was seven million seven zero seven million yes seven million okay uh very cool so so you sold about you sold more than you said about 25 25 almost 30 of the business we are 25 26 maybe something yeah um do you tell me about the partners you chose to raise from um so we have high-tech grinder funds which is a very large german investor so they have very good connections the they took the lead and frank really believed in the company from the first time he met tim our ceo and he helped us close the seat round then we have the yoga capital it's a very new belgian blockchain vc but they are well connected in the blockchain space there's block rocket which is an accelerator in germany around blockchain technology then there's imac imac is one of the top incubators so they already invested earlier before the seat and they did a follow-up investment during the seat and then there's uh an angel investor as well who trained so you brought on a lot of folks that sounds like a good group of people what was revenue when you guys raised the capital do you remember i think it was around 5k mr 5 000 6k yeah yeah and what where will you be at by the end of this year do you think um currently we have just about 40 so we'll hope to end the year around 50 60k uh so you're you're at 14 000 right now 40 four zero four zero oh that's that's a ton of growth so you went from five thousand a month eight months ago to 40 000 a month now today is that right yes correct b2c we grew from around 100 000 users to 500 000 visitors um b2c users yes who use our web wallet interesting okay so that's driving a lot of the growth of the recurring revenue um not really because we only monetize b2b i see how are people finding you um so we we have customers like for example the sandbox it's um the largest blockchain gaming studio um that creates a metaverse and they use our social logins to invert new people to their application um so people logging in through the sandbox um through their social logins they create a family account so they sign up through to actually our customers and they can use the same wallet to sign up through or to play multiple games from multiple customers so it's one account that they can use over multiple blockchain games but you mentioned you have 50 customers right now so they must pay like 800 or to a thousand dollars a month on average right yes something like that interesting and what enables you to charge them more or less what are you upselling [Music] um so the more users they have the higher the price goes um and then we can upsell multiple services for example if they just use the um web wallet we can start up selling the nft management solution for example or nft analytics very interesting and did you guys decide do you have any co-founders or did you launch it by yourself 100 percent uh no we are with four farmers so we yes did you split it evenly uh yeah so we started it all together and we were actually all i.t consultants on one certain id company and then ethereum launched and we all believed in ethereum and decided to start a company to get it wow what a story okay so 25 do you regret that do you regret splitting it evenly um no i think um it's the best and it's fair and everybody is equally involved in the the projects and the business so it was a good decision very cool all right let's wrap up here with the famous five gerber number one what's your favorite book alert of the rings number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um no not really number five learn a lot of doing well that's good what's your favorite online tool for building bentley um number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night seven okay that's pretty good and what's your situation married single kids um kids yes living together very cool okay how many kiddos 86 you have 86 kids no i i thought you said kilos sorry no i have um two kids and my wife also has a daughter so oh i see i see sorry i should have i shouldn't have said kids i'm like wait what 86 kids holy cow okay you you have two kids that would be incredible yeah i have two and my wife also has a daughter so we are three kids in total i see okay and how old are you i have to count i'm 40 42. happy early birthday last question gerber what is something you wish you knew when you were 20 um that it would be so much fun to build out a company with good co-founders guys there you have it uh venli building a tool to help make blockchain more accessible they went from five thousand a month in revenue now to forty thousand a month in revenue over the past eight months they raised their seed round just recently raising 2.4 million at a seven million valuation 50 customers 14 on the team and six engineers and gerber is hiring he wants more engineers so reach out in the meantime gerber thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks a lot and we're also hiring business developers so they're also very welcome to join us guys check it out at vendley.io thanks garbert thanks a lot enjoy your evening one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry 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