How Vindi CEO Rodrigo Dantas grew to $4.8M revenue and 4K customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is rodrigo dantas he is the ceo of vindi he's a sass infinite entrepreneur focused in payments industry in brazil he's a former executive at a major brazilian banking angel investor of five companies rodrigo you ready to take us to the top yeah okay that's right good for invite me for a call you bet so tell us about vindy what's the company do and how do you make money okay uh we are a payment platform focus in sas and subscription business in brazil especially subscription billing to recurring companies sas companies gym clubs and subscription boxes we are focused on this and we are making money supporting these guys uh to build their customers and uh provide financial services to them how are you different than stripe yeah it's more like uh zora uh you know zuara yeah an american company yeah we have uh uh the same model of zwar and brazil but stripe and and companies like adrian is uh uh they are a benchmark for us interesting okay and is your model sas and if so what do people pay you on average per month for this yeah we are uh we have the model in sas like sas companies natural size companies but we are making money with fintech model 2. we have a payment platform uh being distributed by sas model and we are making money with uh uh fintech solutions too okay so if you look at the past 12 months of revenue what percent of revenue was pure play sas versus your other stuff ninety percent is sense nine zero five yeah yep very good and ten percent is fintech so on the sas side again walking through what's the average customer we're gonna pay you per month to use your technology uh almost uh 400 400 brazilian rails uh but we we have here different of type of customers we have companies like uh resultados digital is using our platform and they are in the middle of our price and we have companies like thomson oiters a biggest company of software in world paying a lots and lots of transactions per month so 400 reals is about 100 usd per month again we're talking averages here you have different cohorts like you just described put all this on a timeline for us riga when'd you launch what year uh well we we founded these companies five years ago uh and now our dream there uh so 2013 or 2014. i'm sorry for uh five years ago yeah so we just got into a new year's four so 14 or 13. yeah yeah yeah and um which year 2013 or 2014 no 2014 okay in the beginning of 2014. okay great beginning 2014 and then how did you get your first 100 customers what growth channel did you use yeah our dream there was uh support sas company only success companies because in brazil uh the trend there in that time was support companies like uh hesitations digitize companies like hog contention brazil and these guys um was lost to to provide a growth important growth to build customers and our dream there is support these companies but in the middle of our path we discovered another segment uh selling in the same model of sas companies in brazil like uh uh gym clubs we have an important uh major big company here is smart feed so rigo just to be i want to dive into how you got your first 10 customers did you focus on the gym niche no no no sas companies sas companies okay okay so how so specifically how did you land your first 10 sas companies where did you find them was it a phone call a cold email what okay we have uh the inbound marketing uh we found that this this model in the beginning and we are providing right now inbound market yet but our 10 customers came with us about inbound marketing very rarely the companies get their first customers from inbound marketing because you have to have a team of writers and you have to be putting out content so these weren't like your friends that you met at like conferences or something this was literally you built a team of writers and you had inbound content already right at day one no we yes we created a blog uh five months ago to launch our platform and we push in everyday uh articles to talk with these guys you launched that six months ago six months ago okay i'm asking back in 2014 was your year one right back then how did you get your first 10 customers uh in the beginning of 2014. yeah how did you get your first customers in 2014 uh in january for example but our our content production begins in uh six months ago of our first customer for example vertigo i don't understand you're saying you just started content marketing six months ago which would have been 2018 but you said you launched in 2014 did you not have customers until 2018 no no 2014 is our 10 customers in the beginning of 2014 okay how did you get those 10 customers in 2014 before you were doing content marketing yes yes yes you know that's a that's a question how did you get those 10 customers in 2014 true thing about marketing because we in the beginning we we created blogs before the company before they acquired this customer it's a personal blog for for example writing about these customers about uh the brazilian market i see this was you you were doing the writing yeah yeah yeah okay and what have you scaled to today how many customers we have uh 4 000 customers okay 4 000 customers at 100 bucks a month or 400 reals a month is about 400 000 usd per month in revenue is that right yes and what's your growth rate what were you doing about a year ago we are growing uh 100 year by year okay so about 200 000 usd per month a year ago yeah and rodrigo where's most that growth coming from is it adding new customers or expanding old customers we are uh expanding your the the the regular our customers too but our most our people team here has focused in growth in new customers and we have a good kpis of of growth in our on our customers but we are focusing bring more because we are making money with the fintech solutions to now you know yeah well just be clear though you're doing 400 grand a month right now which is about 5 million in terms of run rate that's 90 of your business so what you're doing a couple hundred thousand dollars annually right now on the fintech side yeah but we have we acquired two companies in this path too uh we acquired a small fintech a payment facilitator and we acquired one of our competitors who name is mark bill we we acquired this company what's it called smart bill is mock build okay and did you acquire these because they were already pci compliant so by acquiring them it sped up your pci compliance process exactly the the first company fintech is because uh to to to bring a complimentary solution for us especially in pci compliance and the second acquisition smart view for example is to to understand to understand uh enterprise sales because we are focused in small business and medium business and these guys uh was focused in enterprise sales and we are bringing to to us this culture because the sales are are are very different in enterprise and medium companies so considering your enterprise strategy and when you look at your growth today what are you spending what's your fully weighted customer acquisition cost to get someone paying you 100 a month yes our focus is to bring new segments for us so what's your fully weighted calc though my question is what's your fully weighted customer acquisition cost it's marketing no how much is it how many dollars you're fully weighted cack ah okay uh to aqueous to acquire new customers yes okay uh maybe it's around uh 1 000 brazilian brazilian reals okay which would be what is that about 250 us dollars maybe 300 300 and half dollars so you get your money back in the first three months you have a three-month payback period yeah in seven months we are uh receiving this feedback okay well i thought you told me that people were paying 400 reals per month which is about a hundred dollars us dollars per month on average right yes so if you're spending only 300 to acquire them your payback period would be three months not seven months is that right yes yes so is it seven month payback or three month payback uh seven months seven months go back okay then your acquisition must be higher it must be more like 700 usd or about 2400 rial or all right yes yes i don't i don't i don't uh i don't want to calculate this but yes it's it's more it's more it's a little bit more churn's critical in any sas company what's your churn today and how do you keep it low i'm sorry i'm understanding i understand what's your turn oh it's around uh two percent per month we have a control term here logo churn or revenue churn no uh the the the the customer churn uh we we don't have uh uh a significant significant uh turn two three percent is equal to quantity and uh the number of customers and we have one percent and a half of revenue okay got it so you're churning about 15 or 16 of revenue every year yes yes do you have meaningful expansion revenue no we don't have this this number now okay um so got it so your net revenue retention annually then is about what's 84 84 89 okay 89 49 got it very good all right and where are you so from a capital perspective have you bootstrapped the company or raised well we raised um three million dollars with a vc in brazil and then we are focused and and look and understand the next steps for for our company and we are talking with the new possible investors in vindy how much do you want to raise ideally uh for our new strategy of sas and fintech we are seeking for uh 10 million dollar okay for this year for the next step and what what valuation would you love to raise that at we are we are looking for uh just to s at 100 millions in brazil but we are open to new uh proposal with this new model sas and fintech when we talk about 100 100 million we are talking only the sas model but we are growing fast in fintech too so you want to raise 10 million reels on a 100 million real evaluation yeah okay so you're doing you're doing about five million dollars today in revenue uh yeah if you want to raise 10 million reals that's what that's about 2.5 million dollars right yeah yeah so why i mean you've already raised three million dollars usually people do you know a next round they're raising way more than what they already have is this a i mean it sounds like you're growing why are you only raising two and a half million when you've already raised three yeah yeah it's because we have here a new uh environment in brazil because companies like vindi uh doing the same strategy in sas infotech they are growing fast but they are making lots more of money and fintech strategy we are looking to our two benchmarks in brazil or one of this benchmark is stone stone it's a acquired company and we are looking for another company whose name is pagasiguro they are a different type of uh to evaluate a company but they are doing the same strategy of sas companies to growth you know yep um okay very good and how many people are on the team today we have 100 people and is everyone where's everyone based uh we are in sao paulo and we have a small office in the another city her name is campinas it's closed for sao paulo okay that's great very good and are you guys operating are you profitable today or break even or burning we are very close to our break even maybe two months we are targeting our big keeping so how much are you burning per month right now like ten twenty thousand uh three thousand three thousand dollars per month oh okay great so you're very close yeah yeah okay rodrigo let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh zero two one from peter thiel number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yes yes yes which ceo um i like a a guy here in brazil her name is erica santos of hezbollah he's a new type of ceos yeah yeah you talking about resultados yeah yeah rd good number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company what my favor sorry online tool uh i like very much of zendesk they helped me to grow our business number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh eight hours and what's your situation married single do you have kids i have two kids i have a marriage and very happy and how old are you i have 37 years old okay last question what's something that you wish you knew when you were 20 what um what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old oh my god responsibility guys responsibility is important again launched his company kind of in the fintech sas space back in 2014 now 4 000 customers paying 100 bucks a month so doing 400 000 a month in revenue that's up from 200 000 a month just a year ago again about three million dollars raised only burning three grand a month in terms of net burn 100 people in sao paulo and other remote locations 16 revenue churn annually spending about 700 bucks to get a new customer so a seven month payback period again the company vindi.com.vr think of it almost like zora but for brazil tying into stripe and other payment process platforms rodrigo thanks for taking us to the top well thank you thank you knighton