Wigzo Revenue & Funding (2024)

hello everyone my guest today is ahmed o'mara he's the founder of wigzo technologies it's also a first generation entrepreneur now playing in the ai marketing cloud for e-commerce space emma you ready to take us to the top yes all right so what does wigzo do and what's your revenue model how do you guys make money uh so basically um we just started off with the personalization tool for e-commerce and initially we were just collecting data and you were using it to personalize customer communication for uh for e-commerce companies like email personalization push notifications but what we did quickly realized is that uh you know massive problem exists for e-commerce is they're not able to assimilate um data into a single platform and that's the problem because they're personalization tools and their email marketing tools and everything works in a separate style and then there's transactional data that's um you know that's uh that's coming in so we uh uh built into this uh complete a data warehouse solution first of all we plug into the e-commerce we capture transactional marketing ads data and put it into a single platform and then um we we've built algorithms on top of this data to utilize this data you know not only personalized communication but uh run different types of ads uh uh um yeah and uh and what are companies paying on average uh per month or per year to use your technology uh so we have we work with two different segments of customers there is a stripped-down version of quixote there's an enterprise version of wixo the stripped-down version typically works between companies making 2 million to 20 million in revenues and the enterprise version is 20 million to 100 million in revenues and um typically the 2 million to 20 million bracket pays to pays us about 1500 a month um and um the 2200 million can go as high as uh 150 to 200 thousand dollars uh annually what's a fair average though on the enterprise cohort um a hundred thousand dollars for an enterprise score yeah and what do you what are you upside against is it a feature set seat based up selling gmv based up selling what's it upselling against uh it's yeah at the end of the day it's a gmb based upselling and uh we you know the customers that we work with uh there's a lot of consultation that goes in once you know enterprise customers we give them a lot of consultancy all based on uh based on their data is that either are you pure place ass uh it's a pure play says okay you don't charge it you don't take a percentage of gmv through the platform or anything no nothing okay very cool okay so put this on a timeline for me when'd you launch the company uh 2014 2014 and um what do you get today in terms of customers you're serving how many uh we in total we're serving about 600 plus e-commerce across india and u.s middle east and southeast asia and brazil okay and so six and then i mean have you done this bootstrap or did you decide to raise capital no we have raised capitals we have raised uh we've just closed our cities a round um and cornerstone uh came in and funded us but we are a profitable company we're doing about um two and a half to three million in revenues here what's the um how much have you raised though today um until date we've raised about two million dollars okay two million dollars and then was that equity or debt uh it was all equity oh all equity okay great and then so going back to the three million run rate today so that means last month you did about 250 a month in revenue that's right okay and where were you exactly a year ago do you remember uh we were less than a hundred thousand dollars okay so more kind of more than doubling year-over-year has most that come from expansion revenue on customers or adding new customers all together um that's pretty much coming from new customers right now because we see a the playing field is really i mean it's it's uh we're getting a lot of traction from from large e-commerce companies large e-tailers retail companies like uh mobados and um and sephora and jockey um and these are some of the customers that we've signed up in last three months along yep and then look if you're doing 240 200 000 a month right now across 600 customers that means the average customer is paying about 400 a month right yeah that's right not 1500. sorry earlier you said your small segment had about fifteen hundred dollars per month and your enterprise was you know north of a hundred grand a year but when you actually take the average here it's actually much lower it's much lower yeah okay but i guess those price points you gave me earlier are those kind of what you're adding new customers at today versus your historical averages uh that's absolutely good i see i see okay so when you launched company in 2014 when was the first line of code written um i think it was um august 2014 um we started coding the first version of the mvp okay and um when did you actually you know i guess the question i like to ask is how much money do you have to spend on building the thing before your first dollar of revenue um we had to spend um i think we were a seven months that we did not have a a single customer um we demoed our first version of the product in january 2015 uh so that's what seven months and the first dollar came in and march um to 2014 so it's almost august uh 2014 to march 2015. so in total though would it cost you to build the mvp uh it costed us close to about um the mvp close to about 80 000 okay so not ridiculously expensive yeah that's good and you mentioned profitable today i mean are you talking 10 grand at the bottom line a month 30 grand more uh it's close to about 30 to about 50 grand a month and as a ceo how do you decide to use that money do you let us pile up do you pay out dividends to employees what do you do with it uh so currently we're looking at expanding so really the money that we're currently doing and the you know the round that we've just raised we're planning a massive expansion in the us in the north america region we see because at the end you know if you really want to be like a 50 million dollar company in next three years um we got to have some you know a good presence so we're going to open offices in in in california and uh in boston and um we'll be recruiting uh heavily in the us yep and what does your team size look like today how many people so we're a team of 64 people six four okay so 64 folks profitable 200 000 a month in revenue 3 million run rate churns critical in a sas company what's your 12 month churn look like in terms of revenue about six percent okay that's not bad that's again annually correct yeah yeah i think uh the the reason for lower churn uh is what we've yeah i think we've not hit a critical uh 48 month and ltv uh yet i mean if you look at the new version of the product that that's um the the oldest customer i can think of is 24 months i i think we'll have a fair picture when we hit that 48-month ltv cycle and we'll have a better picture of churn yeah do you know i mean the customers that signed up exactly a year ago were you able to expand them at all or no yeah we were able to expand them because um um it uh i mean it depends case the case like our account managers yeah but you can look at a weighted average though so if you look at the total revenue you added exactly a year ago in that month you lost six percent of it you expanded it by more than six percent yeah more than six percent okay so net revenue retention's above 100 yep okay interesting and how aggressive are you being to get the customers what are you paying to get a customer um anywhere today um anywhere between seven thousand dollars to about ten thousand dollars okay so seven grand get a 400 a month customer what that puts your payback period at i mean north of 12 months right yep and what's allowing you to be that aggressive i mean are you just filling the cash gap with the money you raised basically yeah that's that's correct are you are you comfortable with seven grand or are you trying to drive that up or down no i think uh the reason is that uh recently we've been focusing on large customers so if we take that uh if we take those contract values and just focus on getting those customers uh they pay up uh so we for example recently closed two hundred and fifty thousand dollars contract and um for paying ten thousand dollars um or fifteen thousand dollars for that kind of uh uh customer is absolutely um okay for us now you know why we do have 600 customers but we're currently um focusing on large uh 2200 million segment of customers more than the two to 20 million customers yeah yep all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh mark mason's uh how the art of not giving a yeah that's good number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh there are a lot uh i love uh azim from mixpanel um and uh uh i love reading elon musk that's just fun to read um what he's doing on twitter and there are a bunch of sas companies that i follow like intercom and obviously their main hubspot those first guys number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh uh i think i have to go with uh intercom it just solves a lot of problems for sas number four how many hours of sleep to get every night about four to six depending on what time zone i am and and how are you i'm 33 all right and what's your situation married single kids i am single right now okay no kids no kids okay last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i wish my 20 year old self would start up as quickly as possible you know and build and fail and build again and fail guys wigzo.com essentially ai marketing cloud for ecommerce they now have over 600 customers doing 250 000 a month in revenue up from 100 000 a month just a year ago they've raised two million dollars they're profitable taking forty thousand dollars a month in free cash flow to the bottom line turning six percent of their annual revenue but expanding by more than six percent for net revenue retention greater than a hundred percent spending seven grand to get a new customer so an 18-month payback period with a team of 64 now looking to expand to the us ahmed thank you for taking us to the top thanks nathan