How Wimi-Teamwork CEO Lionel Roux grew to $10M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is lionel rue he's an engineer plus mba graduate started his career in japan working for total oil then he created another company in racing fuels in southern california that he sold three years later after graduation he worked as a strategy consultant and in 2011 he created wimmy accurately all right so tell us about the company what's the company do and what's the revenue model how do you make money uh we it's a subscription model model it's a solution it's growing really fast actually we serve many different companies in operating in any kind of industries it goes from you know very large publicly traded companies to very small businesses we serve uh teams uh that want to be more productive and want to who wants to um you know realize execute projects in a more smooth and um easy way and so lionel what do people pay like you know on average per month to get access to this technology you've built um it ranged from nine dollars to to 18 a month according to the the spectrum of features you need um i assume that's per seat though right i'm talking about when an actual when a new company sign when a new company signs up typically what do they pay right off the bat or on average it's say it's based on a number of to active users it's actually internal users because our all our plans include an unlimited uh number of guests which are um you know people operating from outside the company that can be customers suppliers and this kind of stuff yeah but it can be as low as nine euro and nine dollars a month uh for one one seat yeah i guess what i'm actually asking here is what kinds of teams are you built for are we talking 100 persons teams paying a grand a month or 10 grand a month like what's a team pay on average on average it's about what 500 to 600 dollars a month okay but there is a very very large variation because simply we have a deployment of several thousand people in uh in a large oil company in france we also uh provide the solution to sephora uh you might have heard it this makes some people have thousands of seats some people have one i'm just what i'm trying to get is if they're paying 500 bucks a month the average team using you has about 50 seats something like that right yeah right yeah put this on a timeline for us when you launch the company about eight years ago oh wow okay so 20 what 2010 that's a heck of a time to launch a company yeah it took uh it took a while to take off honestly uh we did a lot of test and try the product was not mature it's actually the the product itself is quite ambitious because the initial vision was to build a platform that include all the the most essential teamwork services that includes instant communication document sharing with a drive that works just like dropbox plus task management plus calendaring plus video conferencing and screen sharing so that's quite a product honestly and um i entered this business without much i.t experience but with a lot of ambition and drive um and uh it took us a while to to build the platform so what have you been able to scale to today in terms of total teams on the platform um we have about 42 000 companies using our product okay i assume that's free and paid how many are paid um that's about five percent okay got it 42. and walk me through how you get that i mean a lot of people try a freemium model but they can only get one percent or so to convert why how do you get five percent um it's because we're targeting we are trying to target the most the people that we have the most chance to convert we we also target some um you know we target specific decision makers uh so we're trying to take care of who we target that's how we use so let me just try and break that down so 42 000 companies sign up you'll look at things like what's their team size and then you'll decide to reach out to them because you know that you can charge them more versus someone who's signing up with just one team member right okay got it so 5 to 42 000 is about 2 100 customers today right okay what we're going to say you also target what we also do some profiling on the type of uh people we're targeting uh like for example age is one factor the fact that the company is set up as with several sites wait hold on tell me about the age what age do you target how old they have to be um it's from 25 to 45 that's where we we we got the most uh the batteries the best response um in terms of conversion and also uh related to the profile of the company um if they have several sites that's something that um uh where you know where we have much more chance to uh to deploy uh we need how do you know if you have many sites what do you ask on the onboarding on the free tier to know this um that's when we do some outbound we do a little bit of outbound and we profile the companies before you know sending them them emails or or this kind of stuff okay break break break that outbound strategy down for me i mean what's your total team size today and how many of them are focused on outbound uh it's actually a minority um the the majority of the business 90 of the business is um comes from inbound so in that case we try to to um to tailor the criteria that we use for sem or this kind of stuff or we build some pages in on our website to attract a specific set of of uh leads like what's the link to one of those pages the length no no like what's what's the link to one of those pages so that we can go look at it um you have on our website uh some pages that um it's called solutions um and you can see the type of uh industries we're targeting on priority yeah these are basically like in your footer you have a bunch of things listed message channels online file sharing but basically a bunch of keywords right and you're saying these are set up specifically to rank well in sem and seo right but what i was referring to more specifically is the the section solutions that appear on the top and at least different you know consulting firms architects design offices accountants this kind of people that's where we get we provide the most value for them so if i search like you know project management for architects you guys should come up pretty high right interesting you have to type that in french though okay very good okay good well walk me through kind of how you okay actually go back to the team question so how many total on the team um it's about 50. okay five zero do you mean you mean uh internally for for your team my team yeah yeah uh we're 25 people right now okay about half of the um half of the company is uh has a technical background that includes the developers the the system administrator and this kind of stuff the other half is you know marketing sales and administration this kind of stuff and have you and where's everybody based mostly in paris actually we have two offices we have three offices one in the main one is in paris another one is in sofianti police which is in the southeast of france and the third one where i try to go every other month is in san francisco where we don't have a permanent staff but we have people that can um you know um perform some uh do you have a u.s subsidiary set up no we just have um you know you know desk that you know i can i can sit on so paris and remote and have you bootstrapped the company or raise capital um well it's kind of in between um well hold on how can we how can it be in between you've either raised money or you haven't raised money there is no in between we raised money small but like a lot of times so how much money total have you raised uh 3.3 million okay so what you've done like four rounds for you know 700 each seven rounds for like 300 grand each yeah i mean pretty much what we did our strategy was to raise small because we were confident in creating values and instead of raising a lot of money early on uh we prefer to raise this you know small small uh small amounts but uh pretty much every year yeah um are you still are you casual positive today are you still burning money yes we're cash positive and it feels so good do you mind me asking about how much you take 10 to the bottom line or by how much um no it's it's actually five percent right now okay that's that's good yeah yeah it's it's on the right side yeah tell me more about some of the other economics critical to any kind of sas company especially in project management space churn how do you measure churn and where are you at today um the churn well in the project management you have a natural churn uh which is due to the duration of a project for example you know people take the you know take a subscription it makes perfect sense select hands and they drop it and they might we take another subscription later on um the churn is about 20 right now 20 revenue turn per year right and you have expansion revenue that makes up for that loss or no yes yes we're growing at a rate of about 50 a year but if you just got the cohort so that cohort that signed up a year ago you'll lose 20 will that same cohort upgrade by more than 20 yes yes yes of course by how much do they expand by um well we have two type of expansion new accounts and also uh you know current accounts getting bigger yeah so ignore ignore new customer ads just expansion on the cohort the old accounts the old accounts uh it would fuel about half of the growth okay so you'll get about you'll get about 20 expansion on those accounts right yeah okay so let me just replay this back to you if a year ago you signed up a hundred customers that paid you i'm making this up a million per year you'll lose 200 grand from that cohort but you'll upsell 200 grand so your net revenue retention is 100 right right plus plus plus the growth of new accounts yeah yeah but new accounts typically you don't like you don't count new accounts when you're doing cohort analysis because it's time based sure typically typically yeah yeah so where are you walk me through kind of the growth strategy where are you getting new accounts how are you signing up customers it's right now the the most valuable channel is um we didn't find any other i mean any other best uh channels is the um seo really um for the solutions pages um right uh or directly from the you know from the home page um the thing is that since we're eight years old and um we're one of the rare actors that is uh not u.s based um uh especially in europe and and uh more particularly in france yeah because you have like a monday base camp trello there's all kinds of companies in the space absolutely absolutely but all of them are you know u.s companies which is great my wife is you know is american and my kids also i love the us but companies are looking for alternatives to u.s new us softwares and uh we sort of built an um a credibility a brand that sort of makes us stand out in france that's kind of help the recruitment of new customers so so you said average customer pays 500 bucks per month what are you spending fully weighted to acquire the customer typically uh that's that's a very tough question and i'm gonna have a boring answer um we don't know actually we don't measure yet no no we measure it we spend some as you know a pretty significant amount on you know adwords facebook and all these things but um the the return on investment is kind of mediocre what is that like a 12 month payback or 24 month payback or what yeah it's about 12 month payback here why do you consider that mediocre most people if they could spend 12 months of ltv to get a customer they would do it all day um it's hard to um i don't in france we're not in a very mature market there are a lot of testers you know people just curious um and probably we have a product that can be sometimes too ambitious um compared to the maturity of our leads um so they uh so they they they check out us out they they start a trial period but and they drop it uh so which sort of deteriorate deteriorate the return on investment yep before lionel before we wrap up here can you give us a general sense of where you're at in terms of run rate today uh right now we are burning i mean we run rate is about 130 000 euros which would be 140 150 per month per month okay 150 000 bucks per month so so help me i'm doing something wrong here with math because if i take 500 bucks per month as an average price point times 2100 customers right five percent of 42 000 that would put you like a million a month so do you have less customers or is the average revenue per customer lower [Music] um let's see it's uh there are 17 users per account now because we have discounts and stuff like that so our um monthly revenue rate is about 150 000 euros i guess you know what i'm asking is earlier told me the average customer pays 500 bucks a month right and then you told me you had 2 100 customers 5 of 42 000 right if i take 2100 times 500 right that would put you at a million dollars a month but you're at 150 grand a month so i'm asking do you have less customers mistake in the numbers i i told you yeah that's what i'm trying to understand is it a lower price point it's less than 500 is the average yeah i see it's less okay let's see the thing well i'm confused is that because we sometimes you know people pay annually yes you divide by 12. so um so let's see we have 17 on average 17 users on a paying account so that would be times let's say 15 times back yeah so 255 a month times 12 is about 3 grand for a year right yeah i mean i can do the math right if you have 2100 customers and you're currently doing 150 grand a month each one pays about 71 dollars per month actually we have less than 2100 i think we're more at half of that oh okay so less so about 2.5 percent of the 42 000. right right okay got it got it got it got it yeah so if you have a thousand customers it's more like they each pay 150 bucks a month something like that right got it and where are you in terms of growth rate so a year ago today where were you uh we were fifty percent lower oh okay 100 grand right that's great well congrats on the growth this is great let's uh let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um it's a rework jason free number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i'm sorry is there a ceo you're following or studying um well i used to be a big fan of steve jobs but i'm sort of not following much uh any other ceos right now number three what billing tool do you use uh we use our own billing tool we built it okay um well name a different tool that that you use to use run your business up spot hubspot number four how many hours of sleep you get every night i'm sorry how many hours of sleep to get every night uh i sleep my good eight hours that's good and what's your situation married single kids uh i'm married i have two kids and i do a lot of uh extreme sports and how i have really good life work balance that's good how old are you 45 43 44 exactly okay 44. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew lionel um i'm so mine what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. um i wish um well um which i knew like uh perfection is um is not a good thing first i mean let's put it um i can afraid how can i phrase that um it's better to have something um not perfect but that runs then you know spending too much time trying to reach that perfection before guys there you have it don't focus too much on perfection come on from lionel again launched wimmy teamwork back in 2010. now about a thousand customers paying 150 bucks a month so 150 grand a month in revenue up 50 year over year so about 100 grand per month just a year ago they've got about five percent and free cash flow going to the bottom line that's an ebitda margin which is obviously a great place to be team at 25 in paris and remote locations 3.3 million bucks trade to get about 20 revenue churn per year but also 20 expansion so 100 net revenue retention on the cohort again looking to scale fast as really one of the only french solutions focused on kind of project management for specific industries like architects lionel thanks for taking us to the top all right thank you nathan