How WordLift CEO Andrea Volpini grew to $3.2M revenue and 800 customers in 2024.

guys wordlift dot IO today does 195 000 a month in Revenue up from a hundred and three thousand dollars a month just a year ago they help large Brands like Ray-Ban quickly use AI to write meta descriptions for all their thousands of skus on all their sunglasses they do that same thing across other brands using their Knowledge Graph enabling you to build a real AI strategy and increase human productivity launching all these descriptions within your own company's voice based off the data you feed or lift.io he's got 800 paying customers he profited seventy thousand dollars last month so really healthy profit margins last raise was eight hundred thousand dollars at 5.5 post and we'll be looking to do his next round in Q4 this year q1 next year targeting four to five million it's somewhere around a 20 million valuation uh again scaling nicely with a team of twenty seven Engineers five on the sales side hey folks my guest today is Andrea Bo Pini he's a Serial entrepreneur and an expert in the semantic web Technologies and artificial intelligence space he's the co-founder and CEO of word lift a company that specializes in AI driven SEO Solutions his experience and focus and focus is on leveraging artificial intelligence to improve web content and enhance SEO and user experience Andrea are you ready to take us to the top totally all right well I'm thrilled to have you back on you know we had you on about a year ago for those that have not heard of warlift before maybe describe how a customer is using you today and then we'll jump into more of the story right so we we build knowledge graphs and these knowledge graphs are designed to optimize content so that search engine can understand what this content is about get more uses and then we're starting to use this knowledge graph to use generative AI alongside with it and that's that's the exciting part and so what does that mean can you maybe actually share a customer name that's using you and tell us how they're using this specifically right I mean uh let's take Ray-Ban okay they they they have product description and uh they've been using for over a year uh now uh where lift to build a Knowledge Graph and then fine-tune a model that can create a product description for every single variant not just the main model but every single variant with the exact tone of voice that Raven has and uh by doing that they're getting significant amount of traffic and that means an increase of the revenue around 25 are they specifically using new Ray-Ban to update all the skew data for all the different Sun classes in terms of like the metadata description for each for each frame that's correct that's correct and we build an ontology to describe how does sunglasses is made of what is the purpose and using this ontology we can create better content so better data equal better content and we'll be fusing the knowledge graph alongside with the language model in order to provide uh better quality better accuracy better validation prevent hallucination and this has changed the business this year very cool now are you still last time you came on was about a year ago and you said you were charging on average 130 bucks per month is that still about the average no really I mean we have uh refocused heavily on on the Enterprise client I mean today is a Enterprise SEO platform uh and uh we have a reduced number of clients uh and a higher ticket um or average Enterprise client uh you know would uh would have you know 5.3 000 Euro average uh monthly um subscription with us okay so I guess how many last week came on you told me you had about 1150 paying customers it seems to give less now but they're paying more how many customers today so we are around uh 800 uh clients and uh you know just to give you a few numbers uh last year 2022 we close at uh 1.2 million euro um you know the the final number and uh in June this year we've done uh 1.352. so we we went beyond 100 growth uh um in the first semesters and now you know the numbers is kind of slightly going down but uh we we're targeting uh 2.3 2.5 million euro uh by the end of the year okay so 100 1.4 million dollar run rate is about 120 000 per month divided by 800 paying customers would mean each one's paying on average about 140 per month yeah yeah yeah but I mean there is a there is a slight difference between you know the the Enterprise patch and everyone else and uh we have on board that the clients of the size of Coca-Cola for example and so we are working on multiple markets multiple languages and so you know the the way in which we're selling the subscription to the Enterprise is that we sell by website per Market Per language and so at the end of the day you buy wireless on a URL basis and uh you know starting point can be something like uh two euro per URL per year okay got it so it's you sell per URL per language per year kind of and then we add on top you know uh smart content services like the content generation like the module for generating q a so we are effectively becoming a journal DVI platform focusing on Enterprises doing SEO starting from the creation of a knowledge graph 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 frownerpath 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 evaluation 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 so 1.35 million run right today up from you told me a year ago again you're about 1.2 million so a little bit of growth now that'd be okay if you'd bootstrap the company because when you bootstrap you can grow on your own terms but you've raised a pre-seed round in 2022 I think you raised 800k at 5.5 million post money how are those investors responding to you know what I would say is maybe slower growth uh you know relative to what their expectations were when they invested I mean you you called The 100 growth uh slow growth you told me that a year ago I mean you came on in 2021 as well and you told me you had 705 paying customers at 123 a month which would be 1.1 million run rate you told me then you grew that to a year ago to 1.2 million run rate and you then said this year you're at 1.3 million dollar run rate in June so that would be 2.5 in in December doesn't make sense how much how much monthly requiring Revenue did you do last month yeah so uh 195. I see I see okay got it so a year ago you were at you were doing 100 103 yeah around the 100 so we I see I see yeah so comparing September to September you've gone from 103 000 per month to 195 per month I see okay and where did uh where did most of that growth come from you know you know doing a lower rpu high volume approach relative to Landing a Coca-Cola it's very different sales motion yeah yeah so so the and and the growth is coming primarily from you know uh helping this company generate content with high accuracy uh by leveraging on the knowledge graph so the knowledge graph is the foundation and then on top of that we start generating content and validating content and that has been you know kind of the people that we've done last year I've been investing on Transformers for for many years now and the combination with with Knowledge Graph it's it's uh it's bringing a lot of value but Andre isn't that isn't the knowledge graph only as powerful as the data set that you feed it in the sample size of that data set and isn't that directly I mean if if the customer out signs up for your tool doesn't have a large Json to feed it your knowledge wrap is going to be really poor for that customer right I mean of course we have built a lot of tooling for enriching this graph and improving whatever data you start from I mean for example we now have the ability to ingest the Google Merchant feed directly into the knowledge graph and then we can start enhancing you know this Merchant feed and making it better because we apps scale the images or we add additional metadata to the products or we you know start to categorize product with a different taxonomy so there is a lot of value that gets into the creation of the the data inside the graph I mean it's not just the graph of course the data that you bring in it's it's the first asset but we we have to improve it because otherwise there's no SEO value but once we improve it then there is no justice your value you have something way more valuable which is you're going to build your AI stack on top of it I understand how many folks are full-time on the team today so uh we have a around uh 24 people between you know the the kind of the resident one and and the people working remotely um we have around seven people in the tech um we have uh uh five sales uh we have uh nine in the support uh integration uh team and then we have uh yeah two two marketing and me and so with that head count expense obviously you know you pay that out of your month your current revenue is the company profitable today are you burning that money yeah no we are profitable we have a good profit um we have around uh I mean if we if I look at uh Augusta I think we are around 38 profit margin 38 or 38 000. 30 okay so 38 on 200k of MRI would mean you profited something like 70 000 in August yeah yeah it's true that of course we are keeping on keeping my salary low the other you know management I mean we're we're still kind of in a bootstrap mode I mean I haven't I want to keep the company profitable so that I don't have to you know deal with the issues with investors I mean I want to keep things as uh healthy as possible and I I a company that is profitable we always been profitable since you know the after the first year now and I want to keep it that way so does that mean you still have the full 800 000 pre-seed from last year in your bank [Music] on Monday we have a new general manager starting off I mean so we we're investing on on technology and team uh as we should but we are not overspending we're not like crazy with the money that we got and you mentioned our own salary a lot of Founders are not quite sure what to pay themselves so when you say you pay yourself quote a low salary can I ask what that is and how did you come up with the number no you're gonna ask no but I mean um let's say that uh if I would go and work on a corporate uh um I would possibly earn double of what I'm making kind of I mean yeah but you own obviously you I mean are you still found or do you own 100 of the equity no I mean I have a another co-founders when we're we have a team so but of course I have Capital uh you know I I invest in my company I'm happy and I I'm not complaining about my salary I mean it's a balance that I'm choosing because I want to invest in the company I want to see the value grow and I want to keep the the value for investing in in Innovation yeah that's right um 50 50 at the start yeah pretty much okay okay and how what what employee stock option pool did you set up on the seat around do they own 10 20 percent so so we have around 10 at the moment uh for that and I'm planning you know if we do a new round I'm planning to to review this number and increase it and you know kind of make it more uh more participation from from everyone on it okay so investors put in 800k at 5.5 posts last year which would be about 15 to the company employees own something like 10 and the rest which is 75 you and your co-founder kind of split 50 50. with some others um shareholders that I see you mentioned adding more to the e-stop pool if you do another round are you planning to raise additional capital in the next 12 months yes um so we see that General TBI it's um it's a great opportunity so we saw that we could uh you know dabble on major clients and and then there is a significant opportunity because we are at this specific point in time where we have learned that the quality of the data is as important as the language model and so the more we can focus on strengthening the tooling that creates and qualifies the data that we ingest from client the better the content will get and so we want to double on that and I want to increase the speed I want to open an office in the US and I want to have you know a larger product team and so how much are you looking to raise Andrea we are looking at between four and five million euro okay and how much Equity do you think you have to sell to get that deal done Max 20 no more interesting so something like a 15 to 20 million you know pre-post money evaluation 20 minutes would be a fair would be a fair number you know in Europe the evaluation are slightly lower if we would be in San Francisco there would be maybe a 35 but uh but uh we're in Rome when do you plan when do you plan to kick that process off so um ideally end of the year beginning of q1 next year uh we have to you know have a solid plan I don't want to make you know get money if I don't have exactly you know the idea of how to spend it I'm still conservative so as you could see from my existing numbers I'm now overspending I don't see value in adding marketing you know expenses if I don't see that at least I get a 3X return so everything is very much calculated at this point but yeah we need a little bit more of flexibility would you ever consider you know keeping your Equity instead of selling a bunch in a round would you consider using something like non-dilutive capital why not I mean we discussed it in the past I'm always looking at bro first you know my target is to have a healthy company that it's sustainable enough that you know it doesn't uh overspan it remains profitable but at the same time we have to kill it on the Innovation side and killing on on our you know in The Innovation side when you deal with very large corporations you have to work on a technology stack which is so volatile like there I start these days you know we we need resources but uh yeah maybe a mix between the two yeah well good on that note Andrea let's wrap here with the famous five number one your favorite book uh I'm starting to root to read again the Society of the Mind by Marvin misky this is kind of uh I'm you know a major study on how the brain works and uh and I I was passionate when when it came out I mean I think I read it in the 90s but now I'm rereading again and it's it's so beautiful number two is their CEO you're following or studying I thought of several CEO um yeah of course I have to follow people like like mask because I use X or X Twitter uh but um I have a good relationship with uh with the founder of yoast that we're gonna meet next week and and we have a you know I think a great relationship I can learn a lot from him because he sold the company already right number three what's your favorite online tool for building word lift um personally I like a lot uh the work that uh we do with zapierre I think uh you know kind of connecting dots and automating marketing it's it's good but uh yeah of course number three what's your uh sorry how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh I mean I should do better I mean I think we have you know six uh six and a half seven I mean depending on the period of time now it's it's very low and what's your situation married single kids I'm married two kids very happy and uh I think you had a birthday right you're 46 now uh yeah um very good the last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um oh boy uh when I was 20 that uh that I could uh already focus on uh kind of my dream idea rather than you know kind of learning from from from the bottom up you know I could I could focus in the beginning on things that I loved yes I mean not that I didn't not that I did things that I did a lot but I could be more crazy even more crazy than I was already guys wordlift dot IO today does 195 000 a month in Revenue up from 103 000 a month just a year ago they help large Brands like Ray-Ban quickly use AI to write meta descriptions for all their thousands of skus on all their sunglasses they do that same thing across other brands using their Knowledge Graph enabling you to build a real AI strategy and increase human productivity launching all these descriptions within your own company's voice based off the data you feed or live.io he's got 800 paying customers he profited seventy thousand dollars last month a really healthy profit margins last raise was eight hundred thousand dollars at 5.5 post and we'll be looking to do his next round in Q4 this year q1 next year targeting four to five million at somewhere around a 20 million valuation uh again scaling nicely with a team of 27 Engineers five on the sales side Andrea thanks for taking us to the top 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 buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpukak LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 pm Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hey guys recording this here on what is it friday the 19th maybe you're seeing this on monday at the latest but want to let you know we are almost sold out for founder comp sorry founder 500 in austin texas here in about a week uh it's gonna be an amazing event 500 b2b sas founders i'm looking at the attendee list there's almost um there's almost 60 founders with more than six seven million bucks in arr it's an incredible group of group there's over uh there's over a hundred over 150 with more than a million uh more than a million revenue it's an incredible group you don't want to miss it uh grab your hotel grab your flight grab a ticket right now i'll put the link in the bio um in the description here on youtube and i think there's only about three tickets left okay about three tickets left i'd love to see you guys there don't be bashful grab your ticket now hey folks my guest today is andy volpini he is the ceo and founder of wordlift.iio which is helping everyone with automating their seo andy ready to take us to the top crazy all right so this is a very competitive space you know sas tools to help with seo what's your unique spin what do customers pay you for we build knowledge graphs that's that's the reason people come to us and uh and then using this knowledge graph we can automate seo at various level and that's pretty unique i mean uh we help you create uh your own knowledge graph much like google does and this interacts with google at some point so that you will enter into google knowledge graph more easily and also reuse the knowledge graph for other you know seo or digital marketing tasks why is the knowledge graph important and can you give me an example of what that might look like for a company so so when you build a knowledge graph you have this flexible data structure that uh that google can read and uh and by using these uh this data structure you can also build uh other services like i don't know generating your product description or generating you know uh the description for the startup that that you work with within the subspace so a knowledge graph is kind of a starting point for your ai strategy but it's also important for google because it represents a new site map in terms of you know what are the concepts that matter for the business how do we index them what is the data you know behind the website and that's way more important as we progress from you know traditional seo into modern seo and what i love about you guys you came on the show back in april of last year uh you had just brought if you remember this you had just broken a million dollar run rate you remember that that's correct that's correct and most importantly you told me you and your partner still owned more than eighty percent of the business which is great right we're still doing we're still that's amazing and you told me not only Profits that you're in control you passed a million in revenue uh you guys are also very profitable you told me on 85 000 a month in revenue you took about 20 000 that month about a year and a half go to the bottom line right yeah i mean we we have around uh 28 uh uh profit uh this uh in this quarter if i look at uh you know q2 that's unbelievable Raised yeah but we raised money in between oh you did okay so tell me what's the time so tell me about tell me about that how much did you decide because you told me you also told me that you declined an m a offer for five million dollars did you end up raising um so so we we decided to raise uh a little bit of capital uh and we closed the deal uh beginning of this year uh 800 000 euros um and we still have more than 80 percent of uh of the share so we still are pretty much where we were but we kind of rearranged the cap table and we have more money to invest for you know growing the sales and the marketing team and also the technology and what about i mean are you talking like a 10 million valuation or what valuation did you raise that at no no a lot less than that i mean uh it was uh you know a little bit more than five okay so basically the same as the m a offer that you got yeah i mean it was pretty much the same but you know i i keep the control and i can grow the company and you know kind of bring the numbers up yeah and uh yeah so raising 800 against 5.5 million valuation you guys decide to sell about 15 percent of the of the cap table you know the equity to the investor pretty much and why do that you were so profitable and you were growing so quick because uh because you need to have uh more uh more um you know cash available uh and um and and you know in order to to to grow because of course the the customer acquisition cost is still quite low compared to the to the lifetime value and so we we need to invest more in in acquiring clients and also by acquiring thailand because as you said it's a very competitive space so we need to have resources for you know kind of getting the best theme that we want yep 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different valuation a vc is gonna 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 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 attraction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 evaluation 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 what is your cac today uh i mean if we look at uh the court of the of the you know average user um getting a subscription for us we're talking about uh 180 200 euro uh for for acquisition but then if you look at you know the enterprise client that runs you know 70 of our revenues then the cost per acquisition is higher and uh you know in that case it's it's also i touch so so we need we need the resources well what's your range what don't name the customer obviously but what's does your biggest customer pay you per year today oh boy uh i think in the range i mean it's it's it's it's like or monthly yeah i mean if we look at uh you know yearly uh the biggest client would would probably give us i don't know maybe maybe maybe 300 000 uh euros per year um could be more um this year but uh that's kind of you know and why is it so much is it because they're tracking like so many keywords or what's the utility base like what's the metric the utility base is really the number of urls so so number of uh sites uh per urls and uh you know we have to build uh basically a data set uh on on all these urls and then we have to enhance the urls and and bring you know business value that uh it's at least i don't know five times what they spend with us yeah and that's that's what we're looking at yep that makes a lot of sense so that's your biggest customer but what does your average customer pay you per month would you say so the the lifetime value uh it's it's around uh uh one thousand and uh and three hundred uh euro uh and uh you know this is uh you know the the payback period will be something between 25 and 26 months 25 uh on on 180 spend on uh no no i mean on on a lifetime value that it's around uh one thousand and three hundred one thousand and four hundred euros um lifetime yeah and then you said your payback was 25 months yeah i mean the time the time that uh that stays with us on average oh not the payback period just the total lifetime yeah sorry sorry the other lifetime prepared yeah okay no the payback it's uh i mean a few months um basically one uh 1.5 months yeah yeah yeah so your average customers are paying something like a hundred and thirty bucks a month you spend 200 bucks to get them so they pay back in one and a half months interesting and what is what is that plan if someone signs up to you today for 130 bucks how many sites are they probably tracking and using you for um they can they can build a graph for uh you know between three to ten website depending on the number of uh you know content types that they need to cover so we we scale also by content type so by looking at the site uh you know if you're just have to deal with products is one thing if you have to deal with products and podcasts then it's of course more more expensive but let's say between three and ten websites i see i see and when you came on about a year and a half ago it was about 18 months ago you said you had just passed Currently serving 1166 customers i think 705 customers how many customers do you have today right so we have more than a thousand clients at the moment and and and today we the active subscription are a thousand and one hundred and sixty six wow one thousand okay so so talk to us about that growth how did you sign up 400 new customers over the past 16 months yeah um it's really a combination of activities uh inbound uh is working terrifically well of course i mean uh everything that comes from from seo and you know any initiatives that we do on on the inbound marketing is is working very well um as usual we've done uh participating at uh the next web we're partnering with the next web so we usually also get some some um you know good generation from from events so i would say inbound and events and we're starting to kind of look at uh how we can increase the advertising uh to get more clients well this is Monthly recurring revenue incredible growth right you're doing 88 000 a month a year ago now you're doing almost double that so 100 year over year growth very capital efficient you've raised way less than what your total arr is right to eight one twenty right of course yeah you would judge that uh negatively i know but uh you know for us it was like uh i don't think it's negative andy no no i don't think it's negative i only think it's negative if the ratio between arr and what you've raised is out of whack if you raised 10 million bucks and spent it all to build a million dollar a month your business that's terrible you didn't do that yeah but um also i mean uh we were growing the business quite fast so i'm quite happy about that of course we are not uh you know leveraging the capital that we raised at the moment as much as we we should because of course the hiring process it's it's strategic and it's low and that's kind of so you still have like 700 grand 800 000 in the bank something like that something like that yeah yeah what is your team size today how many people full time so so we have um basically uh around 20 uh people uh 13 are kind of the the the the core employees and then we have other uh seven eight uh freelancer uh that they work with us full time what do they do um so we we basically have uh you know seven in tech and then uh you know we have six that are you know looking at uh client success uh meaning that you know kind of the assistant client and help them grow and you know do some some some activities on top of the license and then and then we have of course uh you know five sales should be should be seven already but we still have five and then we have a couple uh doing marketing okay so you have more well that's your whole team then you just gave me the breakdown 20 team yeah sorry the seven to eight freelancers what do they do uh i mean pretty much the you know distributed among these uh these different functions i mean it's not that we are kind of consolidating it depends on on also you know we're globally um based and uh you know the team is remote uh uh in most cases so yeah depending on the skills yep very interesting okay so good that's that's five five new higher since the last time we chatted which is great yeah let me ask you a question um where are you based right now uh now i'm on the beach but uh so i'm but i'm usually in rome i'm usually in rome so let me ask you a question um you guys were doing when you raised a hundred thousand recently about 1.5 you know 1.6 million run run rate revenue um why didn't you you know to save that fifteen percent equity that you sold why didn't you guys consider debt uh because it's uh it you know it's not it's a combination of factor i mean that uh can can we can easily get that at the moment you know if i go to a bank i can get a good deal and and banks actually are looking for us because we we bring money in the bank so but uh it's not just about uh as you know it's not just about the cash it's also about you know the network and kind of structuring things so i mean there is more than just you know the cash if if it's just cash you go to the bank you get a good deal if you're profitable you you will not spend much in any case you know the cost of money hasn't been high now it's of course rising back but hasn't been high um so i mean that is of course an option but uh i always use that in the past but uh but i think it's also about system yeah so who was that it sounds like a very strategic investor who was it uh it's it's primo venture uh they're uh quite well known uh in the italian landscape and you know kind of they they can bring us forward i think uh a longer journey well uh while we're here yeah and what's the top thing you think they can help you with uh good question um connections um structure uh because of course uh in order to scale i mean i've been bootstrapping most of my businesses so i know how how to do it but if i have to create a company that it's worth uh you know 10 or maybe hundreds million dollars you know what is the strategy there and uh you know i need an advice on that and uh and how how should i shape the structure because i'm always you know looking at uh high profitability but but i might lose you know the focus on you know what is the overall business value and uh and any doubt for that so when you say help with business structure do you mean literally your org chart or just the structure of the business how much to burn how much to invest i think it's a combination of both i mean the old chart is an important aspect for instance i would you know i i rather try to do everything myself and control everything because that's the typical founder the typical bootstrapper but then in reality that doesn't scale i mean if you have to to move from a thousand client to ten thousand clients what do you need you know yeah and uh and you need that kind of help i think you know that makes a ton of sense uh i'm asking these questions because i just i love learning from founders like you i think it's great what you've built that's that's the work that you do i mean depending on the fact that you know you know you you you don't just lend the money you know to the to the company i assume that you you know the advantage is that you can also help me grow and that's that that's what i value a lot out of uh you know i mean we're at a so i'm struggling with this a little bit at founder path um because i think we add way more value than most vcs right so like for example for you like coming on i'm not trying to like sell you right now i'm just using as an example right but you know if you work for the company yeah yeah but if we use like if we let's say we give you a million bucks in debt and so instead of 800 000 you keep 15 equity the next thing that i would do is i would sign up personally for founder path as a customer for word lift i would use it i would record myself using it i would then email it out to my list of eighty thousand sas starters and say i love word lift and you'll get signups and customers now i know that's like a very tactical direct roi driven thing but i just think that's more value than what even most vcs add right that's why it took me a while to to find the right vc because you know i want something you know someone that was on the field and we we sent up the first contract with the business with the biggest insurance in italy because of them because they have some you know more tactical approach which is not common in the vc world so i don't know yeah i'm not all these aren't when i have a debt or do i want to have less equity you know if i have control i don't know if i want to have that because personally i'm kind of against that even though i know that the business is solid enough tell me why i want to know why my it's just a mentality it's just a mentality you know um i don't want to have to deal with that i just want to you know i rather prefer to to to leave something on the table than dealing with that but it's a mentality issue it's it's a limit if you want because i mean but try and dig deeper so when you say don't deal so like when you say don't deal with debt it sounds like you've had an experience in the past that was a bad one with debt so what do you mean by deal with yeah i mean um give an example when i was running an agency uh many years ago and uh you know the company was doing well and you know we're you know doing i don't know maybe five million revenues at that point uh but we still had uh you know maybe two million bats with banks because you know they were you know money were coming in and we were getting them and payment times were kind of different from a salsa because in an agency you do consultancy you do the project maybe the client is not happy maybe we'll pay you today maybe tomorrow maybe will not and so so we you know as we were drawing we kind of had these you know kind of uh drawing and and that was kind of a bad experience for me in the past that kind of um made it made a big difference because it it's at a point i decided not to take any debts and and and to you know and and that's um yeah but it's a limited personal experience yeah yeah no i think that's really helpful to learn from i mean look i think you're gonna go build a 100 million dollar plus company so the 15 you know i think bigger than that maybe so the 15 equity sold you know it's gonna be worth more than 15 million dollars i think very quickly and so like we're always trying to get counter pass how do we just like make it easy to deal with so like no board no covenants no warrants get money overnight so i'll win you you give me 12 months andy i'll win you over i promise okay i love that i love that i like that i know that i mean in order to to make also kind of you know moving from from europe to the us will will definitely need you know some some different kind of help yeah that's the number that's a huge use case people don't know this you know we we just raised 145 million we've already deployed 60 million and of the 60 million deployed yeah sixty percent of that six zero percent is non-us yeah because i mean i see a lot of value there yeah honestly i mean i think you should uh look a lot at companies outside of the us yeah you're an exact great use case right it's like a company like you that maybe you want to expand to the u.s well take money from counterpart expand us but we'll see what happens um well i don't wanna turn this into a sales pitch but i'm just thrilled for what you've built capital efficiently it's incredible so um if people wanna check it out again guys check out wordlift.io that's the url give andy some love for being so transparent on the show and andy though in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book uh oh boy i'm i'm i'm reading uh carvanega i love him i mean i forgot how much i love him who is it uh carl vonnegut carter what's the book called uh it's uh matatorio5 it's in italian okay okay italian author number two is there a ceo you're following are studying uh ceo well enough i follow my ceo so to be honest but uh yeah who i'm looking at uh i'm looking at a lot of companies within the sectors you know i'm looking at uh you know people of course around fish can it's it's a good uh it's a good leader i think in our space because we got out of seo and so it's it's someone to to look after and also a super friendly person that uh you know i always uh like to to to to listen to to read about number three what's your favorite online tool for building word lift ah boy that's interesting um we use a lot of uh trello we use a lot of uh zapier uh we use a lot of uh of course uh we we're running all the infrastructure on azure this is not really a tool but it's it's a cloud infrastructure it's very important for for companies like us yep go no that's great yeah number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night and now i'm going down to two to six uh six and a half but usually they try to reach eight okay fair enough and uh are you still married with two kids yes yes i actually got a wedding a month ago yeah i think you told me you were married but you were you weren't actually you hadn't had the ceremony yet yeah yeah we we went through the celebration yeah ah congrats that's very exciting and did you have a birthday are you 44 now today uh my birthday is on on the 10th of march so i'm 45. oh you're 45 okay i had two birthdays yeah 45. very cool last question here something you wish you knew when you were 20 uh the life is easy you know that uh that once you set a goal and uh you have fun with uh with what you're doing you're gonna achieve that goal and you don't need all the sturmund rank and uh and you know the troubles that you go through but uh i wouldn't have my 20 years old guys andy's having fun word lift dot io playing in the seo space their big competitive advantage graphs knowledge graphs and seo optimization they have over 11 166 customers today they just broke 155 000 a month in revenue up from 87 000 a month just a year ago healthy growth 28 profit margin which is incredible they just raised from a strategic partner 800 000 bucks at a 5.5 million valuations sold 14.5 percent of the business but most that cash still in the bank today 50 20 people strong on the team again growing nicely without having to spend a bunch of capital which we love andy congrats and thanks for taking us to the top 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 buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is andrea valpini he's the ceo of word lift a visionary web entrepreneur focusing on semantic web artificial intelligence and seo the platform is a semantic platform for online content developed by working at the intersection between semantic technologies natural language processing and search engine optimization andre are you ready to take to the top totally all right so what is this sitting i mean is it sitting on top of like gpt3 or what's the underlying technology so we built our technology uh from the ground up during research projects back in the past and we technically analyze the content and build knowledge graph that's that's what we do in simple terms we also use gpt3 now for content generation but that's not the core of it okay so so explain to me can you tell me the story of a real customer using you and how they're using you yeah so um we get your site and then we analyze the content on your web pages and we build a knowledge graph much like google would do and then we help google understand your content on your website by using these knowledge graphs so it's a it's an intermediate layer of metadata that allows search engine to understand the content better so if i plug in getlatka.com to wordlift.io you'll scan the site basically give me a knowledge graph report and say nathan this is how google is probably seeing get lack of here are four things you could do to improve right but even more than that i mean we would help google understand all the different entities that you have inside get leica we're working for instance with zoom info and other you know database oriented companies that use wordlife to present their data at best to search engines interesting when did you start working with zoom info so um a few months ago i think we're just wrapping up the the case and the numbers are good how's it going are you enjoying working with them henry's been on the show many times that's why i that's that's why i'm pointing this out yeah yeah they're they have an amazing team they have an amazing team um yeah so you know you're doing a really good job he'll just try and buy you so so are you in acquisition talks with henry uh not at all not at all not yet i mean i haven't got a proposal but i can i can do the seo and get luck yes where oh there we go we love that so what would i pay you what's the average trust we're gonna pay you right so um the the the the package that uh you would probably fill in it would start at maybe a thousand or two thousand uh you know dollars per month something like that okay uh and then and then it would go up depending on the amount of data and and the revenues that we can help you generate and when did you launch the company so we started in uh 2017 uh with the commercial operation but as i said we've been working on research for many years before that okay when did the research first start um 2013 uh 2014 i started a company called red link in austria where uh we do like part of the back end of the infrastructure of word lift and then 2017 i was commercially ready to to enter into seo got it do you remember that first year how did you get your first 10 customers um so i've been in the business for many years so it wasn't it wasn't hard for me to get the first i think what it's what it was hard this is like kind of making the first subscription and getting you know the first uh what was it like a 2 000 euro a monthly recurring that's that's kind of you know was like my okay so we got it because of course um i always been doing uh consultancy and working on on different areas so at a certain point you have to decide now sas is the thing and and you're going to put your effort there though it gets very easy to maybe get you know a gig for a lot more money but then you have to kind of focus on on on building the machine that makes the money and creates the value for the end user and that's that's the game i was uh you know i started in 2017 with with your agency andrea this is a big thing the most successful stats going to start as agencies how large what what year did your agency do the most revenue and how much revenue did it do um so my my my biggest experience in that field i got to 5.4 million uh euro uh but uh there was a different agency than i sold that and then i started uh basically preparing for world lift which was uh back in 2012 when did you sell that first agency uh when when the year yeah it was it was 2011 2011. interesting so you learned i mean i love this right you learn what your customers need you go into sas but it's harder to get started in sas versus agency because you have to build recurring revenue in 2017 how much did you grow your mrr to sorry how much did you grow your mrr to in 2017 your first year uh first year i think uh we we broke even uh after one year now brook even means that we were paying our salaries and and the team at that point was maybe three people so um and how long was it to take you to break even uh one year and a half one one and a half okay so in 2018 you had three yeah 2018 i was i was i was profitable and uh and i've been profitable since then that's great okay so and do you remember what revenue was in 2018 uh 2018 we were making what uh maybe maybe less than 200 000 euro per year yeah okay interesting so that's less than call like a fifteen thousand dollar a month run rate up from two grand a month in 2017 your your first uh your first year in business but good growth two grand to 15 grand a month is nice growth yeah yeah i mean we had a three x uh in the beginning uh i think now we are getting into between 30 and 40 that's a more sustainable growth rate uh we we we can expand a lot there is a lot of need of you know improving seo with automation what can i ask what mrr is today uh Monthly recurring revenue we are around uh 80 80 90k per month well hey we congratulate that means you just broke the million dollar run rate so congratulations yeah we we did we've done that uh last year so 2020 we broke a million dollar we were actually 906 in europe so we're below a million in europe but yeah we broke the one million dollars yes well king i love that congratulations especially i believe Bootstrapped because you're bootstrapped correct yeah totally love that okay so last month if you did call it 85 000 in revenue how much went to the bottom Profits line are you profitable yeah we are profitable um and um yeah of course we are now investing on growth but we are keeping an lt balance so pretty much we always keep like 30 40 percent of that wow so you took about 20 000 and your bank went up by 20 grand last month basically yeah that's incredible now how do you talk about your team how many people are on it so we have now uh 15 people uh one five and uh six are attack and uh i kind of include myself into the tech but uh maybe i shouldn't so yeah between five and six uh so and then and then we have uh like three three sales and and two marketing or 3.5 sales and two marketing but it's gonna grow i mean we're gonna just expand now the the the marketing and the sales team because currently we acquire clients with uh inbound which means that if i take the marketing cost and i kind of put the Customer acquisition cost into into the you know the numbers we spend 180 euro per acquisition of a client and what's the client going to pay per month on average so so the the the lifetime value is between 1 200 and 1 400 euro um so the ratio there it's very good and then i realized that maybe we should start selling but uh what's the payday period on the 200 year or the 150 euros sorry the payback period on 150 euros um so usually the lifetime value is is 29 months for for a client um but then we have these different cohorts because we have the you know the self-serving that gets the store uh and buys maybe the starter for uh for a few bucks per month but then you know the the money are are driven uh by the the vip and the enterprise so the larger clients so we do have these uh you know 80 20 split between enterprise and uh and self-serving and how many customers today um so we have a served uh 2070 Currently serving 805 customers clients last year uh and and we have roughly 700 active subscription because like last month yeah yeah because i mean a client would would probably buy more than one in our case and retention is very good after of course a period of time i mean we lose a lot in the first month and then and then of course you know it goes kind of flat down i think we we have an annual churn of uh between five and uh and six percent monthly annual annual and that's revenue or logo term that's that's the the revenue wow six percent of revenue trend that's super low do you have expansion revenue that makes up for the six percent loss uh yeah we do now we're we're trying to to to understand you know between scaling up because we have these very large clients that kind of demand attention and we can scale up in terms of covering more websites or more data sets and then you know on the other side we want to balance and get new clients on board so that's kind of the tricky balance i also love to make the product more than i love to make the business run but i'm trying to fix that i promise i will you've made some bets on the pricing page in terms of what triggers will allow you to have upsell revenue you upsell currently based off domains by web editors and by schema types those are the quantifiable things that people you currently show which one is most powerful for driving expansion revenue i think the the entity types are very powerful because depending on the type of content that you're serving i can optimize for that type of content but if you are a large organization then my skill will be on the number of urls if you have like you know one of our clients it's all clay and then you know the more urls that we have to serve the the higher of course the the retainer will go interesting very interesting okay love the site this makes a lot of sense to me um is talking about quota do your sales people have a quota uh we do have uh a two sales uh that have a quota uh and uh one is focus on the enterprise maybe you know them gennaro kofano for wic mba is a big fan of your work and uh and it's it's it's been uh you know creating the the commercial team from scratch basically so yes what was his what was his name uh gennaro qualfano uh four week mba he has he has a a a website and a podcast how did you convince him to join the team he he was coming back from the u.s and uh and he was very strong at growth hacking but he didn't understand the web much and i taught him about the web and and about seo and so we have a strong uh partnership there and uh did you have to film equity uh i tried but i didn't succeed because he wants money like you he thinks that you know he wants money and no promises uh i think now equity are becoming money so maybe maybe i'll try it again what do you mean by that equities becoming money i think the company is getting more value as we grow we get more interest uh from from people around the industry we have a few fortune 500 companies that are using were lifter ready so i think there is uh there is a potential that we can grow this big do you own 100 sorry do you own 100 of the business uh well most of it i mean we have uh like um the cap table now is going to be uh kind of revised and simplified but yes me and my partner david riccitelli on the most of the company yes and most is more than 95 uh no it's less i mean uh we are in the range of uh um 80 okay where's the rest of the equity go to employees and stuff uh yeah i mean it's uh it's uh it's internal yep that's great now do you allow your employees since you're bootstrapped and probably participate in the profits at all do you give out dividends to them or anything uh we haven't done that yet uh but i'm thinking about uh creating like incentivation plans we do have like a five percent kickback if you bring me clients stuff like that very basic but we should do more i think that uh there is a lot of potential in building a team together we have kind of a distributed team so i'm kind of struggling to you know bring everyone together and and find a good way to to to motivate people and grow because that's essential how many so how many of the 15 are our remote employees uh i would say that we are 50 50 split got it yeah i i got to tell you i just found this tool called remote.com and they make it so easy to manage remote employees like i don't want to deal with freaking paperwork in indonesia or china or australia but you click a button remote enables you to handle it do you use any tools like that to manage your remote teams um so we we do have a lot of tools for uh kind of feeling that we are all in the same space you know slack trello probably the one that we use the most uh we use every hour for tracking times and tasks which allow us to optimize you know that the work of everyone uh so every hour probably is the one that we would use the most but uh you know i think it's more about the spirit of the company kind of you know for us we used to do like two gatherings per year where everyone gets in rome or somewhere else and we get together i think these are essential we kind of miss that because of the pandemic but uh yeah we have to get back there and and definitely definitely an incentivation plan is needed guys remote.com asks they could sponsor the show and if you listen or you come on like android you know i'm a tough cookie when it comes to negotiations so if a sponsor doesn't give me some special deal they never get mentioned if they give me a special deal i brag about them to everyone so i'm going to brag very quickly if you guys want to onboard your first remote employee at like a 50 discount remote.com has given that to us you can check it out at nathanwhack.com forward slash remote if you're trying to build a great bootstrap team like andrea totally bootstrapped past million revenue and profitable checkoutremote.com andrea what would you buy the company at today sorry what would you value your company at today uh around five walk me through that wi-fi five million euro yeah why is that why five i mean we have a a kind of an aggressive business plan for the next uh three years um i think we we we have all the elements to to to to grow at the moment um we just have to do more marketing more sales and and get the product a lot more simpler for a large user base would you consider raising capital or you really want to stay bootstrapped i think i think we we're evaluating also the option of raising capital i think it's a good time i'm not scared about it i think we have good financial money in the bank so i don't need that i can use it in order to bring the company to the next phase how much money come well look it's a different mentality right the bootstrap mentality is just different the second you take your first dollar of vc you have a board you have to manage you have reporting you have to do monthly you know it's just a different world but if you did raise how much would you try and target how much did you raise uh if i would raise yeah how much do you think you would try and raise i think i think i would i would try to keep you know an healthy balance so probably i would give you know less than 20 of the equities and uh yeah that that would be that would be a good a good match for me but if you find me someone that wants to buy at seven million then i'm ready yeah yeah well do you need all the cash today like could you take a quarter million today and then a quarter million in five months and a quarter million five months after that or do you want the full like whatever a million or two million investment today well we don't need it today because as i say we're cash positive and in any case in order to spend you need to find the right resources you need to you know build the team i don't need you know the cash immediately i need someone that kind of helps me drive the company to the next phase because there is a lot to do yeah well look we we've just raised a very large fund at founder path specifically for this but we don't take equity what we do is we just turn your mr to upfront cash and so if you're at 90 grand a month in revenue i mean we could probably get you 400 500 brands today and you keep your equity you grow and then you go raise an even higher evaluation in the future right that's pretty fascinating i i i look at that um there is also this uh secure token offering that i was looking at because that's another way problem is that you know what i'm expecting from kind of bringing some investor in is also the guidance to kind of make the next steps it's not just about the liquidity because i mean liquidity now it's very cheap to get because yeah because of the existing economical situation it's not hard to find cash well i would be very excited to download everything i've learned from interviewing three thousand sas founders to you try and help you grow get in with your four-week nba guy help them steal the enterprise side of things that could be i think way more than cash free but we'll take it offline we'll chat more about it i want to learn more about this product because this is interesting we're spending a lot of money and time on seo right now so this is interesting um i want to put get lacka through word lift and see what you guys spit out i hope you see a bunch of opportunities yeah i do i do i mean one thing that that world does in the seo sector which i'm sure you're familiar with is that seo has been primarily driven by analysis so understanding you know what you need to do now what we try to do is is what i call that gentive seo so we want to do it for you without you having to understand it so that's kind of what we try to do all right on that note andrea let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um the diamond cutter it kind of i don't know if you read it but it's a good mix between buddhism and business development number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh man i follow a lot of ceos but uh jack dorsey probably won but i also like yoast a lot i mean it's uh we i admire the way in which he created a space in wordpress number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business i use a lot personally i use a lot uh zapier but i think company wise we are in love with trello number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i think average this week is 7.43 minutes that's great you you must track that i use what do you use uh uh garmin very good and what's your situation under a married single kids uh i'm married uh with two kids uh super happy uh father so yeah i love that how old are you i'm 43 and uh uh the the oldest daughter is is six and and the other one is four love that wow what a special time for you last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 um focus more on things that that can you know bring you significant growth rather than kind of messing up with things that you love which will you know you will spend a lot of years before getting too bad at the same time i really have no regrets so i don't know what to say to my 20. and hey i meant to ask you what's growth if you're doing spot 80 to 90 000 a month today what were you doing exactly a year ago a year ago we were probably within 50 60 something like that i mean we yeah that's that's pretty much yeah guys there we have it word lift dot io doing seo work for you so you don't have to understand it it's one click they get it done growing very fast two grand a month in mr back in 2017 they've now scaled to over a million dollar run rate they did more than eighty five thousand dollars in revenue last month and they profit a big chunk of that 20 grand goes to the bottom line they've done this with 705 customers a team size of 15 they're bootstrapped right now they would potentially raise sell less than 20 of the business that maybe around a five or six million dollar valuation we'll see what andrea decides andrea thanks for taking the top awesome 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 buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lanka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we gotta push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya