How WordLift CEO Andrea Volpini grew WordLift 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...