How Yanomo CEO Joost Schouten grew Yanomo to $77.6K revenue and 760 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is jost shelton he's a serial entrepreneur with a passion to make companies work for us rather than us working for companies he co-founded a younomo a nester.io slashme.com and speaks on the topics of purpose-driven organizations and self-organization all right just you ready to take us to the top and let's go for it okay what does yanomo do and how do you guys make money uh primarily we provide end-to-end insight into human resource costs for organizations and we do that by automated time tracking so that you can actually automatically track your time of your human resources uh through your google and outlook calendars and we sell that as a sales b2b sas solution okay and so what's the average customer pay per month for this about seven eight bucks okay per per user by the way okay and what's the typical team size signing up how many users uh so we really have a segment here so we have a bunch of users that are just single users up to 10 users it's not really our focus that's all automated uh sign-on and automated conversion we're really trying to focus on companies between 10 and 200 users okay um so is it fair to s so is it fair to say the average team size signing it might be 10 uh it would be a bit probably around 20. somewhere around that size okay so a new brand joining is going to pay maybe 160 bucks a month on average something like that yep yeah um great 20 seats very good put this on a timeline for me when did you launch well we actually officially incorporated in 2012 but we only kind of got started uh in 2014. um and then we took it from there pretty much what'd you do between those two years 2012 2014 uh you know hobby away get started try to figure out what you need to do um and then when we learn we actually had a bit of a pivot like we didn't really start out uh focusing on on time tracking uh that really turned out to be where we should be at uh initially we focused more on hey how can we help organizations uh share their uh progress inside of the work that they're doing with everybody throughout organizations so that people at the workflow actually can take action rather than management alone that's great turns out it turns out pushing that through the operation is actually quite hard so 2014 is kind of year one in the market over the past four or five years how many customers have you scaled to uh so about a thousand fifteen hundred users so about 100 120 companies um and there there's a big there's a there's an interesting shift here because we actually grew quite nicely from 14 15 to 16 and the 16 uh we stalled and that had a lot to do with with me actually as a co-founder being pretty close to the burnout and and having to uh scale down my my focus time uh right now hold on just to be clear so today you have 1500 seats or or 1500 companies seats okay got it so 120 companies paying well actually i mean i guess we can just do seats right so 1 500 seats at that eight dollar price point i mean we can kind of back into your monthly recurring revenue of 12 grand yep uh well actually and we're not not necessarily like that was kind of at the peak and we actually scaled down a little bit because we we really stopped all all our uh our growth and that showed some really exciting metrics obviously it's a bit challenging so what are you at today in terms of mrr uh i'm here i've got an ar figure about 73k okay ar of 73k that's great now tell me why you scaled down it sounds like you something happened and you said oh my gosh i'm about to burn out yep well that's that's exactly it so i really you know i took my focus time down and we really skilled down all the costs we we we stopped uh marketing and sales for a while um the exciting thing that we showed from that is that our churn is actually relatively low for the the marketplace what was it uh we're 99 logo for uh for annual okay logo chart annually that's pretty good yeah so so so we're quite satisfied with that and right now uh we're climbing out of that again um and we've been quite consistent so we only lost a few customers and we still had some new customers coming in through word of mouth um but i guess it's also like looking at a lot of the success stories it's quite nice i hesitated for a little bit to actually come on to your show thinking okay is that the story that you want to tell but actually of course they're the best they're the best stories yeah so that's a reality right no no this is this is these are way more fun for me than having the ceo of cvent on and talking about working how they're about to hit a billion dollars in arr fair enough okay so nine percent low return annually doing about six grand a month today that 73 grand in ar where were you exactly a year ago were you more than that uh we were a little bit higher so we were uh but maybe you know 10 or 15 percent higher so it's it's actually not uh reduced uh significantly which get me quite excited now that we're really starting to look okay what's what's next where are we going did you bootstrap or raise capital fully bootstrapped fully bootstrap and what's the team size today uh we've got five people and obviously we're not paying them full time because you can't do that on that sort of revenue which shows another flexibility we can really uh we've managed to scale down and retain the team and retain the talent uh which i'm also bypassing everyone remote uh yes okay well and actually i'll spend half of the year here currently in new zealand and half of the year in amsterdam so we've got our development here in new zealand uh marketing and sales is in in amsterdam that's great okay so five people and you've been able to keep them through all these kind of ups and downs did you give them all equity uh we actually offered but there's actually just two of us that have equity the rest is that just pay us by the hour and we're happy with that that's great i guess they're just quite excited about what we're doing and excited about who we are and are you uh burning capital right now or your flat break even no we're actually we're actually in the in the black black figure so so we're breaking even um which is uh which i'm quite pleased about it does mean there are some other gigs on the side you know like that's bootstrapping reality but looking at these figures i think it is quite an interesting moment to look hey what's what's next for us are we gonna are we gonna raise capital are we gonna look for that we we've tried that in the past it turns out that the dutch uh capital raising market was actually a bit tricky because there weren't too many players that understood b2b sas and the ones that did were looking for half a million ar which wasn't where we were and and tell me more about um how you're getting new customers so to get a new eight dollar per month seat what's your fully weighted cac so so again that's that's that's really uh segmented in two series so we're looking at uh under teams 10 seats uh that should be fully automated we shouldn't put any effort in that and then we're looking at maybe 5200 bucks um if it's uh over the ten seats we're looking at uh five hundred to a thousand because over uh ten seats our lifetime value is also coming close to about six uh six k so no matter what size team you sign up your payback period is about two months yeah something like that yeah very good okay very good so walk me through i want to go back quickly here the breaking point for you because it happens to a lot of entrepreneurs it sounds like something happened there was an event maybe there was a big buildup to it but what what what was the day the moment where you said something has to change uh well it's a couple of things that come together right so so um first of all we started a partnership with a sales partner that didn't really work out you know so it's a bit of a downer when you really got a lot of energy to go for something and it doesn't work out um and we lost about two or three of our bigger biggest clients in a matter of a couple of months and interestingly enough that had nothing to do with our product but all of these three big clients got acquired by a bigger enterprise acquisition that brought their own systems so so that was a bit a bit of a downer i was working 60 hour weeks and i realized that wasn't quite sustainable so i just really scaled everything down took some time to recover and actually go started another company as well that i'm quite passionate about um and now on the other end of it really excited actually to look at hey what where can we take genoma from here and what do you think the answer is um you know i'm actually i'm actually not fully sure yet uh it kind of depends i i'm leaning towards looking for investment you know it's been really interesting bootstrapping i learned shitloads but it's also time to either scale it up or to say hey this is just a cool side gig um and scaling it up is definitely so very interesting to me still very good all right uh yo so let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh i would say reinventing organizations by frederick la lu reinventing what reinventing organizations by fred like yeah good book number two is there a ceo you're following are studying um...