How YouMail CEO Alex Quilici grew YouMail to $9.4M revenue and 65K customers in 2019.

what is going on youtube you know we are just two weeks away from founder 500 in austin texas on september 1st and 2nd there's over 500 b2b sas founders all coming together you don't want to miss it ticket prices increase every three days i have it on automatic accelerator every three days and we're almost sold out you can see there's about nine left when you go to the event bright link about nine left and it's updating real time so check it out today it's founderpath.com and then in the upper left you can hover over our product drop down and click the event stream i'll also put in the description here of the youtube video i'd love to see you there hey folks my guest today is alex cuilichi he's the ceo of umail before that he was co he co-founded was the ceo of quack.com which brought a consumer voice portal service that was essentially siri over a 1-800 number back before there were even smartphones aol acquired quack for 200 million in august 2000 and just 18 months after it was found the impressive short life cycle there and at aol he was president of vice president of voice services where i helped drive the acquisition the division to multiple product launches and over a million paying subscribers and over 50 million bucks in annual revenue today's building you mail which helps you helps you stop spam calls and messages alex you're ready to take it to the top i am let's go all right no i love this when i had you back on in early 2019 you had an rpoo you remember what you told me at an arpu about 12 bucks a month on average you were b2c only what has changed so the biggest thing is umail wants to stop spam calls either before they get to the consumer's handset or even better when they're actually made so we've created products that enable carriers to monitor their network and detect when they're originating these bad guy calls and we've created tools that allow enterprises to shut down imposter scams you know those calls you get to pretend to be married or pretend to be your bank so when you so so carrier would be att so you help at t monitor their networks to prevent these like bad guy calls or these fake marriott hotel fake social security calls actually it's not at t t-mobile and verizon and the carriers that are interesting here because they're not really responsible for making the calls it turns out most people don't know there's almost 3 000 wholesale carriers in the us and those carriers can provide things like hospital you know telephony they can provide international telephony they provide call center telephony they provide all these different ways to make phone calls well the bad guys just abused many of those carriers and sometimes they don't even know it and so we try to name them can you ever win those what's that can you name one or two of those uh sure there's like airstream is an example of a wholesale carrier that provides services for enterprises but you know bad guys can use their network there's there's tons of them the way to find the full list is go to the fcc they have something called a form uh 499 that you have to file if you're a carrier there's the list interesting okay so let's just get the backstory though so in 2019 what were consumers paying you for so they were paying us for essentially robocall blocking and privacy protection as well as second phone lines that were robocall free and had a number of business uh phone features that was the consumer model now are my these notes could be wrong so feel free to correct me but my notes say that you had about 12 a month per customer you had about 65 000 customers right yeah that's that's spot on okay so multiply there i mean you were doing like almost a 10 million run rate b2c back then right uh pretty close that's that's right so i mean i would say that's a pretty successful b2c company why pivot at all what did you realize well we realized that the carriers and the enterprises needed help they're willing to pay up for that help if you're an enterprise and someone's using your name in making tons of imposter phone calls to rip people off that not only gives you customer support costs but it causes brand damage and you may even have to reimburse those those people as a form of goodwill so there's tremendous damage there that they're willing to pay a portion of to stop the problem and enterprises are not twelve dollars they're not 120 dollars a month they're substantially larger when you can find and get these contracts successfully carriers are the same way that's really interesting and just to build up the baxter before we focus throughout the interview on the enterprise motion today what year do you remember what year you passed i know you launched in 2007 but what year did you pass a million in number revenue uh that was a while ago that was probably 2009 actually oh wow okay so you went from zero to a million into about two years yep that's correct in fact we did it in about 11 months because we were completely free service we're running out of money we needed a business model and we quickly pivoted found a subscription and got to a million 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 going to 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 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 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 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 founder path 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 that's amazing um you bootstrapped or have you raised so it was an interesting company i actually came in not as the founder but as an early investor they'd raised a couple million in angel money before i even got there i came in as a board member and helped them raise vc funding and then i became the ceo so we're a company that has vc funding and then we also did a crowd source ground in 2015 which was really transformative for us how the hell do you keep a cap table clean with all this going on uh well you don't at first but we keep it as clean as we can and you know one of the things is even in the crowdfunding round we didn't go after the thousand dollar investor went after the 50 000 plus investor so that doesn't add too many new people to the pool you know even if you raise a few million dollars i i see okay so i guess maybe just let's get the most up-to-date data so what was the last round when did you raise it was it your series b or c or what so the last round was a series b and it was 2015. so since then we've been acting like a bootstrap company we try to keep you know uh break even as roughly where we run sometimes we'll lose a little money as a project to help spur growth but we're really bad we've been growing all that growth as a break-even company well that's okay so last round just because it was was 15 5 million or 15 million it was 5 million in 2015 yeah which is a maybe a big round for 2015 uh and maybe you know today markets are now correcting but okay so 5 million series b and i guess what including the five million what's the total you raised today including crowdfunding so we've raised a little over 15 million dollars in our history but what's important to know is you mail with several different companies...