How Flipsnack Reached $15M Revenue and 28,000 Paying Customers in 2025 (Interview with Founder Gabriel Ciordas)

Opening metrics snapshot

Nathan Latka

00:00How many customers are paying you today?

Gabriel Ciordas

00:01>> Right now we have over 28,000 paying customers. Today, I'm quite proud to say that probably 2025 will be ending at 15,000,000.

Nathan Latka

00:10So you're at 15,000,000 of revenue today. How many folks are full time on the team?

Gabriel Ciordas

00:14>> Now I think it's 94.

Nathan Latka

00:15How much of the business do you still own?

Gabriel Ciordas

00:17>> Right now, 100%.

Nathan Latka

00:18What's the largest customer pay you per year on a dollar basis?

Gabriel Ciordas

00:21>> If I'm not mistaken, right now, it's getting closer to 100 k.

Guest introduction and background

Nathan Latka

00:25Someone came to you today and offered you a 10x multiple, so 150,000,000 all cash upfront. Do you take the deal? Hey, folks. My guest today is Gabriel Sjordas. He's a serial entrepreneur passionate about building companies that aim to innovate the tech industry and make customers'lives better by helping them achieve remarkable results. This is one you guys are gonna love because he doesn't do a lot of interviews, but he is a killer. He has built some

00:46incredible companies. Gabriel, you ready to take us to the top?

Gabriel Ciordas

00:48>> Nah. For sure. Thank you for for your invite.

Flipsnack product overview

Nathan Latka

00:50Alright. Well, I know that we're gonna focus obviously today on your company, flipsnack.com, but you are a serial entrepreneur. You're based in Romania, I believe. Correct?

Gabriel Ciordas

00:58>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

00:59And how long have you been building companies?

Gabriel Ciordas

01:01>> 1999.

Nathan Latka

01:02That's wild. Okay. '99. So I was I was 10 years old at that point. Alright. Tell us about Flipsnack first. For folks that are not familiar with the product, I'm gonna share my screen here. Why should customers use you?

Gabriel Ciordas

01:13>> So, basically, Flipsnack is a a tool that brings sexiness to your presentation materials. By presentation materials, I mean all the materials that are product catalogs, real estate brochures, employee benefits, internal communications, training materials, hotel brochures. So all these things that are communicating with somebody and communicating about your company, Flipsnack allows and helps you to make more interesting. And on top of everything else, gives you a lot of metrics about who saw what and when. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

02:02Which is right here, what you're seeing here, in in addition to password protection, things like that. I will say, guys, I I, one of the big requests I got when we're building GitLab is we shipped the physical magazine. But a lot of people weren't home. They were traveling. They didn't want me to ship them a physical magazine. So I said, oh, I gotta come with a digital thing, but I didn't wanna store PDFs, and it was

02:21a pain in the butt. So I actually use I'm a customer of Flipsnack. Right? We send out now and people email me. I just send them this link, and this is Flipsnack generated, and you can see it's beautiful. People clicking through. And what's great about this is they can also search. So if they're curious, hey. Am I mentioned in the magazine? You can search, and it'll show you every time your company name is searched. So not

02:40only does Flipsnack just take the thing and put it in PDF format and great interface, it also adds search to it and a bunch of other things. What other things, Gabriel, do you add to this digital experience that maybe you don't get on other platforms?

Gabriel Ciordas

02:52>> I I would say metrics is probably the most important thing. I mean, you know, we all send out we all send out materials, but we don't really know what's happening with them. Not only that, but we don't really know which parts are interesting and which are not. So I would say the fact that we'll give you all the metrics about what your visitors did, how long they spent on certain pages and so forth is probably one

03:20>> of the most important features I would like to mention. Then obviously we have brand control. This is a problem that most of the brands have. Then obviously we have the real time updates. So oftentimes we send some materials and we realize that we made a mistake here and there. With Flipsnack, you can fix that in the link. You don't have to send anything else. They click the next time they click on the link, it's basically the

03:54>> new version up. It's very easy to share things, distribute things, we'll issue QR codes and they just click on it and they go straight to the materials. And also probably security. Security and privacy. If you want to send some materials that you want to make sure that are only seen by the person designed to see them, this link will only open to certain emails. And from the security standpoint, we have been doing tremendous efforts to make

Customer segments and pricing

Gabriel Ciordas

04:29>> sure that all your materials and everything that you have there is super secure. You know, we've been on the market since 2011.

Nathan Latka

04:37So, Gabe, before we go back to your before we go back to your launch story, just to touch on this. So now that we have a good understanding of the product suite, what's your what's the average customer paying you per month? Is this sort of a PLG motion? You know, a lot of people paying $10 a month, or is it more enterprise? You know, a couple people paying $5 a month?

Gabriel Ciordas

04:52>> So, basically, we we have both. So, you know, we have the self serve where we have several pricings adjusted to a lower level. Then obviously we have the enterprise, which is custom pricing. It's tailor fitted for every need. We have a huge wide range of customers from the biggest brands of Fortune five hundred to, you know, smaller brands, but the the needs are quite different. So we try to, custom fit everything.

Nathan Latka

05:28Don't name the customer, obviously. But what's the largest customer pay you per year on a dollar basis?

Gabriel Ciordas

05:34>> If I'm not mistaken, right now, it's, getting closer to a 100 k.

Nathan Latka

05:39And what do they get for that? Help us to understand. Is it just like thousands of PDFs? Is it based off number of pages or what?

Gabriel Ciordas

05:43>> So, basically, the product can be used by several parts of the business. You can have your marketing department, your sales department, your HR,

05:59>> warehousing and so forth. So basically this customer of ours uses in a very wide array of

06:09>> use of, how do you call it? I'm sorry. Use cases. Use cases, Yes. So it's high volumes on several on on several levels, on several departments.

Nathan Latka

06:23And so now take us back to the story. So you launched the business in 2017. Did you raise a bunch of capital or were you were you actually. Oh, 2011. Okay.

Founding story and bootstrapped growth

Gabriel Ciordas

06:32>> 2011. No. We did not we did not raise capital back in the days. We started as we started Bootstrapped, and we we worked our way up.

06:43>> And lately we have been seeking some funding to accelerate our growth. We had a good, very good period in the pandemics where people were spending a lot more time in front of the computer, But then, you know, we had a slowdown. And meanwhile, we have moved towards the enterprise world, which is a very, I would say complicated and sophisticated world from several aspects. One of them being the the the time it takes from the initial contact

07:16>> to signing a a deal or contract.

Nathan Latka

07:18Fill on the gap here from 2011 to today. So what year did you break your first million of revenue? Do you remember?

Gabriel Ciordas

07:24>> I don't, but that's a good question. I I will definitely look into that. But it wasn't too long ago. We were we were we, you know, we started off with a small team, and then we started to add more complexity to the product. And it was, you know, it was a process that an organic growth process.

07:46>> And, you know, we learned a lot and we like to believe that everything that we have learned from customer experience and customer needs, we have put in the product. So today, I'm quite proud to say that we're very close to meeting most of our customers'needs, and we're very close to solving most of our customers'problems.

Nathan Latka

08:09And Gabriel, with that customer focus, how many customers are paying you today?

Paying customer count and freemium history

Gabriel Ciordas

08:13>> So right now we have over 28,000 paying customers.

08:19>> We will reintroduce the freemium version. We took it out at some point in time, and we now realize that we didn't do a very good job on that, but we all make mistakes. But we're we're used by millions of of people.

Nathan Latka

08:34Okay. So 28,000 paying you hit going into 2011, 2020 are you comfortable sharing revenue today in 2025?

Gabriel Ciordas

08:42>> So probably 2025 will be ending at 15,000,000.

Nathan Latka

08:46Okay. And where were you at? Where'd you finish last year?

Gabriel Ciordas

08:48>> Probably 12.

Nathan Latka

08:50Are you happy with that growth rate?

2024 and 2025 revenue figures

Gabriel Ciordas

08:52>> You know, entrepreneurs are never happy. But, you know, we need to understand that, you know, markets are shifting, needs are shifting, new players are coming to the market. I think we can do better, but now that we're more focused on the enterprise and we are now learning how to deal with enterprise companies, I think the revenue for 2026 will look completely different in a good way. I think we will have an impressive growth. The way the

09:31>> team is working together right now and focus, I I think, will take us into probably the best year of of Flipsnack. So 2026 should be and will be the best year of Flipsnack.

Team size and Romania headquarters

Nathan Latka

09:45So you're at 15,000,000 of revenue today. How many folks are full time on the team?

Gabriel Ciordas

09:49>> Right now, I think it's 94 people. K. And, you know, I'm I'm very happy and proud to say that these are people I mean, most of them are people that are with the company for ten years plus.

Nathan Latka

10:02And are they based in Romania mainly, or what's the split?

Gabriel Ciordas

10:05>> Yes. Most of the most of

Nathan Latka

10:07the

Gabriel Ciordas

10:08>> people is in Oradia in in Romania, my hometown. And now we are going to as part of our growth and expansion efforts, we're going to open some sales offices, probably Japan, Korea, Portugal and Switzerland.

Nathan Latka

10:29How many folks in the 94 today are sales reps?

Gabriel Ciordas

10:32>> Approximately six.

Nathan Latka

10:33Okay.

Gabriel Ciordas

10:34>> Approximately six people are doing sales, but we need to do a lot better on on that side.

Nathan Latka

10:40Well, how do you structure? Because you're in a very tricky spot. 28,000 paying customers at 15,000,000 of ARR means the average customer is paying $535 per year, but the variant is huge here. You have some customers paying $16 per month, and you told us your largest customer is $200,000 per year. You can't put a sales rep on a $100 per month account, but you absolutely need a sales rep on a $200,000 per year account. How are

11:03you solving this?

Gabriel Ciordas

11:04>> Well, obviously, you know, none of our sales initiatives are are aimed towards the self serve people. So, you know, self-service, just you come to the site, you like it, you pay your subscription, you use it and and so forth. Obviously with the limitations given by your subscription.

11:25>> Our sales efforts are towards enterprise companies that have special needs. And we will also be able to offer special services for those special needs. But we all know that special services come with a higher price tag. So our our salespeople's focus is enterprise.

Nathan Latka

11:49Gabriel, it looks like one of your biggest growth strategies, maybe early on especially, was SEO. I mean, you are a really, really high domain rating here at 91. That's generating almost 168,000 organic hits to your website per month. I mean, this is really hard to do. Was this intentional? Was it accident? Tell me about your SEO strategy.

Gabriel Ciordas

12:08>> So I would say consistency. You know, we're again, we're a company that was established in 2011. It's been a while. We have invested a lot in SEO. Obviously nowadays, the things are changing with the SEO due to the AI that we have out there. But we were constantly growing our SEO efforts and we also tried to make sure that everything that we say is legitimate. So it's a whole array of efforts that you're doing, but at

SEO strategy and domain authority

Gabriel Ciordas

12:48>> the end of the day, the fact that your consistency is there, your honesty is there, you're a legit business, that basically that basically helped a lot.

Nathan Latka

13:02It looks like based off my sort of quick forensic analysis on your SEO background here, the most successful, like, tactical SEO thing you've done are templates because they're driving 60,000 clicks to your website free per month right now. If somebody else was competing with you paying $5 a click, right, that's that's $3,000,000 extra they're having to spend to get that same traffic. You also have templates driving 15,000 clicks a month. Were both those things intentional? And

13:27what does the management of both those SEO programmatic SEO playbooks look like on a weekly or monthly basis?

Template library as SEO engine

Gabriel Ciordas

13:32>> So we do have a team that is is handling our templates because at the end of the day, templates are part of our solution. Oftentimes we wanna solve problems fast.

13:51>> But we're not creative. Creativity is not like a cup of coffee. You just push a button and then all of a sudden you're creative. So our templates help a lot. And I think that our customers are looking at this segment of our business, and they it's very, very useful. And we're

Nathan Latka

14:12How many people on your team are focused on the SEO just the SEO playbook

Gabriel Ciordas

14:16>> Not a lot. I think three people right now. Okay. It's it's not that big, but they're not doing exclusively SEO, but they they have extensive, you know, know how about, you know, what to do in order to become SEO friendly, I would say.

Nathan Latka

14:33Interesting. Yeah. So temp this is it. I mean, is this is your free traffic generator here, this page.

Gabriel Ciordas

14:38>> Yes. Yep.

Nathan Latka

14:39Interesting. And are you generating these using AI, or is it a human creating every one of these templates?

Gabriel Ciordas

14:44>> It's humans creating it. But so what we do, we we do two things with AI for now. Number one is accessibility. So if you if you have, if your vision is impaired, our accessibility tool will be able, that's, that's powered by AI, will be able to help you, understand the feel of the content. And I think my colleagues did a great job with the accessibility tool. It might not sound that important, but at the end of

15:24>> the day, I think it's our responsibility to make sure that everybody has access or everybody is able to understand the messages that we're trying to send with our materials. So accessibility is is one of the things and now we're getting ready to launch a tool that will allow you to better find your way around our features with AI. So basically, you'll tell them, okay, I wanna do this and then our AI will take you to the

AI features inside the product

Gabriel Ciordas

15:57>> area that you need to to work with to do certain things on on on your on your presentations.

Nathan Latka

16:07Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So AI in the app tell people click around faster, get what they need quicker. You grew with the SEO playbook. Any other growth tactics you use to break 15,000,000 of revenue, like affiliates or resellers or anything else, paid marketing?

Gabriel Ciordas

16:21>> We just started affiliates. And also we are now starting with influencers, obviously in the areas that are most interesting for us, like again, hotels, real estate, training materials, employee benefits. So, we're trying to find influencers that are in that area so that they can tell their audience about us and how fast and how well we solve their problems.

Nathan Latka

16:57And are you spending money on paid advertising per month right now? If so, We about how

Affiliates, influencers, and paid advertising

Gabriel Ciordas

17:01>> do spend I think we're spending around 120, 140 k a month.

Nathan Latka

17:09And and is it on Google or which platform?

Gabriel Ciordas

17:12>> I think there are several platforms, but probably the most the most significant one is is Google.

Nathan Latka

17:19But are we using an agency for that or it's in house?

Gabriel Ciordas

17:22>> No, it's in house. Basically we do it on our own. We're trying to see if balancing those budgets towards influencers might make a difference,

17:34>> But, you know, we're eager to see that. And also, you know, working with people in different industries would probably be able to help our growth.

Nathan Latka

17:47Mhmm. Interesting. And and just to confirm here too, you mentioned you were bootstrapped at the start. Are you still bootstrapped today? How much of the business do you still own?

Founder Path venture debt partnership

Gabriel Ciordas

17:55>> Right now, a 100%.

Nathan Latka

17:56Okay. So this is amazing. It's rare you get someone a 100% bootstrapped. Now you if you're comfortable sharing, obviously, we've worked together. Are you comfortable sharing how we work together and what that was like? Maybe how much For sure.

Gabriel Ciordas

18:06>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Nathan Latka

18:08So what was it like? Why'd you come to Founder Path for Capital? Obviously, you wanna stay bootstrapped, but what was the capital need?

Gabriel Ciordas

18:12>> So, basically, exactly the, you know, the expansions, the the trend that we wanna accelerate. We wanna move a bit faster. There's a lot of learning that we need to do, and in this world, to learn costs a lot. So we wanted to make sure that we are

18:37>> capital efficient and also we have a backup, I would say. And then we have tried and we're trying new things now. And once they're confirmed, we will invest more and more into those areas. So your funding was very beneficial to us. And I'm assuming that by the middle of the year, you will be able, or we will be able to see

19:11>> the benefits of of of the funds that we we got from you. And, obviously, we will both take the the the we'll be both take the the benefits of these fundings.

Nathan Latka

19:25Gabriel is a tough guy to negotiate with, I will tell you. You know, we've deployed almost a $250,000,000 on 250,000,000, and his CFO is a guy named Andre. My lord. Beat me up. But it was a work side to obviously partner with you, and it it all started because I love the product. I actually used the product before I even met you. And then you reached out and said, oh, this is a natural fit. Are you

19:43comfortable sharing, Gabriel, how much you took?

Gabriel Ciordas

19:45>> I don't think it's necessary at this point, but what I, what I would suggest is, when we have very clear and interesting results, we both do another episode of this where we deep dive into into everything.

Nathan Latka

20:04We would love that. Tell me more about what you wanna do with the business going forward. Obviously, you're you're moving to the enterprise. You're a serial entrepreneur, so you have a lot of things you could spend your time on. You're at $15,000,000 of revenue. If someone came to you today and offered you a a 10 x multiple, so a 150,000,000 all cash up front, do you take the deal?

Enterprise pivot and 2026 outlook

Gabriel Ciordas

20:20>> You know, there's a saying never seen ever. It's it's obviously interesting. To be honest, my full focus right now is on growing the business because I strongly believe that my colleagues have crafted a fabulous product. And what I want to do now is to push it. We're lacking awareness. One of our this is probably the biggest problems. The biggest problem that we face is that we don't have enough awareness. Now, obviously, at the end of the

20:51>> day, we're all working for money. So if somebody would, would say, okay, I'll give you today 10x. I would say perfect. Let's, talk back, in August, September, and then, we'll see what happens. But right now, I'm my focus is exclusively onto the growth of of the product because, again, I think it's a fabulous product.

Nathan Latka

21:17Alright. Well, Gabriel, if people wanna check it out, test the product, it's very easy to try it, where can they find more about you online?

Gabriel Ciordas

21:23>> Well, obviously, flipsnack.com. And what we could do is throw in a discount if they come from here. So maybe we'll come up with a Nathan discount or something. So if they will test it out and like it, they will also get a discount due to the fact that they are your viewers.

Closing and discount offer

Nathan Latka

21:46We love that. Let's just come up with a code now and you so since we're recording, can we do latka podcast so we can put in your system later?

Gabriel Ciordas

21:52>> Perfect. Yeah. Let's let's do this. What would be what would be a sweet, discount? Let's, figure that out.

Nathan Latka

21:59Well, your pricing yeah. Your pricing starts at 16 a month and goes up to 85 a month. So we'll figure that out later. But, yeah, guys, check it out again. I love the product. I mean, it's so easy for me to promote stuff that I use. Right? So I I love the product. I'm also obviously invested on the debt side, via Andre and Gabe and his team. So, check it out. Flipsnack.com. But, in summary, again, serial

22:19entrepreneur launched Flipsnack in 2011, Bootstrap, booked 12,000,000 of revenue in 2024. In 2025, 15,000,000 of revenue. Guys, 28,000 paying customers. 94 folks full time on the team, only six sales reps. They've really leveraged incredible SEO, over a 100,000 clicks per month coming to their template library to get a lot of free users to convert to paid, and then they upsell those folks to larger accounts so much so that their largest customers paying $200,000 per year. I

22:49mean, talk about a range. $10 a month freemium user, basically freemium to 200,000 ACV. Gabriel's got the world in front of him in terms of growth as they pivot more to the enterprise in 2026. Check it out at flipsnack.com. Gabriel, thanks for taking us to the top.

Gabriel Ciordas

23:03>> Thank you so much, Nathan. Thank you.