How Kunveno Hit $30,000 ARR and 5 Paying Customers After Spinning Out of Trumpf (Interview with CEO Yannick Dickel)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Kunveno.de launched because him and his two buddies built it internally at a big company called Trump. They said we need to spin this bad boy out. Trump said, here's some money, 6 figures. Give us 20% of the new company. They spun it out. Now they've got, call it, five paying customers paying on average, you know, call it $500 ish per month, doing 2,500 per month right now in revenue, hoping to double revenue to 5,000 a month

00:20by December and then go out and raise, call it 500 k at a 2.5 ish post money valuation. We'll see if he can get it done. Tough market right now. Again, they are helping you drive up your employee engagement with their platform, kunveno.de. Hey, folks. My guest today is Yannick Dickel. He's building a company called kunveno. De. It's a b two b SaaS appreciation platform. Yannick, you ready to take us to

Yannick Dickel

00:43>> the top? Yeah, sure I am.

Nathan Latka

00:45Alright. So you launched in 2022. It looks like it's an you know, you're playing in the HR tech space, a leading appreciation platform for employees. What does that mean?

What Kunveno Does: Work Tech and Employee Engagement

Yannick Dickel

00:54>> That's right. We started last year. I mean, HR tech, yeah, sometimes we struggle with the term, maybe let's say work tech, because we are doing it mainly for the workforce and enterprise, for enterprise customers. We're building a B2B app that integrates also in other apps, for example, Microsoft Teams. Our ultimate goal is to increase employee engagement through fun and easy rituals, which will be placed on our platform and also empowers teams, for example, to celebrate their

01:29>> successes online.

Nathan Latka

01:31Yannick, you be really specific? Employee engagement can mean a lot of things. What specifically? What kind of engagement?

Yannick Dickel

01:36>> I mean, team engagement. So our focus is on engaging teams, making sure everyone feels valued in the team and is seen for his or her engagement in the team. Yeah. So that's Yeah.

Nathan Latka

01:53Try be specific. So there's thousands of founders listening right now that have a team of five people on their customer success team. They wanna get more engagement from the customer success team. They would use your tool to what? Get more from the customer success team to get on more Zoom calls or to respond to more Slack messages or to go on more vacations together. What do mean by engagement?

Defining Engagement and Target Customer

Yannick Dickel

02:12>> I mean, ultimately, we can measure is making sure everyone feels appreciated.

Nathan Latka

02:17How do you measure that?

Yannick Dickel

02:19>> For example, by asking our users how appreciated do you feel from your team colleagues, from your organization, from the sales department, for example, in your case? So that's what we typically ask our users and where we can see already good numbers and success.

Nathan Latka

02:40Yannick, why can't I just set up a free type form and email my whole team, Hey, do you feel appreciated? Yes or no, answer the survey.

Yannick Dickel

02:48>> You could do that. But I mean, with our tool, you are reminded, for example, to give positive feedback to someone who helped you out in a project or in other work environments. So that's pretty much what we do. We bring people together. We make sure everyone feels valued and to have a possibility to give positive feedback.

Nathan Latka

03:17I mean, when I wanna give positive feedback to somebody I found about, they go on Slack and I publicly say, great job on this, it looks wonderful. And then people hit all the like and heart emojis. Why is your solution better than what I just described?

Yannick Dickel

03:27>> I mean, can do that for smaller teams, I'd say up to maybe a 100 people, but in larger organizations and that's what we target from say 100 to larger than 3,000, 5,000 people, it's hard to get it going with such as likes channels. So what we focus on and to make sure the whole organization is within that framework.

Nathan Latka

03:58And how do you think about pricing? What do one of these customers use that they use you today? What do they pay per month or per year on average?

Pricing: $2 Per Seat Per Month

Yannick Dickel

04:05>> On average, they pay 2 US dollar per month per user. So that's pretty much for in our in our case for for almost every employee.

Nathan Latka

04:16Do all your companies today you mentioned your core you know, your target customer has more than a 100 FTEs. So are all your customers today larger than a 100 FTEs?

Yannick Dickel

04:25>> Yeah. They are. Right.

Nathan Latka

04:27Okay. I see. And do they usually buy a package that for the whole entire team or do they test it with a small team first?

Yannick Dickel

04:33>> It depends on size of the customer. Typically, split it down to T shirt sizes with customers, so it's S, M and L, large. So, for example, for a large customer with 3,000 user states, start with, let's say, 500 users and then sort of roll it out for the other ones.

Nathan Latka

04:58Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

05:21your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:46get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

06:07not 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, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

06:33going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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

Backstory: Spinning Out of Trumpf

Nathan Latka

06:55if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation 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. Alright. Let's jump back into

07:21the interview. If you take an average of just the average number of seats, right, that a company might pay you for, what would the average be across your full customer base? Something like, you know, 150, 200?

Yannick Dickel

07:33>> Probably a bit more. More than like 500 to a thousand. Yep.

Nathan Latka

07:38Okay. Wow. So that's big. So these are like 5,000 person companies paying you for 500 to a thousand seats?

Yannick Dickel

07:45>> Right. Right.

Nathan Latka

07:46Okay. Okay. So 500 seats on average of $2 a seat. I mean, folks are paying on average maybe a grand per month or you're targeting $12,000 per year contracts.

Yannick Dickel

07:54>> That's right. That's right.

Nathan Latka

07:56Interesting. Okay. Very cool. All right. Now that we understand sort of pricing today and sort of where you're at today, give us the backstory here. You launched it last year. Are you sole founder?

Yannick Dickel

08:05>> No. We are a team of three founders and we got to know each other working for a large manufacturing company actually in Germany called Trampf. There we got to know a very positive work environment and company culture, but we also got to know how quickly things can change, for example, during lockdown times, during COVID, etcetera. Decided back then, we decided to do something to keep people attached to their teams and ultimately to their company. So we

08:37>> established what you could say, sort of a prototype for what we are currently developing with kunveno and we are also corporate spin offs. So we started with Trump and now we are doing it as our own business and, yeah, developing the system even more.

Trumpf as First Customer and Minority Stakeholder

Nathan Latka

08:59Does Trump since it's a corporate spin off, does Trump own a chunk of the company today?

Yannick Dickel

09:04>> Yeah. But only a minority stake in the company. Right.

Nathan Latka

09:07Okay. So they took like 10 or 20% and then the three of you guys split the rest?

Yannick Dickel

09:12>> Right. Right. That's it.

Nathan Latka

09:13I see. I see. Okay. Very cool. Very interesting. What was that like? Was it hard to convince Trump to let you take the technology with your two buddies out of the company and spin it off?

Yannick Dickel

09:22>> I mean, they also profit from our business because they're a customer themselves. So I think it's quite beneficial for both sides. And also, for example, for employer branding topics, it's quite interesting to get such a topic flying, I guess.

Nathan Latka

09:40Yep, yep. Okay, so Trump was your first customer. Tell me how you got your second customer. What's the story there?

Sales Channels: Cold Outreach and Partner Sales

Yannick Dickel

09:47>> I mean, like all founders usually start with cold outreach, so that was quite interesting for us because none of us had much sales experience beforehand. So yeah, we started to make some calls and to get like a couple of pilot customers first. And now we are actually having like a split in sales because we continue to do like traditional outreach, direct sales, but also are engaging in partner sales channel, which is quite interesting because, for example,

10:26>> change agencies, consultants can also sell our products with an existing project or with an existing customer and they're getting up to 20% of revenue of the first two years. So that's quite interesting for them to have recurring revenues as, for example, a consultant and for us because customer acquisition costs are quite low when we engage in partner sales. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

10:54Well, and more importantly is the CAC there is fully variable. It only gets paid out if the sale happens, which is nice. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So those partner channels, cold outreach was your first customer. Fast forward today, how many organizations are you working with?

Current Customer Count: 5 Paying, 14 in Total

Yannick Dickel

11:11>> Currently, have 14 customers. Some of them are already paying, some of them are still in a trial period.

Nathan Latka

11:19How many of them are out of the trial period? Real paying customers.

Yannick Dickel

11:23>> Real paying customers, we've got five right now.

Nathan Latka

11:26And what's the process of moving someone from a trial to paid? Is the trial free?

Free Trial to Paid Conversion Process

Yannick Dickel

11:31>> Trial is free, exactly. And we're making sure that value is already been felt by the customer in the trial period. And then we start to talk to them and to go into a cooperation mode for now onto, for example, twelve months.

Nathan Latka

11:53Yannick, how do you measure value during a trial period?

Yannick Dickel

11:57>> I mean, you can always

12:01>> measure it with engagement. If all the employees are active users and start to use our platform, start to write, you to other colleagues, celebrate successes together. And then we're doing like a spot where we ask them, do you feel appreciated by your colleagues? That's what we start when we start a trial period and then after two months, for example, and we can see improved values of our service. So that's what we call successful.

Nathan Latka

12:34Understood. Okay. You told me earlier on average $10,000 or $12,000 per year contracts, you know, times five paying customers. It puts you at about 5,000 a month right now on revenue. Is that about right?

Yannick Dickel

12:46>> That's about right. A little less, but that's yeah. Sounds where where

Nathan Latka

12:52were you exactly one year ago at this point so we can calculate growth? Were you zero?

Yannick Dickel

12:56>> Zero. Yes. We we did our first, yeah, deal in late December of last year. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:04That's great. And have you self capitalized the company and bootstrapped or did you sell equity and raise?

Yannick Dickel

13:11>> I mean, because we are a spin off, we got our first funding from Trump, but now we are doing like our first real funding round end of the year. So end of December, maybe early January. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:27How much are you looking to raise?

Yannick Dickel

13:29>> 500 k.

Nathan Latka

13:31And if someone hurt hears us right now, an investor, and writes you 500 k check, what percent of the company are you willing to give them?

Yannick Dickel

13:38>> I mean, that's depending on what are able to do in the next few months, I'd say. But we would target out, I guess.

Nathan Latka

13:49What valuation are you targeting in December?

Revenue Clarification: $30,000 ARR and $2,500 MRR

Yannick Dickel

13:54>> Something around like 2 to 3,500,000.

Nathan Latka

13:59Okay. So you're willing to sell something like 20 to 25% of the company?

Yannick Dickel

14:03>> Right. Right.

Nathan Latka

14:04Yeah. Interesting. And what do you think you have to grow revenue to by December this year to get a 2,500,000 post money valuation?

Yannick Dickel

14:11>> I mean, we are currently looking at something around $30,000 ARR, and I'm confident that we can at least triple it by the end of the year.

Nathan Latka

14:25Well, right now you're at 5,000 a month or about 60,000 ARR, right? What do you mean you're at 30,000 ARR?

Yannick Dickel

14:33>> 30,000 is our current number because some of our customers, as I said previously, they don't pay right now. They're in free trial.

Nathan Latka

14:43I'm sorry, but I just asked you about two and a half minutes ago, five customers times a thousand dollars per month puts you at 5,000 a month in revenue. Your response was a little bit lower than that. We annualize that. That puts you at about $5,060,000 of ARR.

Yannick Dickel

14:57>> MRR is 2,500 right now.

Nathan Latka

15:02Oh, okay. Got it. So not a little bit less, half of what I just described.

Yannick Dickel

15:05>> Half half of it. Got it.

Nathan Latka

15:06Got it. Okay. So you wanna go from 30,000 ARR to 60,000 ARR between now and December, and you believe that that if you hit that, you'll be able to get a 2.5 post money valuation?

Yannick Dickel

15:16>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

15:17Why do you believe that? That'd be a 41.7 x multiple on top line forward looking revenues.

Yannick Dickel

15:24>> Yeah. I guess it's valid because our sales pipeline is pretty full right now and also partner sales is ramping up. That's a big topic for evaluation.

Nathan Latka

15:37Many of your current five paying customers came from partners?

Yannick Dickel

15:41>> One. Right. Already one.

Nathan Latka

15:44And what what value metrics?

Yannick Dickel

15:45>> In April.

Nathan Latka

15:47What metrics on the top of your funnel will you point to in terms of when investors ask prove that your partnership channel is growing?

Yannick Dickel

15:54>> I mean, partners, we already signed for partner sales agreements. So that's actually what we look at right now. And then also opportunities we're discussing right now with our partner sales organizations.

Nathan Latka

16:11I see, I see. And then I guess Trump initially capitalized you. How much did they put into the company on day one last year?

R and D Spend and External Development Team

Yannick Dickel

16:19>> I'm actually not allowed to speak about that. But let's say like a 6 figure number.

Nathan Latka

16:28Do you still have more than 80% of that money in the bank or have you burned through most of it?

Yannick Dickel

16:33>> We've burned most of it because we had like a big R and D spend the last few months to get our platform scalable. For example, all the integrations we are able to offer right now for Microsoft Teams, etcetera. So that's pretty much what we spent funding on.

Nathan Latka

16:55Yannick, how big is big?

Yannick Dickel

16:58>> Sorry, what's that?

Nathan Latka

17:00You said you spent big on R and D. How big is big?

Yannick Dickel

17:04>> I mean, we are talking about 25,000 per month for external development right now.

Nathan Latka

17:12Okay. And and how many months have you engaged that group?

Yannick Dickel

17:17>> For nine months now.

Nathan Latka

17:19Nine months. Okay. So nine times 25 k. You spent about $230,000 on development so far.

Yannick Dickel

17:24>> Right. Right.

Nathan Latka

17:25Yeah. How do you know if that development team is, like, doing good or bad work? You know, people always founders always struggle with this.

Yannick Dickel

17:32>> I mean,

17:35>> see our product right now, which is far beyond what we had in the beginning of the year, and also customer feedback, I'd say, because many of the features we developed right with our customers, so we sat down with them, we asked them what they need, what they wish for product wise. So it's pretty yeah, strongly coupled to our customers right now.

Nathan Latka

18:05Who guides them or who drives that team? Are one of the co founders engineering based?

Yannick Dickel

18:10>> Right, right. He's a full stack developer and he used to do it for a couple of years in all sorts of settings. He's quite experienced and also leading a development team.

Nathan Latka

18:22That's great. How many folks are full time at the company today, not including contractors?

Team Size and Co-Founder Roles

Yannick Dickel

18:27>> Three. Only the three founders.

Nathan Latka

18:29Okay. I love that. Okay. And then how many are on the contracting team?

Yannick Dickel

18:33>> One full time and I'd say 0.5 FTE, like, on the spot consulting for for other topics.

Nathan Latka

18:42Well, how many are on the engineering team? The contract.

Yannick Dickel

18:46>> All of them. All of them.

Nathan Latka

18:48I know how many.

Yannick Dickel

18:51>> 1.5. So, like, all

Nathan Latka

18:52the Oh, wow. You're you're spending 25,000 a month for 1.5 FTEs?

Yannick Dickel

18:58>> That's right.

Nathan Latka

18:59Holy cow.

19:02I guess what's the purpose of out there's not a lot of there's not a lot of arbitrage there from what I can tell based in terms of cost, pricing, value, etcetera. So why not just hire this person full time?

Yannick Dickel

19:13>> We thought about it and we probably do it next year, but for this year, it was the better fit for us to do it externally, but we will sure surely, yeah, internalize it like that.

Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

19:28Alright. Well, we'll see what happens. In the meantime, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, Yannick. What's your favorite book?

Yannick Dickel

19:35>> Favorite book? I'd say a Lean Startup from Eric Grease.

Nathan Latka

19:39Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Yannick Dickel

19:44>> Lately, I've been following Alexander Rink, CEO of Celonis Process Mining.

Nathan Latka

19:51Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building kunveno?

Yannick Dickel

19:58>> I have to say church GPT in the last few months.

Nathan Latka

20:02Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every

20:03night?

Yannick Dickel

20:04>> Seven.

Nathan Latka

20:06Okay. And situation, married, single, kids?

Yannick Dickel

20:09>> Married, one daughter.

Nathan Latka

20:11Oh, that's great. And how old are you?

Yannick Dickel

20:13>> 32.

Nathan Latka

20:14Last question, Yannick. Something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old.

Closing Advice and Wrap-Up

Yannick Dickel

20:20>> Network deep, not broad, let's say.

Nathan Latka

20:24Guys,

20:25there you have it. Kunveno.de launched because him and his two buddies built it internally at a big company called Trump. They said, we need to spin this bad boy out. Trump said, here's some money, 6 figures, give us 20% of the new company. They spun it out. Now they've got, call it, five paying customers paying on average, call it $500 ish per month, doing 2,500 per month right now in revenue, hoping to double revenue to 5,000

20:45a month by December and then go out and raise, call it 500 k at a 2 0.5 valuation. We'll see if he can get it done. Tough market right now. Again, they are helping you drive up your employee engagement with their platform, kunveno.de. Yannick, thanks for taking us to the top.

Yannick Dickel

21:01>> Thank you, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

21:03One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

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22:12up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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

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