How RevOS Reached €30K ARR Across 6 Paying Customers with a Viral Health Score Template (Interview with CEO Renat Zubairov)

Intro and Episode Summary

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, sold his first company elastic.io, and now he's building revos.ai to help you do things like customer scoring. His his template for customer scoring went viral. They got a thousand leads from that, and that really springboarded them to their six first paying customers that pay on average $500 a month. They're doing 3,000 a month day in revenue, totally bootstrapped, wrote their first line of code in November, and now plan to scale from here. We'll see what

Guest Introduction: Renat Zubairov and RevOS

Nathan Latka

00:21happens next. Hey, folks. My guest today is Renat Zubarov. He's a serial founder and CEO with a successful exit now in a second venture building an AI revenue operation system at revos.ai. It's his second interview, on the show, and we're excited to jump in. First company was Elastic dot I o. Renat, you ready to take us to top?

Renat Zubairov

00:41>> Oh, yes. Really happy to be here again.

Closing the Book on Elastic.io

Nathan Latka

00:44I'm excited to have you. Close the book on Elastic because you've been on many times over the years. So did you sell the company? You shut it down. What happened?

Renat Zubairov

00:51>> Yeah. We sold it. We sold it.

Nathan Latka

00:53Okay.

Renat Zubairov

00:54>> To the strategic buyer, it's like a publicly traded company here in Germany, And they acquired it to build out a product expertise. As a product, revenue is obviously more high quality or at least perceived as high quality on the public market.

Nathan Latka

01:07Mhmm.

Renat Zubairov

01:08>> And that was basically the plan for that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

01:10And this sale occurred, I believe, in 2021. Right?

Renat Zubairov

01:13>> Yeah. It's quite a while ago. Yes. Two years ago. I think we completely exited it, and we did a little bit of earn out at the end, but we stayed till the end and then also exited successfully.

Nathan Latka

01:24Did you keep any equity? Because the reporting said that Cogia AG acquired 51% of the shares. Did you guys keep the other 49%, or what happened to those?

Renat Zubairov

01:31>> No. No. We were completely out. Me and my cofounder, Igor, we were completely out.

Nathan Latka

01:36Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. Got it. And then the earnout was for what? A year, two years?

Renat Zubairov

01:41>> Three years.

Nathan Latka

01:42Three years. Okay. Did you earn because, you know, a lot of founders, they sell their company. They say, Nathan, how should I think about the earnout? Am I actually gonna make it or not? Well, you've done it. Did you actually make what you expected?

Renat Zubairov

01:52>> Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, it wasn't easy. Ernesto, obviously, some risks. Right? And the many things changed. Right? Company also grew and but there's also different different you know, once you exited the company, right, you're no longer in a driver's seat. And this change, obviously, the dynamics. Right? It's no longer your company. It's not not not not anymore your baby. Right? And there, obviously, sometimes you make decisions which are not you couldn't really affect in the

02:22>> in the new role, let's say so.

Nathan Latka

02:24Yep. Well, you were this wasn't a small company. I think you'd scaled it to 5 or $6,000,000 of revenue. Right? So I guess, is that right or no?

The Earnout Experience After Acquisition

Renat Zubairov

02:32>> It's I don't think no. It's I don't think the number is correct. We do not publish or we don't don't announce the official numbers on that, but it's small. I

Nathan Latka

02:39thought we okay. So you were you were smaller than 5,000,000 in ARR. Okay.

Renat Zubairov

02:43>> Yes.

Origin of the RevOS Idea

Nathan Latka

02:44Alright. Let's move forward to RevOS. Did you learn anything out of like, did you learn about the idea or come up with the idea for RevOS while you were at Elastic, or how'd you come up with the idea?

Renat Zubairov

02:52>> You know, me and my cofounder at Elastic, we were like engineers. And I think you also have a number of engineers here on your show who are like startup founders, entrepreneurs. And every entrepreneur believe, like, so that we just need to build a great product and then they will come, you know? But what we learned also is the sales is actually a very, very important part of the exercise. But what we also got to learn that

03:17>> sales is actually it's not it's not an art, you know? Some people believe, like, okay, you need to really hire a great salesperson and then he will go and sell everything you give to him or her. But the sales is just like a process. It's not a it's not a art. It's a science. And this was like a a part of what we now believe in Revos and what we actually bring as Revos to the market

03:41>> because we see this revenue operations and this revenue process building is essential for every company, and this is actually where we're going in with our new product.

Current Revenue and Customer Count

Nathan Latka

03:51Are you pre revenue share, or do you have customers?

Renat Zubairov

03:54>> We do have customers. We actually wrote the first line of code in November last year. And right now, we have, I think, total around about six paying customers.

Nathan Latka

04:03Oh, great.

Renat Zubairov

04:04>> We did this year around about €200,000.

Nathan Latka

04:08That's great. How much monthly recurring revenue are you doing today?

Renat Zubairov

04:12>> I think we are currently ARR on about 30. So out of 200 we did this year, 30 k is is recurrent.

Nathan Latka

04:21Okay. Got it. So $3,030,000 USD per month across six.

Renat Zubairov

04:24>> So this

04:24>> is these are large contracts with these six customers.

Nathan Latka

04:26No. No.

Renat Zubairov

04:27>> No. So so $3,030,000 ARR in annual.

Nathan Latka

04:32Ah, got it.

Renat Zubairov

04:33>> It's it's less.

Nathan Latka

04:34Okay. Got it. So so six customers paying on average 400 a month, something like that. 400, $500.

Renat Zubairov

04:42>> A bit more, but it's like, you know, the variance is bigger. So this is each number, but it's more than so actually, the the the variance would be a bit higher. Yeah. But this is, I think, the right the right direction. Oh,

Nathan Latka

04:55what'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 founder path. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

05:18your 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 Founder Path dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're

05:42gonna get 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

06:04is 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, 1,200,000 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

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07:18into the interview. Okay. But, generally, you're doing $3,000 a month, which is about 30,000 or $35,000 of ARR. Okay. If that's the case today, but you said you're you did this whole year, you did over $200,000. How did you do $200,000 if today you're only doing $3 a month?

Renat Zubairov

07:33>> We're also applying our learning from the previous company. Remember the saying from, I think, Paul Graham, who said, like, do things with Delta scale? We are working such on such an such an urgent problem for every company. So we actually charge our customers for the for the additional provider, for additional services we actually deliver to them, and they're happy to pay us this money.

Nathan Latka

07:55So you did you did you sold some consulting and services this year, which is how you generated revenue. Okay. What did those look like? Did were they required if they paid you services to then buy the recurring software on the back end?

Renat Zubairov

08:06>> It's actually a transformative. Like like many also companies on your podcast, right, who are actually combining this agency and software and transforming between them, we follow this path. Think this is also a very good path because first of all, we learn real problems, you know, where people pay real money, and then we replace our services with software as we build software along the way.

Nathan Latka

08:30Yep. No. That makes really good sense. What kinds of things and questions are you asking during the services delivery process to identify what software to build?

How $200K Was Generated Through Services

Renat Zubairov

08:40>> Oh oh, that's basically very simple. It's like, what is the most precious problem we actually wanted to solve now? And what are the KPIs you want to see that the problem is successfully solved? And then we try to build a software and also build the systems and infrastructure to deliver the, let's say, the solution as fast as possible, and then make sure the solution is can be productified. So it's not like, you know, one off or

09:06>> one customer, but really like a repetitive product sale.

Nathan Latka

09:09So what are they what are you hearing when you ask them? What's the KPI you care about? What are they saying?

Renat Zubairov

09:13>> Oh, that's very very good very good question. So many people like asking us, okay. How can we how can we sell more? How can we increase efficiency and effectiveness in our sales, customer success, and account management processes? How can we make sure that our salespeople know exactly what to do for with the customer at hand, with the deal at hand, with the lead at hand, and with the customer, existing customer for customer success? And what are

09:40>> the best possible actions they should do now with that particular customer to make sure that either opportunity is close won or a customer does not churn or customer buys more of our stuff.

Landing Henry Schein, Simplifier, and F24

Nathan Latka

09:54Yep. How did you land Henry Schein, Simplifier f 24? How'd you get them as customers?

Customer Discovery and KPI Questions

Renat Zubairov

10:00>> Mixture of, like, outreach. So LinkedIn I think LinkedIn network, some of the automations, like, you know, like Apollo, I think, is a very good tool. We use it a lot. HubSpot is also very good to help support, as well as the content, actually. So we actually did a lot of interviews in the beginning of RevOps. And based on these interviews, we created, like, a spreadsheet for customer health scoring. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the

10:28>> concept. It's like how to score the customer relationship, like, in numbers. And this customer health scoring spreadsheet is now the most widely used customer's health health score model on the Internet. So, like, it's downloaded over, like, 2,000 times already

Nathan Latka

10:41from where can we view that?

Renat Zubairov

10:43>> Oh, you just go to Revos AI and then just scroll down. You can see it over there and download it. There's, like, companies like Microsoft.

Nathan Latka

10:50What is it, though?

Renat Zubairov

10:51>> Is it the customer the customer health score course?

10:54>> No. It's customer health score template. Template.

Nathan Latka

10:57And then it's in your footer. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Let's dive deep into this for a second. And so this is just a I mean, it's a it's a glorified effectively Google Sheet, but you're saying, like, how did you so you build this and then you post it on LinkedIn and then it went viral and then you put a landing page up? What was the order of operations?

Renat Zubairov

11:12>> Correct. Yeah. We actually build the landing page. We did a lot of interviews with customer success people, build the landing page and put the knowledge into this. There's, like, over 60 different criterias how you can score your customer health scoring, and then it just went viral. You know? The the, like, downloads, like, few downloads every day over the last year or so. You know?

Nathan Latka

11:33How many total downloads?

Renat Zubairov

11:35>> Oh, I I don't actually, I don't have an exact number, but it's definitely above 1,000.

Nathan Latka

11:40Interesting. So is this your number one lead gen source right now?

Renat Zubairov

11:45>> It is. Yes. It is. I think this is like a starting of the conversation, and there we see, like, intent, and also people will download it. We reach out. There's a sequence behind it, and then we'll definitely get into the conversations.

The Viral Customer Health Score Template

Nathan Latka

11:56Yeah. This makes a ton of sense. Okay. So six customers today. You you're using these landing pages to get new customers. How do you go from six customers to a thousand customers?

Renat Zubairov

12:05>> Yes. That's a very good question. We are currently experimenting with search engine optimization. You know, we are big believers in this, like, you know, validating and testing hypothesis fast and cheaply. And this is actually where we now invest our resources and time to really see, like, if we could possibly generate some compounding effect on the infrastructure and also resources we actually deliver. And additionally to that, we launched our product, which is now available. I think we

12:40>> launched it on Dublin, by the way, where we lost time at. We launched it on a conference and and also opened registrations for it. So, actually, we have, like, a three d plan where everyone can build its own customer health score, like, in minutes.

Nathan Latka

12:54You took the customer health score concept and then also launched a Udemy course. How is the Udemy course doing?

Renat Zubairov

13:00>> Oh, that's a good point. We actually did, like, an interesting presell to that. I think we earned maybe some few thousand dollars of revenue with presell of this course. However, the course itself, I would not do it again, to be honest, because it's actually mostly it's very hard to promote it. It's actually not very workable in a sense. And we're actually going to close it or do it for free or give it give away it for

13:28>> free on Udemy. We are a German company, and Udemy has some very complicated taxation forms we need to fill. And all the revenue there is, like, maybe a few $100 right now. So we're just like, hey. You know what? We just better open it and just maybe push it on our website instead of Udemy.

Nathan Latka

13:45And did you get leads from from Udemy or no?

Udemy Course: Lessons Learned

Renat Zubairov

13:48>> We are not actually legally allowed to approach these people who are buying a person legally in in Udemy. We didn't expect that to be when we started this discussion, but I think the content we generated is very valuable. So we're definitely going to generate more leads with this content.

Nathan Latka

14:04You're in the HubSpot Solutions Partner Program. Do you get leads from HubSpot?

Renat Zubairov

14:08>> Not yet. Actually, we just launched last week a new program where we delivering, like, a customer success solution on top of HubSpot. We see this as a significant white spot in the market where people are buying themselves like a second CRM, like Totango or ChurnZero or Planhat, you know, and then fight with the data integration challenges and all this kind of mess which is created by second CRM in in operation. And we believe that we can

14:40>> just deliver the best possible experience out of HubSpot, and this is actually the new thing.

Nathan Latka

14:45Who is doing this the best? I mean, you mentioned churn zero. There's a lot of companies that sort of say, hey. Score your customers. But who do think is doing this the best right now?

14:53Think there's Besides you?

Renat Zubairov

14:55>> It's a good question. Yeah. So the reals are definitely on top. But I think there's definitely very few players right now on the market which actually can do it

15:06>> scientifically proven good. You know? The problem with health score is, like, it's very much biased, right, in the sense that when you build it, you just build it on top of your gut feeling, and very few people can definitely validate it. And you need some data science expertise to validate it. But we see a lot of interesting approaches definitely from companies like Vitaly, and Totango is doing a very good job in content. They are very, very,

15:31>> very nice. But Tatango is rather old system, you know, it's a bit clunky. You know, it's developed like Melbourne ten years ago. I think you had like a founder of Tatango here Yeah. In And they do an excellent job in this, like, educating the market. But what we see there is definitely a merge between this customer success management system as a separate system, like a separate silo, and the revenue stack in general. So we see many

HubSpot Partner Program and New Product Launch

Renat Zubairov

15:59>> companies, once they advance in the development, they establish a revenue function on top of, like, individual silos. Therefore, this individual solution is making less and less sense.

Nathan Latka

16:10Yep. We're not we're out of time here, but some quick questions for you. Did you raise capital here or are you bootstrapped?

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Life Advice

Renat Zubairov

16:16>> We're completely bootstrapped, actually. It's all funded by my own money.

Nathan Latka

16:20We love that. Okay. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, your favorite your favorite book.

Renat Zubairov

16:26>> Oh, it's actually I have two books for you I prepared. First one is Thinking Path, Thinking Slow. This is also the same as I mentioned on a previous interview. Oh, that's like and the second is Never Split the Difference from Chris Waltz.

16:38>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

16:39Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Renat Zubairov

16:41>> I really like what people what guys what Alex and Bastian from Celonis are doing. I'm sure you didn't have them here in the interview, but this is, like, one of the most interesting startups from Germany, which I saw, and I spoke with with Bastian, like, a few few weeks ago in New York. Really, really interesting company.

Nathan Latka

17:02Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Rebo OS?

Renat Zubairov

17:06>> We're using Notion a lot. Also, Notion AI now. So it's very nice very nice tool. Love it.

Nathan Latka

17:11Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Renat Zubairov

17:14>> Oh, about six. About

Nathan Latka

17:16six. And situation, married, single, kids?

Renat Zubairov

17:19>> Still married. Still three kids. But the oldest is already out, so he's studying in Munich right now.

Nathan Latka

17:25Ah, amazing. And how old are you?

Renat Zubairov

17:27>> 43.

Nathan Latka

17:2843. Last question.

Renat Zubairov

17:29>> Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

17:34>> I think what what I wish you it always takes longer than you think. That would be, like, my my wise wise advice to myself when 20. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

17:44Guys, sold us first company elastic.io and now is building revos.ai to help you do things like customer scoring. His his template for customer scoring went viral. They got a thousand leads from that, and that really springboarded them to their six first paying customers that pay on average $500 a month. They're doing 3,000 a month stay in revenue. Totally bootstrapped, wrote their first line of code in November, and now plan to scale from here. We'll see what

18:06happens next. Or not, thanks for taking us to the top.

Renat Zubairov

18:09>> Thank you. Thank you, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

18:11One 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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