SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1084 Bulgarian company spends $45k of $65k MRR on paid spend, working!
13 Jul 2018
Chapter 1: What is Metrilo and how did it start?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Murray Ivanoff.
He is the founder of a company called Metrilo, which he founded in 2014 to help e-commerce store owners grow their businesses. Besides spending lots of time with his customers and his team, he loves to do trail running in the beautiful mountains where he's based. All right, Murray, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, man. What's up? What's up? So first off, where are you guys based?
In Sofia, which is in Bulgaria. Very good. And tell us about the company. What's Metrilo doing? How do you make money? You know, we're basically like yet another e-commerce marketing platform in the market, right? The way we obviously make money is by selling our product to people who actually make money out of our product, you know.
You don't sound very excited when you say you're just another one of the guys. Yeah, it's 11 p.m. here, man. It was a fucking horrible day, you know. So excitement is a tough one at that point. Why was it a horrible day? Uh, cause they had to wake up early. It's personal stuff, you know, whatever. Uh, but yeah, it's just a horrible day. So yeah.
But overall you're like, no, we're more than excited, man. Cause like on a daily basis, we work with amazing folks, um, around the world, basically like almost half of our customer base is us. But then, The rest is spread all across the world. So we've seen it all more or less.
We're seeing how different businesses are being born in different regions and what things are working in certain regions and not working in other regions. So it's actually pretty exciting. How many customers do you serve total? We have at this point, we have 450. 450? Yeah. Yeah.
And the most exciting one was probably, it was in November where one of my most favorite customers ever with native actually got acquired by TNG for a hundred mil. And the funny thing is that we've been with these guys since day zero, basically, since the day he actually found it.
He managed to go from literally zero revenue up to $100 million acquisition in two and a half years, which was pretty amazing, you know.
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Chapter 2: How does Metrilo generate revenue?
Now with 450 customers paying 150 bucks a month, you guys are doing about 67,000 bucks a month right now in revenue. Uh, yeah, a little bit more than that, but yeah, in that area. Okay. And give me more of the growth story. When did you launch the company? Uh, it was 2014, like in, uh, in April, you know, uh, just me and my co-founder basically started then like an engineer.
You guys split equity 50, 50? Uh, more or less. Murray, that's the, that's the lazy way to do it. That's the right way to do it, though. It's more or less, it's almost equal, yeah. Who else is on the cap table today? So at this point, it's me, my co-founder, and a few other investors. Okay, how much have you raised? Up to this point, I've actually raised a little bit less than a million euro.
Okay, and is that a convertible note, or is it all equity? It's all equity. Since you're on your cap table, yeah. Interesting, and why did you decide to raise capital? Um, you know, cause, uh, we needed the end of the day, you know, like, uh, we decided to go with the lower price point at the beginning.
And it's one of those markets where you need to invest a shitload of money to acquire customers basically, you know, so you need money up front. Right. And give me a sense of growth. Obviously you raised capital. You're at 67 grand today in revenue. Where were you 12 months ago? Uh, 12 months ago we were at 120 customers. Uh, so that makes, uh, Fuck 3.2 X. Got it.
So, so, so just to be clear, I could take 120 customers times one 50. You were doing about 18 grand a month, 13 months ago, 12 months ago. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So, I mean, that's healthy growth. How are you acquiring customers? A shitload of channels, actually.
We mostly depend on, you know, like we have this classic, you know, like multiple attribution model where we invest a lot of money in PPC. Lately, Facebook has been actually, you know, like one of the main driving engines. Like how much per month are you spending there? It depends anywhere from 20 to 40, 45 sometimes. 45 grand? Yeah. Wow. I mean, that's a lot.
I mean, that's, you know, 80% of your total revenue. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so is most of that kind of coming from your investor dollars? You guys are operating cash flow negative at this point because you have so much marketing spend? No, we're actually close to being fine. It's like the area where we're basically AI. Our costs are actually way lower. What's your team size? Not that far away.
We're 15. Okay, but with 15 people, if you're doing $67,000 a month in revenue and $45,000 of that is marketing spend, that leaves $20,000 for all your other costs plus 15 salaries. Okay. Yeah, basically. No, we're still losing money. We're not like that. You are losing money. We still are, yeah.
But if you turned off some of the variable marketing, you could get to closer to break even fairly quick. Interesting. What are you spending right now to acquire a customer? What's your CAC? Uh, at this point it's, it's around $1,200. Um, like for, yeah, like I would say like the average way to divide by all the other channels and all of the other stuff, it gets to about 700. Okay.
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Chapter 3: What growth milestones has Metrilo achieved?
Married, single, you have kids? I'm single. Single, no kiddos? Yeah. No kiddos? Yep, no kiddos. And how old are you? I'm 29. 29. Last question. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew? Holy shit. I don't know, man. That life actually is as awesome as it seemed back then. There you guys have it from Murray. Life actually is as awesome as it seemed back then.
Launched his company, Metrillo, back a few years ago in 2014. He's now at 15 people full-time helping e-commerce brands do things like CRM outreach, conversion optimization, things like that, serving 450 customers who pay $150 a month, so about $67,000 a month right now in revenue. That's up from $18,000 a month just 12 months ago.
They raised a million bucks, maybe are going to raise again in September here of 2018. 4% monthly churn in terms of logos each month. healthy revenue expansion month over month as well. CAC 700 bucks, again, 150 bucks a month in payment. They're getting their money back in four or five months. So healthy economics. Murray, thank you for taking us to the top. Thank you, man. Have a good one.