SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1591 How She Started as An Employee, Then Moved to Owner
02 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: How did Bruna San Roman start her journey with Switch.cm?
joined switch.cm which is helping hoteliers manage their business many years ago call it two three years ago when the company was sold she took over as managing director now they're serving about 200 different locations that each pay 30 bucks a month so six grand a month in revenue up from a grand in revenue just about a year ago so healthy growth a team of 19 obviously burning cash the parent company continues to invest the 19 are based all around the world two percent logo turn per month so fairly low there as they look to scale up to thousands of hotels using them
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Bruna San Roman. She's a business developer, graduated in international relations and with a master's in political sciences and now is a digital nomad, yogi and supporter of a plant based life. She's Brazilian, 28 years old, living in the Netherlands and the freedom of managing switch.cm.
Her company from home is unique, a gift from the founder and former owner of switch. We'll jump into the story today. But Bruna, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, definitely. Okay. So what is switch.cm and what's your revenue model? How do you make money? So, yeah, we're for rental vacation properties.
We offer the three main basic functions that the business owners need to manage their property. We offer PMS, property management system functions, a channel manager, built-in channel manager, and a booking engine for their websites. Okay. And are they paying you a SAS type fee? Yeah. So they pay us either monthly or annually.
Our pricing plans are very simple, just based on how many channels and OTAs they connect to. And we don't really charge based on size of properties or revenue. We have a simple fee based on the channels. Okay. And so describe kind of what the average hotelier might pay you per month for your tool.
So if they are very small, so they just, I don't know, connect to two channels, they may pay us nine euros or nine pounds, nine US dollars per month in the animal plan and up to 49 or 55 per month if they connect you up to seven channels. Okay. So what would you say the average customer pays you though? Nine or 10 bucks or closer to 40 or 45? Our average ticket is around 30. Okay.
Yeah, most of our the medium and small properties nowadays, they connect to four channels, which is our basic plan. So Bruno, that's $30 a month, correct? Yeah, that's great. So let's get some of the let's pick up some of the backstory here. So you it sounds like you maybe bought this company from someone else, or they passed it on to you. When did the original founders create the company?
And how did you come to control it? So basically, the founder created because of their own frustration with existing PMS and channel management in the market. So he had some hotels in Bali, New York, and seasonal hotels in London. And yeah, he just found it very frustrating to use the existing services. He tried many softwares at the moment. And then he saw the opportunity to develop his own.
In what year? It was 2014, the end of 2014. Okay. And he met brilliant developers in Bali. And they just started developing an easy system, user-friendly. And they saw the opportunity of offering the system to other hotel owners as well. I see. Yeah, they built their own channel manager. They started growing in Bali first with a small sales team.
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Chapter 2: What services does Switch.cm offer to hoteliers?
And yeah, he liked the development and how I was getting more business for Switch. So I quit the work with wordpackers and started doing business developer for Switch. And the company grew a bit, but they also had some financial problems, basically because they were not really charging a big fee for users. They were using those strategies of premium and premium.
Bruno, what year was this that you took over? It was basically in 2016 that I joined the team. But then in April 2017, they sold the company to a new company, to FlyMia, a BOD tech team based in Myanmar in Singapore. And then since this company acquired Switch, I became the managing director. So I'm not the owner per se, but I work mostly as a CEO of Switch.
Well, I hope you at least have equity or something. Yeah, I do. Okay, good. Good. Yeah. All right. And what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers? So since the acquisition, we changed completely the growth model and the strategy, the pricing and so on. We have grown 150% in terms of users. And yeah, basically, what does that mean in terms of total customers today?
We have 200 plus in 40 countries. Oh, wow, that's great. Okay, so 200 kind of customers across 40 countries, you know, paying 30 bucks a month, that would mean you're doing about $6,000 per month in revenue. Is that accurate? Yeah, yeah, almost that. Okay. We still have some free users from the past. Yeah, the past.
Sure, but free users obviously don't feed, free users don't feed obviously your revenue, right? Because they're not paying, they're free. Yeah, exactly. We continue honoring the sales strategy from before, but we do offer some upgrading models for them as well. So I wanted to get you guys a heads up. I will be in San Francisco at the beautiful Fairmont up there on top of the hill.
It's a gorgeous view for the Growth Marketing Conference on December 10th and 11th. Now, Vasile and his team do a great job putting this thing together, whether it's B2B or B2C marketplaces to e-commerce or even mobile apps and hand-on workshops. They cover everything related to growth. And these are very unique growth channels that these top experts, and these are actual operators.
These are people doing, people doing at PagerDuty, at Zoom, at Malwarebytes, at Engageo. These are people actually executing growth strategies you're going to learn from. I'm also giving a session that basically pulls data points from the over 2,000 interviews I've done with SaaS CEOs and showcases six of the most unique growth strategies, kind of off the obvious path
growth opportunities that CEOs have used to drive their first million and 10 million in revenue. So I'd love to see you there. And we've negotiated 10 tickets at a discount, a 40% discount. The link to use is nathanlatka.com forward slash growth. That's Nathan Latka, L-A-T-K-A.com forward slash growth, G-R-O-W-T-H.
On that page, it'll automatically take 30% off for the first 10 of you and then use coupon code the top. for another 10% off. Now, if you choose to make sure you're attending, be sure to email me. If you go use the link now and grab it, I'll make sure to step on one-on-one coffee with you. I want to meet you in person and spend some time together.
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Chapter 3: How did Bruna transition from employee to managing director?
Yeah, we do believe that putting more money on promoting a reactive sale. So we just will be there and then customers will come through the pay-per-click or through the website, through our searching engines. We do believe that this may be, it's a way to, it's a pathway to grow for next year. So we're going to start. My question is about churn, which is how many customers you're losing.
What's your churn today per month? Oh yeah. We still have that. Um, so our counseling rate is around two to three users per month. Okay. Out of 200. So that's about, that's about what? 1%, 2% a month. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty low. I do believe it can be, it can be zero. It's just a matter of, um, yeah, we want to optimize a little bit, uh, the setup moments and the online training we do offer now.
Yep, great, makes good sense. And what's the total team size today? We are 16 in-house and 19 considering also freelancers. Okay, and everyone's spread out around the world? Yeah, correctly. We only have three persons based in an office in Myanmar and one actually in Singapore, but the rest work from their home. Happy and free. So doing $6,000 a month, obviously, is not enough to pay 19 people.
So is the parent company just still sinking money into this to grow it? Yeah, that's correct. I see. So what's the next goal? What do you want to grow revenue to and how do you think you're going to get there? Yeah, we believe we need to focus on growing the customer base. It's to you that our website, our internet-based is still not 100% ready to just put more money on digital marketing.
But we do believe that this is a way of growing our customer base. Got it. Very good. Bruno, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? I totally forgot this name. It's about coaches. Coachermap. Coachermap. Coach? Coachermap. Coachermap. Spell it. C-U-L-T-U-R-E, map. Culture map, got it. Culture map, very good.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now? No, not really. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company? Trello, I use it extensively. And number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
seven and bruno what's your situation married single kiddos i'm single i have a boyfriend okay here in the netherlands for already four years oh great so not married no kids no okay but i do meditate every day and this is really important for my sanity and and clarity of mind i like that i think that's good do you mind me asking about how old you are i'm 28 28 28 very good and last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew
that drinking a lot is not a really playful area for yourself. Guys, drinking a lot is not good, right? That's an easy one there. Founded, actually really joined Switch.cm, which is helping hoteliers manage their business. Many years ago, call it two, three years ago, when the company was sold, she took over as managing director.
Now they're serving about 200 different locations that each pay 30 bucks a month. So six grand a month in revenue, up from a grand in revenue just about a year ago. So healthy growth. Team of 19, obviously burning cash. The parent company continues to invest. The 19 are based all around the world. 2% logo churn. per month.
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