SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
23 year old launches SaaS for hotels, hits $250k revenue in under 12 months
15 Jan 2023
Chapter 1: What is the SaaS event happening in New York City?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have a thousand SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit.
Again, hundreds of speakers, a thousand plus attendees, and we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, heads of product, head of finance and BD, CMOs and CROs, and then people in HR stage. It's going to be special. Prices are increasing every week, so you don't want to wait.
Go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today. Again, that's sasopen.com, March 16th and 17th in New York City. Tickets are almost sold out. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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Guys, lureka.be helps hotel chains make more money with their algorithm. They did about $250,000 in revenue last year, hoping for a million this year. They serve 290 customers, paying on average 250-ish bucks a month. That would be a million-dollar run rate. They're building this right now with a team of seven, and Bart Jan owns 100%, totally bootstrapped today.
Launched as a student, now 23 years old. We'll see what he does next. Hey, folks. My guest today is Bart Jan Yates. He's a 23-year-old entrepreneur who founded Loreca. Loreca is an innovative startup who boasts the revenue of hotels by an average of 24% by giving visibility optimization for rental properties. All right, Bart Jan, you ready to take us to the top?
Hi.
Hello, everyone. Hello. Thanks for having me. So just to be clear, kick us off here. You're selling software to hotel owners so they can make more money?
Something like that. We are selling algorithms. So it's not really software. It's more like an algorithm, but at the end of the ride, they make more money.
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Chapter 2: Who is Bart Jan Yates and what does his company do?
Um, so we have some of them, um, some of those, like, uh, people who are like, uh, trying to make some extra money, like from the beginning days where we were testing our algorithm on different kinds of short-term rentals. But nowadays our focus is really to the hotels, really.
And on average, on average, what are these hotels paying you per month to use your algorithm?
Well, it's around $2,000, but it depends as we work with no cure, no pay. So we take a cut on everything we earn more.
Okay, so people are paying $2,000 US dollars per month on average? Yeah, something like that.
It all depends on the region, the number of rooms, all those things.
Okay, well, help us understand that, right? So what do you price per room?
So like our pricing models look like this. So we like calculate based on data, the probability that they will obtain like the same revenue as a given year. And then we like, we put it equal, like it calls discounting and we'll put it like equal with the market demand, inflation, all these things. And with this, we like to distribute how much money we make extra.
And from this extra money, we take a cut. But this cut is like, it all depends on... What cut do you take? Most of the time, 25%.
Okay, so if someone without Loreca is going to make $100,000 a year, but somebody with Loreca is going to make $200,000 a year, you'll take the delta of $100,000 and take 25% of the upside you helped create, or $25,000.
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Chapter 3: How does Loreca help hotels increase their revenue?
Robert Leonardus Okay. Just to be clear, the 290 hotels you're working with today, the ones that were you working with last year, you helped them earn 22 million more than what their base was, right? Exactly. And you take 25% of that? Exactly. So 25% of 22 million, you guys did about 5.5 million in revenue last year.
No, that's a very good question. Um, we, we had a very long, um, proof of work where we like, we were working at very low margins, just like, um, so we could like build a proper business case to go to, uh, this bigger hotels, um, and ask for like the revenue model we use today. So it's like not even that long, like I think three months, uh, with this model.
Okay, Bartjan, I don't want to lose my audience here because this is a little bit confusing. So you told me you'd make 25%, but then you don't make 25%. And you told me you charge $2,000 per hotel with 290 hotels, which would mean you're doing $580,000 per month in revenue. It sounds like neither of those numbers are accurate. So how do you price? What do you charge?
It's 25%, but important to know is that from all of our hotels, there's a big range. Due to our early days, we still have little clients, bed and breakfast from three rooms, but we also have the bigger. So it's very hard to put an absolute number, but the first number I saw when I popped up my screen was 22. So it's very hard to really determine the number.
Well, Bartjan, what do you think you will do this year in total revenue?
We hope to be 1 million, certainly. This is like least least that we should have.
Okay. And what does that mean? You did 200,000 last year or 300,000 last year?
That's something like that.
Okay. This is great. Well, I guess, give me the backstory here now that we understand the financial model. When did you launch the company? What year?
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Chapter 4: What is the pricing model used by Loreca for its services?
That's what you're saying? Exactly. That's a really high click-through rate. How do you get so many people clicking?
We are lucky that like, so we are only like doing some local blogging and local newsletters. So like our vlog is in multiple languages, but our newsletter is like the people we send it to is not. So we are lucky that so we are in Flanders and Belgium that a lot of people need services like this, like really need companies like us to like help them move to the next step.
And this is why our blog is like heavily written.
Explain to me how your process is. I mean, you're a startup with constrained resources. Writing takes a lot of work. Your last blog post on October 16th is titled The 7 Most Important KPIs in the Hotel Business. How did you identify that title as something you should write about?
I will be honest. I had several marketing people already in my company. Now the last one left and the new one is on board last week. So it's something they decided to do some research about it, but it's not my expertise.
Okay, Barjan. On that note, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Oh, it's the book from Jeroen Belfort. I can't remember the name.
All right. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Oh, I really like a Belgian guy called Bart Verhaar. He has a construction company.
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