SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
$720k in ARR SaaS Raising at $12m Valuation Right Now for App Install SaaS
20 Feb 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. He was in charge of getting installs done at his last mobile gaming company, mobile app gaming company, and said, you know, there's no good tool for this. Let me build it. He launched geeklab.app in 2019.
They're doing $60,000 a month today in revenue across 60 paid accounts up from $27,000 a month just a year ago. They're looking right now at getting a round done, targeting a $1.5 million raise at somewhere near $12 million post-money valuation. Hey folks, my guest today is Jesse Lempianen.
He's an experienced product manager, marketer previously at Rovio, leading the launch for Angry Birds, Dream Blast, and successful collaborations with legends such as Iron Maiden and the Super Bowl.
Chapter 2: How did Jesse Lempianen come up with the idea for Geek Lab?
He founded Geek Lab to solve app marketing challenges, serving top mobile gaming studios and recipient of the Best App Marketing Agency Award. It's called GeekLab.app. Jesse, you ready to take us to the top?
Hey, Nathan, thanks for having me.
Yeah, so just to be clear, you're helping these mobile app developers get more installs. Are you doing this via software or consulting?
Yeah, exactly. So through software. So in other words, like, you know, when you're scrolling on TikTok or Instagram or whatnot, and you click an ad. So on average, around like 20 to 30% of those people actually only end up installing the app.
Chapter 3: What strategies does Geek Lab use to increase app installs?
So we have a software that allows you to optimize that flow and actually make it all the way as high up to 80%. So truly multiply the amount of installs that you'll get.
Interesting. And so a lot of people use like a tool like Pendo for this on their website applications. You sort of help them do this, but inside a mobile app activation process.
Right. And we're actually one step above even. So we're actually at that exact moment when the users decide whether or not they hit the install button. So on the app stores and Google Play Store. So that's kind of our sweet spot where we tackle the marketability issues.
Understood. And give me a general sense of economics here. How much do customers pay on average per month to use the technology?
Yeah, so on average, we're a bit over $1,000 a month, $1,200-ish. And it ranges from all the way up from like $300 a month to like $5,000 plus.
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Chapter 4: How much revenue is Geek Lab generating currently?
So you asked earlier whether we're strictly software or also...
also uh on on the agency side of things so we don't have an agency uh but as you mentioned we actually won the app marketing agency award like this year so how it goes is that with like the very high end uh like tiers that pay us like 5 000 bucks a month ish uh so we actually are very hands-on in helping them not only use our tool but also building the strategies around like how they can
get the most out of our tool and, and make successful campaigns.
You upsell the strategy, you know, a one-time consulting fee of 50,000 bucks, or is that just included in their monthly plan?
We've actually, we've quite a lot like play around with this, this strategy. And so far we've found that, uh, In some use cases, it's still like a good hook to sell like once off consultancy first and showcase what we can do. And then like on that, based on that, like start the ongoing billing.
But now these days, the best solution we've found out is that we actually take three months retainer or so, and then get it from there. And typically then those like transfer it to like ongoing monthly.
Makes sense. Give me more of the background story here. When did you launch the company? What year?
Right, so it was actually 2019 when we got the idea.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Geek Lab face in customer acquisition?
I was still working at Rovio back at that time, and this was actually a problem that I had at Rovio. So I was trying to find a tool that would allow me to actually find out what would be the best app name for a new game that we were making. And I looked at the market, I saw one tool that didn't work and another one that costed like 60,000 bucks for this one test.
And I was like, OK, there's got to be an easy way to do this. Called my friend. I said, let's fix this. He said, yeah, we need two other guys to help us actually build this tool. And then we got our founding team together in 2019 and got our first sort of MVP out in 2020, right in the midst of COVID actually. So another COVID. like spawn.
There were four co-founders. Did you split equity evenly at the start? Not really.
We've done some shifts after that as well.
I mean, it's a tough conversation.
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Chapter 6: How does Geek Lab's pricing model work?
It's the first tough conversation you have as a founder, right? So help our audience. How did you guys decide who gets what equity?
So basically, we just looked at what everyone's doing. So what are the responsibilities and how much time Because we sort of split it between all the founders, jumped into it right away, full time and so on. So that was kind of everything. Also part of our company culture from starting from as founders was like no bullshit. And that's what we live by as founders and we've lived by ever since.
So that's how we got with those tough conversations, just strictly talking about things as they are and putting things on the table and being honest about things.
So 2019, you get going, first customer that year. Walk us through how many customers you have now today.
So currently today, like we have around 60 paying customers at the moment. So we're talking about like game developers, mostly 60-ish. Then we have a lot of, we have a soft spot for indie developers and smaller studios trying to make it.
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Chapter 7: What is the current funding status of Geek Lab?
So we have plenty of free users too that we- How many? Yeah. All in all, we've had over 1,000 signups and actual users.
What does that mean? How many of the 1,000 signups have actually installed the software and started using it?
Exactly. So a lot of those, like over 90% has just like kind of looked around the tool and not really had the use case for it. So the thing is that with our tool, you can actually create like app store pages and kind of these app pages without actually having the app. So we've had a lot of curiosity out of like,
actual people who would want to use the tool for business purposes, just to play around with it and see like how their own app could look like.
And for Jesse, just to say the numbers in a very clear way, a thousand have signed up today, 90% have played around, but then left. So a hundred are still sticking around and 60 of the hundred are paying customers.
Around this. Yeah. Those, those numbers are.
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Chapter 8: What future plans does Geek Lab have for growth?
Okay. Interesting. So 60 customers at a thousand bucks a month would put you at $60,000 a month today in revenue. Where were you exactly one year ago?
Yeah, exactly. One year ago, we were a bit over, close to 30K around MRR. And then we hit like 50K MRR by the end of last year. And we're now on track on reaching like a million ARR quite soon. So that's currently our next target.
And have you bootstrapped or have you raised capital?
So far, 100% bootstrapped. Oh, great. But I will say, though, that that will change this year for sure. For all the other founders as well, they definitely know the pain if they bootstrapped. For us, we've sort of seen currently that it actually limits our growth quite a bit. So, like I said, we have 60 customers now. And one of the core things for us is to...
be very hands-on on helping them to get the most out of the tool because when we can actually showcase the amount of value that our tool can bring, then we make our churn negative because they share the growth stories everywhere. Gaming community is awesome. But for us to be able to do that, we actually have to have
people hands-on helping them and having the expertise in and, and, uh, bootstrapping with our, our margins is, is, is making it so. And with these economies where we want to have buffer for our employees and make sure that they have, have a job to go into, uh, months, months ahead. Uh, so, uh,
It's just, it takes a lot of time to sort of build up that buffer and then to kind of hire again, to grow again.
Well, but Jesse, I mean, bootstrapping isn't holding your growth back per se because like everything you just articulated has nothing to do with growth. It just has to do, it has to do with people that you think you want to hire ahead of growth. Ultimately, if you hire the people, they've got to be creative enough to go get new users.
So where do you know you can spend money to go get new users and grow faster?
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