SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping to $5M ARR: How Kukun Scales SaaS for Banks and Fintechs
21 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Pretty cushy job you quit. Yes, correct.
Chapter 2: What motivated Raf to quit his high-paying consulting job?
It was a difficult choice to make, but for me, I never looked back and I never regret it.
What revenue or what salary you gave up to go all in on the startup? Close to a million dollars a year. A lot of other products. If you have 20 paying customers, right, paying $20,000 per month, that would put your monthly recurring revenue around $400,000 per month. Is that a fair calculation? Yes, correct. How much time do you need? Is it at 2026, 2027?
When do you think you can break $5 million of ARR? I think we're poised to do that next year. If somebody's listening to this podcast and comes to you today and offers you $10 million all cash to buy 100% of the business, do you sell? All right, folks, my guest today is Raph Howery. He's the CEO and founder of Cocoon. It founded back in 2014 after a career at Kep Gemini.
He's now scaling in the space of, we're just going to call it property data as we dive in. So Raph, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I am. All right. So tell us what you do in like one or two sentences. The homepage says the PICO score, get credit for upgrades. What does this mean?
Well, we are about in sort of improving the value of every single home. It is the largest single investment that most of us make. And what we do is we help everyone get maintain it, figure out how to increase its value, how to optimize its value. And then we help those businesses that want to serve those consumers, helping that customer doing that.
So think of a wealth manager, think of a bank, think of an insurance company that wants you to invest in your home, can maintain it, improve its value. That's what we do. We build the data, the analytics and the software to enable that.
Okay. So like if I just put in, if I put in like a random address, Mansell, yeah, let's just do Austin, Texas here. What's happening on the, okay, so why doesn't you, so is this all, are you only in certain states?
No, we are national, but sometimes certain properties, if they're either new constructions or maybe there is no public data available, we can do that. Maybe try a different address. I can give you a different address if you like. Okay.
Well, let's just look at one of these, right? So Elder Miller Resort, Port Ritchie, Florida. So price 285. So I guess just to be clear before we jump in deeper here, you have four homeowners and four businesses. How is your revenue made up? Are homeowners paying you or are banks paying you?
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Chapter 3: How does Kukun generate revenue from banks and fintechs?
That's correct. Okay. Got it. For that hypothetical average customer at 20,000, right? A month. Generally, what will you price for that? Is that a thousand dollar a month contract, a million dollar a month contract, something different?
No, no, it just ranges between, it depends on the bells and whistles, but it ranges between 10,000 a month to about, let's say, 50,000 a month.
Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far, again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those.
Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Okay. And how do you decide what pricing axes to price against? Because again, you have a bunch of different products, more than 10 that I see listed on the site in terms of the things they can get from you.
And then you can price each of those differently. Plus you can price for product upsells. How do you decide that? I mean, it feels like a very complex pricing structure.
No, actually it's a pretty standard. Think about it this way. I have a bank, let's say a zero to a hundred thousand address. Think of that as your basic. And then you have a product, a product maps to those. So each product has a price. And then when you bundle multiple products, you get a discount.
So let's say the price for the cost estimator, the renovation cost estimator, which is one of our most popular products. It can range between $5,000 to $25,000 based on also like there are certain, for example, banks require a lot of InfoSec services. So that changes the price structure. But let's say it's $10,000 a month, very simplistically.
If you add two more products, each one of them is going to, let's say, $5,000, $5,000. And then you get a discount on the $20,000 that we've just added up. So it's really a very simple matrix. It's pretty straightforward. It's buy bands of addresses, buy product. And then once you have that price, you add them all up and you apply the discounts.
Yeah. Well, I mean, so, I mean, we can kind of reverse engineer, right? If you have 20 paying customers, right, paying $20,000 per month, that would put your monthly recurring revenue around $400,000 per month. Is that a fair calculation? With some caveats. Okay, what would it be?
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Chapter 4: What is Kukun's dual monetization model?
It's your baby. Are you comfortable sharing how much you've put in? And are you swinging for the fences? Is it like you're 100% your life savings and passed to work or is it like a drop in the bucket for you?
Let's say I put in north of a million dollars into that business. It's not a drop in the pocket, but it's also not going to kill me fit. But it's something that I really preserve very carefully, and I've built a very careful strategic plan to build what I wanted to do. to build and that I knew would take some time to get there.
And that's why we stayed with my own money and private money so that we can control that growth. Right now, we're at a very different stage. Right now, we got what we wanted. We built what we wanted. So going into a large transaction will be in a better position. Basically, we're at the point where we can explode sales and we're seeing it right now with a very small sales team.
So we want to grow that.
What's the team today all in? About 55 people. 55. Okay. And how many are sales with a quota, quota carrying reps? Just two. Two. Okay. Interesting. What are the rest? How many engineers?
Mostly engineers and data engineers. I would say 40 to 42 engineers. There are some, of course, then there's all the rest of the management and then you have a bit of marketing.
Okay. How do you get this business to a more efficient spot, right? Because you said it earlier, you're under $400,000 a month in revenue, which means you're under about a 4 million run rate with 55 people. That's very low revenue per employee. It's like 70 grand of revenue per employee. That's not generally seen as an efficient operation.
Right.
Yeah, that's because we have not really put a lot of energy into sales. We've only put energy in sales in the last year because, as I said, we wanted to build and control and build that moat around it. Now, this is where the transactions are going is to build the sales function. Today, I can tell you that our sales funnel is extremely healthy with just two sales guys.
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Chapter 5: How does pricing work for Kukun's services?
I'll also say that the cost per employee is very different. We have a large team sort of overseas where the rate is very different. I would say 85% of the company is between India and Colombia. Okay.
So 40 are between India and Columbia. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, that helps a little bit with burn, but still, if you're under $4 million of revenue with $7 million from private investors, $1 million from you, that's $8 million. And today you're at $72K of revenue per employee.
I mean, do you have enough cash in the bank to continue exiting your plan or do you have to go raise money today to extend runway? Yeah.
No, we can still definitely live within the cash that we have, but it will not allow us to explode, right? This is where we will need to raise money to go big and far. And that was, again, by design, because, again, part of the business is to collect all the data and refine the data to get to a point to build a user experience that works for everybody. And that was time consuming.
And so this is, we are past that point. And now we're just going to invest all of our energy in sales and marketing.
How many months of runway do you currently have left? We have about a year at least. Okay. And does that make you, every founder is different. Are you comfortable with that? Does it make you nervous?
I'm never comfortable. I'm always nervous. What makes me feel better is that the pipeline is the healthiest I've ever seen. So we are in a good position to end Q1 on a really positive note, looking at it today. So I think that's what gets me less nervous. But of course, I'll always be nervous. No founder is ever going to remain not nervous unless they are.
Fair enough. OK, let's go back real quick. We've got about four or five more minutes left here. I want to get the launch story. So you launched in 2014, obviously zero revenue there. It looks like you quit a pretty good. I mean, you were at Capgemini for many years. It's a pretty cushy job you quit, huh? Yeah. Yes, correct.
That's correct. It was a choice. It was a big choice, a difficult choice to make. But for me, I never look back and I never regret it.
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