SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EasyGenerators Grows 100% YoY to $4.2m Revenue, 1200 Customers
22 Dec 2020
Chapter 1: Where was Easygenerator a year ago in terms of revenue?
Where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember? Yeah, at the end of the year, we were just over 2 million. So 234 in MMR and just 2.1 million in the yearly revenue. We will be just under $4 million this year, at the end of the year. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed.
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There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Casper Spiro.
He's built a great company. He's been an industry leader in the L&D space for over 25 years, learning development space. He's made an impact on this ever-evolving field as CEO of the fast-growing scale-up Easy Generator and as an e-learning blogger at casperspiro.com. He's also an author and a speaker at various e-learning conferences around the world. Casper, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, I am. All right. So what is Easy Generator? And are you guys a pure play SaaS business? Yeah, it's a pure SaaS business where we enable people to basically share their knowledge. So to capture their knowledge and share it with other people. So that's what we do. And how does walking through all that works? So it's very simple. So it's an altering tool. So we started out with courses.
So you can just write an e-learning course by yourself. So the problem that is there that is creating content in a company is expensive, slow, and you can't maintain it. So what we do is enable the people who have the knowledge to do it themselves. So we started with courses and right now we are expanding into what we call resources like one-pagers, checklists, things like that.
So to make it really easy to share your knowledge. And what are these customers paying on average per month? So that is around, the RP is right, $560 right now. $560? Sorry, that will be next year, $360 is next year. $360 a month right now? Yeah, that's R3, yeah. And it's really different. We have really small and really big customers, but that's the average.
What's your largest contract, out of curiosity? Just under 100,000K in euros. Wow. A bit over in dollars. Yeah, it's over 100,000 in dollars. What is that customer paying for? So they pay, those are enterprise customers, and they pay for an unlimited contract. So basically anyone in their organization can use Easy Generator. And that can go into the thousands of people sometimes.
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Chapter 2: What is Easygenerator and how does it operate?
We're almost there already, or we are there, basically. So we're looking at last year, we grew 87%, so we want to top that. So in this, we want to go in the direction of 90%. Yeah, so you're doing what? Last month, you did 310,000, 320,000 in sales? Yes, correct. Something like that. And where do you think you'll get growth in the next 12 months? You mentioned ARPU expansion.
Last month was close to 400K. It's 369. Okay, so if you're at 370, then your AR is going to be greater than 4 million, not lower than, right? I have, so I will end the year on 432. No, it will be 399. $3,960,000. Why is that? So if you did $370,000 last month, multiply that by 12 to get a forward-looking run rate, that puts you at $4.4 million in an annual run rate.
Are you giving me actual cash collected over the past 12 months from your monthly recurring plans? Yeah, no, I'm actually looking at the numbers because, well, the issue is we register everything in euros. So I'm checking if I might have made a small mistake there. But last month in US dollars, you did about $360,000. Yeah, last month. So in euros, it was $330,000. So that is around...
Yeah, sort of 1.2, yeah, 360. Yeah, okay, very good. Yeah, so I mean, 360 last month times 12 would put you over a $4 million run rate, you know, wrapping up the year, which is obviously great. But let's not get stuck on that. So talk me up the rest of the business. So as you've driven this growth, have you bootstrapped or did you raise?
No, it's still 100% owned by the original company we started from. So we just are bootstrapped, yeah. Okay, that's great. And what's churn look like? The churn is around 10%, I think. It's really different for our enterprise customers. It's way lower than for the individual customers, but on average, it's like 10%. Per month or per year? Per year.
Okay, and when you take that gross churn of 10%, how much expansion do you get yearly? So it's about 32%. So the net retention is like 122.
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Chapter 3: How much do customers typically pay for Easygenerator?
That's great. That's a great net retention rate. And these economics sound good so far. CAC is obviously a big part of unit economics. How much are you willing to spend to get a $360 a month customer? So it's around the $4,000 mark. And where are you spending that capital? So a lot of the capital will be, so what I said, 60% outbound, 40% inbound.
So with outbound, a lot of people, BDRs and account executives, and reaching out to people, calls calling. And the inbound, of course, is a marketing team, but the most expensive there are the campaigns that we run. Yep. And for your outbound crew, what base do you give them? Like if someone's starting with you as an account executive, what base do you give them?
And then what quota do you target do you give them? Uh, so they, uh, the, the goal for an account executive is that, uh, he will probably reach a multiple of five or six times, uh, of his salary in, uh, in, in, in revenue sales. Yep. So what do you start people at? If they join you today as an account executive, what quota do you start them out? Uh, the quota, the sales quota they have. Yep. Um,
I think we will start really simple with a thousand euro recurring revenue and build from there until we reach the target. It depends a bit on how much experience they have, but three to six months, I think, until they reach the goal. So you want them to add a thousand dollars in new monthly recurring revenue each month? At the beginning, yes, but that needs to grow.
At full ramp, what does it look like? Sorry? When they're fully ramped, what does it look like? Um, I don't know that by heart, I have to say, uh, how many sales reps do you have with quota? We have like five, uh, account executives and I think eight BDRs with the BDRs have quota or no. Yes, they do. Yeah. But that, that, that is in, in, in, in sales qualified leads, of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Not, not, not closed commission. Yeah. And how many engineers are on the team? So we have like, so we're expanding as we speak. We have 14 in Ukraine and we are hiring a remote team around Dubai. So that's now six. So it will be around 20, a bit more, maybe even at the beginning of the year. Okay. And so what's the team size today total? 70 in total. 70? Yes. So 70 total.
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Chapter 4: What was the journey of Easygenerator from inception to now?
There's 20 engineers. There's five quota carrying reps. That's 25. Where's the other 45 employees? Yeah, so of course the development team is bigger than just the developers. We have QAs, we have designers, we have a product owner, we have a CPO. So that counts up. We have a support team that does live support almost around the clock. So that is like, I think, close to 10 people now.
We have a customer success team of five, six people. a marketing team of five, six. So then that's up. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. Very cool here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book, Casper? So that probably is a book you don't know. It's called Leading Without Command. It's an old book. I reread it recently.
It's really about output management. And it really helped me to shape the way I formed the company. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? It's a hard one. So probably would go for Elon Musk at the moment. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business? Oh, those are probably two.
So it will be Zoom, which allows us to do the business because only 18% of our business is in the Netherlands. So we do worldwide sales from the Netherlands, thanks to tools like Zoom. And the other tool would be Intercom because we have really great support and Intercom makes it possible. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? We'll be around six. Okay.
And what's your situation? Married, single kids? I'm married already together for more than 40 years. And my kids are like 30, 28, and 25. Three kids, 40 years. Wow. And how old are you? I'm 58. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? Probably always trust your intuition. I made some bad decisions while I knew that I was doing the wrong thing. Guys, easygenerator.com.
He grew it to $250,000 a year in sales back in 2013 at his parent company before spinning it out. He now has a rev share agreement with the parent company, which still owns 100% of the business, but he's grown it significantly. $4.2 million run rate today, up from $2.1 million run rate just a year ago. So over 100% year-over-year growth.
Largest customer pays $105,000 a year, but the average customer pays $360 per month for their tool. Over 1,200 paying customers today. Churn is less than 10%. annually, net revenue retention over 122% with a CAC payback period of under 11 months. Casper, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan.
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