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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

SEO Tool Hits $1m Revenue, 90% yoy Growth, Doing $5m Seed Round Now?

31 May 2021

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 9.283 Andrea Volpini

First year, I think we broke even after one year now. 2018, I was profitable and I've been profitable since then.

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11.786 - 31.814 Nathan Latka

You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews.

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32.615 - 43.432 Nathan Latka

And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.

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43.793 - 47.959 Unknown

We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.

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48.074 - 59.151 Nathan Latka

Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.

59.692 - 63.678 Unknown

We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.

64.48 - 98.653 Nathan Latka

If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. I'll see you next time. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Andrea Volpini. He's the CEO of WordLift, a visionary web entrepreneur focusing on semantic web, artificial intelligence, and SEO.

98.994 - 116.64 Nathan Latka

The platform is a semantic platform for online content developed by working at the intersection between semantic technologies, natural language processing, and search engine optimization. Andrea, are you ready to take us to the top? Totally. All right. So what is this sitting on top of like GPT-3 or what's the underlying technology?

117.143 - 135.847 Andrea Volpini

So we build our technology from the ground up during research projects back in the past. And we technically analyze the content and build knowledge graph. That's what we do in simple terms. We also use GPT-3 now for content generation, but that's not the core of it.

Chapter 2: What is WordLift and how does it utilize semantic technology?

368.682 - 386.223 Nathan Latka

2011. Interesting. So you learn. I mean, I love this, right? You learn what your customers need. You go into SaaS, but it's harder to get started in SaaS versus agency because you have to build recurring revenue. In 2017, how much did you grow your MRR to? Sorry? How much did you grow your MRR to in 2017, your first year?

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387.385 - 402.541 Andrea Volpini

First year, I think we broke even after one year now. Broke even means that we were paying our salaries and the team at that point was maybe three people. And how long did it take you to break even? One year and a half.

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403.363 - 406.151 Nathan Latka

One, one and a half. Okay. So in 2018, you had three people.

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406.171 - 410.363 Andrea Volpini

2018, I was, I was, I was profitable and, and I've been profitable since then.

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410.724 - 414.214 Nathan Latka

That's great. Okay. So, and do you remember what revenue was in 2018?

415.578 - 422.913 Andrea Volpini

2018, we were making maybe less than €200,000. Per year?

422.933 - 435.358 Nathan Latka

Yeah. Okay, interesting. So that's less than a $15,000 a month run rate, up from €2,000 a month in 2017, your first year in business. But good growth. €2,000 to €15,000 a month is nice growth.

435.338 - 459.068 Andrea Volpini

Yeah. We had a 3x in the beginning. I think now we are getting into between 30 and 40. That's a more sustainable growth rate. We can expand a lot. There is a lot of need of improving SEO with automation. Can I ask what MRR is today? We are around 80, 90K per month.

459.088 - 463.455 Nathan Latka

Well, hey, congratulate. That means you just broke the million dollar run rate. So, congratulations.

Chapter 3: How did Andrea Volpini achieve profitability in his first year?

1329.116 - 1334.661 Nathan Latka

That may be around a five or $6 million valuation. We'll see what Andrea decides. Andrea, thanks for taking us to the top.

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1334.641 - 1335.489 Andrea Volpini

Awesome.

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