SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SheetGo Hits $70k in MRR Helping You Get More out of Google Sheets
12 Nov 2021
Chapter 1: What is the current revenue of SheetGo?
So what is revenue today? Is it more like $50,000, $60,000 a month? It's probably a little bit more than that, but in that ball range. Well, $83,000 a month is a big number. That's a million-dollar run rate. Are you north of a million-dollar run rate yet? We're almost there.
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.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, 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. Hey folks, my guest today is Yannick Rold.
He's a CEO of Sheetco, which allows spreadsheet users to automate workflows. And he's doing this while advising other startups as well. Yannick, are you ready to take us to the top? Sure. All right. So tell us about the business. I mean, it sounds a lot like Airtable. Well, yeah.
The difference would be that we work with the legacy systems at companies rather than have to implement something completely new, aka Excel, Google Sheets. Tell me more about how that works. So if I use Google Sheets already, what would I add on with SheetGo? You use this basically as a layer so you can automate your workflows.
Currently, being able to automate with other information flow of spreadsheets, we are now in early release that you can actually implement it with docs and Gmail so you can actually automate the entire workflow. Well, there's a lot of potential customers here. All those things have a lot of users. It'll be interesting to see what wedge you use.
When did you write the first line of code for the technology? 10 years ago. Oh, wow. So this is an older company. No, it's only from 2016. I could only start the company in 2016 because I was in another company. The first idea happened in almost 10 years ago. And the first concepts actually happened about a year later. But I couldn't really get out of my previous engagements until 2016.
When did you have your first paying customer? What year? 2016 is when everything got started. Oh, okay. Got it. So first customer then. Who was the first customer? Do you remember? Good. Very, very good question. Or who were you targeting back then to get started? We didn't know. We knew that this was useful for anyone.
And what we wanted to do is just put it out there and see how many people would actually start using it. And we just had bets on a window door as to how many installs we'd have.
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Chapter 2: How does SheetGo differentiate itself from competitors like Airtable?
And eventually, maybe we should charge for this and see if anyone would pay for it. We really wanted the market to tell us. Okay, so what are customers paying you today on average to use the technology? About 500, 600 bucks, but then we're moving more into a customer-centric kind of company, and that's going up. That's per month, 500 per month?
Per year for single users, and now we're having more and more team users that spend 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 a year. Okay, very cool. So you get your first customer back in 2016. How many customers are you now working with today? We have more, over a thousand. Okay, over a thousand. And are those individual seats or are those logos? And then there's a bunch of seats below them. Yeah, those are logos.
Those are logos. Okay, cool. And are people, the logos that are signing up, who's usually the one signing up? Is it the CTO or the head of marketing or something else? Something else. Always someone that's trying to manage some process in their company. So educate us. We don't know your business. Who is that? Who is it? You're not helping me out here, man. Who is that usually? I know, I know.
Chapter 3: What features does SheetGo offer for automating workflows in Google Sheets?
Cool. So it could be someone that is managing a budget and is wanting to interface with other departments and have the information be automated in terms of updating how information flows to the budget holder and to actions versus budgets. It could be someone in managing sales and wants to update the field sales.
And it could be someone managing inventory or a company managing airplane parts of inventory in the US. And these align with a bunch of the templates you have on the website as well. Inventory management, cash flow, grade books. Do teachers use you a lot? Teachers use us a lot. We help them a lot with attendance tracking.
I've seen some districts work with StreetGo so that it can create student cards to see so that the 130,000 students have a profile of what's happening with them so that the professors, teachers, and districts can follow what their students are doing. We've seen a lot of cases around that as well.
So if a district signs up, that's one of your 1,000 logos, but they might sign up 100 seats for all their teachers. How many seats is a logo usually signing up for? What's the average you're seeing? Right now, it's a range. So we've moved from a user perspective to a business perspective. So we really thought about the end user until...
let's say last year, we started really thinking about accounts late last year. We're now really expanding on that. So Yannick, the question is of the current thousand, like are they usually signing up for just one seat or are they signing up for thousands of seats? What's the average number of seats? No, the average is in the It's above 10, below 100, really depends.
We're still not moving up market to that far level yet. And each CEU says that one user license is about 500 bucks a year, right? Yes, of course. When there's companies, the prices change when we have company licenses. Yeah. Obviously, you give probably volume discounts once people are signing up for hundreds and hundreds of seats. Exactly. Now, conservatively, can I do the math though?
1,000 logos at 5 seats a pop or 10 seats a pop at $450 a month. I mean, are you guys doing what? About $500,000 a month in revenue? No, we're not there. We're not even close to that just yet. Okay. When do you think you can break that? Yeah. So we... Right now, we've been really, really focused on product. And I'd say that we're now set up for growth.
So the idea is 2022 really focused on commercial team. We are, I'd say that two-thirds of the company is engineers. And we only have less than a handful of folks in the commercial team, including marketing and sales. So what is revenue today? Is it more like $50,000, $60,000 a month? It's probably a little bit more than that, but in that ball range. Well, $83,000 a month is a big number.
That's a million-dollar run rate. Are you north of a million-dollar run rate yet? We're almost there. Okay, fair enough. And help me understand growth. If you're around that today, how much monthly recurring revenue were you doing exactly a year ago? We're about...
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Chapter 4: Who were the first customers of SheetGo and how did they find them?
Um, without really focus on the commercial side, we are at about, sorry about that. It's very late here in Europe. Um, we're about, uh, almost about a hundred percent or so. Got it. So you're doing about 35,000 bucks a month, uh, about a year ago. Yeah. I'd say that's, that's a number. Yeah. Got it. And it's clear to me how you're growing. You're sort of adding more seats. I understand that.
Tell me more about your team. How many folks are on your team today? We are 19. 19 all remote. Mostly remote, yeah. Actually, today everybody's remote. We used to have a hybrid. Now we're all remote. Got it. And now have you guys bootstrapped this or did you decide to raise capital? We raised a little bit of capital. And here in Spain, the team is divided between Brazil and Spain mostly.
We raised a little bit of capital in Spain, not much. So we're actually run as a profitable company. Remote teams are all the rage right now. In fact, many companies want to stay this way, even post-pandemic. And the reasoning's obvious. Hiring talent from anywhere in the world means you can bring on better talent. But the challenges are very real.
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Chapter 5: What is the average revenue per customer for SheetGo?
About a million. Okay. And when was the last round? The last official round was 2018. We've had some convertible notes that came in, but the last round was 2018. Okay. And how much did you raise back then? We raised in dollars around $600,000. Okay. And would you do that same thing again? Do you regret raising capital? Could you have bootstrapped?
I think I do regret raising that amount of capital. I think we should have raised money in the US. I live in Europe and I'm American. So we should have raised in the US and a lot more capital for the kind of market we're going after. And I'm glad that you kind of put on the table at the beginning of this call.
But the kind of market we're going after is so big that I think this requires a lot of capital. And I would want to have been able to, uh, put more resources into commercialization. So with two salespeople today, uh, there's only so much you can grow. And so when you raised 600,000, 700,000 in 2018, what valuation did you raise at? Uh, so we raised less than I would have wanted. Um,
let's say south of 10 million. And why do you say that's less than what you would have wanted? I think that first we should have raised a lot more money because I think the value of what we do is very, very high. That's the reason. Well, just to play devil's advocate, Yannick, you launched in 2016 and it's taken five years and you're still under a million in revenue.
That's really slow growth if you want to be a venture-backed company and play that game. Sorry, I lost you for a second. Can you hear me now?
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Chapter 6: How many customers does SheetGo currently have?
I was saying being devil's advocate, you launched in 2016 and it's taken you five years and you're still not doing more than a million revenue. That's too slow growth to go be a venture backed company if you want to play that game. I agree. I agree. That's why it's not enough money. So what we needed to focus on is... Well, you raised all that money though and you weren't able to get growth.
That's what I'm saying is you raised 1.23 million and you weren't able to get growth. Why is the answer throw more money at it? Uh, because the kind of product that we're creating is so scalable that we need to put a lot of focus on product and technology. Um, and so I'd say that, uh, that's probably the reason.
Um, I do think that focusing so far so fast on, um, on commercialization when the product's not ready is not a good idea. And I'd say that we probably focused, we started taking too many shortcuts on, on the product and the tech. I have seen other companies that have gone stealth for a while getting, uh, getting traction, active users, and then going after.
And I think that's a good approach for this kind of size of market. Got it. What's your churn look like today? We're about 100% net retention. But peel back, what's gross churn look like? We're at about industry average, which is at 3% or so net. 3% of the gross monthly. Got it. So you're churning about 36% annually and you're expanding 36% for net of 100. That's right. Interesting.
Okay, very cool. What about getting new users? Are you doing any paid ads right now? Or what's the number one growth channel? It's all mostly organic SEO and marketplaces. Which marketplace drives you the most leads per month? It's Google. Google. You're in the Google App Exchange? No, it's called the Google Workspace marketplace. How many leads do you get from there each month?
We get a decent amount. I mean, I'd say it's probably half or so of our leads. I don't know how many leads total you get. I'm not privy to say. Sorry. You don't want to share how many leads you get? Why is that confidential? You've already shared revenue and valuation. Uh, yeah, I think valuation mostly, most people can discern from the information we have already.
And, um, you've shared revenue that wasn't revenue. Most people would call revenue way more sensitive than the number of leads you're getting. I'm just trying to figure out why you wouldn't share how many leads you're getting per month. Yeah. Um, Cause I think I feel, I'm not trying to feel completely comfortable in sharing as much information as, as, as you're asking.
I don't think I was privy to, no, I don't think I wasn't privy to all the information you were going to be asking before this call. Okay. We've published about 3000 episodes, one a day since 2015. Did you listen to any of the other very short episodes before agreeing to come on? I have not listened to your episodes. Then I totally understand why you would be surprised. I'm sorry about that.
I'm surprised you agreed to something without a little bit of background to know what you're jumping into. I think you're right. You and I have been going back and forth with some emails and the emails were interesting in terms of the kind of information you were sharing and I was providing. Um, so, so yeah, I think you're right. Uh, but I'm not putting as much time into this.
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