SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Ukraine Based Virtual Event SaaS Grows 4x to $800k ARR over the last 12 months
24 Jul 2022
Chapter 1: What is the background of the guest and their company?
Now we are generating 200K per quarter and we have like $2 million in pipeline. That's 80 deals right now 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 these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Yuri Filipchuk.
He's a CEO and founder at Party.Space. He's a professional opportunist, financer and investment banker with six years of experience in crypto and traditional capital markets.
Chapter 2: How is the current situation in Ukraine affecting business operations?
Also loves barbecue, a big enthusiast based in Ukraine, Western part of Ukraine. Again, building a business. Yuri, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Hey there, Nathan. Thank you for inviting me again. You bet. I'm excited. it's been a while, huh? Yep.
Chapter 3: What unique features does Party.Space offer for virtual events?
Yep. Hey, so, so before we jump in, obviously sensitive situation, Ukraine, we're all rooting for you. Are you safe? Your team safe? Are you good? Oh, thank you for asking. Yeah. Well, We are safe. We work. Party space is operational. But the situation here is indeed hot. And really, I still can't believe that it's a full-scale war in the 21st century going on here.
So the majority of my team relocated from the places where they lived. Now we are in western parts of Ukraine. And we do whatever we could to help Ukraine. We are running fundraiser events. We are donating and helping as much as we can. Well, we appreciate that. I hope those of you listening, if you love what Yuri is building, you'll go sign up for his product.
Chapter 4: How does Party.Space generate revenue from its clients?
Check it out. Again, it's partyspace.com. Yuri, what's the product do? So now PartySpace is the metaverse for remote teams and online communities. And yes, you're going to ask right now that metaverse is the buzzword. What's behind that? And I can tell you that metaverse is the environment for engaging events right in your browser.
Engaging corporate or community events in immersive 3D environment where people can meet, speak. We have video conferencing tools for the communication. We have immersive environment and game mechanics to entertain everyone. And help me understand, customers that are paying you today, what are they paying you on average per month? So... We are still charging our clients on a per-event basis.
So when we talked last time, I was directly aiming to do the subscription. But it took a year and a half to build the sales service product because 3D and metaverse is not a joke. And it turned out to be much easier. heavier task. But now we are in alpha stage. We have 42 testers who are running their microverses.
Chapter 5: What lessons were learned from customer interactions in the past year?
That's how we call those smaller metaverses they have created for themselves and their communities. And we are also running one of events for big companies. So I can name drop a lot if you don't mind. So Zapier, Slack, Tremorly, they are our customers. Mm-hmm. And have you... So have any of the 42 converted into paying customers? So our beta test is currently free of charge.
And... But you told me last time you had generated some revenue, right? You generated like 100K or 200K from... Was that a one-off thing? So when we talked, we generated 200K from 30 clients with the majority from one big client. Last year, we... We also, we generated 200K over the course of year with 60 clients conducting events with us.
And now just in, now we are generating 200K per quarter and we have like $2 million in pipeline. That's 80 deals right now there. That's great. 200K per quarter is again, $800,000 yearly in terms of run rates. So you're growing nicely. What are you learning as you add new customers? Sorry, what are we learning?
So we learned, actually, everything changed for us last year when people started calling 3D products a metaverse.
Chapter 6: How has the metaverse concept influenced customer engagement strategies?
And then we decided we should build something that we can show to our customers because corporates are not very open about disclosing what we built for them. And we created Doji Temple. You can see it here. So it's a virtual temple dedicated to Doji Meme. And that was the beginning of our collaboration with communities.
So Doji community, Doji fans, they started gathering regularly there for community events, community calls, etc. And at that moment, marketeers and people who are managing communities decided that Metaverse is the next big thing for marketing. So we started selling our product to HRs, people experience managers, but now we have the majority of our revenue coming from marketing budgets.
From marketing budgets? Yeah, marketing bunch. And so at the moment, like we're like the metaverse market is really young and everyone is still figuring out what's going to be the best use case for it. So I can tell for sure that the wow effect is something that works really well. And marketing people, PR people, they want to impress the customers. And that's why they're looking for party space.
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Chapter 7: What funding has Party.Space secured and how is it being utilized?
a higher valuation and less dilution, which is the name of the game, less dilution. Check it out today at founderpath.com forward slash products. That's plural forward slash valuations. Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. Now, last time we chatted, there was eight people on the team. How many are full-time today? Oh, we are 26. 26.
And have you raised additional capital? Oh, yeah. In total, we raised almost $2 million. So you had $160,000 raised when we chatted in 2020. So you raised another, what, $1.9 million last year? Oh, yeah. We raised $1 million last year. And this year, we raised more. How much did you raise this year? So this year, we raised $500K. $500K. And would you consider that like a Series A or a seed round?
Chapter 8: How can businesses outside of Web3 benefit from using Party.Space?
I'm still prone to call this a pre-seed, and we are quite comfortable with it. Actually, we raised our last 500K from Web3 people from the DAO of 70 funds. They invest in tools for DAOs and communities, and they brought in those 42 alpha testers like that. So we see a lot of traction from Web3 market. And I can say like Metaverse is the preferable UI for Web3 products.
And Yuri, as the crypto markets crash right now, is that impacting you at all? Oh, yeah, for sure we felt that. So we work with the community and marketing budgets of DAOs and huge protocols. And last month, they immediately just cut all the costs there, leaving just a very small thing to cover salaries. And the crypto marketing is on pause.
But I cannot say that about all projects because we still have some projects other crypto projects and a lot on their community spaces, micro-verses and stuff. We work with NFT collections, DAOs, protocols, and guilds. Can anyone listening right now that's just a B2B SaaS company, could they use you or do you have to be in Web3? Oh, so no.
So that's the problem, actually, because when you do the content and marketing for businesses, Web3 people won't even look there. And when you do that for Web3 people, that's not of interest for traditional businesses. That's why we have like... We are working now dividing that into sub-brands where we're going to continue working with businesses and enterprise clients.
And I can say that we see increase of like we work with larger corporates right now. So probably 200 employees is the smallest number of people in our client right now. Very good. Well, we're certainly rooting for you. And it's nice to see you growing about 4x, 3x since the last time we spoke. If people want to check out the tool, they can go to party.space, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Please go there. Test it out. Check it out. Sign up for demo. Yuri, let's wrap up here with the famous... Oh, go ahead. Do you want to add something else? Yeah, yeah. I wanted to add that last time we spoke with you, after that, in just two weeks, we received 250 emails of people who were interested in the value proposition at at that moment of the data during corporate culture.
So we talked to a lot of them and that was really helpful. So Nathan, thank you a lot. That provided a lot of value for us and helped us to figure out our ideal customer profile. Well, I love that. I'm glad my audience is supporting you and trying you out. And again, I think this is really the future.
And you've built in really incredible, I mean, Halloween-themed, corporate-themed, you know, cafeteria-themed sort of event spaces. And we're excited to see what you do next. So let's wrap up here, Yuri, with the famous five. Number one, favorite book? Oh, still Sanzu the Art of War. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Not yet. Not yet, right? a lot of them.
You're a busy guy. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building party space? Notion and Myra. And number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Still eight hours. Okay. That's the only way to keep rolling. And situation, married, single kids? Now I have stable relations, and I have a girlfriend. That's great. She's here with me. Hi, girlfriend. All right.
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