SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Venly Grows From $5k to $40k/mo Last 6 Months Helping You Use Blockchain
21 Nov 2021
Chapter 1: What is Venly and how did it start?
Currently we're just about 40, so we'll hope to end the year around 50-60k. 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 Gerbert von Dunbedehe.
After finishing his master's, he started his career as a business analyst and project manager working on IT projects. When Ethereum launched, he was convinced about the possibilities of the technology to disrupt old models and create new businesses. So he started his own business with some colleagues around this new technology.
He's now building Venly.io to help make the blockchain more user-friendly. Gerbert, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, sure. All right. Tell me who you're selling this to and how you guys make money. What's the revenue model? I'm sorry, basically a SaaS company. So building applications on top of blockchain is pretty difficult.
It's a very difficult technology and making user-friendly applications on top of blockchain is even more difficult. So we actually make it more easy for development studios, games, for example, to build user-friendly games on top of blockchain without any knowledge of blockchain. Interesting. And what are companies paying on average to use your technology? It depends.
We have multiple products live. So we have web wallets. We have an NFT API to mint NFTs. We have an NFT marketplace and a Shopify plugin to create NFTs. And they all follow a different pricing model. So based on the products that they choose to use, they have different pricing. Well, which one is the thing that's close to a SaaS product? Well, they are all with a monthly billing.
For example, the wallet, we have a widget version where people actually create a monthly wallet using social logins. It starts with a free tier. So it's very easy to use for software developers to get started. If they're successful, we're successful. And up to 500 monthly active users, it's free to use. And then it starts at $49 a month. I see.
How many paying customers do you have today across all of your product lines? We have about 50 paying customers. Five zero? Yes. Nice. Take me back to the first customer. Who was it? And do you remember how you got them? Yes, the first customer was a gaming studio from Cyprus. And I had a call with the CEO and he was immediately sold by the product.
So for gaming studios, easy customer onboarding is very important. So they want to focus on gameplay. So after 10 minutes of talking to him, he said, yes, we're going to take it. Very cool. Okay. So that was your first customer. Now, what year was that? That was 2018. 2018. You've now since grown. So help me understand, have you bootstrapped the business or did you decide to raise capital?
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Chapter 2: How does Venly make money and what is their revenue model?
Well, the product was already live. We wanted to build out a product of it. So we need to scale a little bit the product team, but mainly to build out a sales team. Okay. And so how many people are on the team today and how many are sales? So we were four people in April when we closed the seed round. Now we are 14 people.
Chapter 3: What challenges do developers face when building on blockchain?
Mainly the marketing team has been scaled and the development team, we are still looking for good business developers. How many people on the engineering team? Six. Six. Okay, pretty good. And then the rest are sort of marketing, sales, management? Yeah, indeed, yes. Mainly marketing and management. And we are actively looking for good business developers. I see.
Now, when you raise the $2.4 million seed, obviously, most people in their seed, they're selling 15% to 20% of the business. How much did you decide to sell in your seed round? It will be similar to that, yes. Okay, about 20%? Yes. Okay, so you guys, what, you raised it like a $10, $11 million valuation, something like that? The post-money valuation was $7 million. $7 million? Yes.
$7 million, okay. Very cool. So you sold about, you sold more than, you sold about 25, 25, almost 30% of the business. We are 25, 26 maybe, something like that. Do you tell me about the partners you chose to raise from? So we have High Tech GrĆ¼nder Funds, which is a very large German investor. So they have very good connections.
They took the lead and Frank really believed in the company from the first time he met Tim, our CEO. And he helped us close the seed round. Then we have the OHA Capital. It's a very new Belgian blockchain VC, but they are well connected in the blockchain space. There's BlockRocket, which is an accelerator in Germany around blockchain technology. Then there's iMac.
iMac is one of the top incubators. So they already invested earlier before the seed, and they did a fellow investment during the seed. And then there's an angel investor as well, who trained the seed. 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.
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Chapter 4: How has Venly's customer base grown over time?
What are you upselling? So the more users they have, the higher the price goes. And then we can upsell multiple services. For example, if they just use the web wallet, we can start upselling the NFT management solution, for example, or the NFT analytics. Very interesting. And did you guys decide, do you have any co-founders or did you launch it by yourself, 100%? No, we are with four founders.
Four? Yes. Did you split it evenly? Yeah, so we started it all together. We were actually all IT consultants on one certain IT company and then Ethereum launched and we all believed in Ethereum and decided to start a company together. Wow, what a story. Okay, so 25%. Do you regret that? Do you regret splitting it evenly?
No, I think it's the best and it's fair and everybody is equally involved in the project and the business. So it was a good decision. Very cool. All right, let's wrap up here with the famous five, Gerbert. Number one, what's your favorite book? Lord of the Rings. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? No, not really.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Bentley? HubSpot. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Seven. Okay, that's pretty good. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? Kids, yes. Living together. Very cool. Okay, how many kiddos? 86. You have 86 kids? No, I thought you said kilos. Sorry.
Chapter 5: What was the process of raising capital for Venly?
No, I have two kids and my wife also has a daughter. Oh, I see. I see. Sorry. I shouldn't have said kilos. I'm like, wait, what? 86 kids. Holy cow. Okay. You have two kids. That would be incredible. Yeah. I have two and my wife also has a daughter. So we have three kids in total. I see. Okay. And how old are you? I have to count. I'm 42. Okay. Almost 43, yes. 42. Happy early birthday.
Last question, Gerbert. What is something you wish you knew when you were 20? That it would be so much fun to build out a company with good co-founders. Guys, there you have it. Venly, building a tool to help make blockchain more accessible. They went from $5,000 a month in revenue now to $40,000 a month in revenue over the past eight months.
They raised their seed round just recently, raising $2.4 million at a $7 million valuation. 50 customers, 14 on the team, and six engineers. And Gerbert is hiring. He wants more engineers. So reach out. In the meantime, Gerbert, thanks for taking us to the top.
Chapter 6: How has the team structure changed since raising funds?
Yeah, thanks a lot. And we're also hiring business developers. So they're also very welcome to join us. Guys, check it out at venly.io. Thanks, Garbert. Thanks a lot. Enjoy your evening. Bye.