SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Wemby Hits $100k Revenue Giving Your Team Therapy Sessions
27 Sep 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're expecting to close four more clients at the end of the year. And in January this year, we start working with the United Nations, which is something that's pretty good for us at the moment. 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.
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hello everyone my guest today is alberto fantapi he has created a company called wembi.co if you want to follow along and has more than 10 years of experience in the tech sector before founding wembi he was an international he was on the international committee of the red cross in charge of hr and finance for multiple offices across two years notably in afghanistan and south sudan previous that he led the south europe south southern europe marketing team at zalando managing budget nexus of 70 million euros
Before that, he bootstrapped to short-term property rentals after reaching ā¬60,000 in revenues in the first 10 months of operations and had roles in management consulting, investment banking, and was an intern at Google. He holds a master's in management from City University in London and the ESCP Business School and has a BA in politics and human rights.
Alberto, are you ready to take us to the top? Sure. Thank you, Nate, for the summary. You bet. So Wemby.co. Let's just get the business model down first, and then let's talk about the product. Is it a SaaS model? It's an in-hybrid model. It's a B2B2C. So initially, we serve businesses, and in September, we're starting to provide to individual users. Okay, so B2B2C. That's great.
I found you through IndieHackers, and I wanted to invite you on because it looked like you had a nice growth. What's revenue today? We are about $110,000 a year. Okay, that's great. So about $8,000, $9,000 a month right now. Recurring revenue. Okay, so now that we understand that, tell us about the product. What's it do?
So OMB provides online counseling and mental health coaching to employees at the moment focused on the NGOs. So we have a mobile app and we connect employees of organizations with qualified counselors that speak multiple languages and have different cultural backgrounds in order to help them in stress, anxiety, office issues, trauma, whatever they are. In a very discreet and confidential way.
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Chapter 2: What is Wemby and what services do they provide?
How do you bill? Is it based off number of seats or number of companies using it? Or how do you bill? Sorry, once again? How do you charge? Is it based off number of seats or companies or what? How do I charge? It's a mix between the number of users that are subscribed to the service, that have access to OneBit, and the total number of sessions that are contracted by the company.
What's a session? Session is a therapy session. It's a one-on-one video call with your therapist, no matter where you are. And that is basically like the core of the service at the moment. So we match you with a therapist that is the best for you, that speak your language and understand your job and immediately as well your cultural background.
In the past 30 days, how many sessions have you completed? In the past 30 days, about 200. So we're doing about 200 sessions a month. Like since January 2019, we have... More than 2,000 sessions. Okay, total. Yeah. Of the two, let's just focus on the last 30 days. So 200 sessions across obviously five customers, right? So that's, what is it, like 40 sessions essentially per company?
And I guess each of those sessions is with different employees. Is that accurate? Yeah, yeah, yeah, correct. Okay. So let's say like at the moment, most of our sessions come from our first customer. So let's say like 70% of our sessions come from our first client. And the others are, some of them are ramping up. We've got two clients that are ramping up.
Then we start to increase the number of sessions from September. Where do you find the therapists? They're obviously not full-time employees of 1B, right? Some of them are full-time employees. Some others are part-time and some others are contract-based. I see. Okay, how many full-time folks today? At the moment, we've got about 5%. and about 17 that are actively working for us.
Okay, so you have 17 that are sort of contract therapists that you give work based off number of session requests you have. Exactly. Okay. And we've got about 100 in our proximity network that are already pre-selected and ready to start. I imagine you guard that process very close. You want only the best therapists on your platform. Explain to me how that works. Absolutely.
So we got through an extensive selection process. We got like two technical interviews and one personality test. Which personality test do you use? We don't use personality tests. We use more like the Google approach, like, you know, the Google personality fit, like saying... Like maybe personality is not like the right term, but culture fit. Culture fit. Okay, got it. Got it. All right.
Do you have any engineers on the team? Yeah. Like we got our CTO advisor and we are hiring our first engineer at the moment. Like we're about to close the process. First engineer full-time. Very cool. So you have two founders, you and then your CTO co-founder? I'm the only founder at the moment. That's been a tough ride. You're the only founder. Okay.
How are you, I mean, so how are you paying for people full-time salaries with this revenue? On the revenues? So luckily we're not based in the United States. So most of the team is based in Spain and the operations costs are a little bit lower. I see. Have you raised any capital to build this? We raised some angel funding back in 2018, but we are doing our round right now.
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Chapter 3: What is the current revenue model for Wemby?
How's the race going? It's going pretty well, to be honest, because the timing is perfect. So we are a revenue-making, run-and-profitable startup in a space that is absolutely booming at the moment, and it has never been more needed than now. So COVID gave us actually a pretty important boost in terms of acknowledging the relevance of mental health.
And we get quite a bunch of investors that are interested. And we are advancing with two of them past the initial call. Do you have a lead investor yet? No, we are going for it. So we start fundraising seriously basically mid-July. So it has been really a few weeks. And it's summer. So basically just started. And we already got like about three funds which we are doing due diligence with.
Interesting. So one of the biggest assets that any founder can have is the ability to tell a story, a vision of where you're going. Because if you raise $1.5 million today at whatever valuation and you're only doing $100,000 in ARR, obviously that's a super high multiple. that you're going to try and get.
But if people believe your story, like your team does and your customers do, you can obviously raise and not get super diluted. So help me understand what valuation will you target and what vision are you putting in front of these VCs to get that valuation? Yeah, so we are targeting like a valuation between three to five million pounds.
And the story that goes behind is really like I want to become the global psychology service platform. And today, there is nothing like that out there. And we really want to get psychology to the next level. And psychology is a very fairly young science in itself, but it's just starting to be adopted mainstream. And technology has been starting tapping into it just in the past four or five years.
So the opportunity is literally massive. And a lot of things need to get done yet. It doesn't exist. You can't imagine it. I mean, people have tried this sort of before, sort of a marketplace of therapists. Why has it not worked?
Because we try a marketplace approach at the very beginning, and scaling a marketplace requires a lot of money, and you lose control of the quality of the service that is provided. So at the moment, we are not a marketplace. We are a service provider. And as we mentioned before, we deeply control the quality of the service that we give. That's why we have zero churn and we got referrals, clients.
And that is probably like the key, like the quality of the service that in the end, it translates into results, into reducing time of recovery, into satisfaction of the users, into higher employee satisfaction, into higher productivity, lower like people leaving the company. So to do this properly, the quality of the service is paramount.
And to control the quality of the service, you need to be able to do it. If you're growing crazy and your filter for the therapist is very large, you risk not to get the best support. The issue usually with the model, though, is activation, right?
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Chapter 4: How did Alberto Fantappie get his first customer?
Active means at least a session in the last six weeks. okay, at least one session scheduled or attended in the past six weeks? I imagine a lot of people schedule sessions and then, okay, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Attend. No, no, no, no.
Not many people schedule sessions because if they schedule and they don't attend, if they cancel after like, if they miss three sessions, they risk to get like dropped. I see. Because the company's paying for it. Yeah. Well, very good, Alberto. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book. Favorite business book.
I can say the one I started, I read like a long time ago was the Lean Startup, but I agree. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? There is a CEO I'm following. Yeah, I mean, I can say classically like Elon Musk, but more recently, the founder of Airbnb, Brian Chesky. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Wendy's? You mean productivity or?
Whatever you define it as, your favorite online tool. At the moment, I think Slack is what is working really well for us. We are mostly distributed. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Seven to eight. Situation, married, single, kids? Girlfriend. Very good. And how old are you? 37. 37? Yeah. Okay, last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?
What matters in life are really important things. And it's definitely not career money. Yeah, be more specific there. So something you wish you knew when you were 20 is what? Yeah, is what really matters in life. are really the important things. And actually, it's really not money or career. And at that time, I had a wrong perception of this. Very good.
Guys, Wemby.co, a services provider, not a marketplace, to help therapists engage with your teams to keep them healthy, especially in a lockdown COVID world. They've got five paying customers, doing about $9,000 per month in revenue, so over $100,000 run rate.
They raised $60,000 from Angels in 2018, raising $1.5 million right now on a $3 to $5 million valuation as Alberto looks to scale the company. Alberto, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you so much, Nate, for having me.
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