← SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapped to $15M ARR: How Flipsnack Scaled Digital Publishing with SEO & $200K ACVs
00:23:06
Loading summary
Transcript80 lines
- [00:00]
A
How many customers are paying you today?
- [00:02]
B
Right now we have over 28,000 paying customers today. I'm quite proud to say that probably 20, 25 will be ending at 15 million.
- [00:10]
A
So you're at 15 million of revenue today. How many folks are full time on the team now?
- [00:14]
B
I think it's 94.
- [00:16]
A
How much of the business do you.
- [00:17]
B
Still own right now? 100%.
- [00:18]
A
What's the largest customer pay you per year on a dollar basis, If I'm.
- [00:22]
B
Not mistaken, right now getting close to 200k.
- [00:25]
A
Someone came to you today and offered you a 10x multiple, so 150 million, all cash upfront. Do you take? Hey, folks, My guest today is Gabriel Sjordas. He's a serial entrepreneur passionate about building companies that aim to innovate the tech industry and make customers lives better by helping them achieve remarkable results. This is one you guys are going to love because he doesn't do a lot of interviews, but he is a killer. He has built some incredible companies. Gabriel, you ready to take us to the top?
- [00:48]
B
Yeah, for sure. Thank you for, for your invite.
- [00:51]
A
All right, well, I know that we're going to focus obviously today on your company, Flipsnack.com but you are a serial entrepreneur. You're based in Romania, I believe, correct?
- [00:59]
B
Yes.
- [00:59]
A
And how long have you been building companies?
- [01:01]
B
1999.
- [01:02]
A
That's wild. Okay, 99. So I was. I was 10 years old at that point. All right, tell us about Flipsnack. First, for folks that are not familiar with the product, I'm going to share my screen here. Why should customers use you?
- [01:14]
B
So basically, Flipsnack is a tool that brings sexiness to your presentation materials. By presentation materials, I mean all the. All the materials there are product catalogs, real estate brochures, employee benefits, internal communications, training materials, hotel brochures. So, you know, all these things that are communicating with somebody and communicate about your company. Flipsnack allows and helps you to make more interesting and on top of everything else, gives you a lot of metrics about who saw what and when, which is right here.
- [02:03]
A
What you're seeing here, in addition to password protection, things like that. I will say, guys, I. One of the big requests I got when we're building get lack as we ship the physical magazine. But a lot of people weren't home, they were traveling. They didn't want me to ship them a physical magazine. So I said, oh, I got to go with a digital thing, but I didn't want to store PDFs and it was a pain in the butt. So I actually use. I'm a customer of flipsnack, right? We send out now when people email me, I just send them this link. And this is flipsnack generated. And you can see it's beautiful, people clicking through. And what's great about this is they can also search. So if they're curious, hey, am I mentioned in the magazine? You can search and it'll show you every time your company name is searched. So not only does flipsnack just take the thing and put it in PDF format. A great interface, it also adds search to it and a bunch of other things. What other things, Gabriel, do you add to this digital experience that maybe you don't get on other platforms?
- [02:52]
B
I would say metrics is probably the most important thing. I mean, you know, we all send out materials, but we don't really know what's happening with them. Not only that, but we don't really know which parts are interesting and which are not. So I would say the fact that we'll give you all the metrics about what your visitors did, how long they spent on certain pages and so forth, is probably one of the most important features I would like to mention. Then obviously we have brand control. This is a problem that most of the brands have. Then obviously we have the real time update. So oftentimes we send some materials and we realize that we made a mistake here and there. With flipsnack, you can fix that in the link. You don't have to send anything else. When they click, the next time they click on the link, it's basically the new version up. It's very easy to share things, to distribute things. We'll issue QR codes and they just click on it and they go straight to the materials. And also probably security. Security and privacy. If you want to send some materials that you want to make sure that are only seen by the person designed to see them, this link will only open to certain emails. And from the security standp, we have been doing tremendous efforts to make sure that all your materials and everything that you have there is super secure. You know, we've been on the market since 2011.
- [04:37]
A
So, Gabe, before we go back to your lot, before we go back to your launch story, just to touch on this. So now that we have a good understanding of the product suite, what's your. What's the average customer paying you per month? Is this sort of a PLG motion? You know, a lot of people paying 10 bucks a month, or is it more enterprise? You know, a couple people paying five Grand a month.
- [04:53]
B
So basically we have both. So you know we have the self serve where we have several pricings adjusted to a lower level and then obviously we have the enterprise which is custom pricing. It's tailor fitted for every need. You know we have a huge wide range of customers from the biggest brands of Fortune 500 to smaller brands, but the needs are quite different. So we try to custom fit everything.
- [05:28]
A
Don't name the customer obviously, but what's the largest customer pay you per year on a dollar basis.
- [05:35]
B
If I'm not mistaken, right now it's getting close to 200k.
- [05:39]
A
And what do they get for that? Help us understand, is it just like thousands of PDFs, is it based off number of pages or what?
- [05:44]
B
So basically the product can be used by several parts of the business. You know you can have your marketing department, your sales department, your HR warehousing and so forth. So basically this, this customer of ours uses in a very wide array of, of use, how do you call it? I'm sorry, use case, use cases. Yes. So it's high volumes on several, on several levels, on several departments.
- [06:24]
A
And so now take us back to the story. So you launched the business in 2017. Did you raise a bunch of capital or 2011 actually? Oh, 2011.
- [06:32]
B
Okay, 2011. No, we did not, we did not raise capital back in the days we started as we started Bootstrap and we worked our way up and lately we have been seeking some funding to accelerate our growth. We had a good, very good period in the pandemics where people were spending a lot more time in front of the computer. But then we had a slowdown and meanwhile we have moved towards the enterprise world which is a very, I would say complicated and sophisticated world from several aspects. One of them being the time it takes from the initial contact to signing a deal, a contract.
- [07:19]
A
Fill on the gap here from 2011 to today. So what year did you break your first million of revenue? Do you remember?
- [07:24]
B
I don't but that's a good question. I will definitely look into that. But it wasn't too long ago we started off with a small team and then we started add more complexity to the product and it was a process that, an organic growth process and we learned a lot and we like to believe that everything that we have learned from customer experience and customer needs we have put in the product. So today I'm quite proud to say that we're very close to meeting most of our customers needs and we're very close of solving most of our customers problems.
- [08:10]
A
And Gabriel, with that customer focus, how many customers are paying you today?
- [08:14]
B
So right now we have over 28,000 paying customers. We will reintroduce the freemium version. We took it out at some point in time, and we now realize that we didn't do a very good job on that. But we all make mistakes, but we're used by millions of people.
- [08:35]
A
Okay, so 28,000 paying 2011, 2020. Are you comfortable sharing revenue today in 2025?
- [08:42]
B
So probably 2025 will be ending at 15 million.
- [08:46]
A
Okay, and where were you at? Where'd you finish last year?
- [08:49]
B
Probably 12.
- [08:51]
A
Are you happy with that growth rate?
- [08:52]
B
You know, entrepreneurs are never happy, but, you know, we need to understand that, you know, markets are shifting, needs are shifting, new players are coming. I think we can do better. But, you know, now that we are, we're more focused on the enterprise, and we are now learning how to deal with enterprise cost companies. I think the revenue for 2026 will look completely different in a good way. I think we will have a impressive growth. The way the team is working together right now, and the focus I will take us into probably the best year of flipsnack. So 2026 should be and will be the best year of flipsnack.
- [09:45]
A
So you're at 15 million of revenue today. How many folks are full time on the team?
- [09:50]
B
Right now? I think it's 94 people. And, you know, I'm very happy and proud to say that these are people. I mean, most of them are people that are with the company for 10 years plus.
- [10:03]
A
And are they based in Romania mainly, or what's the split?
- [10:06]
B
Yes, most of the. Most of the people is in Oradia, in Romania, in my hometown. And now we are going to, as part of our growth and expansion efforts, we're going to open some sales offices, probably Japan, Korea, Portugal and Switzerland.
- [10:29]
A
How many folks the 94 today are sales reps?
- [10:32]
B
Approximately 6. Approximately 6 people are doing sales. But we need to do a lot better on that side.
- [10:40]
A
Well, how do you structure? Because you're in a very tricky spot. 28,000 paying customers at 15 million of ARR means the average customer is paying $535 per year. But the variant is huge. Here you have some customers paying $16 per month, and you told us your largest customer is $200,000 per year. You can't put a sales rep on $100 per month account, but you absolutely need a sales rep on a $200,000 per year account. How are you solving this?
- [11:05]
B
Well, obviously, you know, none of our Sales initiatives are, are aimed towards the self serve people. So you know, self serve is just, you come to the site, you like it, you pay your subscription, you use it and so forth with the, obviously with the limitations given by, by your subscription. All, you know, our sales efforts are towards enterprise companies that, and we will, we'll also be able to offer special services for those special needs. But we all know that, you know, special services come with a higher price tag. So our salespeople's focus is enterprise.
- [11:49]
A
Gabriel, it looks like one of your biggest growth strategies maybe early on especially was SEO. I mean, you are a really, really high domain rating here at 91 that's generating almost 168,000 organic hits to your website per. I mean, this is really hard to do. Was this intentional? Was it accident? Tell me about your SEO strategy.
- [12:09]
B
So I would say consistency. You know, we're again, we're a company that was established in 2011. It's been a while. We have invested a lot in SEO. Obviously nowadays the things are changing with the SEO due to the AI that we have out there, but we are, we were constantly growing our SEO efforts and we also tried to make sure that everything that we say is legitimate. So, you know, it's, it's a whole array of efforts that you're doing. But you know, at the end of the day, the fact that your, your, your consistency is there, your honesty is there, you're a legit business that basically, that basically helped a lot.
- [13:02]
A
It looks like based off my sort of quick forensic analysis on your SEO background here, the most successful like tactical SEO thing you've done are templates because they're driving 60,000 clicks to your website free per month. Right? Now, if somebody else was competing with you, paying five bucks a click, right, that's, that's $3 million extra they're having to spend to get that same traffic. You also have templates driving 15,000 clicks a month. Were both those things intentional? And what does the management of both those SEO programmatic SEO playbooks look like on a weekly or monthly basis?
- [13:33]
B
So we do have a team that is handling our templates because at the end of the day, templates are part of our solution. You know, oftentimes we want to solve problems fast and, but you know, we're not creative. Creativity does not, you know, is not like a cup of coffee. You just push a button and then all of a sudden you're creative. So our templates help a lot. And I think that our customers are looking at this segment of our business and they. It's very, very useful. And we're.
- [14:13]
A
How many people on your team are focused on the se. Just the SEO playbook today?
- [14:17]
B
Not a lot. I think three people right now. It's. It's not that big, but they're not doing exclusively SEO, but they. They have extensive know. How about you know what to do in order to become SEO friendly, I would say.
- [14:33]
A
Interesting. Yeah. So temp. This is it. I mean, this is. This is your free traffic generator here, this page, huh?
- [14:39]
B
Yes.
- [14:39]
A
Yep. Interesting. And are you generating these using AI, or is it a human creating every one of these templates?
- [14:45]
B
It's humans creating it. But so what we do, we do two things with AI for now. Number one is accessibility. So if your vision is impaired, our accessibility tool will be able. That's powered by AI, will be able to help you understand the feel of the content. And I think my colleagues did a great job with the accessibility tool. It might not sound that important, but at the end of the day, I think it's our responsibility to make sure that everybody has access or everybody is able to understand the messages that we're trying to send with our materials. So accessibility is one of the things. And now we're getting ready to launch a tool that will allow you to better find your way around our features with AI. So basically you'll tell them, okay, I want to do this. And then our AI will take you to the area that you need to work with to do certain things on your presentations.
- [16:07]
A
Okay, Interesting, Interesting. Okay, so AI in the app tell people click around faster, get what they need quicker. You grew with the SEO playbook. Any other growth tactics you use to break 15 million of revenue, like affiliates or resellers or anything else? Paid marketing.
- [16:22]
B
We just started affiliates and also we are now starting with influencers, obviously in the areas that are most interesting for us. You know, like again, hotels, real estate, training materials, employee benefits. So. So we're trying to find influencers that are in that area so that they can tell their audience about us and about how fast and how well we solve their problems.
- [16:58]
A
And are you spending money on paid advertising per month right now?
- [17:00]
B
And if so, about how much we do spend? I think we're spending around 120, 140k a month.
- [17:10]
A
And is it on Google or which platform?
- [17:12]
B
I think there are several platforms, but probably the most significant one is Google.
- [17:20]
A
But are we using an agency for that or it's in house?
- [17:23]
B
No, it's in house. Basically, we do it on our own. We're trying to see if Balancing those budgets towards influencers might make a difference, but, you know, we're eager to see that. And also, you know, working with, with people in, in different industries would probably be able to help our growth.
- [17:48]
A
Interesting. And just to confirm here too, you mentioned you were bootstrapped at the start. Are you still bootstrapped today? How much of the business do you.
- [17:54]
B
Still own right now? 100%.
- [17:57]
A
Okay. So this is amazing. It's rare you get someone 100% bootstrapped. Now you have. If you're comfortable sharing, obviously we've worked together. Are you comfortable sharing how we work together and what that was like?
- [18:05]
B
Maybe.
- [18:05]
A
How much? For sure?
- [18:06]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [18:08]
A
So what was it like? Why did you come to Founder Path for Capital? Obviously you want to stay bootstrapped, but what was the capital need?
- [18:13]
B
So basically exactly the, you know, the expansions, the trend that we want to accelerate, we want to move a bit faster. There's a lot of learning that we need to do. And in this world, to learn costs a lot. So we wanted to make sure that, you know, we, we are capital efficient. And also we, we have a backup, I would say. And then we have tried and we're trying new things now. And once they're confirmed, we will invest more and more into those. Into those areas. So your funding was very beneficial to us. And I'm assuming that by the middle of the year, you will be able or we will be able to see the benefits of the funds that we got from you. And obviously we will both take. Both take the benefits of these fundings.
- [19:26]
A
Gabriel is a tough guy to negotiate with. I will tell you. We've deployed almost a quarter billion dollars on 250 million. And his CFO is a guy named Andre. My lord beat me up. But it was a work side, obviously, partner with you. And it all started because I love the product. I actually used the product before I even met you. And then you reached out, I said, oh, this is a natural fit. Are you comfortable sharing, Gabriel, how much you took?
- [19:46]
B
I don't think it's necessary at this point, but what I would suggest is when we have very clear and interesting results, we both do another episode of this where we deep dive into everything.
- [20:04]
A
We would love that. Tell me more about what you want to do the business going forward. Obviously, you're moving to the enterprise. You're a serial entrepreneur, so you have a lot of things you could spend your time on. You're at 15 million bucks of revenue. If someone came to you today and offered you a 10x multiple so 150 million, all cash up front. Do you take the deal?
- [20:20]
B
You know, there's a thing never seen ever. It's. It's obviously interesting, to be honest. My full focus right now is on growing the business because I strongly believe that my colleagues have crafted a fabulous product. And what I want to do now is to push it. We're lacking awareness. One of our. This is probably the biggest problems. The biggest problem that we face is that we don't have enough awareness. Now. Obviously, at the end of the day, we're all working for money. So if somebody would, would say, okay, I'll give you today 10x, I would say, perfect, let's talk back in August, September, and then we'll see what happens. But right now I'm exactly. My focus is exclusively on to the growth of the product because again, I think it's a fabulous product.
- [21:18]
A
All right, well, Gabriel, if people want to check it out, test the product, it's very easy to try it. Where can they find more about you online?
- [21:24]
B
Well, obviously Flipsnack.com and what we could do is throw in a discount if they come from here. So maybe we'll come up with a Nathan discount or something. So if they will test it out and like it, they will also get a discount due to the fact that they are your viewers.
- [21:46]
A
We love that. Let's just come up with a code now. And so since we're recording, can we do Latke podcast? We can put in your system later.
- [21:53]
B
Perfect. Yeah, let's, let's do this. What would be what? Sweet discount. Let's figure that out.
- [21:59]
A
Well, your pricing. Yeah, your pricing starts at 16amonth and goes up to 85amonth. So we'll figure that out later. But yeah, guys, check it out again. I love the product. I mean, it's so easy for me to promote stuff that I use, right? So I love the product. I'm also obviously invested on the debt side via Andre and Gabe and his team. So check it out. Flipsnack.com but in summary, again, serial entrepreneur launched Flipsnack in 2011. Bootstrap book 12 million of revenue in 2024. In 2025, 15 million of revenue, guys, 28, 000 paying customers, 94 folks full time on the team, only six sales reps. They've really leveraged incredible SEO. Over a hundred thousand clicks per month coming to their template library to get a lot of free users to convert to paid. And then they upsell those folks to larger accounts. So much so that their largest customer is paying $200,000 per year. I mean, talk about a range that $10 a month freemium user basely freemium to 200,000 ACV. Gabriel's got the world in front of him in terms of growth as they pivot more to the enterprise in 2026. Check it out@flipsnack.com Gabriel, thanks for taking.
- [23:03]
B
Us to the top. Thank you so much, Nathan. Thank you.