The Ledger
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Almabase plans to avoid massive VC rounds in favor of debt
“We're certainly going to be not going to be type A, which is like raise tons of money and hopefully get there. But yeah, we're more of, I mean, at this point, money is not really our bottleneck. There's A few things that we're solving for, but whenever money i…”
Almabase's pricing model would fail if built entirely in San Francisco
“If I were to build this team entirely in, let's say the San Francisco Bay area, it's never going to work out with that, that kind of price point.”
Transaction-fee-only pricing attracts low-value, noisy SaaS customers, says CEO
“I don't really see a lot of value in just saying, just pay as a cut because we're going to law, we're going to get a lot of, you know noise in terms of the kind of customers that we attract. We want to be really focused on the kind of customers that, that it m…”
Almabase adds donation percentage cut to SaaS revenue model
“It's a SAS model primarily, but we've been recently over the last, I would say, 12 months or so, we've started making some revenue out of the cut of the donations as well.”
Almabase average contract value is $6,000 to $7,000 per year
“So, I mean, it ranges between, you know, I would say 4000 dollars a year for some of our products to somewhere like 15, 20,000 dollars a year for some of our products. But if I had to like just take an average across all of our customers, all of our paying cus…”
Alumni relationships rely on loyalty, not true connection, says Almabase CEO
“The relationship between alumni and their alma mater is just based on loyalty and not like a true relationship, which is where we realized that this needs to get fixed”
Almabase serves 240 institutions, with over 90% based in the US
“So today, in terms of paying customers, we have 240 institutions. A majority of them are in the U.S. About 90, 92% of them are in the U.S. Roughly a half and a half split between independent schools and higher education.”
Almabase experienced zero customer churn during the COVID-19 pandemic
“Our existing customers have, there's been no churn at all.”
Almabase repays 1.4x cap over three years for revenue-based financing
“So we are doing it at 40% you know, over three years. So for example, if we raise a hundred K, we're repaying 140 K and the way the repayment works is it's a cut or it's a percentage of monthly cash receipt, right?”
Almabase's revenue-based debt takes 9% of its early cash receipts
“I think they basically put a cap in terms of for the first, I think, million dollars per year in cash receipts. It's about nine percent, if I remember correctly. And then between, from anywhere over one million to, I think, 1.5 or two million, it's five percen…”
Bank of America's $50K debt cap pushed Almabase to revenue-based financing
“We did, I think, talk to a bank and bank of America is our banker. We did talk to them, but there was lots of complications. And also they said, we can give you a maximum of 40 K, 50 K, something like that, which wasn't sufficient at the point that we raised. …”
Almabase reaches $1.1 million ARR and over $90,000 MRR
“So we're, in terms of ARR, we're about 1.1, close to 1.1 million. So 90, 91, 92, something like that in terms of MRR.”
Almabase operates with a $65,000 to $70,000 monthly spend
“Our current monthly spend is about 65 to 70 K per month.”
Almabase generates over $20,000 in monthly net profit
“Yeah, a little over that. I mean, because one is the, I mean, we spoke about sort of the recurring revenue, but we also have other sources of revenue, which is, like I said, a little bit of transaction charges.”
Almabase projects $100,000 to $150,000 in setup fees for 2020
“So roughly right now, for example, this year we're projecting that to be about a hundred and a 150 K in terms of like one time, obviously that's not going to record next year, unless we get new customers.”
Almabase processed over $2 million in donations on Giving Tuesday 2020
“And on that day, I think we processed a little over two million dollars in terms of donations for our customers.”
Almabase averages $3,500 to $4,000 total CAC per new customer
“I think our CAC from a lead gen perspective is obviously different for different channels, but I think it averages out to about 1500 to 2000 dollars per customer in terms of lead gen. And then if I add the cost of the account executive as well, including salar…”
Almabase operates with a CAC payback period of six to nine months
“So yeah, the payback that we look at is somewhere between six to nine months in terms of payback.”
Almabase saturated top Indian universities before pivoting to the US
“We unfortunately did that for about three years sold to pretty much all of the top tier institutions in India. And then we were like, okay, where do we, So we have Bits Pilani, we have IIT Bombay, we have Pan IIT you know, Christ University, et cetera. So some…”
Almabase raised $500,000 in equity funding between 2014 and 2017
“The total money we've raised is about 500 K during that time.”