Hold It

Javi Fondavilla, a 33-year-old Spanish entrepreneur, had already built and scaled a retail company to 100 employees and 14 stores across Spain before age 20. When that experience ended, he spotted a massive problem: small business owners were drowning in fragmented tools and spreadsheets to manage their operations. There was no integrated platform that let a five-person team manage invoicing, accounting, HR, CRM, and inventory all in one place. Most SMBs couldn't afford dedicated tools like Salesforce or specialized accounting software—they needed something simpler, cheaper, and unified.

In 2016, Javi met Bernat, an engineer, on Facebook. Despite the unconventional origin story, they were complementary: Javi brought business and product intuition from his retail background, while Bernat brought technical depth (he'd been coding since age seven). They split equity 50-50 and launched the first version in January 2017. Their bet was radical: make it self-service and online-only, with no sales team. "Minutes to start using, but a lifetime to become a master," as Javi would later describe it. The platform covered invoicing and accounting first—60-70% of the features—then expanded to other areas small business owners handled manually.

From day one, Hold It relied on online channels for customer acquisition. They knew early that paid ads would be their primary lever. "We started using mostly Google search and social ads. And we've been scaling the paid ads channel until today," Javi explained. By spending around 250,000 euros per month on ads, they were acquiring almost 20,000 euros in net new MRR—solid unit economics for SMB SaaS. Word-of-mouth and virality accounted for 40% of early acquisition, a testament to product-market fit in their target segment.

The self-service, no-sales model worked beautifully for SMBs already online and searching for solutions. The company raised three rounds totaling 7 million euros, with the last round in April 2019 raising 5.5 million euros at a 22 million euro post-money valuation. By late 2019, they'd reached almost 9,000 customers. Gross revenue churn was a non-issue—instead, they tracked net MRR retention of around 125%, meaning expansion revenue from existing customers more than offset any churn. The 1.5% monthly net churn rate was exceptional for the SMB segment. They controlled burn carefully: spending was tied almost entirely to paid customer acquisition, which they could dial up or down. With roughly 250,000 euros monthly burn and 3 million euros still in the bank from the last raise, they remained in a strong position.

By 2020, Hold It had doubled to 3.4 million euros ARR (roughly 4 million USD run rate), averaging 47 euros per month per customer across 9,000 accounts. The team grew to 71 people, with 30 engineers. The biggest move was launching Hold It Payments in partnership with Stripe, opening a new revenue stream. In 2019 alone, customers processed 4 billion euros in GMV through the platform—invoices, receipts, and transaction data. Their financial model was conservative: they projected capturing only 6% of GMV from invoices under 1,000 euros over the next four years, which represented 800 million euros of the 4 billion in annual volume. This aligned with successful precedents like Wave, which had built a fintech-first business atop SMB accounting software. The move didn't sacrifice focus: it deepened the platform's utility by keeping transactions within the system instead of forcing users to open their bank portals to initiate payments.