SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1152 How Screenful monopolized Trello marketplace to drive $15k in MRR
19 Sep 2018
Chapter 1: When was Screenful officially launched and what was its initial growth?
Started messing with it back in 2013. Officially launched in 2015 on Product Hunt. Has been averaging one new customer signup per day. They each pay about 50 bucks a month. They're past 300 customers, so doing about 15 grand a month today in revenue. It's currently February 2017. Back a year ago, December. They were doing about seven grand in monthly recurring revenue, some more than doubled.
They're hoping to continue that growth by turning on some paid channels this year with their team of four, which is a distributed team. Again, helping teams put up on screens and really help understand what the team flow and the teamwork is looking like. Integrations with Trello, Gira, GitHub, and Asana, and many, many others.
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich... or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Sammy Linenvuo.
He's a technologist and entrepreneur with a passion to product design and is founder of Screenful.com. Before founding Screenful, he spent a decade building machine learning models for user analytics, content recommendations, and ad targeting. He co-organizes the Helsinki Business Analytics Meetup and Atlassian User Group in Helsinki. In his free time, he enjoys snowboarding and juggling.
Sammy, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I'm ready. Good. All right. Tell us about Screenful. What's the company doing? How do you make money?
Yeah, so Screenful helps companies to become more successful in their project delivery. So it's a dashboard tool. We pull data from the tools that teams are already using, like Jira, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub. We pull the data from the APIs of those tools, we calculate some metrics, and we visualize it on a dashboard. Got it. And what's the revenue?
I mean, how do you make money? Is it a SaaS company?
It's a SaaS company. We have monthly subscriptions starting from $29 per month and going up by the number of dashboards.
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Chapter 2: How does Screenful generate revenue and what are its pricing models?
Five grand a month, 10 grand a month? Do you remember what you were doing about a year ago?
I have to think we were probably, must have been something like five, six, seven, something like that.
Okay. So how do you grow the company, right? Over the next 12 months, what are your plans? How are you going to get more customers?
So right now we are fairly happy with the situation. Recently, during the last month, we basically doubled the amount of signups we get. Before that we got on average one paying customer per day and now during the last two weeks we've got like two paying customers per day. So it seems like What we are doing now seems to work fairly well, so I think we will continue doing what we do.
We improve the product so that we get the conversion rate better, and especially we reduce the churn.
What's the churn right now?
The churn is, I think it's something like 6.5%. And that's logo churn per month? Yes, that's logo churn. And it's been higher at the moment. Occasionally it's been higher and that gets a bit nervous because you are losing quite a lot of customers. So that's the metric that we are focusing most at the moment.
Are you doing any paid acquisition? What's your customer acquisition cost right now?
we are not really doing paid acquisition. Like we've tried a bit with adverts and stuff, but well, first of all, we don't have, you know, enough money to you to do like properly paid advertising. And then on the, on the other hand, these like organic channels work quite well. So we get pretty good amount of traffic.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Screenful face during its early years?
Okay. And why do that if the organic's working?
I think it's like now that we are breakeven, we have the opportunity to experiment a little bit on those page channels to see whether they work.
So when you say you're breakeven, you mean you and your three co-founders, you pay yourselves what, like two, three grand a month and the rest helps the company run servers, costs, things like that?
Yes. So like other running costs of the company are not that much. So it's just salaries. We have three full-time employees, so we can pay decent salaries.
That's good. How serious are you about the space? Let me actually quantify that. If someone came to you and offered you $300,000 or 2x your current AR to buy the company, would you sell?
No, no, no, absolutely not.
Why not?
I think it would be too early. It's like there's a lot of things we still want to do. When we started this company, the idea wasn't to make just an add-on for Trello or add-on for Asana. It's more like we want to enter the business intelligence space and you have to start from something.
So we built our first integration and we will continue building more integrations to different kind of tools and we want to become a proper player in the business intelligence sector.
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