SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1459 He Left Growth At Buffer to Launch Amazon Retargeting Tool PixelMe, $10k in MRR
23 Jul 2019
Chapter 1: What is the background of the guest and their projects?
My new book is out on Audible, How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital. You can grab it right now. Here's what a user, Thomas Lornaviticus, said. Latke is the real deal. Five stars. Hey, Nathan, I just listened to your podcast with JLD. You killed it. I saw your book earlier last week and thought, meh, I'll wait when Kindle costs $1.99 or whatever, as I have over 150 books to catch up with.
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Guys, all of you that listen to the podcast, you were the reason I wrote the book. SaaS CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, go grab it today at capitalistbook.com. Especially if you like audio, go grab the audible version right now. Again, capitalistbook.com. He drove a lot of growth at Buffer. Then in 2017, launched PixelMe just a couple of weeks ago, said, you know what?
I'm going to transition full-time to this thing. So he's working in transitioning out of Buffer. Today, he's got a co-founding team of three folks. They have 300 paying customers right now doing about 10 grand per month, 4.5% logo churn. Again, that's monthly, making it easier for you to track and retarget clicks through any links. The specific use case, Amazon.
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 Max Berthelou.
He's the CEO and co-founder of Pixelme at night and product manager of growth at Buffer during the day. He started Pixelme as a side project with Tom and Jeremy as co-founders in September 2017. They're at six grand per month right now and more than 120K in revenue thanks to an incredible promotion that they ran. Max, are you ready to take us to the top? Sure, let's do it.
So where are you spending more of your time right now, Buffer or Pixelme?
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Chapter 2: How did PixelMe evolve from a side project to a full-time venture?
That's, that's what I did. Just, I did, I did that two weeks ago. So I'm still helping buffer a little bit for a couple of weeks and then I, yeah, I'll be free time and pixel.
Very good. Okay. So let's focus on pixel me. What's the company do and what's your revenue model? How do you make money?
Yeah, so the company is like a link shortening. And unlike Bixly, we do like we add a retargeting pixel into the redirect. So it's super useful when you like, like depend on like a third party platform. So let's say you're an Amazon seller, you have a shop and you send traffic to Amazon, you can't install a retargeting pixel. So you missed a lot of traffic.
And with PixelMe, you can put your pixel and retarget all the people who click on the link. So that's what we do. Um, and like the revenue model is, uh, so we sell like a subscription plan. We have monthly and yearly plans and based on the number of clicks you get on the links. And yeah, we have 300 paying customer now, three, yeah, 300 paying customers and like, um, almost 10 K in revenue.
That's great. So 300 customers at, at you said 10 K and a and MRR. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. So what each one's paying about 30 bucks a month?
Yeah. It's like the, uh, the RPU is like around 20, 29 or something like that.
Yeah. Very good. And, um, and put this on kind of a timeline for me. So you were obviously driving growth at buffer. When did you launch pixel me? When did you start working on it?
Yeah. So we launched pixel me in September, 2017. Um, and with my two friends and we worked on it like, for a couple of weeks before, and just launched in September 2017, had some monthly paying customers in September, and then did a great absolute promotion in October, and then started to grow the revenue.
And in October, like the big thing with AppSumo is like, they're basically undercutting your ability to charge every month because they're typically selling a lifetime plan. It's a one-time revenue bump. And then you're screwed because you have to deal with all those users that aren't paying you monthly anymore. So if that, is that the case with how you ran your promotion?
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Chapter 3: What unique features does PixelMe offer for Amazon sellers?
So are you guys all, all based, uh, in the same office or you spread out? No, no, no.
I, I, uh, so I'm living in Paris now. Um, Tom is living in Montpellier in the south of France. And, uh, one of the other guy, like Jeremy is living in, um, Around Paris, like 50 kilometers from Paris. It's a small city.
Very good. And you bootstrapped the company, correct? Totally, yeah. Bootstrapped. And usually I like to ask about growth rate. So if you go back a year ago today, how much were you doing per month in revenue? But were you launched at that point?
Yeah, we launched in September 2017 and we grew the revenue from zero to 10K in 12 months. So it's like, yeah.
Got it. So you were basically zero, you're gone from nothing to again, 10K pretty quick there. Yeah. Great. Very good. And then talk to me about kind of, you know, what you've learned from Buffer that you're now applying to Pixelme. Is there anything growth related? Like what's a unique growth channel that you're using that most people don't think about?
Yeah, the content. Content is the thing I learned the most. That's not unique. Come on, Max. That's not unique.
Give me a unique growth channel.
Oh, unique growth channel. I would say like creating a product that people share with their friends and community. It's not unique, but we don't have a unique acquisition channel. I mean, the The one is like the content is like the one which is like very good for us is like Amazon Seder.
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Chapter 4: How does PixelMe's revenue model work?
And that's when we discovered and like we started to write some content about that. And that's driving a lot of growth for us.
So what was the headline of that of that article?
It's like how you can retarget your Amazon traffic. And there's a ton of Amazon sellers out there. And there was no way for them to retarget the traffic. And we were one of the first companies. We have competitors, but we were one of the first to target those people and to help them. So, yeah. So, that's... one of the biggest channel.
Can someone replicate whatever the technology is that you've put in these links? I mean, it sounds more like a product more than a business. Can someone rip it off pretty easily?
Yeah, I think technically it's not that complicated. Technically, the only part is the phishing. You need to take care of that and be aware of you need to build a system that prevents phishing, which is pretty annoying. And so you need to handle that. And also you need to handle the fact that the server needs to be 100% uptime. So all the links need to be up and stuff.
So that's the technical part of the equation. And the rest is like, most of like branding, like content and the, the, the, the brand and like building, like, uh, like when people look for like a tool like that, or like look for a solution to like put a pixel of some, some, something. Um, yeah, they found out, but like they heard about pics on me and then they contribute your website.
So that's, yeah.
That's great. All right. Very good. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Rework from Jason Fried.
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