SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1537 Bulgarian Company Protects Online Action Using Blockchain, 20 Customers $4k MRR
09 Oct 2019
Chapter 1: What is LogSentinel and how does it operate?
launched in 2017 log sentinel again helping you understand and trace online signals even if they're trying to be erased his platform helps you make sure you always can follow that path 20 customers right now 200 bucks per month paid on average to do about four grand per month right now on revenue still early no turn about 110 000 raised to date as they look to scale with our team of seven in bulgaria and munich
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Bozidar Bozhanov. He is the founder and CEO of LogSentinel. He's a senior software engineer and architect with experience in big companies like Ericsson and TomTom. He's also a former IT advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister of Bulgaria.
He's a regular speaker on IT conferences and a technical blogger, along with being a member of the jury of International Linguistics Olympiad. He's also author of The Algorithmic Music Composer. All right, Bozidar, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. All right. What is Log Sentinel and what's your business model?
Chapter 2: How does LogSentinel ensure data integrity using blockchain?
How do you support yourself? Yeah, well, Log Sentinel is a software as a service, obviously, that provides secure audit trail. Now audit trail is a very specific technical term, but it is basically the trace that every single action that happens in the digital realm, the trace that it leaves.
So when you click on some button in some system, it should leave a trace, and this trace should not be modifiable even by system administrators, even by internal people. And how do you price? So what do people pay on average per month for this? Well, we have very, very diverse pricing scheme, starting from the free module for the very small startups.
Chapter 3: What pricing models does LogSentinel offer to its customers?
ranging from 25 to 30 euro for the very small companies for very low volume, and increasing to custom enterprise pricing for the larger enterprises. Like the banks, we are currently working with two banks, so it's a very diverse portfolio. Okay. What would you just, because I don't want to go down every customer cohort, what would you say your average is? Is it 100 bucks per month, 1,000?
Well, currently it's around 200, I think. It happens that larger customers are more interested into integrating the solution. So we're more to the upper bound. Okay, about 200 bucks, United States dollars per month. Yeah.
Chapter 4: How has LogSentinel's customer base evolved since its launch?
And what are they paying for? You mentioned volume. Volume of what? Data that they send to us. It is mostly based on that, how much logs, how much events they send to our service. Okay. And we secure these logs using blockchain technology so that, as I said, even internal people cannot modify the data. This is very important in many circumstances, including, for example, elections.
Internal actors happened to, for example, modify, in the case of previous US elections, when they hacked into a particular network, they cleared their tracks after that. And our service prevents stuff like that. When did you launch the company? Almost exactly a year ago. So 2017. And what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers? Well, around... 20 or 30 right now.
I said we're still growing. One of the problems actually with software as a service that is B2B is the larger cycle of acquisition. So we are in talks with, say, 20 companies right now, but because they have long decision processes and it takes a while.
Chapter 5: What challenges does LogSentinel face in customer acquisition?
It's not someone just registers and start using the service. They have to register. They have to get internal approval. They have to integrate it. And only then after three to six months, they get on board. Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense to me if your price point also reflects that. But you can't make a six-month sales cycle work on a $200 per month price point.
you are right and this is why we currently target the bigger enterprise companies that we install it actually on premise we also have that option but also we have custom pricing for larger volumes and larger volumes a recent example a financial financial company they they are not that big enterprise but they have a lot of logs
So we scoped them a custom offer and we are actually currently rethinking how our pricing should work because as you said, these longer cycles don't work with the lower pricing. So we want to focus on the higher end customers right now. Yeah, so you have 20 customers today at a $200 per month price point on average. You're doing about $4,000 per month right now? Well, yeah, let's say that.
Why would it not be that? Well, it's like that, but we have some very big customers in the pipeline. We have already signed, actually, contracts that will be paid upfront. So it might be actually about that, but in the current flow, you're correct. Okay. And what does growth look like?
Chapter 6: What strategies is LogSentinel implementing to scale its revenue?
So a year ago today, were you pre-revenue? A year ago today, we had no revenue. Yeah, pre-revenue. And have you bootstrapped the company or raised? We had seed investment, a very small seed investment from two private investors. Okay, so how much total have you raised? It's 100,000 euros, so that in dollars is, yeah. About $110,000. Yeah. That's interesting. And what about churn?
Have you lost any customers? No, no. No churn. Yeah, see, you're too cheap. You got to 10x your price point. I definitely agree with you. All right. And how the first 20 customers you did get, how are you getting them? It is very interesting.
Chapter 7: How does LogSentinel maintain customer retention and avoid churn?
Actually, it's half of them were inbound. We, we did have some, some marketing campaigns, but they just Googled for exactly the right solution that we had. They said, okay, we, we tried competitors, but we want exactly that. And so yeah, half of them were inbound and we had some outbound sales and personal content.
Okay, so how do you predictably scale up to 100 grand a month or 80 grand per month? Well, we are currently devising our marketing and sales strategy. We are increasing the market budget. So predictably, I hope that this would help us predictably scale to more customers. Obviously, that's an easy answer that doesn't always work, but we'll do our best.
So is it too early to talk about like CAC and lifetime value and things like that? You just don't have enough data yet? Yeah. Okay. And what's the team look like today? How many people? We're seven. Seven. And where's everyone based? In Bulgaria. Well, with one exception in Munich.
Chapter 8: What insights does Bozidar have about entrepreneurship and growth?
Bulgaria and Munich. Very good. All right. Good stuff here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, Bozidar, what's your favorite business book? Oh, I don't know. None? None. I'm actually, no, yeah, I don't read business books. I read the economic books. Give me your favorite economics book. Nudge. Nudge? Yeah. Okay, number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
3DO1 said that Bill Gates is a former CEO. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? HubSpot. And number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? I try to get eight. It sometimes goes down to six or something. Okay. Number five, how many, or sorry, what's your situation? Married, single kiddos? Waiting for my kids. Okay. So married? No. Not married.
One kiddo, not married. And how old are you? 31. Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew? Well, I wish I knew all I know now. And this is a diverse knowledge about the world. So I couldn't pinpoint a single thing that I wish. Probably I wish I knew that people were not as idealistic as me. People not as idealistic all the time. Watch out a little bit. Launched in 2017.
Log Sentinel, again, helping you understand and trace online signals, even if they're trying to be erased. His platform helps you make sure you always can follow that path. 20 customers right now, 200 bucks per month paid on average. They're doing about four grand per month right now on revenue.
Still early, no churn, about $110,000 raised to date as they look to scale with our team of seven in Bulgaria and Munich. Bozidar, thank you for taking us to the top. Thank you.
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