SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1596 How He Got His First 700 Customers at $2/seat for Scrum Slack Bot
07 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: How did Alex Kistenev earn money online since age 16?
team of seven in siberia he's building this tool called stand up which is essentially a scrum bot for slack helps you manage kind of your you know your two-week sprints your stand-ups all that stuff all via slack founded in 2016 they're now doing about 15 000 per month in revenue they get that revenue because 700 customers or logos pay him for about six seats six seats in
Each seat is a minimum of $2 in terms of the price point. It goes up to three or four bucks per seat, but scaling nicely, 0% net revenue churn per month. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Alex Kistenev. He has been earning money online since he was 16. At 34, he hasn't ever worked for anybody.
Chapter 2: What inspired Alex to open a co-working space in Russia?
In 2014, he moved to the south of Russia to open a co-working space near the sea. Later, it became a school of robotics program. for children. In 2016, he co-founded Standuply, one of the most popular Slackbots. That's what we'll talk about today. Alex, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Let me get one thing straight first. Standuply, is this a side project?
It's a Slackbot or are you actually making money on this? Well, first, it's a full-time project for me, and I've been working on that for the past two years. And recently, it became profitable, so I can name it as a real business. That's great. Okay, so you founded it in, you said, 2015? 2016. 2016. Okay, and you said it's profitable today. That's great.
Tell us what it does and what people are paying for. Sure. So, StandUp is a Slack bot for StandUp meetings and team surveys. And it's very handy for remote teams because when an Agile team has to schedule a stand-up meeting, sometimes they face troubles getting at the same time on Skype or they can't get together in the room.
And so using stand-up, they can get a stand-up meeting asynchronously via Slack. And we found that it's really useful It's a really pain point behind that service, and we are seeing dozens of teams signing up for that every day. And we're on a mission to build a digital scrum master based on Standup.ly that will handle scrum process for every agile team in the world.
And what are people paying on average for this per month? So we are purely a subscription service, and we charge from $2 to $4 per user per month. Okay, got it. And do you sell directly to the user or do you sell to the head of the team? So it's self-service and teams on average from six to 15 people purchase the service and bottom up in terms of distribution. That's great.
So today, obviously you're two, three years into it. How many seats are paying for the platform? It's a good question. I was thinking about our metrics and I don't have any counts in terms of seats. I can tell you about our customer base. So we have about 700 customers so far. Okay, 700 customers and you said each customer has at a minimum six seats, correct?
Yeah, starting from three, but on average it's like from six to 50. Okay. Well, if I take 700 kind of companies and six seats per company, that's 4,200 seats multiplied by, obviously multiplied by then your $2, sorry, not 4,200 seats.
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Chapter 3: What is Standuply and how does it function as a Slack bot?
That would be 700 times six. Yeah, 4,200. That's right, 4,200 seats. If I multiply that times your $2 price point per seat, it puts you at about, call it eight or 9,000 bucks per month. Is that accurate? So let me tell you more accurate data. Our current MRR is 15K. And so to reach profitability, we had 25K in revenue in May. Okay. Sorry, you said your current is 15, but last month you had 25?
Like our MRR is a bit different from revenue because some customers pay for annual subscriptions. So speaking of MRR, it's about 15K, but we counted 25K in revenues. On a cash basis because of annual payments. Okay, very good. That's great. So $15,000 per month. And where were you a year ago? What's your growth rate? Well, actually, a year ago, we were at zero.
Let me tell you where we were in December 2017. You like to ask about December, I remember. So in December we were at 3K MRR and so we do buy five times this year. And are you bootstrapped or have you raised capital? Yeah, we are bootstrapped. Okay. How much of your own money have you put in?
I didn't really count because we put our money with my co-founder to make sure our programmers have ramen to eat. So less than $100,000, a small amount. I think more than that. Okay, more than that. All right. All right, fair enough. Talk to me about churn. What's your churn today? So our average churn is about 3%, but it's including all our customer segments.
And we have a customer segment that's purchasing very small, basic land for, let's say, three users. And they churn a lot. And other customer segments that are Our best customer segments, they churn at about 1%. Okay, but a way to ignore whether a customer pays a lot or a little is to talk about revenue churn instead of logo churn. What is your revenue churn? Our revenue churn is about zero.
Okay, so no revenue churn each month. It's about zero. Sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more. Got it. Depending on if you drove upsells or things like that. That's great. Okay, very good. And where is most of the growth coming from? How are you getting new customers? So, we are getting new customers from Slack App Director.
It's an amazing tool for every Slack app builder because you'll be listed there and your customers can find you there. Also, we do a lot of content marketing and we for our launch in different versions on Product Hunt. So we did like nine launches on Product Hunt in 18 months. And we have to work to get people to know about us. And what's your team size today? Seven people. Seven people. Got it.
Are you guys all based there in Siberia or are you remote? So our main office here in Siberia, but some part of our team is remote. Okay, good. So seven people between Siberia and remote. And besides the Slack channel as an acquisition kind of channel, what is your fully weighted customer acquisition cost? Do you know?
It's another good question, which I don't have any answer on that because we don't spend money on paid ads. We spend like maybe 3K overall on paid advertising. That's per month? No, in total. In 18 months, we spent less than that. Cool. Yeah, that's the reason I asked fully weighted, right? So a lot of people will say, well, we have no cost.
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Chapter 4: What pricing model does Standuply use for its services?
Well, he's paying himself a little bit, but he's the same way. Okay, why does he get money and you don't get money? We just decided it. Okay, very good, very good. All right, Alex, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
That's a tough one because I have a huge list, but the latest book I read, it was Utility, how to make your marketing useful for your customers. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now? I like what Patrick Campbell is doing in terms of educating companies. Patrick who? Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell. Oh, ProfitWell, yeah. Yeah, good.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? It's WorkFlowy. WorkFlowy. Let's go to number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? Seven. Okay, and what's your situation? Married, single, do you have kids? Soon to be married. Oh, congratulations. That's good. So no kids yet, huh? All right, and how old are you? I'm 35. Okay, Alex, last question here.
What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew? Well, I was doing a lot of things at once, and later I understood that how focus is important, so I wish I knew that from the start. This is the advice I would give to my kids. Guys, there you have it from Alex. Focus on one thing. With his team of seven in Siberia, he's building this tool called Standuply, which is essentially a scrum bot for Slack.
Chapter 5: How many customers are currently using Standuply?
Helps you manage kind of your two-week sprints, your standups, all that stuff, all via Slack. Founded it in 2016. They're now doing about $15,000 per month in revenue. They get that revenue because 700 customers or logos pay him for about six seats each. Each each seat is a minimum of two dollars in terms of the price point that goes up to three or four bucks per seat.
But scaling nicely, zero percent net revenue churn per month. Alex, thank you for taking us to the top. Thank you. Bye bye.