SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1604 Would You Sell "One Time For Life" Plans If You're Trying to Build an Enduring SaaS Company?
15 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: What inspired the creation of Plutio.com?
launching Plutio, helping freelancers, built it to solve his own problem, now serving about 600 customers, paying $10 a month, so $6,000 a month in revenue, used BetaLess and AppSumo to get his initial funding and kind of dollars coming in the door, now focusing on making real, true, recurring SaaS revenue from customers willing to pay every month to support him as he adds value and works towards moving to breakeven and profitable here shortly.
Bootstrapped company, two people in London and Lithuania, 5% logo term per month, Hello, everyone. My guest today is Leo Bassam. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Plutio.com.
Chapter 2: How does Plutio's subscription model work?
Leo, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. All right. What's the company doing and what's the revenue model? How do you guys make money?
Chapter 3: What strategies did Plutio use to acquire its first customers?
So Plutio is an all-in-one business management and productivity platform designed for freelancers and small teams. We make money by selling it as a subscription. Okay. And what do people pay on average kind of per month for this? Um, we have three plans, um, start 15 ends at 30 with add-ons for white label and other things.
Chapter 4: How did AppSumo and BetaList contribute to Plutio's growth?
And currently we're at four, uh, 4,000 pounds in recurring revenue, which is roughly $600 a month. That's great. So I want to talk about kind of how you got to the point where you then released the product to market, got your first customers, but right now they're paying about 30 bucks a month. And how many customers do you have? Um, paying customers, 600.
Chapter 5: What challenges does Plutio face with customer churn?
Okay. About 600 paying customers. And you said they pay how much per month? Um, it varies. So from 15 to 30 and plus add-ons.
Chapter 6: How is Plutio improving its onboarding process?
Okay. So if I take 15 bucks times 300, that's, uh, you said that you're doing right now about $6,000 per month. Around that much. Yes. Okay.
Chapter 7: What role does community feedback play in Plutio's development?
Got it. 6,000. Um, and, and how did, so how did you get, I mean, first off, let's put this on a timeline. When did you launch the company? What year?
Chapter 8: What future plans does Plutio have for scaling and profitability?
So we started working on it three years ago, uh, during college and officially launched November last year. Okay, great. And how did, I mean, how'd you get the first 10 customers? So we did get them through websites like BetaList and directories like that. Sorry, what list? BetaList.com. BetaList. Yes. Yep.
But we actually did our soft launch with AppSumo, which helped us get quite a lot of beta testers outside. Yep. Walk me through how BetaList works. So we basically submitted our website there. We paid for it so it goes there quicker than basically in a few days, times a week or two. And we got a lot of interest. And so we signed them up for the Plutio account and asked them for feedback.
And some of them just stayed with us ever since.
okay and the um were they signing up for actual paid plans or are these free plans well it was free plan at the time we didn't start charging until uh last end of last year yeah because so obviously appsumo deals you know they're tricky because they basically just give you a bunch of discount bargain hunters that want lifetime plans so how did you how did you convert people from that uh promotion to actual monthly paying customers um add-ons
So give us more detail there, right? So how many people did you sign up via that promotion? How much money did you make from that? And then how did you convert them to monthly? So we've got about 7,000 users out of the AppSumo launch back in last year. And we just started signing them up for the white label, which we launched a couple of months ago.
So they would have to pay about $9 to sign up for the white label. Okay. And how many of the 7,000 signed up? I don't have that number on hand, sorry. Okay, well, give me a range is fine. I would say 400 or so. Okay, about 400 went from basically one-time lifetime value to a white label $9 a month plan. Correct. Okay, and what do they look like in terms of churn?
Our churn is quite low at the moment. It's at 5% or so. 5%? Yeah. That's 5% logo churn per month? Yes. Okay. So, I mean, yeah, that's low, but it's still actually fairly high to build a real SaaS company. I mean, you'll churn through about 60% of your user base in a year. How do you get that churn lower? Well, most of our customers churn because of the onboarding.
So we don't have any onboarding materials at the moment. And that's because Plutio was at a stage where it's always evolving. And so we just reached a maturity level and we just started working on onboarding, which helped basically increase our retention and reduce our churn. And walk me through what or how you're editing the onboarding.
What do you know you have to get a new user to do to make them sticky? So I created, as I started building Plutio, I created a community which now has about 3,000 active members. And we always ask questions. We listen to them. We see what they want versus where they're struggling. And I always take notes of all these things and obviously plan accordingly. So with them.
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