SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
20 Year Old Sells $15k Lanyards, Now Ecomm Research Tool
14 Aug 2021
Chapter 1: How did a 20-year-old sell $15,000 worth of lanyards?
even though we're pre-launch, right? We've had some revenue already.
We've had four paying customers. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews. And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public. We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years. Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro.
When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content.
Chapter 2: What is EcomPilot and how does it help dropshippers?
Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hey, folks. My guest today is Jacob Lenski. He's building a very cool tool, Ecompilot.net. It's a product research tool for dropshippers. He's 20 years old. He's got a degree.
He's a 20-year-old degree apprentice, meaning he works full-time as a software engineer and part-time completing university, which is paid for. In his spare time, he's working on this business, a SaaS product research tool for dropshippers. They're pre-launched right now, but they've been lucky enough to find some partners who are working on a completely complementary tool now.
raising a series A, also working for Affiliate Tree, which is more of a bootstrap effort at a social enterprise looking to do some good. Jacob, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah.
Chapter 3: How did the guest get their first paying customers?
All right. How does EcomPilot get its first customer? How do we get you to revenue?
Yeah. So, you know, even though we're pre-launch, right, we've had some revenue already. We've had four paying customers. Oh, nice. Yeah, we've had more of a silent launch. This was kind of my first effort in tech business, right? Before this, I was working on an e-commerce business for the past three years. So you probably heard of Amazon selling and dropshipping and things like that.
I was doing that as a side income alongside my software engineering job. And that's kind of where I came across the idea for Ecompilot. Yeah. So it looks beautiful.
Chapter 4: What challenges did the guest face with customer retention?
I mean, the site looks beautiful. So how did you find these first four customers?
So, um, yeah, so the way it started is I started, uh, building this, uh, June last year. Um, we launched around December time for a silent launch where I want to sort of test this. I wanted some early feedback, right? The last thing you want to do is build in silence. Um, this is where I reached out to some people in the Reddit, uh, and, uh, other social media platforms.
I feel like my main, uh, source of feedback was from mainly Reddit and Quora. That's where I got the force first for paying customers. Um, apart from that, we've had a hundred free users, uh, and currently, you know, alongside of our partners, we're doing some market research.
We're basically reaching out, uh, trying to, you know, find out if there's any sort of specific niche or market gap we're missing, see if there's any of the problems people want to solve with the tool, see, you know, whether we can patch up a leaky bucket, right.
What kind, what kind of core threads and Reddit threads were you engaging in to find customers? What'd you search for?
So one interesting, so especially within the dropshipping niche and e-commerce, things like Shopify platforms, right? Any Shopify kind of thread.
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Chapter 5: What revenue goals does the guest have for their business?
There's all scope specific dropshipping communities, which you could reach out to. But yeah, mostly think of e-commerce or website building platforms, right? Where would dropshippers and e-commerce sellers hang out?
And what did those first four customers pay?
It was $27 a month.
Are they still paying?
No, we've had three churn, one's still paying.
Why the ones paying the insurance?
So we've spoke to them. This was early on when we sort of presented the product as, you know, we wanted to get the feedback. We wanted to get some paying customers, see how hard would it be. And the main three turned because one, it was still, you know, it was an early product, right? There's still plenty of things to fix. There's still plenty of things to improve.
The one paying customer stayed on.
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Chapter 6: How does the guest plan to scale to 1,000 customers?
He's still happy to give him feedback and he's been using the tool weekly, which is great. Another thing is those three paying customers have now converted to lifetime customers for free. We've appreciated their feedback and their early adopter mindset, and we found them useful.
If they're happy to, of course, provide feedback for a lifetime supply, that's much more useful than a customer that's gone.
Okay, well, you're completing your degree now. We don't want you to have to go get a real job after this. So how much revenue do you need to start generating so you'll do this full-time after school?
Yeah, I think, you know, originally we were aiming for, let's say, you know, $3,000 a month, right, in terms of profit. So I'm thinking, you know, let's say revenue, you know, our costs are pretty low, right, a SaaS product. Of course, you know, we're not sure what the customer acquisition cost will be yet, right? That's still more to find out once we launch.
But I think the aim would be around $6,000 to $7,000, right, revenue a month. That was sort of my goal. Speaking with my partners, they're thinking much larger. They're saying, in our first launch, when we do it properly through Product Home, through the correct mediums, we could go definitely to, let's say, $100,000 in the first month.
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Chapter 7: What is the strategy behind offering lifetime subscriptions?
And instead of providing a monthly subscription, we provide a lifetime subscription model, especially for early adopter products. That works great for feedback.
And when you say we, do you have a co-founder? And if so, how much equity do you still own?
No, this is the partners that we're speaking with.
So how much equity do you own in EconPilot?
60%.
And the partners on the rest? Yes. Walk me through how that negotiation worked. What are they bringing to the table? And are you doing all the development?
Yes. So I reached out to them in December, mainly because they were working on a complimentary product, Glorify. This was in the same area.
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Chapter 8: What lessons has the guest learned from their entrepreneurial journey?
What was the URL? Glorify what?
Glorify.
I feel like it's just glorify.com or glorifyapp.com. You should be able to reach it. They basically provide a tool for e-commerce sellers to create graphics and marketing images, things like that. And since this is a complimentary product, I thought it'd be great. They're targeting the same audience. I wanted to learn some more from them.
And one thing that was great is they eventually reached out and they said, we like your product. How about we just get on a call, discuss it? And then what we started off as being maybe just an integration where we both worked together as complementary product, they eventually jumped on board and said, you know what, we're happy to be partners. We're happy to follow through.
Of course, I believe Glorify is run, I feel like it's quite a large team now, I think 20 to 30 employees, but it's run by mainly two guys, which are 30 and 40 years old respectively. So way more experienced in business than me. One thing I know, though, is as a software engineer, I'm able to build a tech stack. I'm able to actually create the product.
So Jacob, how do you go out and get 100 new customers, right? That's obviously what's going to give you the flexibility to do this full time. So what's your best idea there? How do you go do that?
Yeah, so I guess distribution is something I'm continuing learning, right? This is something that's much more based on experimentation, right? Seeing what works. I believe that, you know, one of the strongest sources for bringing people in, especially within the e-commerce market and especially in dropshipping and Amazon selling will be through affiliate marketing, right?
There's plenty of YouTubers, plenty of content out there covering how to, you know, get into this ecosystem. It's more working with those sort of brands of people.
Have you reached out to AMO?
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