SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
BillBee Fastest Growing Bootstrapped Ecomm SaaS, $2m to $4.5m ARR in 7 Months
09 Aug 2021
Chapter 1: What is Billbee and how does it serve e-commerce businesses?
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Chapter 2: How has Billbee's customer base grown recently?
Hey folks, my guest today is David Pullman. He is building Bill B, order and inventory management for multi-channel e-commerce companies. David, you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, I am. Thank you.
All right. You're in a very hot space. How are you sort of defining your niche and trying to monopolize?
Yeah, actually, I think at the moment, especially in the last couple of months during COVID and so on, this space and this niche has gained a lot of momentum, I think, and especially in Europe with some bigger acquisitions and bigger venture capital investments. Name a couple of those just so everyone has contact. Yeah, one I have in mind is Central, which is a German ERP system would say for...
order inventory of Ecomass and Sequoia joined or yeah, went into them last year. And this was kind of a big announcement for the European and especially German tech scene, I think. And yeah, this is kind of a space where we are in and yeah, especially with all the marketplaces coming up and with Shopify and different cloud job systems coming up. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What strategies does Billbee use for customer acquisition?
Seems to be a very interesting space though. However, I think we got the niche, that we focus very small and medium-sized businesses and try to target the flop 90%, I would say, and not the top 10%. So yeah, that's what we do.
And when you came on back in December last year, I love that you were bootstrapped. You said that you had over 9,000 customers, which is a big number. They're paying on average $15 to $20 per month, right? So I think you were around a $2 or $2.5 million run rate, right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that was back in December. I think the numbers were from September or so, yeah.
And so today, how many customers are you working with?
We are at around 12K customers.
That's great. So how did you get an additional 3,000 customers over the past six months?
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Billbee's pricing strategy?
We have a very high signup rate. It's around 1.5 to 2K a month. And we somehow managed to turn at least 25 to 30% of them into paying customers and churn is comparably low. So yeah, that's why.
Break that down for me. So last month, between 1,500 and 2,000 new signups at your platform, what do they have to do? What's the funnel look like?
We do not have any direct sales. So they really come to Bilby through word of mouth marketing and through partners. So we are listed in the Shopify app store and marketplaces app stores and partner pages. So this is our main traffic source and especially the e-commerce community is very big and very connected in Germany. So everyone, yeah. Yeah.
Chapter 5: How has Billbee managed to increase its average revenue per user (ARPU)?
Talks to each other and, and, uh, gives the names of, of, uh, tools they like. And yeah, that's, that's how we get the most signups, I think. And we have a. very high conversion rate from from visitor to sign up and also very high rate, as I said, from from trial to page. So yeah, that's that's the way it works at the moment.
You have 47. You have 47 reviews on Shopify and an average rating about 3.6. How many new leads each month do you guys get from Shopify? Would you say?
I would say it's maybe 15% of the total.
Okay, so 200 to 300 signups a month, like trials from Bill B. Roundabout, exactly, yeah. And so then 25% of that is 20 to 40 new customers from Shopify each month, something like that.
Yeah, yeah. But the majority, though, really the biggest part is organic SEO and organic word of mouth traffic, yeah.
Okay, the organic SEO terms, what sort of terms have you been optimizing for?
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Chapter 6: What challenges does Billbee face as a bootstrapped company?
Typical German buzzwords, so German terms for inventory management, order management, invoicing, e-commerce invoicing, invoice creation, bill creation, all these kind of stuff.
And do you require a credit card on the trial or no?
No, it's email and password only.
Okay, and what do you know you're going to have to do during the trial period to get them to convert to paid at the end? How long is that trial period?
Trial period is 30 days. But I think the majority who is able to work with Bilby and is productive with Bilby within the first five days, this is the most interesting group. So we've always thought to cut the trial to 10 or five days or so. And I think this might be enough. Because if you haven't get the benefit... You've done that, sorry. Have you actually done that or no? No, we haven't.
We're thinking about it and maybe doing it in the near future. Because I think if you're not used to Bulby within the first five days or so, you won't probably get used to it in the first 30 days.
That's a good, I mean, I think that's an astute observation.
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Chapter 7: What are the insights on churn and customer retention at Billbee?
Now, what do you know people have to do during the trial to drastically increase the likelihood they convert to paid at the end of the trial? Is it a JavaScript embed? Is it a number of product sales? What is it?
I think once they connect the marketplace or shop, wherever they sell their eCommerce stuff, I think once they connect this, this is the trigger point. So if the orders flow into Bulbi and they see how easy it works, how easy they can create invoices, how easy they can create shipping labels and so on.
So I really think the trigger point is connecting any third-party application to Bulbi, being at a marketplace, being at an eCommerce store. So yeah.
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Chapter 8: What future plans does Billbee have for growth and product development?
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And have you started really developing additional products to upsell your 12,000 customers or is your ARPU still about 17 bucks a customer?
Actually, we have simplified pricing. However, we have increased ARPU through this. So we are at around 32 at the moment.
$32 ARPU. Yeah. That's almost doubled over the past seven months. How did you do that?
On the one hand, the customers were growing through maybe COVID and Christmas and holiday season and so. But also we have a dramatic shift of our pricing strategy. So beforehand, we had different modules. So you could have a very few modules and you could have more modules and you could have premium support and so on. And now we have completely simplified this.
So we have only one pay-per-use pricing, which is 100% based on the number of orders you have. And this ranges from ā¬1 with zero orders to ā¬499 with unlimited orders, let's say. It's impressive. It's logarithmic. So if you have fewer orders, you pay more per order. And if you have a lot of orders, you pay less per order.
And so with all that strategy and the change you've implemented, what was monthly recurring revenue last month?
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