SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bug reporting tool Breaks $4800/mo, 600 Customers After Raising $1.5m at $6m Valuation
09 Nov 2021
Chapter 1: How did Bird Eats Bug achieve $4,800/month in revenue?
I see. Okay. So 600 pay seats times a minimum of $8 per seat. You guys are doing about $4,800 a month right now in revenue?
Yeah.
Okay. And if that's what you're doing today, what were you doing about a year ago? Do you remember?
We were pretty much zero. We just launched payments. And if I remember correctly, that would be, I don't know, maybe $200. $200.
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Chapter 2: What was the initial traction before launching Bird Eats Bug?
It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Dan Mockroft. He spent most of his career in product management roles in companies like Google, BCG Ventures, and Rocket Internet.
Now, together with two of his colleagues, he co-founded a B2B SaaS startup building a new kind of dev tool that helps software development teams report and fix technical issues 30% faster. It's called birdeatsbug.com. Dan, you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, absolutely.
So when did you guys start writing the first line of code for this tool?
About two years ago, like in summer, we had the idea and the first line of code was written. And I think two months later, we already launched the MVP. So like the minimum viable product on product hunt, and we got to number five product of the day. And that basically kickstarted the company.
And this was in 2019?
Correct.
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Chapter 3: How did the Product Hunt launch impact Bird Eats Bug's growth?
Okay. And tell me more about the product hunt launch. Why do you think it did so well? Were you guys intentional with that launch? Or do you just sort of get lucky?
I think it's a combination of both. I think there's a big element of luck when it comes to product hunt launches, but we tested the waters. We did some preliminary, let's say, launches for smaller products, useful for the community just to get a feel for product hunt in general.
But I think the main advantage for us is that usually, for example, we heard that the audience on Product Hunt doesn't have very good retention. And I think that the reason for this is that you have a lot of repetitive products, like a lot of website builders, for example. And in our case, we were very unique. And I think also the name helped and the whole branding.
And we see a lot of the people who tried BERT on the first day, like on the launch day, still with us today. So that's very interesting to see.
You got 361 upvotes on that day. This was back September 23rd, 2019. Do you remember what your web traffic looked like? How many leads did you get from product hunt? Do you remember?
We didn't have signups at that stage. I can share how many... Chrome extension installs we had, and that was about five, 600 installs. And I think about like seven to 100,000 bugs reported on that day. And like, it was like a massive peak. Then it of course went down and it took us probably like a year to get like consistently to that level of usage.
Where are you now in September? How many bugs reported on your platform? I assume that's your critical usage metric, right?
Correct. We have about 1,600 bugs a week.
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Chapter 4: What strategies did Bird Eats Bug use to acquire its first 10,000 signups?
So that would be like, what, 6,000 a month, roughly. And we're growing like in the last quarter, we were growing 20% month over month.
And how do number of bugs reported correlate back to revenue? Is that how you price?
Sort of. So we have a generous free tier, but then once you run out of free tiers, like on a free tier, you can store up to 30 bugs. You can access up to 30 bugs and then you need to upgrade. But then once you upgrade, we don't have specific tiering. So we just have one plan for simplicity.
And the correlation is pretty direct, although there's a time lag because it takes you a while to go through your freemium plan and then upgrade.
how long does it take your, you know, obviously you track onboarding. So if I sign up today, how long will it usually take for someone to hit that 30 bug limit?
Um, like it really depends on average. It's a two to three months, uh, that we see a company, but that was before our pricing change. That was like 50 bucks per person we were given. And now we're giving like 30 bucks per company, um, partly to reduce that amount. And, um, I think that's going to be like within a month, like most companies will hit that.
I see. Okay. So how many paying customers do you have today?
We have about 6%, and that's an interesting story. So we took Dropbox as an example because they have a free tier as well, and they have a lot of word of mouth. And in our case, we have 40% of signups coming through word of mouth, which is crazy. And we decided not to make the free plan too restrictive to keep the word of mouth going on.
But also we want to know that we're spending time on something worthwhile that companies are willing to pay for. And I think Dropbox is at about 4%. And then we're targeting roughly that amount to stay happy.
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Chapter 5: How does the number of bugs reported correlate with revenue?
So how many total signups do you have you had then?
We had about 10,000 signups. Okay, got it.
So you've got about 600 paying customers right now? Yeah. I see. Okay, cool. So tell me more about that. Obviously, Product Hunt was an initial strategy to get a bunch of these signups. What else did you do in the early days to get your first sort of 10,000 signups?
Once we launched on Product Hunt, most of it was SEO and direct traffic. And we listed on a few platforms like Capterra, for example, or GetApp. And at the moment, we're essentially trying every single channel that we can get our hands on. In terms of the most successful, in terms of signups, I would say it was Google Ads. And we're advertising for general screen recording, I guess, categories.
And other than that, it's interesting because you have Capterra and GetApp and Software Advice, and that's one umbrella. But we get more leads via GetApp, although we were originally betting on Capterra. Uh, and, uh, what also works for us, um, is newsletters. Uh, I can, I can recommend that I was not expecting this.
And also we, uh, we have an onboarding video and we just tried to like, uh, put it on YouTube and see how it would perform. And, uh, like that performed surprisingly well. So like, even for an ad, like 75%, uh, watch time, we're getting like on average watch time is 75%.
So looking just at your paid spend, I mean, what are you paying to get a new paid customer these days?
I believe it's going to be like under 10 euros per paid customer. That I don't know from the top of my head. From the signups, I think we're paying like less than 10 euros per sort of signup. And then I guess you can convert that. So like, what about 15 signups?
Yeah. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: What pricing model does Bird Eats Bug use for its customers?
So it takes you 15 times $12, right? 10 euros to $12. So 15 signups for one paid times $12. It's about 180 bucks per paid signup, something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah. Interesting. And let's talk about GitHub. You know, everyone always asks me, Nathan, should I go on G2 first or Capterra? GitHub, I would say is like an underdog in this category, but it's performing well for you. You rank number five under the category bug tracking. So you rank fairly high with 29 reviews, 4.7. Do you pay for placement here or is this all organic?
So I think on get up, like you have to pay, like if you want to track clicks. So like we're paying in some regions, I think mostly like the U S and like Europe and North America. I don't,
know how much like the cost per click um i'm not that sure about like the the thing with getup is that like you have high purchase intent so that's great um and like if you have a good retention customer lifetime value i think that's uh that's also great i think the challenge that we find with getup um is that we are essentially creating our new um our own category so like we're not um something that's been that's existed before and like we're not technically bug tracking
Yeah.
So like people like looking for adjacent things, uh, and then they find the bird. Um, so it's not always easy to kind of like, um, tell the person that it's not, you know, exactly a bug tracking, for example. Um, get up, I think works for us more because get up seems to have like more technical audience versus Capterra or like more like developers, um, uh, looking for tools there.
How many leads do you get from get out per month right now?
That's a good question. Or a range. I can tell it's like in the tens, but we're not spending too much money. So because the cost per signup is quite high for us, at least, we pay for the presence. I think in general on GetUp, we're spending under $800 a month. To list on all of them. Say again?
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Chapter 7: What are the future plans for Bird Eats Bug's product development?
Yeah.
Okay. Interesting. So let's go back to like, again, how you're currently building. So bug tracking tool, over 10,000 free signups, which is great. You're converting 6%, which is high for freemium tools. So congratulations on that. What are they paying on average per month?
It really depends on the size. So sometimes we have a single bug reporter, for example, and they're paying eight bugs. Sometimes it goes over 200 a month for slightly bigger companies. And the interesting thing that we found is that a few bigger companies reached out to us. with thousands of people.
And we couldn't cater to them because all of them wanted things like single sign-on, for example, self-hosted solution, and also SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications. And we will get those for sure, but they take months to get. And their purchasing departments are really ruthless about these certifications.
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. So how many seats on average are these 600 customers paying for? It sounds like a five person team might be average, something like that.
Um, yeah, I would say like five to 10 to 10 people. And, um, but it goes like from one to like a hundred, uh, easily. So there's like a fluctuation.
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Chapter 8: How does Bird Eats Bug plan to improve customer retention and expansion revenue?
Yeah. Yeah. But so if I have to go, how many paid seats are on your platform across the 600 customers, it'd be something like 3000, 4,000. Got it. Right.
Uh, from 600 pain cut. No, like 600, uh, like pain customer would be like 600 seats. Essentially.
How many logos? Yeah. Okay. Got it. So how many just companies?
Yeah, that would be about 60.
Okay. Got it. 16. Okay. Oh, well, those are huge teams.
Like six, six, zero.
So those are average 10 person teams. Exactly. I see. Okay. So 600 pay seats times like a minimum of eight bucks per seat. You guys are doing about 4,800 bucks a month right now in revenue.
Yeah.
Okay. And where were you, if that's what you're doing today, what were you doing about a year ago? Do you remember?
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