Developer SaaS Hits $112k MRR Bootstrapped using community growth strategy

4.992 - 44.266 Julian Donjou

The easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Mergify launched back in 2018. They work side jobs until 2021, 2022 when they quit and went full time.

44.566 - 67.596 Julian Donjou

Julian told me a year ago they were doing $35,000 a month, now doing $110,000 a month in revenue, all bootstrapped, which we love, serving 150 customers that pay on average $750 per month. And again, they help you merge your code faster and safer with merge queues, workflow automations, and just a lot of different ways to save time. Hey folks, my guest today is Julian Donjou.

67.616 - 79.458 Julian Donjou

He's the CEO and co-founder of Mergify. He's been a free software developer for the last 20 years, contributing to multiple open source projects and publishing several books on the Python programming language. All right, Julian, you ready to take us to the top?

89.789 - 112.172 Julian Donjou

Yeah, sure. So what we do is we provide automation services for software engineering teams that are using GitHub. So the common problems people have in software engineering teams that, I mean, you do a lot of code changes, you do a lot of pull requests. Basically, you're trying to merge your code as fast as possible and, I would say, as secure as possible.

113.033 - 140.217 Julian Donjou

So our customers, usually, they're having large repositories, a lot of people, engineers working on the code, and they're trying to make that process of merging the code very fast and reliable. And so walk me through, on average, what do those customers pay per month to use the technology? I mean, we invoice and build per seat. So I guess our average team size would be around 100 engineers.

140.538 - 160.363 Julian Donjou

So I think for most customers, it's around between $500 and $1,000 per month on a subscription basis. Okay, cool. We'll go in the middle and just go with 750 there. So just to be clear, you charge on that per seat model. Most teams are about 100. Do you upsell feature sets or anything else?

161.812 - 183.596 Julian Donjou

Yeah, we do. So we have multiple plans. Right now we have three plans. Our larger plan is really for people using GitHub Enterprise Server, which means you are deploying GitHub on your own infrastructure. So we do have a Mergeify instance that you can run. with that GitHub infrastructure on your cloud, for example. So that's really our high-tier package.

183.616 - 196.187 Julian Donjou

Our regular plans, which are basically two basic plans where you have the basic features of Mergeify, for example, a simple merge queue that's going to merge your pull requests automatically in a very simple way.

196.207 - 212.279 Julian Donjou

If you want to go faster, have more optimization, we have a premium plan, for example, where we're going to add more and more features, more advanced features for larger teams, for example. Okay, walk me through some of the backstory here. What year did you write the first line of software for Mergeify?

241.732 - 263.013 Julian Donjou

We're trying to automate our work, basically. I mean, we are lazy. So the goal was to, you know, having a program that does things for you. And there was a lot of missing features in that regard on GitHub. So we're starting that way, trying to automate everything. And that's actually where we got our first customers. We both were very active in open source communities.

263.794 - 281.053 Julian Donjou

Name a couple of open source communities that you were in where you got your first customers. We started with a lot of BG OpenStack projects. We were working back then at Red Hat, which is a major open source project contributor. There's a lot of people there working.

281.113 - 302.074 Julian Donjou

So, for example, the Ceph project, which is a distributed storage open source project, started to use Mergeify in their repositories to automate a lot of their work. And that's basically how we started getting first open source projects and then our first customers. And Julien, fast forward to today, how many paying customers are you working with?

309.946 - 324.488 Julian Donjou

That's really where we find the most companies using GitHub nowadays. And Julien, so can I take 150 customers times the $750 per month average price point? It puts you at about $110,000 a month in revenue. Is that accurate?

325.149 - 325.249

Yeah.

325.415 - 346.217 Julian Donjou

Yeah. That's great. And if you're at $110,000 a month today, where were you exactly one year ago so we can understand growth? I think a year ago, we were at a third of that. So we basically multiplied by three over the last year. And have you done all this bootstrapped or have you raised capital? We all bootstrapped since the beginning.

367.006 - 384.148 Julian Donjou

Finding the good product market fits the good. Even the good marketing, the good way of selling the product took us a few years. Since we didn't raise capital early, which was a choice, we wanted to focus on building the product and not trying to go on a roadshow, trying to find a VC or that.

385.21 - 405.063 Julian Donjou

Yeah, I mean, it took a few years to start, but at the end of the day, we're quite happy with that decision so far because we're free and very autonomous in the way we can take our decisions. No, I think that's super smart. Now you keep saying we. Did you have one co-founder at the beginning? Yeah. Did you guys just split equity 50-50 at the start? Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's odd.

405.083 - 423.158 Julian Donjou

So how do you get over disagreements? It turns out we've been working together for more than 10 years. So before starting the venture, I think we both I mean, we worked for five or six years together on the same coding project, all of that.

423.178 - 447.289 Julian Donjou

So we knew each other very well. I think we're both alike in the way we think. So it's very rare we disagree on anything. If we do, I think we try to spend a lot of time discussing. And so far, we never are to be in a very large disagreement where we're like, okay, we're blocked or we're stuck. It's a risk. I mean, for sure. And I knew since the beginning that it is a risk to split 50-50.

447.522 - 463.406 Julian Donjou

So it's very fair. And I know the company will not run without me. And he knows that it would not run without me. So we have to work. I mean, you have to have this mindset where you have to work with each other. You can't just get rid of the other one. So it worked very well so far and it still works to this day.

463.426 - 475.825 Julian Donjou

So how did you, you launched in 2018. It sounds like your revenue really started sort of the end of 2021. How did you guys pay yourself between 2018 and 2021, like your house rent and for food and things like that?

475.805 - 505.187 Julian Donjou

yeah we did not actually i mean we worked for the first uh a few years uh we had uh two jobs for a while um both media and i and when we were able to switch to to that full time but it took yeah i mean the first years were pretty hard you had to which is a good thing i think to have because you know that both money and time are very constrained so you have to focus on the right thing which as an engineer you see a lot of stories of people trying to build products and you know never launching and adding more and more features because you're like

505.167 - 523.31 Julian Donjou

yeah, that new feature will bring new customers and you never do anything. Whereas where you were in the first few years, we were in the mindset that would be like, we have no time and no money. So like we have two hours of spare time this week. What do we do? What can we do with only two hours and basically zero dollar?