SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Directual Used $1k/mo Russian Talent to Build Low Code Tool MVP, Now 50 Customers, $1m Raised
30 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Today is about 2K monthly, and we are going to reach at least 10 or 15K MRA by the end of this year.
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We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
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My guest today is Pavel Ershav. He's building a tool called Directual.com. It's a low-code platform for building sophisticated applications. All right, Pavel, you ready to take us to the top? Thank you. All right. So tell us about Directual. Obviously, no code is a very hot space right now. Who's paying for this platform?
Yes, absolutely. That is a hot topic, but we shall distinguish. There are low codes, no codes, very simple tools for building simple websites, landing pages, and low code, mostly low code tools for building complicated tools. And for them, the main stakeholder, the main player is the IT department of the company.
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Chapter 2: What is Directual and how does it fit into the low-code market?
The salaries in Russia are lower than in US, much lower.
So you're paying like 700, 800 bucks a month, something like that. Sometimes even less. Wow.
I want to move to Russia. So that is why we have kept our headquarters in Russia. We kept our engineers in Russia, but nowadays we are working worldwide. We have clients from all over the world, the US, Europe.
Does it make you, so you've raised a million dollars and in order to get a return for your investors on the money you've raised, you've got to grow much bigger than $2,000 a month in terms of software revenue. I mean, does that ever worry you? Does that concern you at all?
It did, but we made a decision. We came up with the decision with our investor. So he saw the situation with our enterprise business model and he approved our decision to pivot. So he still is a shareholder in our company.
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Chapter 3: Who are the primary customers of Directual's platform?
And that company is supporting our way towards sas model very good how how did you get these 70 customers on the sas platform so that is a great question because we tried to buy some facebook ads and that uh worked worked not so well as we expected and there are two channels that really worked out turned out to be the first is their posts on media, for example, on Hackernoon, on dev.to.
So they're just their blog posts with how to create something on the actual. And the second channel is communities. There are a lot of no code and zero code communities. You've mentioned that the topic is very hot. And those communities appear each and every week, new community. There are no code lists, some directories of articles, and we are working with them.
We are providing them with some tutorials, webinars, and that is a great channel for us.
How are you, is there any tool you're using to go find these communities? So, uh,
Some communities have found us by themselves and others we found via Google. So we are Googling no-code communities and there is a list.
That's great. And so when you do a webinar with a no-code community, do you give a revenue share to the community organizer?
Yeah, we are providing them with a special reference link and 30% of the first year subscriptions are for the partner. So that is a standard model.
Okay, interesting. Very cool. And do you feel like this model can help you grow to $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month in revenue? Yes, I do believe in that.
And moreover, we are aiming to develop our own community, a community of directorial developers who will support newcomers because the hardest thing for us is to help the people to overcome the threshold. It is not super easy to use our platform. It is complicated. It is not VIX or something similar. So community here could help us significantly.
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