SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 457: 4000+ Units Sold Teaching Kids How To Code, $2m+ Raised with Piper
24 Oct 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: What is Piper and how does it teach kids to code?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million.
Chapter 3: What were the initial funding sources for Piper?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 4: How did Tommy Gibbons get involved with Piper?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is none other than Derek Rodenbeck. He is an artist and he's looking to increase his revenue.
Chapter 5: What is the pricing strategy for Piper's computer kits?
If you want your chance to enter and to win 100 bucks each Monday on the show, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. Nathan Lacta here, and this is episode 457.
Chapter 6: What are the future revenue expectations for Piper?
Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Kim Garst and how she's gotten 1,200 people to pay her $47 per month to do over $2 million in revenue this year for her membership course.
Chapter 7: How does Piper plan to implement subscription models?
Top Tribe, good morning, everyone. Nathan Lacta here, and our guest today is Tommy Gibbons. He is a former Goldman Sachs and Fundera employee. He met a fellow Princeton grad in 2013. fellow Princeton 2013 grad in San Francisco as first non-technical hire to launch, fulfill, and grow his company, Piper, at playpiper.com. Tommy, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Chapter 8: What challenges did the team face during product assembly?
Good. Hey, first off, love your logo, love the concept of the business. Why don't you tell everyone what you do and then how you generate revenue? Yeah, that's probably our hardest thing to do is explain exactly what Piper is. So it's a computer kit that we give to kids ages 7 to 12. It's supposed to be their introduction to their first computer that they're going to build themselves.
They go through a complete physical assembly. Once they put it together and they screw in the last screw, they turn on the Raspberry Pi, and then they're playing our Minecraft adventure story mode. Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, says, I love Piper because it represents what enabled me to do all the great technology things in my life. So that's the model. How do you make money?
We sell each kit for $299. And then we already have over 4,000 customers since launching Christmas last year. So they gave us a pretty fair share of their money. Now, is there anything that's monthly recurring or is it just one-off sales? You know, we're looking into things like that in the future.
Maybe progress emails where we let parents know how their kids are doing, what they've been learning or working on, and then potentially subscriptions where we send them new things in the mail on a monthly basis for new challenges to complete their computer. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah. So what was funding year or the, sorry, founding year? We launched a Kickstarter in the spring of 2015. Okay.
Sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say that's what I was going to ask. It sounds like this might have been a Kickstarter thing. Yeah, it absolutely was. So we were one of the most successful Kickstarters of that quarter, raised over $250,000 from there. Then we joined 500 Startups in the fall of 2015. We shipped our first products that December.
Obviously, that was a big crunch getting out in time for Christmas. December 2015? Yeah. Yep. We actually all went down to Long Beach in California and assembled the boxes ourselves. We hired a bunch of Craigslist workers and ourselves and we were sorting through buttons, switches, lights, and putting these pieces of wood inside a box and send them out to all of our places.
Tommy, go off your memory, but what does that Craigslist ad sound like? What's the title? I think it says workers needed for packing children's toy in Long Beach. And you know what? It's kind of funny because we had Craigslist workers and then we had TaskRabbit workers. Who was better? The TaskRabbits were a little bit better.
But they had gotten to the site before us and they had spoken with each other and I guess found out that they're getting paid differently. And so before the first day at work, they went on strike. Oh, gosh. What was the pay difference? I think the task minimum was like a 22 and it was like 15 for Craigslist. Oh, that's hysterical. Yeah.
By the end of it, the guys who were helping us out, they loved the product. They had a lot of fun. It was, uh, it was definitely a company culture building moment. That is funny. So you've, uh, so how much in total funding have you raised, including the two 50 from Kickstarter? Um, we have 2.1 million in our seed rounds. So that is X to 250 from, uh, from Kickstarter. Okay. So about 2.3 total.
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