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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

EP 557: Appointlet Hits $35k MRR, Co-Founders Because of Reddit Helping 1100 Customers Schedule with Rami El Chamaa

01 Feb 2017

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 9.04 Nathan Latka

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.

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Chapter 2: What is Appointlet and how does it work?

9.52 - 21.232 Nathan Latka

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. He is hell-bent on global domination.

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Chapter 3: How did Rami connect with his co-founder through Reddit?

21.252 - 33.233 Nathan Latka

We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Theron.

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Chapter 4: What was the initial revenue and growth strategy for Appointlet?

33.253 - 49.512 Nathan Latka

He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it. For your chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now, and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter.

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49.795 - 70.822 Nathan Latka

top tribe you know i don't have a lot of time to waste that's why i use fresh books to send out invoices and make sure i'm collecting my money to get your free month go to nathanlatka.com forward slash fresh books and enter the top in the how did you hear about us section Happy February, everybody. Nathan Latke here, and this is episode 557.

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Chapter 5: What pricing strategies has Appointlet implemented over the years?

70.902 - 85.354 Nathan Latka

Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from David Darmanian. He's CEO of the two-year-old Hotjar, which just passed $500,000 in monthly recurring revenue, helping over 10,000 customers see what website visitors are doing.

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86.448 - 111.426 Nathan Latka

nathan latke here good morning everybody our guest today is rami shama he is the ceo and one of the founders of a pointlet now he's got a backstory he started off as a well earlier but right before point he was a digital marketing manager at east line marketing where he led lead generation seo email marketing and content marketing before that he was with ernst and young now again he's building a pointlet rami are you ready to take us to the top

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112.165 - 112.627 Rami El Chamaa

I'm ready.

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112.888 - 115.118 Nathan Latka

All right. Very good. I'm excited you're here.

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Chapter 6: How does Appointlet acquire customers effectively?

115.179 - 120.623 Nathan Latka

So, hey, tell us first, what does a pointlet do and how do you generate revenues?

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122.594 - 149.31 Rami El Chamaa

So Appointlet is basically an appointment scheduling software. We help businesses and people automate their appointment scheduling. So instead of going back and forth in emails, by phone, trying to find the right time to meet someone or talk with someone, you use our tool, you use Appointlet to automate this process, which will save you time. I mean, in a lot of cases,

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149.898 - 163.974 Rami El Chamaa

make you, I mean, increase your revenues and sales. Um, we make our money through, uh, through subscriptions. So we're a SAS, we're a SAS business. So we have, uh, like different monthly or yearly pricing depending on, uh, your team size.

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165.075 - 165.175 Nathan Latka

Yeah.

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Chapter 7: What role does customer support play in Appointlet's growth?

165.196 - 172.444 Nathan Latka

Great. And what is the, uh, well, hold on, let me look real quick. So I'm on your, just give us a sense of like an average. What does the average customer pay you per month?

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173.805 - 179.16 Rami El Chamaa

Uh, the average customer pays us around, um, $15 per month.

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179.501 - 191.602 Nathan Latka

Okay, got it. So yeah, you have your kind of basic plan at $14 per month, solo $27 per month, and then $45 per month and $81 per month. The average is somewhere around $15. Walk us through kind of pricing strategy.

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Chapter 8: How is Appointlet managing its finances and funding?

191.642 - 194.387 Nathan Latka

Folks are always curious about that. Why did you have these four different pricing plans?

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195.228 - 212.473 Rami El Chamaa

So before I talk to you about pricing strategy, I mean, this pricing has been set... since like four years now. Like this type of pricing. I mean, this type of pricing, not the numbers. We are moving towards a new type of pricing that works on a per member basis.

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213.014 - 230.818 Rami El Chamaa

We found out that our customers, I mean, this works much more for our customers because we would be able to provide them with plans that would grow their team. Instead of right now, if you have a team of two people that want to use a portlet, they're going to have to get on the five member plan. All right.

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230.838 - 244.443 Rami El Chamaa

So that's an issue that we're currently facing and that very soon we're going to move to a new pricing with different price points and a different strategy. Now, I prefer not to go into the details of the new strategy.

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246.207 - 252.298 Nathan Latka

Let's go back to kind of let's go kind of back to when you founded the business. So you said you founded it four years ago?

253.072 - 275.354 Rami El Chamaa

Yeah, let's talk about it. I mean, it's a pretty interesting story. So it's actually my co-founder, Jared Morse. He's in Portland, Oregon in the US. And so he was working at a previous company in Portland. He saw that it took too much time to schedule a appointments through Google and add it to the calendar.

275.794 - 300.123 Rami El Chamaa

So he thought like, let's, let's, let's build a web app that integrates with Google calendar and that like allows people to like choose a time and let the event go directly to the calendar. This was, uh, this was, this was the beginning of a pointlet. This was the initial version of a pointlet. And, uh, And after that, I mean, Jared is, I mean, at the time, he was mainly a developer, right?

300.204 - 324.991 Rami El Chamaa

So he didn't really know maybe what to do next. Or maybe he very well did know. So he submitted a thread on Reddit, like, just built a web app, and now what? This was like four years ago. And me, I was like 21 at the time. I just saw the thread and I looked at the software and I said, like, this can be pretty good. This is a pretty neat idea.

325.051 - 334.17 Rami El Chamaa

And so this is when we started talking with each other and we started working together. That's great. Yeah, so I'm from Lebanon and I met him through Reddit.

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