SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to Make $3m Building a Slack Clone with no money, experience, or sales team
23 Jan 2024
Chapter 1: How did Chanty.com grow to $3 million in revenue?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, 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. Guys, Chanti.com is competing with Slack and Loom and Trello.
They're trying to be your work productivity app on one and having success, completely bootstrapped. They got their first customers in 2018, turned on a $20 million acquisition offer in 2021 as they passed 1.5 million bucks of revenue. Today, they're serving over 24,000 paying customers, doing 3 million a year in revenue, really leveraging an affiliate strategy.
In fact, one of their largest resellers, which is an India-based reseller, brings in about 250 of their total 500 new customers every month. Those margins on the affiliate deals obviously improve for Chanty over time, but they already have great margins.
On the $250,000 of top line revenue every month, he's profiting about $100,000 per month, but he's looking for a sales co-founder, a rock star who can come in and help him grow the business, willing to give up 15% equity if he can find the right person. We will see what Chanty does next. Hey folks, my guest today is Dmytro Okenev.
He has bootstrapped Chanti from zero to three million bucks in ARR, trying hard to compete with MS Teams and Slack. Dmytro, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, I guess. A lot of people would say you're crazy. Slack is huge. Microsoft Teams is huge. How are you going to bootstrap and compete? What would you say back to them?
Yeah, I can't believe that we made it. Yeah, that's, um, thanks for the, um, our obsessed with the, our product and, um, yeah, you know, we still doesn't have salespeople on the team, so it's just pure product that grows.
When you last came on in 2021, you'd said that you passed about a thousand customers. They were each paying about 120 bucks a month. So you were doing about 1.5 million in revenue then. Where are you today?
So we are around 3 million right now. Um, the. Uh, customer lifestyle value grew up to the 4.6 K and the, uh, actually user base grew up accordingly. The paid user base. So how many paying customers today? Um, so currently we have 24,000 of paying customers, which are basically, uh, quite of them are small. That's we have a few who are like really, really, really big.
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Chapter 2: What strategies did Chanty use to acquire customers?
So when you say you don't see the money, who actually owns the customer owns the credit card that's being billed. You don't own that. The affiliate owns it.
Well, it depends. You see, it depends on the partner network that they are in or our resellers. So that doesn't necessarily mean that we will hold the credit card.
If you don't own the credit card and own the customer, how do you know that that customer is going to come to you in year two and pay you the full $100 so you don't have to pay the affiliate that 70% cut?
Well, the situation with the credit card itself, for me, is not a big problem because... Well, even our regular customers who we have an organic manner, sometimes they just have to change the credit card or add credit card. Right now we support this cloud, I think, which doesn't have credit card at all.
Demetrius, I'm not challenging your ability to put a credit card in your system. What I'm asking is how do you earn the direct customer relationship in year two when an affiliate is the one that introduced the customer to you in the first place? That's my question.
Yeah, but we own the data and we still own all the communication of the customers.
But you don't own the billing.
Yeah, but sometimes we don't own the billing.
Okay. I guess, tell me more about the affiliates model because when you came on in 2020, you said that you had at least 100 affiliates who have driven at least one paying customer. What's that number today?
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Chapter 3: How does Chanty’s affiliate marketing model work?
Um, that was the right decision though. We took the path. So more or less we are growing with the affiliates.
So, um,
I'm happy that I surpassed that offer. That advice was really nice.
Uh-huh. Have you turned on any other M&A offers since 2021?
There was one company who is already on IPO. They just want to buy us, I believe. What did they offer? Yeah, the offer was like... Quite not nice. Well, like 10 millions. I don't believe that this is the fair price so far.
What do you think the fair price is today for Chanti?
Look, given our profits... What are your profits? Well, they're profitable. So that's good.
How much? Like last month, if you're doing $3 million of revenue annually, you're doing $250,000 a month in revenue. How much did you profit last month? About... around $100K. Wow, that's super impressive. Yeah, congratulations, Dimitra. That's really impressive.
Thank you. So I would expect that our profit margins would be around 70% to 80%, maybe in a year or two. So that would be very impressive. But yeah, thank you so much.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Chanty face without a sales team?
vision of the company and to just, you know, shake up the things.
So you're a sole founder, right? In 2021, you told me you owned 80% and employee option pool was 20%. And now you're looking for sort of a sales co-founder. Yeah. What would you be willing, if you found just an absolute rock star in terms of a sales co-founder, what amount of equity would you be willing to give them or let them earn on a vesting schedule?
Yeah, I have a clear clear number of mine, so I calculated that it could be like 15%.
One five?
One five, 15%, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How'd you get to that number out of curiosity?
Yeah, because I was just thinking about the contribution that we are getting out of it, and what would be the potential, the outcome of this. So by dividing this, how we are doing the contribution,
what was already the tap what will be the hardest thing to do in percentage and what's the uh i don't know what probably we can address the market that we can address um so yeah that was around from this 80 that i got this would be uh actually around one quarter of them so this is around 15
How else are you acquiring customers besides affiliates and value-added resellers?
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Chapter 5: How did Chanty respond to a $20 million acquisition offer?
I don't know how to say it correctly. And then that people can actually write nice stories. What I found that these stories are not converting. So it's great to have these
yeah almost entertaining content but we also need to provide other other types of content so these are the editorial content these are you know social proof credibility content that we definitely should provide um and now i'm making a new plan for the next year so that we will we will provide more tailored content for some specific niche businesses and more content for educate our users.
So related to our Use cases.
Understood. Yeah. So just to be clear, Amara looks like she stopped working there in August, 2023. She was your marketing manager for two years. And instead you're using a strategy like Nick Stevens, who's a freelance SaaS writer, digital marketer, who's been writing for you for about four years.
And you believe he sort of is, it matches your storytelling and the storytelling you want to tell your market.
Um, yeah, during these years, we got like a huge interesting network of external writers who can help us because if one writer writes all your blog, then it's all one style, you know, we need diversity. So yeah, even when we got like three in house writers back a few years ago, we were still we're accepting the guest guest post that if they were really, really nice.
Talk to me just really quick before we wrap up about about what you're paying to acquire customers. Obviously, the affiliate model is purely variable. There's no fixed CAC there. But when you are you doing any paid marketing, Facebook, Google ads, etc.
Now, my opinion, the map barely fits here for us.
Yep. Yep. Well, it sounds like you're profiting a hundred thousand dollars a month on about $250,000 of top line revenue. So that's obviously a great growth rate. Just help us understand growth a bit. If you're at 3 million today of revenue, where were you back in 2022 at the same time, December, 2022?
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