SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
KarmaBot Slack Tool Hits $200k Revenues, 233 Customers Using App Exchanges
08 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What milestone did KarmaBot recently achieve?
Just yesterday, we hit 200K annual revenue. So that means 17,000 a month. That would be 233 paying teams, which translates in approximately 20,000 active users.
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Hello everyone, my guest today is Stas Kulish. He is building a company called Karmabot.chat if you wanna check it out. He grew up in the far Eastern part of Siberia, studied computer science and nuclear physics, played in a band, got excited by the indie games making and left uni to become a digital designer. Check, I mean, that is a hell of a bio.
For several years in the early 2000s, he's been working remotely, traveling and blogging extensively before that becoming a popular sort of mainstream thing and then ended up in New Zealand today building Karmabot. Stas, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, yeah. Hi, I'm Stas. You just made the introduction.
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Chapter 2: What challenges has KarmaBot faced during COVID-19?
But I can, because I built the tool, I can override it. So we should, you know, keep me in mind there. That's something I would definitely do with you because I think this is an interesting tool. But I will tell you this, I tried to install it the other day and have our community manager start using in our Slack group. It's so difficult to figure out like, how to get it started?
Because there's the tech piece of installing you as an application inside Slack, but then there's the emotional piece. There's a psychological piece of what are the rewards and how do you tell your community about it?
We totally understand that. And we work, I mean, just earlier today, I did two demos. Yesterday, four demos. We speak to customers and they need to do so much work in order to make it happen for their team, but then it becomes their thing. This is how we're different. We're not trying to sell the pre-existing system that we claim is successful.
We allow people to use this tool to build their system. And that takes time and it's difficult. And then, I mean, we're happy to help. And this is partially what we want to do with the fundraising money. This would be actually, you can totally see how we can spend that and explaining people how to, the best practices, how other companies did that.
This takes time to just convey the message, you know?
I do. I agree with you. What's, how many folks are on the team today?
Just six people, and I think I mentioned before, they come and go permanently. We have just four, including two founders.
How many engineers? Are you all engineers?
No, not all. My co-founder, he's more of a business administrator, finances kind of person, and then we have designers on the team, two developers, one full-time, and myself, I'm in the middle of it. I can code, I can do that. designs.
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Chapter 3: How does KarmaBot's revenue model work?
Um, annually, I think it's 4%, but that's, that's just a game about the COVID. I guess I call it COVID churn, which is a made up churn, but this is kind of relevant. These days we see, um, high churn up to three to 5%, but actually annually or monthly monthly, uh, The 5% we got last month, that was monthly, but just because of companies dying out, literally. They're not there anymore.
And so the good thing about it, the ones who survived and who subscribe now, I think they are the survivalists and they will be staying there for longer.
Yeah, I mean, Sas, I'm not revealing any private information here because you came on our deal, our new Shark Tank for SaaS show on YouTube and shared this. But I was shocked before COVID, even during COVID, but shocked at how low your churn was. I mean, you were under 1% revenue churn per month.
Chapter 4: What unique features does KarmaBot offer for team recognition?
And then you saw a little spike to like 3.8% during COVID. But that'll come back.
And I panicked.
It's a good thing to panic about, but also be realistic on, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not too bad. It's not too bad. And this is just to support my claim that this is a habitual thing. When it's established, it's there. It's really hard, difficult to pull out of the company culture.
How are you signing up new customers? And what do you think your CAC is right now?
Well, we don't spend anything on marketing just because we don't have anything extra. So they come to us through the stores. Slack has its own app store marketplace. Microsoft Teams has its own marketplace. And they just come organically. And we're trying to handle this flow with my co-founder doing demos. And the rest is just a self-service.
How many new demos are you doing per month?
Oh, I do... Seven to 10 a week, so that's 40, 100.
Yeah, you're doing 40 of 40 a month, basically?
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Chapter 5: How has KarmaBot's customer base grown over time?
Customer.
Okay, we gather customer reviews, we gather at G2 website. So G2.com, if you search for Karma Bot, there will be a page with a brilliantly shiny review set. And yeah, they don't have it on Slack.
Have you done anything with Slack to try and get like their staff to add Karma Bot to like the staff picks list? I imagine that would drive you a lot of leads if they did that.
They would. but they have another product, which they are big friends with. And that was one of those things like we go in head to head. Who is it? It's like, it's a disco, disco boat, a girl boat previously. So they were, they are in essentials. They are on the front page. We cannot like ask. We, I asked actually, it's like to, to, to put karma next to them, but it was counterintuitive.
They invested money in this. They are part of the Slack fund. Oh yeah. So, We are still featured in the new and noteworthy. We are not on the last position in the particular area. That's why we're still getting people from the store. But to be honest, it gets crowded. That's why we need to get out of chats in general and get a bigger chunk of the markets through the web.
Are you profitable today?
Yeah, yeah. We've been profitable since January. As I said, we're keeping this very lean.
Very good. All right, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
Favorite business? I really like lead scaling. You've heard of that?
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