SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Learn from Organice: How to get free customers from the Slack App Exchange
11 Oct 2023
Chapter 1: How did Andrew Phan launch his agency at just 24?
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Guys, when Andrew was 24, this was back in 2012, he launched his own agency and started doing consulting work. Today, he charges on average $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 per project.
Chapter 2: What is Organice and how does it integrate with Slack?
And last year did, quote, several millions in revenue, call it $3 million in revenue. But what we talked about today was how he's launching these individual SaaS applications like Organize.app on the Slack app exchange, which helps you bring your org chart online. into your Slack channel. If you're a smaller team, that's maybe too early for the enterprise level org charts.
He's just now got his first paying customers on that product.
Chapter 3: Who are the typical customers for Organice's Slack tool?
55 engineers up at the holding co level, 1.5 of which we'll call it a person and a half working on the spinoff for OrganizeApp. We'll see what he does next. Hey, folks, my guest today is Andrew Phan. He is building a company called Organize, which helps founders and people ops teams of growing Slack heavy organizations by bringing the core of their HR tools into Slack.
Andrew, ready to take us to the top?
Hey, guys. Nice to be here.
We're good. We're thrilled to have you. From what I understand, you have a company called Upsilon where you work on side projects.
Chapter 4: How did Andrew acquire his first paying customers?
And one of the side projects that has taken off is this one called Organize. That's N-I-C-E dot app. Tell me about a customer that pays for Organize app.
Chapter 5: What pricing model does Organice use for its users?
Yeah, so we just started recently. The application was launched this March. And currently we have a bunch of paying users and a bunch of users which I hope will convert to the paid users soon. If I have to... describe an average customer, I would say that this is an SMB company which uses Slack a lot and which is probably growing and which is too small to start using enterprise-level HR tools.
And when you say lots of paying customers, how many paying customers?
Not a lot. Currently, we have five.
That's great.
Chapter 6: How does marketing on the Slack App Exchange work?
And what do you charge per month on average?
We charge per users in their workspace.
Okay, and how much?
$1. $1 for a user if you pay annually or $1.25 for a user if you pay monthly.
Okay, so $1 per user per seat per month or $1.25. And then how many seats do the five customers currently have?
In total, they have somewhere near 400 seats. So our MRR is somewhere near 400, depending on the amount. It jumps depending on the number of users.
Well, so why does it jump? I mean, if they use your tool and pay for it and get addicted, they shouldn't churn at all.
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Chapter 7: What metrics does Andrew track to convert trial users to paid customers?
Why does it jump?
It jumped to the positive direction. I mean, people, those companies, they are growing because, yeah, usually you need to visualize the organization if you want to grow. Because if you are shrinking, it does not make sense to visualize your existing team. So I would say that revenue is growing.
And help me understand, Andrew, how you got these first five customers.
Yeah, so this is not our first product which we launched on top of Slack. And what we realized is that Slack is a perfect place to start your first, I would say, bootstrap small business.
Chapter 8: What future plans does Andrew have for his agency and SaaS tools?
Because once you release something for Slack, you can get into their marketplace. And basically, this is a free marketing tool for you. And this is how we got our first client. So we just released our application there. We wrote a description for this application where we mentioned some words like org chart, org tree.
And our first customer basically found us using the search on the Slack marketplace.
I want to go deep on how you optimize for Slack because I'm on the listing right now. Slack does not use ratings. So it's not like you can get to the top of a list if you get a lot of five-star ratings. But what you have in your description are bold words like org chart, birthday, work anniversary, manage PTO. How did you know what keywords to target?
And does making them bold actually get you more traffic from Slack?
So Slack Marketplace team is not huge, and the algorithms on how they rank certain applications are not that sophisticated in comparison to Apple Store or Google Store. So this is only my guess, and my guess is based on observation because we have two other applications in the marketplace. So they... rely on the application usage.
So for example, if you found some customers which are using you a lot, they're probably going to rank you higher.
So Andrew, they're tracking how many people click that green add to Slack button. So for you guys, last month, how many people downloaded Slack on the Slack directory?
Not a lot. Maybe... 25 uh yeah i'm saying not a lot because for our another tool we get like 20 30 downloads per day that tool is uh more It's less appealing in terms of a business. However, it has good keywords, good names, so that's why people install it. So for organized, we basically tried... We try to highlight our main feature, which is building our org chart.
And I guess most of the clients, they find us by typing org plus something in the search bar. Because if you do this, probably you will see us in the top. And basically, the number of results won't be huge. Probably like five, ten results in total.
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