SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
LogoPackage Sells $80k One Time To Fuel New SaaS Tool MVP
14 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The total sales is right around 175,000. And then that first version sold about 5,000. So 180 is very close to the lifetime sales so far. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews.
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Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests no questions asked. Hello everyone, my guest today is Michael Bruni-Groff. He began his journey to entrepreneurship with a BFA in graphic design from Western Michigan University.
He then made Chicago his home after graduation and worked for design agencies for four years before going freelance. When a major client went under, he started exploring product design and the Logo Package was born, his current company. Now it's his full-time work and primary source of income. Michael, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, sure.
All right, so what is the Logo Package and what's the revenue model? How do you generate income? So the logo package, in its easiest form to understand, is that it makes exporting logo files for designers very easy. They need to create logo files for their clients when they're done with a logo design project, and it can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour or more.
And Logo Package Express is a piece of software that gets it done in about three to five minutes. The revenue model is essentially, it's a one-time purchase for the software. It's an extension for Adobe Illustrator. And basically, it's just getting new customers to come in and buy is the main way that revenue grows. And give us the background there.
When did you sell your first $99 sort of extension? Well, the first version of this product was something that I made myself. It was sort of a bundle of actions and scripts and things that people kind of had to manually install inside of Adobe Illustrator. And that first sale was in October of 2018, but that was a very alpha MVP version.
Once that started selling, after I brought on some affiliates in January of 2019, I decided to make the investment to actually get an extension, a plugin developed for Adobe Illustrator. And I didn't have that skill set. So I looked for developers and I found one. And the extension version, the most current iteration, launched in May of 2019.
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Chapter 2: What inspired the creation of the Logo Package?
So I kind of made an insulting offer of about 5% when we started. But he gently guided me towards a better number. We started at 20%. And then when the new version of the extension, instead of that alpha version launched, I bumped him up to 40%. And for all of my affiliates, I'm between 30% and 40% just to keep them motivated and wanting to promote it.
So how much in sales do you think the logo has driven you? Um, the logo geek in sales, I can actually find that is, um, while you look it up, tell us, tell us what tracking you use for this stuff. So I sell my, um, I sell my product through, uh, a platform called gum road. You may have heard of gum road. It's just makes it really easy to sell digital products, um,
Yeah, we've had Hill on the show a couple times. Okay, great, yeah. So the amount of sales that have come from Ian from Logo Geek is $20,000. And that is between what dates? That would be, what I'm looking at right now would actually be between May of 2019 to the current time. So a little over a year, they've driven you $20,000 in sales of which you've paid them a 20%.
A 40% because of this is, this would be the extension version. Yeah. Got it. Got it. So somewhere like, like what? Eight grand on the 20 grand you paid out. Yeah, for sure. And also I give a 20% discount as like an incentive for my affiliates to share with their audiences.
So the price of the extension is $99, but I typically sell it for about $79 because I give that deal to a lot of my affiliates.
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Chapter 3: How does the Logo Package's revenue model work?
Okay. Well, yeah, so let's, so you, again, you were hustling, you were hustling, you got some early revenue, you got your first four customers, you made some money, you then use that money, um, to pay five grand to develop or to build out the current thing for sale on the logo package.com, the $99 Adobe illustrator extension that launched in, uh, you said first sale that was 2018.
Um, the extension launched in May of 2019. Okay. May 29th. Okay, good. So exactly. Almost a little over a year ago. So, um, yeah. So, okay. So let's, let's talk more about that and then talk more about the other parts of your business and your story.
So between, uh, we just talked about the sale of the sales geek or the logo geek, sorry, but the whole extension on together, how many people have purchased a copy of the tool? Overall, the extension has sold 2,426 copies. Are you happy with that? Yeah, I, you know, starting off, I was not a business person. I was a designer.
And, you know, coming up with something that's actually my livelihood now and supports me has been amazing. And I couldn't ask for more, although I will continue to ask for sales. So yeah, 24 selling 2400 of these at 79 bucks a pop or something. What is that like 150 180 something like 180 grand in sales? Yes, that's correct.
The total sales is right around 175,000 and then that first version sold about 5,000. So 180 is very close to the lifetime sales so far. That's great. So, I mean, do you get sick of having to start every month at zero and like you have to sell X number of packages to cover like your rent each month? Like why not get into like a recurring business?
Like you should have built the initial Figma or something. Yeah. Well, I'm working on that, but I don't want to go to the standard sort of monthly subscription model simply because my audience has a ton of those subscriptions. They're designers, they're paying for Adobe, they're paying for email, they're paying for all of these different things.
And it's actually a unique selling point that they only have to pay for this once. So, you know, when I release a major update, I'll charge a little bit for that update. But the product I currently sell solves the problem of it takes forever to make logos, right? That's the designer's problem.
But the clients have a problem too, which is they receive 100, 200 files and they have no idea what they do. So I'm also working on solving that portion of the problem. And that solution will definitely be a monthly recurring sort of more standard software as a service model. Have you already started building that? Do you have developers? I have developers. I have conversations with developers.
I'm in the validation phase. And currently what I'm doing is interviewing client type people, showing them a demo that I built with bubble.io and, um, It's really high fidelity uses their logos and stuff like that. I'm getting their feedback because ultimately designers have to pay for this new tool, but clients have to want to use it or else designers won't pay.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did the guest face in developing the extension?
So I'll talk while you open it up because this wasn't planned. If you're listening to the iTunes version of this right now, you will not see this, but if you go and look at this episode on YouTube, you will see Michael about to share it. What do you use? What tool do you use? Bubble.io. Yeah, this is called Bubble.io.
Yeah, so he's going to use Bubble.io, which it sounds like is maybe similar to Envision. You can build high-fidelity specs. He uses this to walk his early potential users through sort of a demo or walkthrough to sense if they're willing to pay for something like this.
And then once he thinks he has something they're willing to pay for, he'll actually invest the time and money to take the designs and pay the developers to make it live. Is that right, Michael? Yeah, that's exactly right. I know a lot of people like to build something as quickly as possible and then pivot when it doesn't work.
I'd rather build something that I'm pretty sure is going to work, especially because I don't have huge teams of people either. It's usually just me and a developer that I partner with. Yeah. You'll have to enable the screen sharing. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Zoom feature. Should be good to go. Sure. All right. So what are we looking at? Okay.
So essentially, like I said, the extension for Adobe Illustrator exports a package of logo files that are all sorts of variations and that sort of thing. You can get a couple hundred files in that package, and a client maybe doesn't know what all those are for. So this tool would be called the Logo Package Portal.
And with Logo Package Portal, you could sync all of your logo files from the extension to this portal, sort of cloud-based hosting for these logos, and generate a share link that you send to your client. The client opens up the link and they get access to this sort of dashboard. And then it's really simple.
It's just, you know, usually a client or a business person, a lot of people listening can probably relate. They just get asked for some kind of logo. Hey, we're a printer. We need a vector logo or whatever. So basically there's just two really simple filters. You can filter by color and you can get all the different variations of your logo in the different color schemes that are available and
And then there is also a use filter. So basically, I need to use this logo on my website. I need to use this logo for social media. I've got to put it on merchandise or something, right? Can you click on a couple of these? Yeah, I will. So they're not going to change the look because you're always looking at the same logo.
But we do have a little context bar down here that will give additional context to clients who sometimes have... they don't have the knowledge that a designer does. What's a PNG? Well, you can click on that, get a little tool to see what a PNG is all about. You know, why would I use something for social media? What is it? Social media? Uh, yeah. So I forgot we're not looking at a real thing.
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Chapter 5: How did affiliates contribute to early sales?
Yeah, and one of the things I'm majorly considering is actually a partnership to build this. So where there's profit sharing and kind of not have to pay that upfront cost of development. Very cool. Well, let's kill your screen and go back to just our faces. So this is cool.
So you guys just got an inside scoop of sort of how Michael is going from, he's sold a bunch of, like he's generated cash by selling this extension on a site, the logopackage.com, about 170 grand worth. He's now thinking about moving into sort of a subscription plan with this new UI. This would be inside a website somewhere, right? And they pay a subscription. Correct. Very cool. I like that.
When do you think is let's say you move forward with it? When do you think it launches? My, my estimate right now would be somewhere in March of next year. Okay. And you've done all this bootstrapped, right? Yes. Yep. I love that. Why? Actually, March next year is a long time. I mean, you have validation. So what's taking so long? Why not pay someone now build it, get it out in a month?
Well, that's what everybody asks, but I kind of do things my way, and basically I also have some features that I need to develop for the extension that have to be working properly in order to even execute this idea of the portal.
So I could build an MVP that would be useful to half the people on my list or something like that, but I'd rather get the extension where it needs to be so that it's working properly to sync these files with... with the portal, and I expect, based on the availability of my developer, that that will take me sometime into March of next year. Where did you find your developer?
I went to forums for Adobe Illustrator scripting, right? That seemed like a good place to find people who knew about making extensions. And this person, Trevor from creative-scripts.com, he actually had his own section on the forum devoted to like his way of building things. So I got in touch with him and that's been a really great collaborative relationship.
All right, Mike, let's wrap up with your famous five here. Number one, favorite book. Favorite book at all or favorite business book? I'm gonna do book for you. Yeah, I'm really bad at favorite questions, but I think a business book that influenced me early on in this transition in my life to being an entrepreneur. Do you take swearing on the show? Yes. Okay. It's called Just Fucking Ship.
It's from Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman of the 30 by 500 fame. And it's just about, you know, don't wait forever until something's perfect and never actually launch anything. And it's also got some real good practical advice about shipping as well. Come on, just don't wait till March next year. Ship it. I don't plan not to. I just have to get some things in line. I hear you.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Yeah, I think we talked. I think we mentioned him earlier. I am following what Sahil from Gumroad is doing because I'm using his platform a lot. I've actually spoken to him about things. So that's pretty cool. Number three, what is your favorite online tool for building your products? Figma, which you mentioned earlier as well.
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