SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SupportBee Ticket Software Hits $45k MRR, Bootstrapped, how?
05 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So it's about 45,000 a month. Some of them are on annual, some of them are on monthly, but that's the average.
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My guest today is Ana Mohan. She is building a customer support software for collaborative teams. She's an entrepreneur, cyclist, and aspiring writer. And she's a proud transgender woman, pronouns she and her, and lives in Barcelona with her two cats. Ana, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, yes. And one of my cats right there as well.
I see. It looks very comfortable back there on that chair.
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Chapter 2: What is SupportBee and when was it launched?
So 450 customers, 100 bucks a month, 45 grand in monthly recurring revenue. And have you done this? Ana, have you done this all bootstrapped?
Yes, actually, we've never raised any money.
I love this. I love this. So difficult to do. And where's home base? Where's headquarters?
So we incorporated in the US as a C Corp, as a Delaware C Corp, but we don't have an office anymore. We didn't have an office for a while. Then we had for a couple of years in Bangalore because I think we had this phase where we thought, okay, we should be in Bangalore. We should raise some money and we should hire all the talent we can. But I think very soon I realized I can't really do it.
I don't think I can be in a super busy tech ecosystem.
All right. So where are you sitting right now?
So I'm in Barcelona, Spain. My co-founder, she's in San Diego in the US. I have a couple of new team members in Barcelona that just came on board. And then I have one developer in India. He's been doing our backend stuff and then one in Bolivia. So we've been remote, fully remote since 2015. And even before that, we had a strong remote ethic.
So what does that mean? So I just adding up the numbers, how many people total are on the team and how many of those are engineers?
So two engineers, then my co-founder who's doing customer support and success. I basically just keep the whole thing running in terms of the business and trying to think about growth. And we've just added one person who's coming on board for growth. So we have two people who are sort of ramping up from being freelancers to coming on full time.
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Chapter 3: How did the founders come up with the idea for SupportBee?
So I mean, you're I mean, four people and $45,000 a month, that's a revenue per employee of almost 10,000 bucks a month, which is really I mean, it's impressive for early stage SaaS company. Yeah, I mean, it's super impressive. So I mean, that must mean you guys are extremely profitable that I hear it.
Yeah, we can all pay ourselves a good salary. We have been saving some money to invest in growth, which is why we can, this year at least, we are planning to invest a bit more in marketing. To our own detriment, we've never really invested anything in marketing. We've never had a sales team and It's great that we got so far, but I think we sort of want to shake things up a bit now.
Well, so how have you done all this without marketing, a sales team? I mean, you have 450 customers. How did you get your second 449 after the first one?
Well, obviously, I mean, as you understand SaaS pretty well, we actually got a lot more, but then some of them churned out. We have, I think we just have a good sort of search presence, organic search presence. We have some integrations. We have a certain base camp on Asana.
So we've got some, but really, to be honest, I think I personally think we can do a lot better, but it's all been organic so far.
Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say one of the things I found interesting when I look up support B on Ahrefs, my go to tool for anything SEO, you guys have an incredible domain authority, right? It's pretty high domain rate at 72.
However, you only get about 2000 organic clicks from search every month, which is really low for a website that has that much authority, which tells me there's a massive opportunity there. But you currently rank for about 2900 keywords, which keyword right now is bringing you the most trials and customers, would you say?
I'd say it's fairly distributed. I'd say it's perhaps some variant of ticketing system, like support ticketing system, ticketing system, something like that. So I think this is what I've kind of learned over the years, like painfully so, is that having pages for things like ticketing system or knowledge-based software versus just generating a lot more content, which targets a lot of long tail.
And that's the opportunity you're talking about. So now we started doing that. Now traffic has grown quite a bit, but I think we have to work on converting them to trials. And so that's what we are working on now.
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Chapter 4: What is the pricing model for SupportBee's services?
Maybe on an annual or monthly basis, what's revenue churn?
So on a monthly basis, the revenue churn looks about 2.5%. to 3%. And I think the low return is about similar, 3-ish percent.
Okay. So sort of 30% annualized.
Yeah.
Okay.
Which I think for the, yeah, for the segment that we are in, I think it can be improved, but probably there's better places to invest our energy in right now. That's what I believe.
Yeah. Now, do you I mean, churns fine, especially if you get like your CAC paid back instantly. Right. Your economics make sense. It sounds like you're not doing a lot of paid stuff, but there are other forms of CAC. What was your total CAC right now, would you say, to acquire a hundred dollar a month customer?
I really wish I had that number. I don't because even content is so new for us. Now we're investing like a certain amount in producing content every month, but we really haven't nailed down that funnel. We started, we really started, we haven't started trying to like For example, a great example of that is we only have one action that you can take, which is to sign up for a trial.
You can't really sign up for even a newsletter. So I think once we put that in place and we measure it, maybe in a year from now, I'd have a better answer.
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Chapter 5: How did SupportBee acquire its first customers?
And if not, then you probably think that we're not that great. But either way, I think be a little bit more... like, and in fact, those are some of the people working with us part-time. So like a much, much more vibrant colors, so much, much, uh, the copy written in a way that appeals to the smaller businesses, um, things like that. So I'd say, uh,
Just sort of like focusing on some of that and then like continuing to produce more content, investing a little bit more into customer success. So it's not just about doubling the customer base, but also reaching out to some of the people who churn out because maybe they couldn't figure out the product, things like that.
So all of that sort of put together and maybe taking a more long term approach, to be honest.
And before you make a bunch of these moves, I mean, historically, what's the company grown out of the past 12 months? What was revenue 12 months ago?
So we did do some upgrades for some old customers and that helped us grow a bit in the last 12 months. I'd say about 30% or so.
Okay, got it. So you were doing call like $38,000, $39,000 a month about a year ago.
A year ago, yeah.
And in order to drive this brand overhaul and maybe make some critical key hires, I mean, would you consider raising capital or no?
Not at the moment because I think I'm pretty, I think unlike 10 years back now, I know what story sort of you need to sell. So not at the moment. But I'm curious to see how things pan out in the next 12 months. And based on that, if we need to, then yes. But I do want to consider revenue-based financing, other options too.
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