SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Twitter Tool Profits $10k/mo on $35k MRR, Would Sell for $1.8m Cash
15 Oct 2021
Chapter 1: What insights can we gain from the Latka numbers?
Okay, here, the Latka numbers. I have them ready here. He has them. 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 these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Javier Abrego.
He's building a cool tool called tweetbinder.com. Helps you analyze your Twitter information. Javier, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes. All right. So you came on, this must have been a while ago. I forget. It was a while ago. Give us an update. Where's the company today in terms of product? What are you guys helping customers do?
Yeah, well, I was at your show, Deal or Bust, about one year ago. Yeah, it was great, Nathan. It was great. But right now, Tweetbinder... It's actually a little bit better than years before. What we do basically is to analyze information on Twitter. We are a six-people company, three engineers. And 2020 was a very good year for us in terms of revenue.
And this year, our hope is to get the same amount of revenue than last year. What did you do in 2020 revenue-wise? Okay, here, the Latka numbers, I have them ready here. He has them. Okay, in US dollars last year was 440,000 US dollars. And this year, we are hitting 300,000. Right now. Yeah, we hope to get there at the same than last year. Got it.
So does that mean you're doing, if you're at $300,000 now divided by nine months, you're doing about $35,000 United States dollars a month? Yeah, more or less. Something like that. Interesting. And Javier, so it sounds like you're flat year over year.
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Chapter 2: How did Tweetbinder evolve since its last appearance?
Why is it flat? Twitter's growing fast. Why aren't you guys growing? Yeah, good question. In the first years, we have two lines of business. What we call the SaaS, you know, you get your report in twitbinder.com and the services side. And we have like... let's say 60% of our revenue in the services part of the company. We had to kill that.
So we have been growing the, let's call it the analytics part, the SaaS part of the business quite okay. And last year, we are better than last year in terms of, let's say the SaaS business. But last year we had a lot of requests for custom jobs on like with, related to COVID because a lot of people wanted to know what happened around COVID in Twitter last year.
So it was a horrible year for everyone, but in terms of Twitter analytics, it was a good year. Interesting. Okay. So that makes sense then. So today, how many customers are paying you per month? Per month, our subscription clients, there are 120 at this moment. And that's the MRR side of the business. What we have very strong as well is the one-off reports.
Sometimes you don't need a subscription. You just want to see how your event went on Twitter. So you just buy one report. That part of the business, we are selling about 200 reports, a little bit more, per month. And it's getting us around, let me see, around $13,000. And our MRR subscription, just subscription, is about $19,300. Sorry, $19,300. Got it.
So when you add them, that's how you get $30,000, $35,000 a month in revenue. Yeah. And there's a third one because we're still doing like these custom reports we have like for universities, for example, they want to do something that requires a little bit from our side. For example, we had one client that wanted to get a list of all the doctors, medical doctors of France that are on Twitter.
So we can do that, but we have to do it ourselves. So the rest of the revenue comes from that type of of services and it's like, I don't know, 15 clients per month. Got it. So, so I could, you and you charge, you know, between 50 and 200 bucks for these one-off reports, depending on how much history you're pulling for somebody.
But Javier, if I wanted to ask to pay you and I said, Javier, I really want just a list of everyone on Twitter who has the words angel investor in their bio, you could go pull that list for me. Yeah. Interesting. Would I get their email as well? No. So what data set would I get from you in that report?
You're going to get the number of followers, the number of following, their location, where they're based, the number of tweets, the number of likes they are getting, the number of retweets they are getting. And then on top of that, the public metrics of Twitter, we can give you other metrics, grossing those metrics, engagement rates, those kind of things.
But the email is a private part of your Jericho. I see. And so you launched this business in what year? 2013. 2013. And do you own 100%? 89%. 89%. Who owns the rest? A small firm here in Spain that we closed at the founding round in 2017, 100K. They got around 9% of the company and the rest of the company is from one client and one worker here in Dubai. Got it.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does Tweetbinder face in growing its revenue?
Yeah, and actually, you are getting a lot of retweets and likes as well. I love that. What we are doing now with this, Nathan, is we are going to launch, and this is an exclusive for you, we are going to launch a product that tracks Twitter users. And every hour, we are going to update the metrics, followers, list, retweets, likes, everything, everything.
So every hour, you're going to get updates in the Tweetbinder dashboard. So Javier, I think a lot of founders will fall into this trap, which is they want to decrease churn. They want to launch a new product that feels stickier. But how do you know that that's what I want? How do you know someone's going to pay monthly for that? I don't want to get hourly updates.
What am I going to do with that information is the big question, I think, with any reporting SaaS. The good thing is you can compare with your competitors. I mean, maybe you are not a good client. Actually, you can have this for free. And if you want, you ask Nathan. But let's say you are a beer company. You want to compare your performance on Twitter with other beer companies.
So you can group them in this product and you can compare what they are doing. Got it. We asked our client, what do you need? What do you need? What can we do to stay with us? And they asked for this. When does this launch, Javier? We launch in two weeks. Okay. Well, we're looking for it. We're recording today on Thursday, September 23rd.
So two weeks from now, it'll be like October 5th, 6th timeframe. We'll see, or October 10th. We'll see how that goes. Talk to me a little bit more about what you plan to do over the next 12 to 24 months. So do you anticipate staying? Do you think you'll raise more capital or no? No, we don't need it right now. We are profitable. Thank God. How much do you make per month?
We have a profit, net profit of $10,000, a little bit less, $8,000 to $10,000 US dollars. In Euro, it would be like $6,000, something like that. Congratulations. That's hate. Very few SaaS companies are profitable, so congratulations. Yeah. We've been profitable for the last two years and one year and a half, let's say. The previous years were very tough for Twitter by their nature.
So if somebody's listening right now, we have a lot of buyers and private equity firms that listen to the show and they came to you and offered you, you know, 1.8 million all cash upfront for the business. Would you sell? I will, I will probably say yes, but what I will, what I want Nathan is to grow this company. And the only way that I know how to grow is by creating products. You know, that's,
my blessing, my curse at the same time. So what we want to do is not really to sell the company, it's to partner with a big company that we can go with and they can buy part of Tweetbinder, let's say 40% of the company. So we can be like part of that other company, use their resources. That's what we...
my, my wish that will be, we will, that if somebody offers me 1.8 million, I mean, that's great because I own 90% of the company, but you know, I have so much fun in the day, so much fun. And that's a good thing. That's otherwise you wouldn't be doing what you're doing. Javier, we're out of time here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
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Chapter 4: How many customers does Tweetbinder currently serve?
business book it's not famous five it's famous eight or something it's more than well yeah we asked a couple extra questions you know that you know the drill okay the hard things about the hard things okay and is there a ceo you're following or studying uh yeah yeah andrew gazdeki from micro choir number three how many hours of sleep to get every night eight and uh what's your favorite online tool for building the business besides your own
I hate this question because nobody says three binary in your podcast. I will say Slack, of course. Slack, yeah. And what's your situation? Married, single kiddos? Married and two kids. Two kids. And how old are you? 42. 42. Take us home here, Javier. What do you wish you knew when you were 20? Well, I will say like to be patient, you know, to be patient mostly.
Guys, Tweetbinder, they got off onto a great start in 2013. They broke $400,000 in revenue last year, now doing $35,000 a month in revenue. Profitable, 10 grand a month, the bottom line. They do a lot of revenue via one-off reports. They make 13 grand a month doing that. All the other revenue comes from 120 customers. that pay for the recurring fee.
Launching a new SaaS product here in October that will help them drive more SaaS revenue and scale. Javier still owns 89% of the business. They sold 9% in $100,000 pre-seed round back in 2017 at a $900,000 valuation as he looks to continue to scale with his team of six. Javier, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan.