SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
UnicornPlatform Bootstrapped, 500 customers, Doesn't Want "Scale at all costs"
06 Jan 2021
Chapter 1: What challenges does Unicorn Platform face with customer churn?
Our churn is quite huge. We have about 20% per month of people who cancel the subscription. But this is not a problem. I understand that our product is intended for young startups who just started their business. And young startups often die. Almost everyone dies.
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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 Alexander Azora. He's a CEO and founder of a unicorn platform, the landing page builder for startups and also creator of broadwise.org, the startup community DJ.
Alexander, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, I'm ready. Thank you. Of course. So the reason I invited you on is we're seeing a trend right now where if you focus on building a great community first and then a software product, you really have an unfair advantage. So talk to me first about the community that you've built. What is the community?
That's a great question, and I agree with this trend. A community is often... Imagine a huge crowd of people, like thousands and thousands of followers. But often, and in my case too, the very first users of your product, the community you have around, can be literally dozens of people, like 30 or 40 people. And that's not too much. It's easy to get such following base.
and if you focus on the quality not on quantity if you know your follower if you're friends with them if you help them constantly will we they will give you back what does it mean so imagine you have only 30 followers on twitter but you know everything about this audience they are your goal target audience and then you ship something we will be if we are loyal enough We will use your product.
We will talk about it. Perhaps we will not purchase it, but we will always constantly support you whenever you launch or announce new features. And this is a very solid basis, fundamental of any SAS project.
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Chapter 2: How does building a community benefit a startup?
It will remain small, but We are artists, not businessmen.
Alex, artists love people admiring their artwork. And so I think the answer you gave is a little bit of a cheap answer because you just focused on the capitalism side, the money side. But... social capital is a direct precursor to financial capital and social capital is attention.
And so the more people you have using this art, this software that you've built, the financial stuff will take care of itself. So let me ask a different question. How do you go from your current user base to a million people using your platform paid or not? Um, or do you not care? Maybe it's, it might be something you don't care about. I'm,
I'm scared of such numbers. I will be honest. I am too scared to wake up one day and see on my phone that I have not 7,000 users, but 700,000 users. I'm not ready to make this crowd happy. I know how to make 7,000 people happy. I know how to make 20,000 people happy, but I don't know how to provide perfect support, perfect website loading speed, all that kind of stuff for a huge amount of
And I'm not sure I want to learn it because when you are big, you are getting far, far away from being a human. When you're a company, you're soulless. When you're indie, you're human. And I don't want to become soulless. That's my vision.
In your product video, you've got a custom painting of Elon Musk floating behind your head with spaceships going around his head. He runs three very large companies. And I argue he's extremely human.
Yes, that's the biggest mystery to me, the personality of Elon Musk. Why is that? Because what you said, he's running three huge companies, but he's still human and funny.
So much of this comes down to team. You've used the word we a couple of times. Who is we?
Our team is small. It contains four people. All of them are passionate experts in what we do. We have me and one developer, one support engineer and marketer for people.
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Chapter 3: When was the Broadwise community launched and what is its purpose?
How do they find you?
We have two main sources of traffic. The first one is word of mouth. Our people keep, our users keep recommending us everywhere on listings like G2 or Alternative 2 to their friends and Twitter and private spaces. And the second channel is, of course, Product Hunt. It's a huge, huge support for us.
We plan to launch again and again. Why not try some other things, similar to Product Hunt, to see if you can grow your audience, like Betalist?
Betalist gives almost nothing. You tried it. Yeah, yes, I tried it. It got like 300 visits and zero conversions.
When you did this launch on Product Hunt back in November of 20... Have you done one since November of 2019? We had three launches so far on Product Hunt. Yeah, so I see your Unicorn platform swag, your Unicorn platform 3.0, which you got 829 upvotes. When did you do that?
It was this summer.
Okay. And how many clicks to your website did you get from that?
I have a report for the previous launch, and it was quite the same. Let me show you. People love numbers, so I share as much as I can. Like visits, clicks, conversion, money. I'm opening my article and my personal blog, and I will tell you the exact numbers in a moment.
Yep. Guys, the listing looks great just while you're listening. Again, 829 upvotes launched in August. Was number two product of the day.
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Chapter 4: What metrics are used to measure the success of Broadwise?
So silver medal there. What were the metrics? How many clicks did you get?
So we got 8.200 visitors. And it turned out that 300 signed up.
became users and we had 31 sale like 10 of people who signed up purchased uh with plan that's great alex on that note listen we're rooting for you we hope you find a great growth marketer so that your software can be used by many more people and maybe scale up you get a little more capital then you can hire more engineers then you can build your product faster and get to your product vision faster let's let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book
Oh, I'm reading one, and I just love it. It's Critical Chain. What's it called, Critical Chain? Yeah, by Eliahu Goldthread.
Okay, I'll have to check that out. It's like... I don't know how to... Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Oh, I'm following one great guy. He's the CEO of MailerLite, Ignace.
Ignat, okay. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? Notion, One Love. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Sleep?
It's eight hours every day. And what's your situation, Alex? Married, single, kids?
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