SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
WebHookRelay DevOps Tool Hits $120k Revenue, 1 person team, bootstrapped
26 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Can I take 500 customers times 20 bucks a month? You're doing like $10,000 a month in revenue. Yeah, something like that. 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 Carolus Rusanas. He is building a tool that helps you debug webhooks sort of at scale.
He's an entrepreneur, full-stack engineer with extensive experience in compute infrastructure, networks, Kubernetes, and developer tooling. The website's webhookrelay.com. Carolus, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Hey, everyone. Okay. So explain this tool simply for us. People understand a webhook. They understand they build a tool.
It has to connect to Stripe, and it uses webhooks to do that. Where does your tool come in? So main use case is when you want to receive one webhook and then pan out into multiple destinations. For example, if you're integrating it with Segment, HubSpot, like Zapier, like many tools, so it can do that. Then it can also... forward it to your internal networks.
So main use case usually is just some service in your internal network, like Office Network or some cloud provider that doesn't have public IP. They can receive those webhooks without getting exposed to the internet. For example, Jenkins CI, that's very powerful, but if someone hacks it, then they have access to your whole infrastructure. Carol, let's explain this to a non-developer for a second.
Why is it important to be able to test a webhook without being exposed to the internet? Mostly because your computers, for example, don't really have access to the internet from outside. Internet cannot access your laptop unless you configure your router. Also, some internet providers don't even give you public IP addresses. Also, some services
require HTTPS, so you'll need to get a valid certificate for your laptop if you want to test something out. And then if you want to retry or see what kind of requests there was and what kind of response you received, it really helps with that. Got it. I mean, is this a big problem? Do you have customers that are paying to use the tool? Oh yeah, quite a few.
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Chapter 2: What is Webhook Relay and how does it work?
How many people are on the team? Just me. Just you. I love that. Okay. So one person, one engineer. And I mean, so can I do the math? Can I take 500 customers times 20 bucks a month? You're doing like $10,000 a month in revenue? Yeah, something like that. And It's just a single project. I have a few other projects, and I also do consulting on the side. So yeah, it's just one stream of income.
That's great. So just looking at Webhook Relay, if it's doing $10,000 a month today, what was it doing exactly a year ago? Probably $1,000. Oh, wow. So a lot of growth. Yeah. And it's pretty much no marketing as well. So how are customers finding you? So I only write some tutorials and blog posts on Medium, DevTour. I also wrote some Twitter bots to help with followers and have some automations.
But yeah, I pretty much try to get users through content. I did try to do some ads on Facebook and Google. But yeah, I think the quality of users that came just wasn't good enough. Tell me about what you did on Twitter.
Chapter 3: What are the main use cases for Webhook Relay?
So you have 4,700 Twitter followers right now. You're saying you built sort of a tool to get more followers and then you converted followers into webhook relay users? Yeah, so mostly that. So yeah, I was running this bot that would look for our engineers, try to follow them and so on. But yeah, Twitter banged me maybe three times and suspended my account. So I had to change my tactics.
So, where do you put up most of your content now? So, mostly just on Webhook 3D blog and most of the new users actually coming from Google search where they are looking how to like test like Stripe Webhooks or set up their Jenkins testing environment in the company. Got it. So, the Jenkins search is a good one for you. You get a lot of users from that.
Yeah, because I think it's like a real pain point. Lots of corporates don't really want to expose their Jenkins servers to the internet. So a lot of corporate customers are coming for that. It's just like the sales cycle with corporations. It's just so slow. A lot of hand-holding. So yeah, it does take a lot of time sometimes. And do your... Talk to me about churn.
Once people start paying, do they stick? What's your churn look like? Oh yeah, it's very sticky. So what percent churns every month? Around 4%. Okay, so 4% monthly churn, that's on a revenue basis? Not really sure. So if you start the month with $10,000 a month, you'll lose $400 a month in churned revenue? Oh, but the growth is always also every month.
It's around some months during coronavirus, it's a bit lower, like 7%. But prior to Corona, it was like 15 to 20%. In terms of churn or growth? Growth. Yeah, yeah. So ignore growth for a second. Just look at like lost revenue from the prior month. You'll lose like 400 bucks a month or about 4%, but you'll grow like 15 or 20%. So net, you're at like 15% growth. Yeah.
So it's difficult to say like with churn. Like as I said, like some months it's 0%. Some months they're awesome. So like With the last few months, uh, there was a turn because some of the companies went bust. Yeah. Are you spending any money today on marketing? Like what's your cap? No, nothing. So it's just your time and writing. Yeah.
I just see that it's like the best option, at least for me at the moment. Um, yes, it costs me a dime, which is probably worth more to me. Uh, but. As I said that, I tried to run ads and I don't know why, but most of the clicks actually don't really go anywhere.
I remember even though I would have thousands and thousands of clicks, there would only just be a few registrations and then those registrations would have to be converted into paying customers and that didn't happen. Well, very good. I love it. Bootstrap to 10 K a month. That's great. A very niche specific tool for developers. Carol, let's, let's wrap up here with the famous five.
Number one, what's your favorite book? Uh, lots of science fiction books. Um, pick, pick one. Uh, actually maybe a Chinese author, uh, three body problem. Um, I can't pronounce his name, but what's the book title. Three body problem. Three body problem? Yeah. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? I like Elon Musk, but really not following Elon Musk.
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