BootstrFM

So welcome all to the 10th episode of Bootstr, and I think that, you know, it's a little bit of a applause worthy, I suppose. We made it to the double digits for episodes. Didn't think that would actually ever happen, but here we are. It's crazy. So yes, welcome to BootstrFM. We are a Twitter space that we do on as many Wednesdays as we can, here and there with a break, but as many Wednesdays as we can. And we have the goal to both talk to a founder that has a lot of interesting things to share and that we can all learn from and also to give the stage to others, to have them voice whatever is on their mind related to bootstrapping and founding and startups, etc. And my name is Erwin. I am the founder of Tailscan. I've been working on that for exactly 14 months now. And my co host is Dom. Dom, would you like to introduce yourself too?

Hello, of course. [00:01:00] I'm Dom. I'm working on a SaaS bootstrap product called Helpkit, which turns Notion pages into a professional help center or documentation site. That's what I've been focusing on for the past two and a half years. And yeah, doing some other things on the site, but that's basically my main stick.

And today we also have our guest Nick joining us, Nick from ChartMogul, Nick, would you like to give us a quick introduction?

Sure. Yeah. Thanks, Erwin. So yeah, my name is Nick. I'm the founder and CEO of ChartMogul. We do subscription analytics. So if you're a B2B SaaS, you can plug in your Stripe account or something like that and we produce a subscription analytics for you. And we also have a CRM product that we launched last year as well. So we've gone multi product, last year, which is kind of interesting. Something new for us to keep it interesting. And I've been doing this for nine, nearly 10 years, I guess, not more than nine years and before that I was like five years at Zendesk. So I've been like nearly 15 years in, in B2B SaaS. So [00:02:00] thank you.

Wow. That's crazy. The funny part was Dom and I were talking before the episode and, um, Dom mentioned, Hey, did you know that Nick actually worked at Zendesk? And I did not know that because you know, the moment that we met, what is it? Six, uh, five, six years ago in Korea, you were already working on ChartMogul. So I was like, I did not actually know you were at Zendesk before that. That's cool. So that's the start of your career. Uh, did you do anything before Zendesk?

So, I had one job before that after I graduated from college which was, um, I worked for a company called True Knowledge. Which was renamed to Evy. And then I actually left after about a year and a half there and joined Zendesk. Interestingly, that company was acquired by Amazon and became like the back end of Amazon Alexa. So, uh, if you actually I was in an Airbnb a few years ago in San Francisco and it's the first time I'd ever seen an Amazon Alexa product because I don't know, for whatever reason, I [00:03:00] hadn't, hadn't come across one. And I was like, interesting, let me try something. And we, I started asking it random questions that I knew that this startup, True Knowledge, could answer. And it could actually, it actually still answers like this, like random questions. Like if you said, who is Nick Franklin? The true knowledge, like from Cambridge, England, it would like, the Alexa would spit out a response saying I'm still employed by like this startup back in the day.

So that's kind of fun, yeah, so I did that for a bit, but I left to go to Zendesk. And so I never, I wasn't part of their shift of being acquired by Amazon. But yeah, so I did, I had a short stint there. And then, yeah, so I've only really had three jobs, I guess, since I graduated, but yeah, I had plenty of you know, part time jobs like washing dishes and stuff before when I was A bunch of delivering papers, washing dishes, all that kind of, all that kind of stuff in the past. But yeah, I've only had three office jobs, I guess, or three, I don't know, what's the right word? White collar jobs? [00:04:00] Yeah.

Yeah, I'm just comprehending this. So I can't believe, so you actually have something in Alexa, specifically something you put in there yourself and through acquisition. I mean, that's wild.

So my, my first job at that company was like, it was called knowledge engineer. Then I moved into like product role, which got me involved in the product, which I really liked. But before, originally I was. My original job title when I graduated was like knowledge engineer and it's basically glorified data entry. So, it's more than just data entry, but sort of sophisticated data entry. Okay. So structured data entry and sort of building relationships between different classes of objects.

So and I was really fast at it. So this is like clicking around and like lots of, you know, so I really input thousands, like thousands, like probably hundreds of thousands of different pieces of information I input into this thing. So this is probably a fair few categories of product that categories of question that if you asked Alexa, it might've been me who helped to train it. This says True Knowledge was built like with a, [00:05:00] kind of question answering system that was an ML. So the modern ones is like, obviously this like chat GPT and stuff, complete trash is that, where the true knowledge, which became Alexa was more like, uh, trying to, sort of hard, you know, build a system that could translate natural language via templates into queries that would be like a query, this knowledge base that had all the structured data linked together. So it's a really smart system that the founder had come up with, but it wasn't like anywhere near as good at answering questions as like, And ML, like these like recent, GPT systems, right? Yeah, you have to, do quite a bit of manual work.

That also means if Alexa ever takes over and now that we know you, you're at least going to help us to fight the AI overlords, right? Yeah, put a good word for us, please.

This definitely wasn't AI, like it was, I mean, I would say it was, you know, kind of, very complex magic trick is how I would describe it. You know what I mean? The new ones are, yeah, like [00:06:00] emergent intelligence or whatever is coming out of these like neural nets or something that this system was, people could, you could understand it basically. It was just a very complicated clockwork. Uh, yeah.

And so, you know, this was very data related, I suppose, this does tie into a little bit of, uh, of what you're doing now. Can you tell us how did you start ChartMogul? Like what were the early days like, and how did it come to be in the first place?

Yeah. So I worked at Zendesk. I had two, two main jobs there. The first was I was the sort of head of the EMEA, like Europe, Middle East, Africa region. So it was kind of doing sales, my personally, myself and support personally, myself initially. And then I had to hire a salesperson, hire a support person, hire an account manager, and kind of build a small team. I did that in Europe and I did the same thing in Asia. And we built a team in Manila, philippines where it was mostly the same thing again. So how I like salespeople, account managers, support people and train them, and we'd run the Asia region, [00:07:00] from there. And it's kind of a lot of good training about how, you know, how does sales work in software, all these things.

But my, My heart was always kind of in product design. It's more what I enjoy doing, building products and you know, with Zendesk, the product was mostly being built in San Francisco. I think we did have a couple other development offices over time, but mostly the design and kind of R& D and stuff was being done in, in San Francisco. And so, you know, I just felt like I want to get back into product design, sorry, building products. And, uh, At Zendesk, we were kind of measuring, our recurring revenue. We were using a product called GoodData at the time. GoodData is like cloud based, BI product, a bit like Tableau or Looker or one of these other products.

And I just felt like, you know, this was, I had a dashboard for the Asia region. My boss had a dashboard for the worldwide region. So, and it just felt like not to bash GoodData, but it was just not particularly like, didn't feel like a modern user experience and I think partly because [00:08:00] these products, like these BI products, they've been designed to provide analytics for everything, right? You can just, you can throw any data at it and kind of slice the data and query the data any which way you like. So, because of that, they didn't have like, a really delightful user experience, I guess. But at the same time, it's quite addictive to keep checking this.

This dashboard, cause like, you know, my performance was attached to these numbers. My boss is checking these dashboards and there was just a lot of things missing. Like it wasn't, we didn't know when it last updated. So it was just like, we just guessed, like, it looks like the numbers have changed since I checked it a few hours ago. But there's no like notifications of, Hey, you've got a new customer. The MRR has just increased by a hundred dollars or anything like that. So I felt like, you know, I could probably build something that would, you know, be like an analytics product that was sort of opinionated and just for subscription, just for subscription businesses.

So kind of like a Google Analytics, but instead of measuring web traffic, it would measure recurring revenue. And, yeah, so I went part [00:09:00] time at Zendesk and I started working on this and, I hired some people on Odesk, which is Upwork now, and to help me because I was really slow. I kind of taught myself Ruby on Rails to kind of get back into coding. I hadn't done any coding for a long time, so I thought I'd kind of get back into it, um, By that, and then started trying to build the product and I just realized I was really slow, so I was like, I had to hire some people, and, Yeah, well, while I was building it, I thought this was like the most niche idea ever, and no one would, no one else would think of this idea at all, but then while we were building it One of the engineers I'd hired on, hired off of Upwork, sent me a link to like, uh, bare metrics and it was like, Hey, this looks like kind of what we're building.

I was like, oh, damn. . Like, this is like two, this is like 2000, uh, 14. And it was 2013, 2014. I can't remember the dates. Anyway, sorry. Uh, but yeah, it was kind of like around then and, I was like, damn. So I kind got, I felt like I had a choice, I can fully quit my job at Zendesk and go all in or I can maybe give [00:10:00] up. So this is like, okay, it's time to just, really quit my, quit my comfortable job and go all in on this. And so yeah, and like try and get to market as quick as possible before this competing product. Who had got to market before us. Had like, you know, captured all the market and mindshare and everything.

yeah, then I went full time and we launched this thing and we also raised, um, small seed round at that time, 600, 000 as well. You know, I think the money hit the bank like two weeks before we got our first like paying customer of ChartMogul. So it's like almost at the same time, we did that as well because I was using my savings, to, fund the initial development. So I was keen to stop that happening. So raised a seed round and yeah, went from there. So that's, I guess that's the long, and I also moved from Manila to Berlin. So I spent the first four years in Berlin and now the last almost five years in, in South Korea building this company. So that's the early days.

I have a quick question in regards. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. I want to ask you in [00:11:00] regards to the competition, because I think especially for new entrepreneurs, you know, they start building a product and then someone, you know, you pour your heart and soul into it. And then all of a sudden, like while building it, you find out there's someone else already building kind of like the same thing. Like that can be detrimental to your mental health as a founder, in my opinion. It seems that for you. It also motivated you and like got you out and like really, you know, like pushed you, stopping your job and like going full in, but can you tell us about like, how was that mentally on you and how did you deal with that? Cause like, especially if you're still building, that's like really, really tough on you, you know?

Yeah. I remember talking to a friend of mine and he was just like, you know, maybe they're good at marketing, but just beat them on product. Like that was his advice to me. And I think we'd already designed and was building the product and I could already, like, we'd already built a fair bit of stuff. So we had, you know, it just wasn't polished and ready to go yet, and there was some few pieces missing and I could see that, there were some things that we had that they didn't have. So I knew when we launched, maybe it would be a better [00:12:00] product or, you know, there'll be some way. I just felt there'd be some way to make it work.

I felt optimistic. I think founders, you've got to be optimistic, right? About, I'm always optimistic about, the future and our ability to do well and I mean, we launched a CRM last year and CRM is like, probably, I don't know if it's the most competitive, but it seems to be one of the, it's a super competitive category, in SaaS, right? But I felt like we, we'll bring something new to the market and we'll somehow figure it out and we'll get customers somehow. So, yeah, I don't think it demotivated me. It was definitely a little bit annoying at the time because it was like, you know, it would have been nice to be first and all that. Yeah, but it ended up though, you know, by the time maybe we were second to market, second, and then maybe there was like a third and a fourth or fifth player coming within the six to 12 months after we launched as well. So yeah, quickly became a crowded market and became kind of a not a duopoly, but like three, three main players in the market the last few years. Yeah.

I'm curious, how was [00:13:00] it for you in the beginning when you were starting Chart Mogul in terms of what was your. Did you have like some sort of like goal in mind? Like you want to have a lifestyle business, you want to have a big exit and then, you know, never have to work again or was that, what was your initial, you know, motivation when it came to building the product?

Ah, well, the initial motivation, I guess there's a few things. One is, I've been working for about six and a half years for other companies, right? Like, and I always had an ambition to, I had some desire or ambition to see if I can build my own business startup my own company. So I guess there was some founder ambition there and I mean, part of that, you know, in the back of your mind, part of wanting to be a founder is the ability to kind of like reach some level of financial success, right from that although obviously the most guaranteed way of So the goal of getting to financial success is to take a much more lower risk route, right?

To work your way up the ranks in a larger company, you know, get to VP level, get to SVP level and start to make real, [00:14:00] real money at the, you know, I remember when Zendesk used to be a public company, I remember, seeing like, They would publish the senior executive salaries on Yahoo Finance, because it was like public disclosure, and I'd be like, okay, this is how you really make money in a much more low risk way, as you just work your way up the ranks in these bigger companies, and they pay very, very well. So I think it was the primary motivator. I think my, I think, I just wanted to get back to creating something. So I really enjoyed the process of creation. My university background, I'd studied animation and illustration and it's just like, I like to make animated movies and things like that, and just see if people like them.

So I think that's what I really like is build products and see if people like them. There's a sort of joy and a fun to that. Of course, it's always nice to make money as well. So I think for me running a product, Software product business or any kind of product based business is a good match for my kind of interests. It's like, I like building and designing products. I like when people buy them and I like the money that we make from it as well. So it's like, you know, whatever you can do with that [00:15:00] money. You can hire more people, et cetera. So, yeah, so the motivation in terms of ChartMogul, it wasn't really to build anything lifestyle business or a huge global, like a public company, I guess we've ended up somewhere in the middle.

We have like 68 employees today and so it's nowhere near being a public company, but you know, I think if you're trying to create the most relaxed lifestyle you possibly can. You also wouldn't hire 68 people either. So I don't think I really had a plan to create a small lifestyle business because I did go out and raise some venture money as well, like we raised a total of 3. 7 million, although we haven't. We haven't raised any money since 2017. So, think we were talking about this before. It's like, are you bootstrapped or VC? And I was like, well, we did raise VC, but we haven't raised any for quite a few years now.

So I think that the term is fundstrapped where you raise some venture capital money, but then you mostly grow. That gets you started and gets you to, helps [00:16:00] you, you know, get off the ground and, uh, build the start of the business, but then you continue on from there by growing from your customers revenue, the subscription revenue generated from your customer base, so. I don't think I really, I just wanted it to be some sort of success. I don't think I was really too, I mean, the bigger, the better, I think in my mind at the time, right? I just left Zendesk, that had just gone public. And so I was like, well, that's what a SaaS company is supposed to do if it's successful right. So, so I was like, well, let's try and do something like that, but I hadn't really thought through a hundred percent about, you know, could we make a massive company, but hopefully not just too tiny where, you know, so yeah, that's, I don't think I had a clear vision of exactly, exactly how big or small it would be.

Yeah. That makes sense. Right. Yeah. I guess in a way you don't, you don't know what the market size is and is going to be. I suppose the moment you started out, this SaaS world also looked quite different than it looks now. So yeah, I guess it's quite hard to plot where exactly is going. But it's impressive that [00:17:00] you grew it to 60 plus people and that, I think you, you mentioned, I think to me at some point that, um, that your revenue at this point over all those years, like 10 times the amount that you raised. And so, yeah, you're basically paying, you know, expenses and everything and being profitable By all the revenue rather than, you know, having the funding, it really was just a way to grow quicker, I suppose.

And so you coined the term funstrapping just now, and I do actually have, I wrote a question down about that because, well, first of all, I've never heard of the term funstrapping before, I don't quite understand what it is, but like, what do you think about it? Because there is quite a bit of narrative, especially on Twitter, but you know, elsewhere as well sometimes where it's either, you know, doing things bootstrapped or raising VC money, and, you know, from this, what I take away is, shouldn't there perhaps be a third category besides bootstrapping [00:18:00] and traditional funding? So, fundstrapping being a actual third legitimate option where, Continuous raising is not the goal, but it's just initial raising and then take off.

I think I have, so when we first raised, it's like, um, 2014, right? late 2014. And then we raised again in a 2015, and then another round in 2015 and this is kind of three seed rounds. We never really did a and our cap table is very, very short, very small number of people. And but, back then, 2014, I think, you know, if you're going to raise money, the intention is that you're going to raise, you're going to grow as fast as you can, you're going to raise an A round, a B round, a C round, and then you're going to have a large exit, you know, via acquisition or IPO.

Right, but a lot of companies, probably the majority of companies. that go down this route, they don't grow fast enough, you know, where they're really doubling in size every year or tripling and then doubling in size [00:19:00] and where they're accelerating towards, you know, 100 million ARR and beyond that they can actually deliver the out, that outcome. And therefore, you know, it's only a subset of the, of the companies that raise these seed rounds that actually get there. So the rest generally with SaaS, because it's quite a good business, best business model in the world, in my opinion, it's also recurring revenue. They generally just, if they're like us, they weren't growing like super fast, you know, like, after a few years, we're kind of growing like 30, 40, maybe 50 percent a year. And then it kind of goes down to 30 percent and like 25%. And then we kind of say, okay, well, we're building a good business, you know, we'll eventually be making, you know, tens of millions in ARR, but it will take many years to get there.

And this isn't the profile for IP or anything like that. So then I think what a lot of companies do in that position is they, just get profitable. They just say, well, okay, let's just slow down our spending and, let our revenue catch up with our expenses and get to cashflow positive. And that's what we did [00:20:00] in 2019, I think. So two, about two years after our last round, we realized we're probably not quite, we're not in quite the right market. We don't have quite the right product and market. I guess the product's not, it's more like the market we're in, subscription analytics, to create like a very large, very fast growing business.

So let's just get profitable and go from , and so that's what we did in around 2019. And we've been profitable ever since, the last like four or five years. And so that's kind of, I guess, the Fundstrap model, which is, I don't think, If you do raise venture, you kind of aren't planning to go down that route initially, but it seems like that's a, that's definitely a better route to go down than just burning all the money, right? And, ending up in a really bad place. So that's kind of like the route we decided to go, go down. And it's, you know, it's worked out really well. I mean, I guess we raised before, the market went super crazy in like 2020, 2021, when it went super nuts. So we've only raised 3. 7 million. So, you know, if we did have an exit, it wouldn't [00:21:00] be hard to give a return to our investors and make everybody happy, our employees and myself as the founder as well. So it's like, we raised a small, relatively small amount and we've done pretty well on that. But I think that's not what, What Venture Capital has been traditionally designed to do, right, it's designed to back a bunch of companies and for as many of them as possible, ideally, right, to become very large businesses that can have huge exits or IPO, which is another form of exit, right?

So, like, but I have seen recently that there are actually some VC funds or some types of funds that are actually set up, getting set up for this type of model, where they're like, you know, we'll get you started with an initial, you know, initial amount of money. But then that's it. This is going to be your last check. The plan isn't to go and raise an A round or a B round or a C round or whatever. It's to build a profitable, sustainable business. And, you know, maybe they take a larger chunk in the business or there's, you know, something like that in order to make the finances work, right? Like, they might, [00:22:00] in order to make the, their business model work as the investors, they might have to take a larger chunk of the business, or not quite as huge valuation or something like that, but, yeah, I'm not, but yeah, so I think there is always a different options out there. But anyway, these, I mean, these days for SaaS, capital is definitely harder to come by anyway, so,

yeah, so would you reckon, and I'm asking this from a position of you know, I don't know a lot of things about this specifically, so, Bear with me perhaps, but what I'm wondering is because capital is a little bit more scarce and it is a little bit harder to raise and you know, if you want to go down that VC route, it is, I suppose, more challenging, obviously, depending on what you're building, what you're doing, but, Would you reckon that because of that the fundstrapping funds, like the funds that do want to put in a seed round, and then, you know, as long as the company will become profitable, or it seems like it will be, and they take a chunk accordingly to, to that, do you think that is something that we'll be seeing, like, in the years to come? [00:23:00] Would you reckon that's going to be a bigger factor?

I don't know, probably. I mean, I just saw that recently some funds like, like kind of you know, tweeting about that. I was talking about that. So, you know, if it's just, if we're seeing that now, it seems to make sense. I mean, there are just a category of businesses where, you know, it's a bit like a, I think it's Jason Fried gave a good example. It's like, when you're trying to grow a plant, right? There are certain types of plant where, you know, if you don't give it any water. It's just going to die, right? And it does need a bit of watering now and again. But if you pour a bucket of water on it, it's just going to kill the plant, right? Too much water, right? Kills the plant. So there, there's a certain type of business. So somewhere between like, bootstrap businesses have obviously very little low capital requirements, right?

You know, so, but ChartMogul, I think We definitely benefited hugely from having venture capital, not just the money, but also our investors. I mean, one of our partners, Christoph Jans, who's extremely well known in the SaaS industry, you know, helped us get a whole lot of [00:24:00] customers in the early days. So we also picked our investors as well, but yeah, having the capital was definitely helped us in it to get to the market position we're in today. So, yeah, I don't think we could have bootstrapped and still had the same story, it wouldn't have happened. But we also didn't need like tens of millions of dollars in venture capital either.

So yeah, I mean, I guess traditionally people use the banks, right? To get business loans, but that hasn't always, they don't lend to software companies generally, banks. And especially early stage software companies, so. Yeah, I mean, more financial products probably, but yeah, it's not, it's financial products and it's not something that I particularly also, as I said, I haven't actually raised any money since 2017. So all I do all day is just like design and build features and products at ChartMogul and talk to our customers and talk to our team. So it's really also, I'm not the expert either, because I haven't done it in years, and it's not really what I'm that interested in, it's not what I'm intrinsically interested in anyway. Mostly I'm more interested in like, making our product better and making our [00:25:00] customers happy and that kind of thing, so. I'm the wrong person to ask about funding and all these things, honestly.

Right. But still, the reason I ask is you're walking, you know, You have walked a path that I think many in our community, are even less familiar with than you, or let's just put it bluntly, like myself, don't even know that it's even an option, right?

Because in my mind, that's an interesting thing, in my mind, it's literally the narrative of you bootstrap or you get VC fund, right? But so you, did open my eyes a little bit. It's like, you know, there's actually, under the right conditions, there's this middle path that, is much less, well, I would consider it much less brutal, where, you know, there's more wiggle room of like making the product, profitable, right? Like an actually good one than just like burning money.

Yeah, and I think traditional VC probably still isn't the right financial product for that. of like, yeah, sustainable, slower growth that, you know, they [00:26:00] do, they do generally want to invest in like hyper growth companies. So, but there is a category of financer of investor that, that is interested in these, like, slower, but more longer term growth. Yeah, for sure.

I want to switch to something else because we have you on and I think you are by far the best person to talk to when it comes to SaaS metrics at this point. I think you're, um, you know almost everything there's out there to know, I suppose. And you know, many of us, obviously we know monthly recurring revenue, right? We know, churn rates, but there's much, much more to metrics than what many people know. So I have a question for you, with all that experience, do you know something that is a key to look at? You know, at various stages, like when you start out or when you have your first hundred customers, first thousand customers. And have you found anything interesting that correlates or something less obvious perhaps?

About interesting stuff about metrics, I mean, I think in the [00:27:00] early stage, it's good to mostly look at the usage data. We like the kind of adoption data, right? So we actually give our product away for free if you have less than 10k MRR, because I think it's great to have all your SaaS metrics in order. It's nice, but I don't think it's what you should really be looking at when you're very small. Because, you kind of want to build a, get to some scale before you try to start optimizing your subscription business. You know what I mean? Like, trying to improve upsell rates or, you know, slightly reduce your churn or these things like, I feel like that's fine, but you kind of want to get to some scale first.

And so I think the more important than sort of revenue SaaS metrics is adoption data. So, we released the CRM product last year, and it's quite nice because this time around, we actually don't need the money to survive in a way, so we can be really patient with monetization. So we've [00:28:00] built an internal dashboard for product adoption, like usage metrics related to our new CRM product. And I'm just checking that I don't really, I'm not really caring that much at the moment. If anyone's buying our CRM or not, so it's, I'm just caring about are they using it, right? Are they, and then we have a free, it's free, the first three seats are free. So, a lot of people aren't buying it, but they are using it, and I just want to, I'm mostly focused on trying to get their adoption.

Numbers and people creating tasks and opportunities and logging calls and sending emails and all these things you can do with the CRM. I want to see them doing that stuff. And that to me is much more important and interesting than the revenue. But when we first launched the analytics product in like, when we first started charging for it in 2015, I was really looking at the revenue because at that point it was a little bit existential, right? Really needed the money, in order to survive, right? Because burning money and we want to create some revenue, but this time around, it's much nicer in that, I can just, I can look at what's actually [00:29:00] important, which is the usage and adoption, because that's what's truly important early on.

And then once we get to some, you know, actual, once I'm happy and we get to some real traction, I can switch to looking, okay, let's optimize the business side of things here. Let's optimize the net revenue retention and all those metrics. But we have some interesting stuff that came out. So we released a new product, last week or the week before last. Maybe the week before last. It's called Benchmark. So we have like two and a half thousand something active ChartMogul, accounts, right? Some of them are free, some of them are paid. And we can aggregate their SaaS metrics and produce these benchmarks.

So we released this benchmarks feature and it's kind of a cool feature that you don't even need to pay, you don't need to use our product to use the feature. You can just sign up for a free trial and use the feature. So you don't have to load in any data. You don't have to, it's the first time we've released a feature where you don't actually have to do anything with the, the product. That's my pitch to encourage people who are on this, uh, on this call to try it out. But yeah, it was kind of interesting to see that data [00:30:00] because. Yeah, like, you know, the people's our customers, retention rates aren't as good as I thought they'd be, and the companies that are really growing fast are absolutely amazing at acquiring new customers. So, yeah, that was kind of interesting to me. Like we have really, ChartMogul has really good retention.

But like, we're not like adding like thousands of new customers every month. But like when I look at the, when you see the customers that are really growing fast, they're like absolute machines adding like just thousands sometimes of custom new, new subscribers every month, but sometimes they'll be churning out like 40% of them every year. Which to me would be like, yeah, like for Chumbo, that would just be like a death knell, you know, wouldn't work. But our attention is really good, but we're not like adding like, you know, thousands of hundreds of new customers every month. It takes us, it's a month, I guess, cause we're more niche, right. But, so it's pretty interesting to look at these benchmarks.

Yeah. I think also it depends on how sticky your product is, right? Like if your product is really sticky and you want to, but retention is [00:31:00] key. And it just also takes longer for, I guess, like very, integral parts of your business, like having metrics in place. It just takes a bit of time. Like you want to have like, the thing in place, you know, but I was curious about, I was just checking out like the ChartMogul site again. Like when you say free trial, is your free, what does your free trial encompasses? Is it like, is it a fixed length? Is it just like, cause you said seats earlier. I'm just, Oh yeah, sorry. It's a little bit how you set up the

pricing. I mean, but yeah, you sign up for the free trial and yes, 14 day free trial. But if you have less than 10k MRR, you can just switch to the launch, the free launch plan and basically the trial never ends because you've got less than 10K MRR. So, and yeah, you just sign up and connect Stripe and it will do everything else for you. It's actually very easy to get set up with the SaaS metrics. Just take a couple of minutes. Um,

So from your experience, would you say most, customers grew from the 10k free, I guess, free tier to like, I think, I think about a third, [00:32:00] about a third already signed up and they were like,

yeah, so it's, it's about a third of our customers, a third or so of our customers, they kind of graduate from the free plan, by passing 10k MRR and then they upgrade to the paid plan, which starts around a hundred dollars. But the other two thirds, they just come to us directly and they're already over 10k.

That's, I thought it's actually a bit more even, but that's interesting. Sorry, Erwin.

That's all right. Don't worry. Um, no, Nick, I wanted to mention very briefly. It's a bit of a sidetrack I suppose, but it is interesting, and you taught me this, you don't know you taught me this, but you taught me this, to lean in on something very unique that you, only you as a business can do. So, yeah, I think it's incredibly smart that you have your trial, your Set to how much money, you know, the business makes itself. And so when they grow, you grow, I think that's magically smart and you know, you're uniquely positioned to specifically do that. [00:33:00] So yeah, kind of everyone wins, I suppose because the amount of.

Computing and like, you know, cost potentially, a computing cost is also lower for you when they don't have as many transactions and notifications, webhooks from Stripe. You taught me this because when I built Tailscan, I was also thinking like, what can I uniquely do? And what I ended up doing, because it's a browser extension, I Embedded it into the website so you can try it live on the website and yeah, I just wanted to mention it. Like it's a fun thing. Like I realized being able to do that partially from you doing something very uniquely that only you can do, it's something that they always advise people to also think about, like, what can you uniquely do to boost your business that Others potentially can't.

That's hard, yeah. I mean, especially in SaaS, so much is like, it's hard to build real, it's hard to build network effects, it's hard to build an emote, you know what I mean? Like, most features can be copied, right? I think it's, you know, Musk always says, right, rate of innovation. And I think it's, in some ways it's true, right? Like, if you [00:34:00] can the long term, the most competitive thing you can do is just maintain the momentum, of the team. I mean, if you're a solo founder, it's a bit easier because you just have to motivate yourself and work hard. But when you have a, you know, 60 people or whatever, 70 people, if you can get everybody working hard and working fast, shipping fast and a good momentum to the kind of cadence of innovation, then that by itself becomes your biggest competitive advantage. I think that's what our biggest competitive advantage is. So, and everything else kind of falls from that.

Yeah. I wanted to, I didn't actually write that question down, but I did want to ask you as well. At some point you decided to interp mogul. So for those of you that, that are listening and that don't have a clear picture on this, your revenue your recurring revenue and everything is known by ChartMobile. So you can see charts in any potential perceivable way, you can also share them. And I know you built this feature, correct [00:35:00] me if I'm wrong, like a couple of years ago, image download feature. Yeah. The image download feature. So you click it and you get like a very nice image. Yeah, I love that feature because

it's the, I think it's one of the only features that we ever designed and shipped. Where there hasn't been a single like feature request or bug report or anything since we did it. Just like, we just shipped it and then it's just worked ever since perfectly. Which is usually, usually never the case. Like, we shipped this benchmarks thing a couple of weeks ago, and it was like, there's instantly a list of, like, 12 requests for things that we need to, like, improve about it. Anyway. Sorry, I'll let you finish. Sorry. Sorry. Go ahead.

Yeah. No, no, no. So I'm curious. Like, do you track how many people click that? Like, is that, because this is a flywheel thing, right? It's like branded by ChartMogul when you shared this image, so other people will see this. So it is a bit of a flywheel thing, and I'm always very big on like flywheel

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, like the net, like the kind of network, yeah, I know what you mean, like Calendly, like you book a Cal, you go through their flow and then you're like, hey, would you like this too? And you can use [00:36:00] Calendly to manage your calendar as well. We had that at Zendesk when I was there, zendesk had this like feedback tab that like was stuck to the side of the, You'd embed it and it was stuck to the side of the website. I mean, it was like, like Intercom came later with like the Intercom like chatbot or whatever.

But before Intercom came out, Zendesk had this feedback tab and when you opened that, it would just be like this form, I guess. But it said like, powered by Zendesk at the bottom. And that generated a ton of that like, That. So I guess this is our way of trying to make that happen, but yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't think they're getting enough like shares to, you know, make it like a huge flywheel for us, like, uh, in terms of Lead generation or whatever. I don't think so. We can track how many people open that modal, but we can't really track how many people copy the image and tweet it out or anything like that. That would be harder. I imagine, but yeah, whenever I see people on Twitter or LinkedIn sharing those downloads, I always like retweet them, so I can [00:37:00] encourage them to keep doing it.

I mean, I will, I know I will, but, I just, yeah, I don't know, I have some, I have a thing for flywheel marketing that I really like.

So Andrew, and like, uh, micro acquires, acquire, like Andrew Gazdecki, they use ChartMogul and he sometimes tweets out the ARR chart, but he doesn't use the download feature. He just like screen grabs. The ChartVocal UI, it doesn't actually, it doesn't actually say like powered by ChartVocal. And he has like so many followers. So anyway, anyway, but yeah, it's whatever, it doesn't matter. I think it's just a fun thing to try and create those things . But I think the number of our customers who are actually interested in sharing their revenue publicly is pretty small, probably sub 5 percent of our customers actually want to share their revenue numbers publicly. The vast majority just want to keep a secret. Keep it, keep their cards close to their chest kind of thing.

Yeah, of course. Of course. It's, I mean, you know, it's specifically a, I guess a Twitter and other niche like [00:38:00] kind of thing to do that. But still, it's very interesting. I think it's a, it's something everyone can think about, that's listening is like, Hmm, my product, you know, what can you do to make that flywheel happen? It's interesting. I want to ask you another question. It's for someone that is starting out right now, and I'm sure some of the people that are listening in are like wanting to start out or like do start out. Is there anything that you want to tell them, that you think is like, you know, a good thing to realize or advice that you hold very close to you.

Oh, hmm. I mean, the main thing, right, is just to get started, right? Like that's the, I mean, every single business in the world was at some point started by someone, right? Who's probably might, might be much less smart than you are, but the difference between them and you, if you haven't started at something yet, would be like that they actually started it, right? I mean, one fun thing about becoming a founder and CEO is that you get to meet a lot of other founders and CEOs.

Especially if you're in some kind of VC thing, like with [00:39:00] Point9 and Alvin, our VCs there, they run these cool events, but if you're in like 500 it's probably like, you know, 100x that, where they, you know, they really have created these communities. But even, even if you're not in, in a VC or whatever, then, you know, there are like other communities for startups and even this, right. So I think when you get to meet, so over the last 10 years, a lot of my friends have, you know, are, have become like founder, CEOs, and you get to realize that just absolutely nothing special about most of, most people that start businesses. So it's just, uh, they're just people that, didn't want to be an employee basically, but for the most part, and had some idea about how to make that happen.

Right? Like they had some insight about, okay, people will probably like this kind of service or this kind of product. Why don't I try it? Why don't I? I mean, Nuno's, I can see Nuno here. He used to work at ChartMogul and now he's running his own startup called IsDownApp. IsDown. app Yeah, if Nuno wants, and then, so he left ChartMogul and started his own [00:40:00] startup, and he's not the first person to have done that, and he's not the last that will probably do that as well, and uh, I think Nuno is already using ChartMogul for his product, so, hey Nuno, I don't know, I'm not the host, I don't know how to let you talk, but uh, I mean, I will invite him to speak if you'd like, yeah, yeah, so I think, my thing is just get started, just try, you know, just try, come up,

I shot Nuno an invitation, feel free to accept it if you'd like, and on that note, by the way, if anyone else wants to join in, feel free to send a request, you're always very welcome to come on stage and talk as well. I wanted to move into the discussion questions a little bit, I would want to talk about, the en anti VC narrative and, and why it's so prevalent on the, on Twitter. That's something that I would like to dig into a little bit as well.

Yeah, yeah. We also now have Charlie. We're going to go to you in a sec as well. Let's see if we can actually hear one of you. Charlie, can you hear us? Can you speak?

Yes, I can. It did cut out. It does cut out for a few seconds when you first joined, but yeah, I can [00:41:00] hear. Okay,

Shoot us your question or shoot us what I want to say?

Firstly, thank you so much. I've listened to a few of these now and they're really useful, and it's just great to, to hear so many different perspectives. I still work my, my nine to five as an accessibility specialist, but, I'm in the process of becoming a solo founder with my own accessibility agency and releasing some accessibility focused products as well, my main question I guess is to Nick, in discussing the different models of bootstrapped versus funstrapped and this idea of acquiring a team and things like that. Currently I'm, as I mentioned, you know, going down the solo founder route. But I've recently finished reading Find Your Why by Simon Sinek, and he discusses the benefits of splitting out somebody that has The why, knowledge essentially, and somebody else that has the how knowledge, and if you look at many of the major kind of [00:42:00] partnerships and successful businesses in, in recent decades, it's been that duality of partnership.

So my real question is how do you make that decision as to when you need to hire somebody else, as opposed to try and learn it yourself and how do you know? What those people look like that can assist there?

I mean, I think, you know, when you're building a company, there's always a lot of stuff to do, right? Like you got to do Engineering, right? That's usually the biggest bottleneck with a software products company is you can never have enough engineers, or you can never have enough good engineers, but there's also things like mark design to do marketing, there's customer support to do, there's finance you know, all that stuff to do.

There's also recruitment to do if you're hiring people as well. So you've got to kind of figure out what do you want to do and what are you good at personally and then what do you want to offload first? So I think, for us, you know, it was and first thing first was like [00:43:00] to have some, to hire some professional engineers. I can code pretty badly. I wouldn't describe myself as an engineer though. So I was quite slow. So I moved, hired some engineer, hired an engineer or two, I moved off the backend to do pure frontend. Then I hired another engineer and I was like, okay, I'll just move off the frontend onto just the CSS they can do like, you know, the functional parts of the frontend, the JavaScript, and then I was like, okay, we hired enough people that I can just haven't, I don't, I'll stop committing code altogether.

So I think engineering, for me, because I'm not very good at that, it was a big one. Yeah, like content, we hired a content writer pretty early on, it's pretty labor intensive to do content. Also, I'm not a big fan of doing, you know, paper, like, the kind of bureaucratic side of running a business, all the paperwork and stuff, so we hired a you know, financial operations manager to, to help there as well and things like that. So, I mean, I don't know if there's, I don't think there's any formula. I think it's just as it, as you, as you run the business, you think, God, [00:44:00] it'd be nice if we had someone to help with that. Can we afford the person to help with that?

If we can, let's try and hire them. So, and yeah, it's more like that, really. I don't, yeah, I mean, I think we've only really been strategic once in our hiring, which was when two or two or so years ago, we decided we're going to go into the CRM market, and then we actually decided like, okay, we need to build up this, we need to increase the headcount of this type of full stack engineer for this team to be a certain size in order to support the build out of this new product and to be able to support two products at the same time. But in every other thing, it was more like, okay, we need one salesperson or we need another support person, or we need another one of these people. And it was kind of like somewhat strategic, but not really. But yeah, so I don't, yeah.

I think it also comes down to You know, the question that you ask as well is like, when should you hire specifically thinking about like, what is your, I guess, funding background as well, right? So [00:45:00] what I've been seeing at least a lot in the Indie Hacker community is that if you're really trying to bootstrap your SaaS, try to be an, I guess, revenue, like, or profit if possible, but let's say like you focus on revenue in the beginning, you're bootstrapping. I feel like My opinion or my advice is to try to stay solo as long as you can. Now, that is not to say that perhaps a co founder could be interesting, let alone like the mental aspects when it comes to this. I've been doing it alone for two and a half years and I've seen other people doing it.

I'm not saying, you know, Being solely, solely alone is helpful. But what I'm saying is if you can't bootstrap your product, especially in the beginning as much and as long as you can, you have a huge leverage. Even if you go later down the road and you wanna hire new people, you wanna do funding, the more you can do yourself. I think in the beginning, the better. And that also. Just help your cashflow. It will help like a lot. And then practically speaking, you just got to think about [00:46:00] like, what is it, but like, what's the amount of like money for recurring revenue product has so that you can actually think about hiring, right?

If you do not have the funding background, you need to be very scarce with your resources. And typically what I've seen people do, I think. Maybe around like the five, 6, 000 MRR, they do start maybe outsourcing stuff. But I guess like before that, now this is a completely rule of thumb. I just like kept them like seeing recurring and recurring on like, IndieHackerForums, you know, and Reddit, et cetera.

That is like, if you stay, I guess like if you want a bootstrap. And that is your goal until you reach like 5k. That's like my hard point, I guess. Just try to do it yourself if you can. Obviously, if you can't, that's a completely different story. But if you're an engineer and you're sort of good at marketing or like you, I don't know, you know a little bit about like making like nice looking landing pages. I think, yeah, that's definitely my advice. Um, also I've just [00:47:00] seen that we have Nuno now as a speaker, which is amazing. Nuno, can you talk? Nuno? Nuno? Now I can.

Yes. Hey, welcome. Cool. So, thanks a lot for this. I've been listening to the last three episodes and these spaces are amazing. Well, I don't have a specific question for Nick. One thing I would like to say is I worked for ChartMogul almost for two years, And I think, ChartMogul has a lot of good things and it's a wonderful company to work with, with and for, and one of the things that, I still remember dearly and one of the things that impacted me the most is the love that Nick has for building the product itself.

It's like, it's still for me, when I had like any meetings with Nick, and I think I mentioned to him when basically when I left, that [00:48:00] when I left the meeting with him, I felt reinvigorated. It's like. to be building something, and, I think after I think nine years, it still feels like it's kind of a superpower to have and maybe a question here is how do you maintain that ability to like, you're always pumped every time you spoke about ChartMogul, about building, you were always pumped. Ah, yeah, yeah.

That's true. Yeah. Well, thanks Nuno. I always like my ego being, you know, massaged. Yeah, you know, I'm always pumped because, so you got to do things, there's two things. One thing I'm a little bit excited that, we're just doing a lot with the product, on the analytics side, um, this year is going to be really cool for us. We're finishing some, [00:49:00] like, huge projects. And there's going to be a ton of new stuff coming. And then we also launched the second product. So it's almost like doing a whole startup over again, cause you have to do everything else. You have to do everything, you have to like figure out onboarding and figure out what people need and try and sell it to people and figure out the support and build a whole help center for it.

And like, it's like a whole process of doing a whole new startup again. So it's in a new product category. This time it's not a new product category. Subscription analytics at the time was brand new. So it was like kind of having to invent all these things from scratch. With CRM, it's more like how to do it, how to just do it better than the people that came before us did it, I guess. It's just a slightly different design challenge in that respect, in some ways it's nice, it's more calmer because we know that there's, we know that CRM, anyway, why am I always pumped about it? Uh, it's not always the case, you know, if you have a ton of churn, you know, one month and it's like demotivating.

But, I guess we've been lucky in that, you know, deep, generally things grow, and I think the main thing to keep me motivated is like, you got to make those [00:50:00] hard, what's the expression? Hard choices, hard decisions, hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. So, and what that often comes down to in company building is the hard choices are letting people go that when it's not working out. That's the hardest thing I find about company building is, is like occasionally you do have to let somebody go because they're not quite the right fit for the role. And if you, You know, always try and hire the right solid people, and if somebody isn't working out, you let them go, which sucks, sucks for them.

And it sucks for sucks to have to do that as well. But if you do that and you kind of like, do that, over time, then, you know, You make sure you then your team is really strong, and then so if you're always working with, smart, motivated people who are in the right, who are the right people for the job, then it's really great because they can also do work on the stuff that you don't find interesting, right? Like we have a VP sales, a VP marketing, a VP finance, a [00:51:00] VP success, a VP engineering, like they're all really solid. They're all really smart and they take care of all this, a lot of stuff that I'm not good at, or I'm not interested in. And I don't want, you know, so I can do focus on more of the fun stuff as well.

So I think you have to kind of be a pretty ruthless, and like rigorous around how you, build the organization, so that you stay motivated, right? So when you wake up in the morning, you're like, oh great, I get to work with these people. These people are awesome, and they're the right people, right, to be working with. Yeah, so, I don't know. Yeah. We'll see. I hope I can stay motivated about ChartMogul for many years. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, occasionally I do go like, ah, wouldn't it be fun to be doing something, you know, consumer product or hardware or something, you know, occasionally. But then I'm like, you know, also got to be, thank my blessings a little bit because, ChartMogul is a product that's primarily purchased by founders and company builders, and they're kind of fun people to sell to. Like at Zendesk, we sell to the head of customer service. The [00:52:00] person running the customer service team is the main, was the main buyer of Zendesk. And those guys, those, they're great people. They're really nice people, but they're generally not as bought into the company.

As the founders like they're just kind of like they're doing their exact their middle management basically you're selling into middle management and that's fine but they're not as like our customers are pretty damn passionate like, like sometimes too passionate They're like, you know, they're spending like hours and hours investigating why their MRR number is off by 50 cent and it's like this is not a good use of your guys's time, But they're like super selling to founders actually quite fun because they're pretty passionate people. So that also keeps me motivated, I guess

That's awesome. I also love to hear, Nick, that you also have the shiny object syndrome, like all of us do, wanting to build new products. Oh, a hundred, a hundred

percent. Yeah. I mean, I have to check myself there. One thing that we do these days, which I think is pretty healthy, which we didn't always used to do is we design stuff quite, quite some months ahead of time. So we'll design various features, and then even polish those feature [00:53:00] designs and get like the, you know, designer to like make the UI even look really, really good, and then we'll take engineering through those feature designs and get their input on it as well to tweak the design based on the specification, and then we'll just park that and leave it there for a bit, and then we'll kind of weigh it up against other feature designs and other spec, other things that we did for sometimes months. And that actually is way healthier than how we used to do it, which is just design something super excited about what I just designed and then ask the engineering team to make it for me.

And so that, that was like the early, that was like you know, just got started founder and probably annoyed a lot of people. But these days we do it in a much more You know, we kind of know exactly what we're going to be doing for the rest of this year, right? So, we kind of I think it's healthier. It's a healthier cycle of, uh, we're not just chasing the shiny objects. We're kind of much more looking at the horizon more. But yeah, in the early days, oh, 100%, yeah.

Nice, nice. [00:54:00] We do have one more question here in the Xspace, I guess, community post here. Um, and the question was just revolves around like, the question was like, how do you come up with your monthly price? But I guess we can spin this question in a more generic way. That is to say, like, can you talk us a little bit about how you initially came up with your pricing? Do you have any, maybe recommendations for that? Cause that's also a bit of a huge black box, right? So how did you come up in the beginning with your pricing?

I mean, our initial pricing was based on the number of active customers and we switched to some, and that actually wasn't a good idea because you have some companies making a lot of money, but they only have like 10 customers or a hundred customers. And then you have some that are making very little money, but they have like a million customers. And then it costs, then we charge the people with a million customers, like a ton of money. And it's too expensive for them, but because they're not making that much money from those customers because they're like B2C.

So then we did move to MRR based pricing and that, you know, that has been [00:55:00] much better. But I think, you know, some people still don't like that, but we do taper it. So as your revenue grows, the unit price goes down. So it trends down to a very, very fraction of a percent or something. But that has been like the best, kind of like middle ground that we found where, you know, we can charge a small company a hundred dollars a month and larger companies, you know, that are making, tens of millions. We can charge them, you know, in the thousands, sometimes dollars a month, depending on their, their scale.

Um, so that has been like the best middle ground for us, I guess, to kind of peg it to the recurring revenue. Which is what they're measuring in there, in ChartMogul anyway. But yeah, I mean, I think if you can do seat based pricing, that's the best. Because then it's like, Then it's kind of baked into the cost. Like if you're hiring a sales person, you know that you're gonna have to pay the sales person, you know this X amount of money, and you're gonna also have to pay your CCRM provider an extra, you know, $50 a month or whatever the cost of the seat is, right? The license, and the same for ze. Zendesk is like customer support, right?

So you need a customer support person. You're gonna pay them whatever amount per month, [00:56:00] and then you're gonna pay an extra 40, $50 a month to Zendesk for the seat. For the Zendesk seat, right? So I think. Seat based pricing is definitely preferable if you can do it, but with Chartmogul, there wasn't enough. Well, with the CRM product, it is seat based pricing, but with our analytics product, which is our main product, there's not enough things that you'd need where, you know, people would just buy one seat and then share the login because you can get like 90 percent of the value that way. So there isn't enough kind of workflow y types, features to, to go for seat based pricing, so we have to do some sort of volume based pricing.

Yeah, so yeah, pricing's a little bit hard to do right. If you price too high, then you, you're not competitive, and, you lose market share, you price too low, and, Don't make enough money. So it's difficult, it's really, it's just stressful just thinking about pricing, honestly. You know what I mean? It's just like, it's just thinking about the topic because I don't think it's ever possible to really get it perfect.

Yeah, no, I fully agree. And like, there is this amazing blog post by Patrick Campbell, [00:57:00] like the founder of ProfitWell, he also talked about just like, You know, like just how coming up with pricing is just super hard. And there are so many, um, I guess so many ways you can analytically try to approach a price that you will do, but in my opinion, if you're starting out, like all of this just doesn't work, right? So I think what you just said, Nick, which is like, I think the surrounding topic is like, have a value metric that you use for your pricing.

And the idea is that if it's, if, even if it's the MRR or it's the seeds, like have something that can grow with the customers that you have, I see a lot of indie hackers having pricing that is solely based on features and which is fine if you have a very I guess, minimalistic sort of product, but if you're really thinking about it, if your customer grows, you want to take a little part of that share as well. Right. And so the concept of having a value metric that grows with your, like the [00:58:00] company, like your customers, I think it's like something. That you should always try to approach.

Yeah. I mean, back to the point of, you mentioned the word IndieHack or whatever. I mean, to the point that we were talking earlier about VC funding versus bootstrapped. I think the aim isn't really, the funding isn't the important part, right? It's just, you want to build a great business, right? A great business that has lots of customers that makes lots of money. Right, but I don't know if describing yourself as an indie hacker, if you're in B2B, would be advantageous, because if you're a business, you want to buy from a business, another business, right, that has like, it looks in some way established, right?

Like, so maybe, that term doesn't sound like it's good for business. That's my point, like, if someone said, yeah, we want to buy this new product to do some thing. It's by this indie hacker, we'd be like, are we sure we want to buy that? Like, are they going to stay in business? Like, are they assuming a business? Do they have lots of, you know, like, I mean, most of the products we buy are [00:59:00] from companies like, Notion and Slack and Zendesk and these kind of companies. And most of the, I think the majority are VC backed. So even if you're not VC backed, it's probably a good idea to kind of, you know, make yourself look a bit bigger than you are, I guess.

Yeah, I sometimes, I don't think there's any business advantage to being a, to looking like an indie hacker in a way. That you kind of want to make yourself look a little, fake it till you make it a little bit, right? And then you can actually charge decent amounts of money for your products, one thing I see that a lot of bootstrap startups or solo founders doing, they're charging really little amounts, small amounts of money for their product, and that's actually also a turnoff, because if your company, ours is still a S& B company, it's not a big company, right? Uh, less than 100 employees, but you kind of want the price to at least be 50 or more, you know, otherwise it's like, Too little. You see some bootstrappers, they're charging like nine dollars or something and it's like, come on guys, it's actually a negative. It's a negative [01:00:00] signal. It makes it seem like, you know what I mean, it's too small. And so I think it's good to charge something, you know, 50 or 50 to 100. And then the, you know, I don't feel like, they might, it's unstable, I guess, as a company. So yeah, pricing is complicated.

I agree. I agree with you. Like if you're starting a B2B SaaS and you are like, none of your plans revolve around like the 50 range, I think it just, you're really just making your life super, super hard unless, and that's like something that I always find interesting. There's always exceptions. Like I, I've seen some sort of SaaS like form builders, for example, that I could guess you can say is more of a prosumer. Then B2B usage, maybe, I don't know. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I've seen very low prices actually working very well if you have the volume, but that's another question, right? If you go into more B2B, I don't know where you want to be. I mean, if you have the volume, yeah.

If you're like a Calendly or something that's super high volume, then, you know, 20 or [01:01:00] something's probably, you know, 15, maybe it's even fine. You know, like, if you really are going for like a mass market, but honestly, like we, we have a lot of those companies, as Calendly used to be a customer of ours, and not anymore, sadly, but we have a lot of, we have a lot of SaaS. Over a thousand customers who are SaaS companies. Like the vast, vast majority are not in that category. Like the vast, vast majority of SaaS are not, yeah. There's a few like Webflow and calendly and Trello. And yeah, there's a few, but it's the vast majority. And, and those businesses always seem to be the coolest businesses also, but the vast, vast majority of B2B SaaS is not that it's like relatively low volume, high price. Right? Like higher price than 20 bucks or whatever. So, yeah.

Yeah, I fully agree. Like why make your life so much harder, right? You have less support, you have a higher price, you seem more valuable. There's a lot of things to be said for [01:02:00] having a higher price. It's just, I think sometimes the, the founders, I don't know, sometimes people are just. I mean, what do you call it? Like, it's just a bit of a, imposter syndrome where you just think, Oh, my startup, like, is it really worth that? You know, like, am I even allowed to charge that money? And a lot of people don't know, like how B2B business usually,

Yeah, I was definitely helped by the fact that I did sales at Zendesk before starting this business because, you know, you'd occasionally in Zendesk, you'd do like, a bigger, you know, a lot of Zendesk licenses are pretty small, but occasionally you do one that's like, you know, 50, 000 or something. And you'd be like, okay, they just literally just gave us 50, And then I remember, I think in my second month of selling Chartmogul, I think it was like February 2015, uh, I quoted one customer like 17, 000 or something, because that's how our pricing worked out for them. And they were like, ah, it's a little bit [01:03:00] expensive, you know? And I was like, yeah, but does it solve your problem? And they actually just signed and paid us 70, 000 for like the second month in, second month in business and it really wasn't a very good pro like it wasn't like Wait,

was it monthly or yearly?

That was, I think, for the year. I mean, I could go in and check, like, it's still online. Okay. Like, it might have been, you know, if you give me, like, I can rewind to, like, February, 2015 and have a look, but, I think it was for the year.

Um. That makes sense. That's like a grand a month.

Yeah, I think it was like that and, you know, I just remember like, sometimes when I see, the people on Twitter, like Bootstrappers, IndieHackers posting like, Oh, I'm almost at my, you know, 1, 000 MRR, et cetera. I'm just like, After this many years, this many, so many, a hundred, we've got 150 customers or something. I'm like, yeah, but if you just charged like way more Could have got there in a month, you know, like that's so I think my my observation of the community of indie hackers and bootstrappers is a lot of them are really charging very little [01:04:00] money.

And I think like, that's totally, like, if you're Pieter Levels, right. Who has a lot of customers, cause it's like photo. ai, right, and it's like profile photos and things like that. That's totally makes sense. Cause it's like a consumer or prosumer type of product. But if you're really B2B SaaS, your pricing needs to be in a completely different dimension.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like for me, like I unfortunately didn't have the background that you had in terms of the B2B sales, but what kind of made the switch for me is when, I think it was also like the second month and back then Helpkit had like the highest, The third tier, the highest tier for the annual plan was around like 900 or something, and someone bought it. And I'm looking at my charts and I'm like, wait a second, someone just gave me like 900, like upfront, you know, for the whole yearly plan, and I was like, wait a second, what is going on here? And so after, you know, after two and a half years of doing this and just talking to so many, Founders, like I just, the way how [01:05:00] money works in B2B is just completely different, you know, like a lot of people under a hundred dollars a month and even have to ask for permission.

There's like all these like different, you know, hierarchies of like when an employee can even buy tools and when they consider it to be expensive and not, and that scale, you know, in the beginning, I was like, Oh my God, 20 a month is so much. But now it's like, If it's under a hundred, people don't even really, you know, they don't even look at it. I'm obviously exaggerating, but, that's the nuance.

Most of our customers, I think, who are similar size to us when we, they don't need to usually get approval for anything over about 8, 000 a year, sorry, anything under, about 8, 000 a year. That's kind of, that tends to be our point where we're like, yeah, they might need to ask, like, for permission for that purchase or whatever from procurement or from somebody, right? But under 8, 000, it usually just goes through, I mean, we're also, ChartMogul is an SMB that mostly selling to other SMBs. So if you think about what the enterprise is really doing, [01:06:00] they're selling like million dollars, million dollar contracts and stuff, like hundreds of thousands of dollars for like, for software.

I mean, if, yeah, there's like massive inequality among enterprises, like the actual amount of, uh, the amount of like the wealth distribution among businesses, I think is much worse than people. If you look at like, the B2B software market. All of the B2B SaaS startups, they are like sub 1 percent or something of all the revenue in B2B software. So if you look at it, it's all going to like SAP and Oracle and Microsoft and all these kind of like huge, huge B2B software companies, even the public SaaS companies like, well, maybe Salesforce is pretty big now, but that's the biggest one. Yeah, like, we are really fighting over a really small slice. Like, really tiny. So, I think that's why these people are always saying, like, go out market, you know, go out market, because that is actually where all the money [01:07:00] is.

You know, but also one thing that I realized at least for myself is like, if you're starting out as a founder, you have no sort of benchmark. Right. So you just don't know what is expensive and what is not, and that is like the big problem. If you would know these kind of intricacies and like, You know, like for example, what you just mentioned, like if it's like under 8,000 a year, nobody doesn't even really like, need permission. Yeah. Knowledge. If you know this, I remember doing a

whole, I remember doing some freelance work, like contracting work, like, early in my career and I remember quoting like a hundred pounds a day. Like, I'm English, just like British pounds. Right. And I remember just saying that and they just went, yeah, okay. And I was super happy, like a hundred pounds one day. Like that's cool. It's not even that hard, this work. But then looking back on that now, I totally could have just said 200, right, and like, that would have also been a non issue, but I just like, didn't know at the time.

That's awesome. Well, Nick, thank you so much for taking your time and sharing your invaluable lessons, and I think we all definitely learned a lot from this. And if one big lesson I [01:08:00] also draw out of this is that like Erwin just said, maybe let's go back to the pricing page and just increase the zeros at the end. Erwin, do you also want to just wrap up real quick?

Yeah, for sure, besides obviously adding the zeros to my pricing, I do. Almost pushed that live. Nick, thank you very much for joining. I learned a lot, there's quite some interesting insights you have, especially also the B2B part and the prosumer part. It's insightful. It's a perspective that I, and also the funstrapping, by the way, it's a perspective I hadn't, uh, I didn't really have properly before this. So thank you for that, and thank you also everyone for joining. Nuno and Charlie for hopping in as well. I would say for anyone listening give all of us a follow to see how things are going in the future, and please also follow the Bootstr account so you can see, the next episodes, whenever they come, we usually announce them on Sunday or Monday, for that Wednesday. So you can click notify and be notified of the next one as well. Again, thank you [01:09:00] very much, Charlie, Nuno, Nick, for joining. Thank you all. And see you at the next one.

Thanks guys. Bye bye. Good evening. Good morning. Enjoy your day. Enjoy your night. Bye bye. Thanks. Bye.