Billbee Charges 7 Cents an Order and Grew MRR ~70% in a Year Without a Single Salesperson

The cheapest thing Billbee sells costs seven cents. That is what the German company charges to run one order — one invoice, one shipping label, one stock decrement — through its back office for a small online seller. Multiply it across more than 9,000 paying customers and, David Pohlmann told Nathan Latka in an interview recorded in the first days of October 2020, it came to 180k a month.

A note on the units before any of those numbers get quoted onward. Billbee sells in the German-speaking market and prices in euros: Pohlmann described a pricing band that runs “from starting from zero a few cents until yeah a couple of hundred euros,” and when he reached for an example of margin he used two euros, not two dollars. The monthly figures — 180k, 25 to 30k of profit, an average customer worth about 17 — he gave without naming a currency at all, and Latka restated them in dollars in his wrap-up. Read them as euros unless you enjoy a growth story flattered by an exchange rate.

The niche that made the first hundred customers easy

Billbee launched in 2015 into a market almost nobody was serving: hobbyists selling handmade things on DaWanda, the German answer to Etsy. Latka asked how the company got its first hundred customers, and the answer was that in that corner of e-commerce there was essentially nothing else.

We’ve been in a very niche market and there’s a platform called DaWanda which is the German clone of Etsy, and we started especially in the DIY area for e-commerce. There was a big community and we really started off with the DIY community, and there was only one tool to generate invoices, and this was Billbee at this time. So it was really easy to get the first 100 customers in there.

David Pohlmann, MD for revenue and operations, Billbee

What began as an invoice generator for craft sellers is now, in Pohlmann’s words, “some kind of toolkit for multi-channel e-commerce” — invoicing, shipping, inventory and stock levels for micro-businesses selling on Amazon, eBay and Shopify. The customers got bigger; the shape of the pitch did not.

What the 70% actually measures

Pohlmann gave the current number without hesitating — 180k a month, and he specified that this was September’s figure. On the year-ago comparison he was working from notes: “let me just check it out, I have the numbers here … probably we’ve grown by 70.” Pressed on the base, he put September 2019 at “around a hundred thousand, little less than a hundred thousand.”

Those two figures do not quite produce 70%. A hundred thousand growing to 180k is 80%; Latka’s own closing arithmetic, converting each month into an annualised figure, put it at 1.2 million a year earlier against 2.2 million at the time of taping, which is 83%. To land exactly on 70% the September 2019 base would have to have been about 106k. The honest version of the headline is that MRR grew somewhere between 70% and 83% over the twelve months to September 2020, and that the founder’s own recollection is the conservative end of it.

The second half of the headline needs the same care. Two million is a run rate, not booked revenue: 180k a month annualised. GetLatka’s database carries a revenue row of 1,320,000 recorded 1 June 2019 and one of 2,200,000 recorded 6 October 2020, the day of the interview — the same annualisation, stored as dollars, from a founder who was almost certainly counting in euros.

Seven cents an order

7 centscharged per order processed, before module upsells — the whole pricing model

Billbee does not take a cut of gross merchandise volume, which is the obvious move for software sitting on top of someone else’s sales. It charges per order instead. Latka asked why, and the answer was about whose economics the price should track.

Even if you sell very high cost product it doesn’t mean you have a high margin, and vice versa. So you could sell something for 2 euro and have 1.5 euro margin, and the other way around. That’s why I think we decided to go with a per order pricing instead of a percentage pricing.

The effect is that a Billbee bill scales with work done rather than with revenue earned, which is a far easier thing to defend to a seller of low-margin, high-ticket goods. A handful of paid modules sit around the core price and do the upselling.

The app stores are the sales team

Asked how many quota-carrying reps Billbee employed, Pohlmann said: “No, we do not do any sales at all.” The acquisition engine is entirely other people’s distribution.

• About 1,000 free signups a month — the top of the funnel, all self-serve.
• Roughly a third convert to paid — between 200 and 300 new paying customers every month.
• More than half are partner referrals — from the app and plugin stores of Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Amazon and eBay, which Pohlmann called “by far the biggest source of new leads and new signups.”
• Shopify is the largest single source — and takes 25% commission on what it refers.
• The rest is word of mouth — in a German-speaking e-commerce scene small enough for that to work.

That commission is most of what Billbee counts as an acquisition cost. Pohlmann said the number is hard to pin down because so little of it is spend: “the only cost we really can associate with it is commissions and yeah maybe some ads budget, but we do very few performance marketing.” His estimate for a fully weighted CAC was 150 to 180 to win a customer worth about 17 a month — a payback of something under a year on a subscription that, as the retention numbers below show, tends to get bigger rather than smaller.

13% churn, 102% net revenue retention

Selling to micro-businesses is supposed to be a leaky bucket, and Billbee’s bucket does leak: gross annual churn of 13%. Expansion more than covers it. Pohlmann put net revenue retention “above 100, it’s around 101, 102 or so” — customers who stay process more orders, and more orders is literally the price. Growth by the customer’s own success is the cleanest kind a per-transaction model can produce.

Rule of 40 = growth rate + profit marginPohlmann’s added condition: neither half may drop below 10%.

He volunteered the discipline himself, unprompted, when Latka asked about profitability: “we always try to stick to the rule of 40, but also have both KPIs above 10, so we do not want to fall below 10 percent profit.” At 25 to 30k of monthly profit on 180k of revenue, the margin half was running near 15%, and the growth half was doing the heavy lifting.

Twenty people, none of them selling

The team Pohlmann described on the tape was 20 people, eight of them engineers, and no sales reps. GetLatka’s Billbee profile tracks the climb, with a wobble worth showing rather than smoothing.

• Dec 2018 · 7 people three engineers, two in marketing.
• Dec 2019 · 8 people still three engineers.
• Jun 2020 · 9 people the last count before the interview.
• 6 Oct 2020 · 20 people eight engineers, zero sales reps, as stated on the tape.
• 21 Nov 2020 · 16 people the database’s next reading, four below the tape.
• 1 Jan 2021 · 22 people the figure on the record as this post goes out.

The November row and the founder’s October answer disagree, and there is no way to arbitrate between them from here; both are on the record and both are printed above. What all of them agree on is the direction, and on the composition — a company that more than doubled its headcount in a year without hiring anyone to sell.

Why they don’t want Shopify to buy them

Billbee did all of this without investors. “It’s completely bootstrapped,” Pohlmann said. “No funding, no.” So Latka asked the obvious question of a company whose biggest referral partner is Shopify: any acquisition talks? Not yet, Pohlmann said — and then, unprompted, that they would not want them.

What he spent the freedom on is specific. In 2020 Billbee went remote-first and cancelled all of its offices, and introduced a 30-hour full-time working week with no cut in pay — the kind of decision that is much harder to make with a board and a growth target on the other side of the table.

At the moment we really feel that the freedom of being bootstrapped, and having a profitable company which really produces some cash, and just makes fun to work with.

David Pohlmann, MD for revenue and operations, Billbee

Sources Nathan Latka’s interview with David Pohlmann, recorded 6 October 2020 (all founder-stated figures); GetLatka company database rows dated 1 December 2018 through 1 January 2021.