How Angage CEO Mike Rubini grew Angage to $7.2K revenue and 74 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is mike roubini he is in the e-commerce competitive intelligence insight space with his company ngage.net he's also a jazz musician entrepreneur and maker he runs a portfolio of software companies including again engage scrapbook dot net and fbradar.com which are bootstrapped and profitable all from day one mike are you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right very good so you're running three different companies which one of these does the most in terms of ar or revenue uh probably engage okay engage so let's focus on that one what's the company do and how do you make money what's the business model so engage is an e-commerce information measurement platform and basically we provide market insights about what people buy online so basically what we do is we talk sales of under the thousands of stores and we infer inside from them and um yeah we try to be a police officer okay what do people pay per month on average so uh on average gpa about twenty dollars that's the minimum plan that they have it's also the most common okay your audio is really rough mike you said twenty dollars a month yes 20 okay about the end that's okay okay so 20 bucks a month and then put this on a timeline for us when did you launch what year i launched in december 2017. okay december 2017. so that would have been about a year ago and one or two months right yes exactly and how many customers have you scaled to today so today we have about 74 paying customers okay 74 paying customers and that's obviously at that 20 price point right so you're doing what about 1400 bucks a month i'm doing about 3 000 more than 3 000 euros per month mri okay so 3 000 across 74 would mean that they're paying more than 20 bucks a month on average they're paying more like 40 bucks a month yeah we have two plans uh most are as i said in the staffordshire which is 20 bucks a month and then i have another one which is 97 a month i see i see very good and and what was revenue exactly a year ago so if you go back to january of 2018 yeah mike if you go back to january of 2018 what was revenue then if you're getting 3 000 bucks now uh probably 600 euro okay so good i mean healthy growth but obviously small numbers where are you getting your new customers from walk me through how you're signing these people up yeah so i'm not doing any paid advertising as of today uh i mean just to structure things for you uh mentor a little better uh what i have now is on the low end side i have this uh pure sass model where basically ielts dropshippers find good products and that's what has been uh the model uh until now basically and then on the middle end i have um partner uh companies uh so that they can enrich their apps and because we have a lot of this about stores about products about uh suppliers will be all you know all the data they want we have and then on the high end we sell insights to large e-commerce brands and uh this would be what i'm doing right now i'm trying to do right now so i'm moving on from the low-end um you know model that i've started from okay but question is still the same you have 74 customers how did you sign up the customers what growth channel so basically i've been posting facebook groups and uh doing other stuff outreach uh that's basically free stuff okay name a facebook group that has driven you customers uh i posted on the major ones dropshipping is a good one of course okay it's just called the drop shipping facebook group dropshipping and this is definitely good okay and what would you post in that group give me an example of what a post might sound like so initially i posted um i posted the like google sheets of uh trendy products that we had on uh on the platform just to drive some customers there and initially i also had the flip one and then moved on into the trials and then i just uh this demo i don't have free trials don't have fire a little frequency don't have trials okay and why so you obviously have engage you also have two other companies all together how much do they do per month yeah i'm about to get about five six thousand euros per month okay well so why not i mean why not go all in on one of these instead of being distracted across three yeah that's what i'm doing right now i'm going only only non engaged oh i see so you're gonna sell off the other two or what you're just gonna let them die uh probably just let them know yeah interesting what's your team look like today how many people [Music] uh it's just me and then i have two philippine contractors that do support okay so right now are you burning money each month [Music] no i'm not okay so you're operating at breakeven [Music] i'm profiting about uh from engage i'm profiting about 300 euro per month okay and how are you so so when you talk about development costs with these two contractors what do you spend per month on development would you say zero because i'm a developer okay so well again you wouldn't have two contractors if you never paid them so why do you use them and when you use them why do you use them i use them for support so they are in the truck that i have on all of my tracks and uh basically they look after customers and we couldn't customize basically and they reach out to people when they first get into the fight they don't cost me a lot by the way yep got it um are you have you you bootstrapped this company right or have you put in your own money yeah entirely bootstrapped from there okay and what got you into this you launched in 2017 did you leave a corporate job at that point or why start it no i had another startup uh which i add investors into and then that stuff just didn't go well for me why not [Music] uh let's just say i was too nice how much did you raise and uh uh well it's like nothing was on the books like nothing was written down that the thing and mike how the hell do you raise money if it's not on the books you either raise money or you don't raise money so they they were investors but also partners and they we did everything not writing down anything basically and that's why it didn't uh went well okay how much did they did they how much did they give you they put i i was operating at uh no cost um i put my own money my own time in twist and then they claim they put about 200 000 viewers well did they or did they not they claimed they did yeah but you were running the bank account did two hundred thousand dollars go into your bank account or not uh we didn't have benefited the bank account and it was all all shitty that's fine yeah uh it was not cheating i mean they put the money in of course but um you know it was really difficult for me also and be difficult also to speak about it well why did you think that that would be a good idea though i mean like what was going through your head at that point why didn't you take the time to put together official documents why didn't you take the time to put together official documents when you were doing that why was that a good idea to do it not written down uh it was just my first uh video so i see it that's what i did yeah i see okay so what what happened how did that thing officially end uh i just give it to them the product i just give i give the product to them and then you left yes okay all right let's go back to engage because that's what you're building now it's doing 3000 bucks a month or euros a month you have 74 customers um you're looking to scale it's bootstrap three people really two of them are contractors you're the only full-time do you have any insight yet into what churn is yes children is his eyes is about 15 per month and uh yes and that's because there are two main problems with the the low end uh model that uh previously stated is that one is there are a lot of newbies in the market we're just starting out because ecommerce is offend right now and they don't really need the product that's why i corrected this trajectory of the product by completely removing trials and free plans and now working on more icf plans and then the other thing is the barriers to entry on this level is so low because you don't even need tech to enter the market there yeah i mean the market of like two that find a product you can just put some va's and you know put a platform up on wordpress or whatever and and just uh put some more products here and you can do the marketing and it's okay you don't need the tech part but for me the tech part is is premium is very important and i mean we have some insights that uh nobody has we talked down to the specific variant of the product as he's selling them all okay so so make sense again the question is the question is churn is really high uh you're trying to figure out how to get that lower uh how do you how do you add additional customers oh you you know you're only going to get i mean posting in facebook groups there's only certain kind of people that hang out on facebook all day they're probably not ones with a lot of money yeah i understand your question so now what i'm doing is i'm going on after enterprises and um basically i'm outreaching what i'm doing now i don't know if it worked but i'm...