How Appocalypsis CEO Vicky Dallas grew to $26.9K revenue and 40 customers in 2023.

hello everybody my guest today is vicki dallas she was born in athens greece after school she went to the uk and did a bachelor's in interactive multimedia communications then an msc in e-commerce she came back to greece and created 9am labs.com and in 2007 did an mba and founded startup.gr apocalyptus is uh sorry apocalypses is the latest project in 2018 she also created depressed depressedpreneur.com all right vicky you ready to take it to the top yup okay so apocalypsis.com what's the company doing how do you make money okay a apocalypse is a self-service platform in which business owners and marketeers and even agencies uh sign up and create widgets in order to convert their visitors to turn visitors into customers there are three types of widgets in which give value to our customers it's informative widgets so you you communicate sales on an issue for example there is lead generation widget widgets that you gain emails from the customers and the visitors of your website and then we have a bit more playful widgets which are based on gamification like the wheel of fortune in which you give something to the visitor in order to get their email again interesting okay um and your pricing model are you a pure play sas company yes okay what what do you charge on on average per month what do companies pay you on average it's around 30 to 50 euro okay so caught 40 to 60 something like that and when did you launch the company uh i well it's a big story which i will not tell you right now however we started the few years ago even four years ago it started as something different but uh i i would say that the real start is the the last year which we just developed the engine and we launched it and we also launched the online payment okay so we didn't have online payments so 2018. well yes at the beginning of 2018 yes okay and how many customers have you scaled to today well we don't have many customers we have around 300 people using the platform but they're not all paid customers how many paid like 30 we have around 40 paid customers okay 40 paid customers marketing yet okay so when i take 40 paid customers times kind of 40 a month is what they're paying you're doing about 1600 united states dollars per month on this okay now is this your only thing or do you have other sources of revenue so like this isn't your main focus no this is it's not our main focus i would like it to be our main focus this is self-funded uh we make money by building web applications for the past 15 years so you're like an agency exactly this is uh like we decided it's time to build something of our own yes we were building other people's dreams and now we are building our own dream and it's not feasible right now to do it full-time however we are working toward towards that this year why can't it be full-time hey we haven't uh we haven't taken any funding yet yeah but if you in other words if you if you shut down 9 a.m labs and you don't take any more projects there so you can't rely on that revenue it'll force you guys to make apocalypses work right because you'll have to find the revenue you know i'm afraid to do that yeah you're too okay hey thanks for being honest that's the right answer right thanks for being honest now how big do you want me asking 9 a.m labs i mean last 12 months about how much revenue did it do uh around 200 000 it's not okay so it's not massive to give up then it's not like it's not like you're a two million dollar revenue stream no but i'm just the person who plays it safe yeah and most of the time and uh maybe it's a mistake uh however i'm about to fix it so actually little sign up here did you launch the playboy website for greece it's not uh we developed the website that is super that is super cool uh interesting okay good yes you do everything from that to like sas tools to apocalypses and we also try to give back to the community because we promote entrepreneurs in greece via startup gr and with the latest project with the presspreneur we are trying to raise awareness about mental health issues for entrepreneurs why do you care about that because i think it's a big i believe that it's a try it's a trap for some people if most entrepreneurs are like me which i adore my job i love my job i could work 24 7 non-stop because it gives me energy it gives me creativity it's my hobbies my game so sometimes when it's so exciting you forget to take care of yourself and keep a bit of a balance and take a break and care about other things so um i've seen it around me i've felt some things so i think it's something important to care about and you know raise some awareness about that that we need some limits don't you vicky don't you have to be a little up though to be an entrepreneur you have to be a little crazy yeah for sure for sure all right good so you you have you i believe you said you have bootstrapped both your agency and apocalypses right no outside money excuse me you've bootstrapped you haven't raised any capital no no okay is that would you is that because there isn't a lot of capital to raise in greece uh i will i will be honest again and there is a various ways to raise money in greece i'm not sure why we have not yet raised money and maybe it's because of my personality because i like to do many things at the same time and this is something which usually uh investors don't like however i'm i'm pretty confident that we will find the funding sooner or later it's just that we haven't found the right person who will match our mentality yet and we are not seeking such actively uh we love working so we we sometimes uh have the wrong priorities uh i believe if we had the priority to get some funding we would have gained some funding yeah yeah and by the way i'm not saying you should go raise capital i'm just saying you know if you did want to raise are you having troubles or there's not a lot of sources or something like that um there are sources uh i'm i'm not like extremely active in this area yeah it's not the same as in other countries for sure as you know we have many financial problems in greece uh there are some few people that do help startups and but you know haven't been really active on that yeah okay very good so 40. sure yeah so 40 customers paying 40 bucks a month you're making 600 bucks per per month right now in apocalypses how do you get your next 100 customers uh well right now there is two main things we need to focus on on the next three or four months the first one is to start doing some marketing which we kind of forgot because we were working on features which i believe is something many founders but how did you get your first 40 customers where'd they come from um well some by accident we did a product hunt campaign we did very well we got fourth place there how many how many for apocalypses yeah how many how many new trials signed up when you launched on product time i i don't remember exactly it could be around 200 or 300 but they didn't sign up for a paid account but we did get some awareness for that some found us from some articles we've written but mostly most of our customers is word of mouth uh one good really good thing we have is our support uh our support system which is the people okay replying to the customers the thing is once a customer comes uh it becomes a customers of apocalypses they usually don't leave they love us hold on i want to i want to dive deeper here by the way you introduce yourself on product hunt as dallas do you buy vicky or dallas well some people call me vicki some people call me dallas i like dallas it makes me sound like i feel like it's more like a badass you strike me you know i do lots of stuff yeah you strike me as a bad okay i'll use dallas so when you put this on product hunt you got 612 upvotes that day how did you get so many upvotes did you email market to it or how did you get them well i i've also written an article exactly on how we managed it on medium the thing is i studied a lot what makes a successful product hunt campaign and i had some friends here in greece and another software as a service which helped us a lot by giving us some advice which is gold viral loops and it's about referral referral marketing environment that's us right yeah yeah and uh so savas gave us some amazing advice so everybody i knew gave a piece of advice so i was really really prepared for that day we had everything planned we have read all the correct things to do and it worked i we didn't do anything huge we did send email but we had a very smally made list and i'm going to quickly i'm going to quickly give a teaser of your process here just so my audience can we'll put this link in the show notes but you know number one you found a good hunter um because they have a big following that's in critical prepare the images animation icon video text and first comments and so on and then prepare lists and tasks for before launch day of launch and after the launch and i think one which i just remembered now what i believe made the campaign so successful because i believe it was really successful for such a small company to become to take fourth place in protocol for our first hand uh is we what what we what we suggested on product handbooks not apocalypses was a hundred pre-launch widgets for startups it was a very specific campaign just made for the audience of product hunt something that they would understand so we tweaked a bit what we were offering in order for the product had on the edge to understand it and love it so i think that was you know the way we promoted it was a good one yep yep no it was good and then as a result again over 200 sign ups new partnerships new friends good experience obviously that will always drive you traffic now you have that as an asset for life which is nice um that's how you got your first 40 customers first 400 users when you say do marketing to drive growth i mean what's your next tactic you're going to pull to try and get your next 100 customers we need to do some content we need to generate some content we did we tried that for a month and worked really really well we need to work on our social media social media and we need to you know be involved in groups which are related to what we have to offer facebook groups we need to reply on our on quora questions which are related to our area of expertise and so on i'm pretty confident that then that once we do start working on that it will be a roller coaster in a different way for apocalypses i am a bit late on that because we are currently working on the second big pillar of the platform which is forms so we have widgets and we will have forms and i believe as a whole is something really valuable for the customer dallas how many people are on the team today we are four people just on apocalypses on everything we work on oh how many of them are only focused on apocalypses uh just a hand from the one person the leg from the other okay and is everyone in greece standards of time four percentage over time and everyone's in greece yes we're all in greece we work from the same place yeah very good all right let's wrap up here dallas with a famous five number one what's your favorite business book well i'm very ashamed to say this but i don't read a lot of books but if we talk again next year i will have an answer on that okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now seo ceo but no not a specific one i do follow and read articles from many ceos however i do always check on what hotzer does because i love i love the product i love the user experience i love the way they they manage their communication the way they do their their terms and conditions they have um everything about hotjar is amazing great i see them my case study good number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um i don't have a favorite tool what do you use the most um we use a hot jar a lot um but we do a lot of vanilla things we do a lot of things around on our own number four how many hours of sleep to get every night oh uh well that's uh i don't have an answer for that i'm trying to get the what is suggested but i haven't yet managed that well how many how many hours this is easy question how many hours did you get last night well last night was a hard night so i had that around four to five hours okay okay good and then what's your situation married single kids i'm single okay that's why i work a lot not married no kids and do you want me asking how old you are i'm 38 38 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i would read more books guys read more books coming from vicki dallas had an agency does about 200 000 bucks per year now launching a sas product called apocalypses used our agency to get our first 40 customers here the company now doing 1600 per month mainly from a product on launch where they got 200 new leads they're now operating about breakeven about two people dedicated to the tool and building it based in greece as they look to scale vicky thanks for getting us to the top thank you so much thank you