How appointmed CEO Bernhard Keprt grew appointmed to $1.1M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is patrick enzinger he's an independent designer entrepreneur and startup advisor with a passion for product and interface design in addition to more than 17 years of working with brands like the reds carlton porsche red bull and others and multiple successful startups all over the world he's also the founder of a healthcare company called appointment med it's practice management software for healthcare professionals patrick you're ready to take us to the top yes let's go all right why is a forward-thinking product-led guy like you going into healthcare a very slow stodgy industry yeah funny that you ask i'm doing a lot of those industry design thingies basically so i did a lot of uh work in the online banking industry i did a lot of work in the insurance industry and all of that is very complex and slow and old basically um and actually the team that i have with the appointment now is the same team that we tried to uh build a startup in a financial sector back in 2000 2011 or something and we are like that team uh we're only five people so it's very small and it's and it's uh small by design i i really like to keep things tight and and don't want to have too much management stuff in there how many of the five write code um two two okay and then what are the other three um i do the design and all the business stuff um we do have one marketing person and we have another one doing mostly marketing and customer support and stuff like that so and when did you guys get off the ground when did you launch um we started with with appointment or the initial ideas in 2013 and basically treated it as a site project so all of my co-founders are all self-employed they used to have their own business and then we figured out yeah let's let's not trade hours for money build something that basically um provides an income passively so that was basically the idea um and yeah that's that's pretty much do you remember back in 2013 what total revenue was that year yeah 2013 until 2016 is pretty much zero um it took us a long time to get the prototype ready it took us a long time to have all the security stuff in place if you deal with uh with patient records it's very very very important to secure all of the data we do have almost half a million patients now in our system so it's it's critical across how many customers um i'd say about 1200 or something like that 1200 okay so 500 okay and who are some of these customers are they hospitals no um we we started off with doctors like independent practices um but we we quickly realized that those people they do have the money but they don't like to spend money so it was very hard to get those people on board especially with a with a completely new solution they're used to having um like windows applications and a windows 2000 server running somewhere in their office and stuff like that so they are not used to software as a service um so it was really hard we had sales cycles up to three months per customer in the holidays um and through referrals and connections we started going more into the therapist sector so we do a lot of physical therapy and stuff like that um where it became easier to sell products so this is our main target group now and patrick what do these customers pay you per month on average on average i'd say it's about 50 to 60 euros um per user so if a practice grows we grow with them so if they uh onboard new people or they increase their team or whatever um they basically have to purchase another seat for this what is a user is a user a patient or someone that works at the draw that works at the doctor's office okay uh got it so so how many so so round that out i mean what's the average team size when they join you um it depends i think the largest practice that we have now is it's like close to 50 people working there um but the average is about six to ten let's say okay so would you say that if can i take six times 80 united states dollars per month so each customer pays you about 500 per month on average yeah that's about it okay interesting very cool why did you decide to price against number of workers at the doctor's office versus number of patients the doctor serves um because the patients is very hard to judge i mean we do have the numbers in the system but if you have like 20 000 patients in your practice it's not really um a good kpi to measure the price of our product because not all of those 20 000 will be showing up video practice every single day so we figured it would be easier to do like the crm way um for example send us excel or something like that they do the the pricing per seat working with the software so that's one of the reasons why we went there so then can i multiply 1200 doctor's offices times 500 bucks a month on average that would put your mrr at about 600 000 bucks a month no that's way off um that's that's surprising we do have now but we do have a lot of legacy customers so if we're talking about numbers we're about like 40 to 50k mrr now so it's not it's not that that big but since we are a small team we're only this is five people job one of the things one of the things that we track is revenue per employee right so you've got a lot with a little which we love so if you're at 50 000 a month today where were you a year ago a year ago we were like close to 30 i'd say so where did the growth come from how are you finding these new doctors offices um we we did everything we we did like snail mail campaigns we did cold calling we tried email campaigns and and we basically revamped our entire marketing strategy in 2017 um and and focused on on uh search engine optimi optimization and revamped our website and stuff like that and ever since we did that it's mostly inbound so people find us via google or um by uh some ads we we um ran but nowadays how much did you spend last month on ads nothing we don't do ads anymore that was back in 2017 to 2018-19 maybe seo most of our growth now is referrals from existing customers so last month we had 70 percent of our growth was referred from existing customers because they are so happy with the software that we provide for them how do you track that do you pay them a kickback or something yeah yeah they get a little bonus basically on the next invoice it's uh 50 or something like that so it's not a huge amount but four dollars no 50 euros so about 60 65 all right they get 65 for every new customer they refer to you yeah that's pretty cheap for a referral program that's nice work there yeah it's it works out for us um and and the rest of the growth is basically word of mouth so we don't do um any sales or key account management or whatever um it's basically we implemented intercom on our website to easily reach the entire team so if any questions about our software you can just type a question in and we'll respond in like less than five minutes what about seo so when someone searches terms organically on google what are some of the terms you ain't really high for that drive you a lot of new trials yeah well that's hard it's it's mostly like german terms so it's hard to translate off the top of my head but it's basically like doctors practice scheduling or patient records or something like that interesting okay and are you only focused on the german market right now yes um it was easier to start that way but the entire company is of a company language is english so in case we want to branch out and reach out to other countries we can easily do that all of our internal documentation is english the communication is in english so if we take on new workers we have one um where we had one working from kazakhstan for a couple of months it's very easy to onboard those people so the goal is to roll up an english version of our software by the end of the year or beginning of next year and patrick you've done this all bootstrapped correct yes um we invested about i'd say 150 to 170k um in the early days again we have been all self-employed we have um a very high skill level in our team so everybody was making a good amount of money before appointment basically and that gave us the luxury to invest in our own company so we didn't have to go to investors and we did go to investors but most of them turned us down um the austrian investment scene wasn't really that great yeah how many so so how many co-founders are there that i own equity we have four okay did you split 25 25 25 no it's more like um we started off with two and then added another one and added another one so it's it's more like a how long you are in the company basically so it's not how much do you own today i own 34 okay got it and then i guess whoever you co-founded with the beginning probably owns around the same amount right yeah right right and then the other two own a little bit less yes right i see very cool um so what will it take what scale do you guys have to reach for everyone to quit their their cushy full-time gigs to do this full-time um that's a good question i mean it's it's it depends on the fixed expenses that those people have so a few on our team they're like driving teslas and and do have their expenses basically so they needed to be covered um for me personally i started out full-time in 2017 or 2018. um it took a pretty big pay cut but i have everything that i need basically so it's not really about the money i like the flexibility of doing my own thing now i love the flexibility can i ask you sort of what you pay yourself now the company being one of the only full-time ones um well right now we're about uh four thousand euros a month you kind of whisper that does that like make you nervous yeah i mean it's a lot of money right so it's yeah well money's relative i mean if your living expenses are four grand then you're living paycheck to paycheck sure yeah then you're living like a king that's that's the point that i was trying to make oh yeah we have people who have a lot of um expenses every month so it's it's harder for them to get by with that amount of money but i'm very frugal basically and there's a lot of cash yeah are you guys profitable or do you sort of reinvest everything back into the company um we reinvest most of it um but there's there's a good amount of profit in there as well do you keep just just so that you feel good about life in general do you keep a cushion in the bank and if so how many months of runway cushion do you like to keep yeah we do have about two years left so we have enough money to basically do our thing and don't have to worry about anything how much can i ask how much cushion it is in the bank he's like refreshing his bank account right now i should have checked on the numbers before the call um i mean it sounds like it's gonna be like 150 or 200 grand something like yeah something like that something like that yeah yeah yeah because what total expenses are what like 30 40 grand a month something like that yeah not even that i think with all the salaries and we are very very tight on infrastructure so the whole operation basically our the system is costing us like 25 to 30k a year so it's very lean very small so i'm i'm a big fan of every dollar that you don't spend you actually have in your bank account so this is the philosophy behind this and patrick are people sticking what does churn look like um it's basically non-existent um we're we're in a good spot where people if they switch and that's the challenge getting people to switch their software in that environment in that industry once they switch we basically don't have any churn that is um due to people being unhappy with the software it's more like external circumstances for example um we have one customer that outgrew our feature set basically so they they basically turned into a little clinic and and they of course had to cancel their contract but most of them um are sticking with us for years we we still i would say generators like single digits very cool let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book um dune actually i started writing uh reading sci-fi books again what was it called dude dune okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um yeah a lot i mean elon musk obviously um as a big fan of tesla and spacex and stuff like that um i'm also a big fan of dan maul not everything he does but um most of the stuff um great number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business oh that changes like every other month um i was a big fan of notion um a big fan of slack although i'm not a big fan of slack anymore i think they're going in the wrong direction um and and quite recently we switched our internal communication to around dot co which is a great video communication tool why do you like them they have a great ui um as a designer that's that's basically one of the main criteria to choosing software um and they also have this little um overlay thingy i don't know what to call it it's basically like a non-distracting video call so you can get work done you can go into your id and do code or go into figure and basically see your team in the right hand corner of the screen all right cool number four how many hours of sleep do you eat every night oh eight easily okay and what's your situation married single kids uh i do have a partner we have two cats two cats okay and how old are you sorry how old are you i'm 35 i'm turning thirty in october very familiar i turned 32 in october october 3rd when's your birthday oh 29th okay all right last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 uh how to invest money guys there you have it appointment launch in 2013 basically no revenue for three years till 2016. now in 2020 they broke call it oh how much about 30 000 a month in revenue now they're doing over 50 000 a month in revenue all bootstrap patrick still owns 34 of the business they raised no money and only 170 000 bucks of the founders money they put up to start to get it going now serving over 1200 doctors offices and 500 000 patients as they look to continue to scale patrick thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world 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