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...