Billbee Revenue & Valuation (2023)

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is david pullman he's always making money online all the way back since school he started his professional career as a cooperative student at former 120 000 person hp with stops in europe and california later on he started as employee number one and took over the growth part to further bootstrap bilby to a seven and more figure sas company now working as the md for revenue and operations david you ready to take us to the top yes i am thank you all right so just to be clear you're working full-time at bilby.io as md do you have equity in the company are you considered a co-founder um we have uh vso sorry so um i've watched the stock options so no no equity but um yeah it's only virtual yeah okay great that's helpful to understand so tell us about the company what's the company do and are you pure play sas how do you make how do you guys make money yeah we are actually pure ask we're a typical b2b sas application for small and micro businesses who sell their stuff online so we are in the field of e-commerce and um lots of our users um yeah just selling amazon ebay shopify and all this kind of stuff and we do all the back-end processes like invoicing shipping um yeah inventory yeah stock levels thinking and all this kind of stuff so we we see ourselves as some kind of toolkit for multi-channel e-commerce would say when did the company launch uh we started in 2015 okay and now today on average what are these small businesses paying you to use your technology um we have a rpool of like 17 a month okay and the the bandwidth is very high from starting from zero a few cents until yeah a couple of hundred euros and okay so yeah big bandwidth but average is 17 per month take it back to 2015 though how did you guys get your first hundred customers [Music] um we've been in a very niche market and there's a platform called davanda which is the german clone of etsy and and we started especially in the diy area for e-commerce and there was a big community and we really started off with the diy community and there was only one tool to generate invoices and uh this was buildi at this time and so it was really easy to to get the first 100 customers in there yeah very very niche and how many how many customers now today Currently serving 9000 customers um we have a little more than 9 000 paying customers okay and and yeah what's enabling i mean when you say that they're processing things like payments through you as well is there a percent of gmv model as well or it's just pure sas um yeah actually there's not a percentage of gmb volume but we have a transaction based pricing so they pay us seven cents per order which goes through the system in in basic terms let's say and there are a few modules around it which which yeah which lead to some upselling yeah but basically it's seven cent per order why did you choose to go that route instead of just charging a percent of of total sales that they put through platform yeah that's that's a good question i think it's some kind of historical how we how we decided to go with the orders and um yeah also even if you sell very high cost product it doesn't mean you have a high margin and and vice versa so you could sell something for 2 euro and have 1.5 euro margin and and the other way around so yeah that's why i think we've Monthly recurring revenue decided to go with a per order pricing instead of a percentage pricing interesting so 9 000 customers 17 per month how much are you doing per month in revenue um we do uh 180k and if that's what you're doing today what were you doing exactly one year ago uh in that's this was this september exactly and um september before it was let me just check it out i have the numbers here i think um yeah probably we've grown by by 70 so um yeah so you're doing about a hundred thousand dollars a month a year ago exactly what around a hundred thousand little less than a hundred thousand k yeah yeah yeah very good great growth where and talk to me have you guys Bootstrapped bootstrapped this or did you guys raise capital i know it's completely bootstrapped yeah no love no funding no no yeah no it does that that's great are you guys profitable today are you or are you break even um we're profitable we are 25 to 30k per month so yeah that's great so you throw away we always we always trade try to stick to the rule of 40 but also have both both kpis above 10 so we do not fall want to fall below 10 percent profit yep and rule of 40 takes basically your profit plus your growth and what you're saying is you want to be above 10 both on year and year overall growth and you're well north of that you're at 70 and you want your profitability every to also be above 10 exactly yeah that's great um tell me more about the team how many folks on the team today um we're 20 yeah how many engineers eight around 18 and any quota carrying sales reps or no um no we do not do any sales at all yeah yep yep and walk you know churn is critical in a sas company especially selling to smbs what's your churn look like um annual churn is like 13 so gross churn um but we have a lot of expansion so net revenue retention is actually above 100 it's around 101 102 or so got it so you turn 13 percent you expand by 14 to 15 net revenue retention 102 exactly yeah and you start off in these niche sort of etsy the german competitor etsy sort of sites the diy space how are you getting customers today um yeah it's really a lot of one of most we're we're focusing on the german speaker region as of now so we're quite yeah quite known within german-speaking region which in the e-commerce area would say um but also we get all our yeah referrals which are not word of mouth referrals from our partners which are um the e-commerce systems like shopify woocommerce uh yeah magento amazon ebay all these all these players have their own app stores or plugin stores or or partner sites where we integrate with and that's the yeah by far the biggest source of new leads and new signups you're integrating around you're in the room good we are at around a thousand signups a month and yeah more than a half of it is really referred by by our partners 1000 free signups or new paid customers free free signups how many convert to paid each year each month uh 25 to 235 so one third roundabout i got it so you're getting between 200 and 300 new customers per month yes exactly um interesting of all the app stores you're uh integrated with which one drives you the most new referrals per month what do you guess i would guess shopify yeah by far yeah okay interesting um any talks to to uh for shopify to acquire you guys not yet and but we actually don't want to so why is that we are fine i think why is that yeah at the moment we really feel that the freedom of being bootstrapped and having a profitable company which yeah really produces some some cash and yeah just makes fun to work with and yeah we this year we introduced um remote remote first so we are cancelled all offices we also introduced 30-hour full-time work week while keeping pay so yeah few things you probably could do with some some capital behind you so what are you spending i get a lot of Customer acquisition cost your stuff as from referral partners but when you do spend money what is your fully weighted cac to get a new 17 a month customer yeah it's difficult to count because the only cost we really can associate with it is commissions and yeah maybe some some ads budget but we do very few performance marketing and um so keck is probably a few hundred few hundred bucks maybe 150 to 180 bucks or so interesting what is the ca when you say commission you may you mean the commission you paid a shopify to their app exchange for example yeah exactly yeah which is how much uh with shopify it's 25 percent got it got it very good all right this is good stuff let's wrap them here with the famous five number one favorite business book um scaling up by bernhard number two david is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um maybe the guy from lambeth julion jillian can't spell his name to be honest from where from from lemlist from one from lemless yeah guillaume yeah yeah number two uh is there a uh what's your favorite online tool for building your company um leap sum say it again leap sum l-e-a-p sum yeah number four some kind of employee employee engagement or so yeah how many hours you sleep to get every night seven to eight and what's your situation married single kids um married one kid okay and how old are you um i'm 29 so 29 last question what's something you wishing when you were 20. with the job earlier guys there you have it bilby.io started selling early on to di wires in the german competitor shopify sort of app exchange this was back in uh you know a couple years ago 2015 they launched they were doing about 1.2 million in terms of run rate a year ago now doing 2.2 million in terms of run rate they've got over 9 000 customers paying average seventeen dollars per month they're profitable every month they take about twenty to twenty five thousand dollars to the bottom line also growing nicely and they're doing all this completely bootstrapped which we love team of twenty people eight engineers churn is thirteen percent expansion 15 402 net revenue retention payback period super healthy as they look to continue to scale david thanks for taking us to the top thank you have a good one nathan bye 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every 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