How Billbee CEO David Pohlmann grew Billbee to $7.7M revenue and 20K customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is david pullman he is building bill b order and inventory management for multi-channel e-commerce companies david you ready to take us to the top yes i am thank you all right you're in a very hot space how are you sort of defining your niche and trying to monopolize yeah um actually i think at the moment or especially in the last couple of months during covert and so on and this this space and this niche has yeah a lot of momentum i think and especially in europe with some yeah bigger acquisitions and bigger um venture capital investments name a couple of those just so everyone has contact um yeah when i ever mind central um which is a yeah a german yeah erp system would say for for all the inventory of e-commerce and um sequoia joint or yeah went into them last year and this was kind of a big announcement for the european and especially german tech scene i think and yeah this is kind of the space where we are in and um yeah especially with all the marketplaces coming up and with shopify and uh different cloud job systems coming up um yeah seems to be a very interesting space though however i think we got the niche that we focus very small and medium-sized um businesses and try to target the flop 90 would say and not the top 10 so yeah that's what we do and when you came on back in december last year i love that you were bootstrapped you said that you had you know over 9 000 customers which is a big number they're paying on average 10 million 15 to 20 per month right so i think you were around a two or two and a half million dollar run rate right yeah that was back in december i think the numbers were from september or so yeah and so today how many customers are you working with um we are at around 12k customers that's great so how did you get an additional 3 000 customers over the past six months um we have a very high sign up rate it's around yeah 1.5 to 2k a month and we somehow managed to turn at least 25 to 30 of them into paying customers and churn is comparably low so yeah that's why break that down for me so last month between 1500 and 2000 new signups at your platform what do they have to do like what's the funnel look like and we do not have any direct sales so they really come to bilby through word of mouth marketing and through partners so we are listed in the shopify app store and marketplaces app stores and partner pages so this is our main traffic source and especially the e-commerce community is very big and very connected in germany so everyone yeah yeah talks to each other and gives the names of tools they like and yeah that's that's how we get the most sign ups i think and we have a very high conversion rate from from visitor to to sign up and also very high rate as i said from from uh trial to paid so um yeah that's that's the way it works at the moment you have 47 you have 47 reviews on shopify and average rating about 3.6 um how many new leads each month do you guys get from shopify would you say i would say it's maybe 15 percent of the total okay so 200 or 300 signups a month yeah from billb round about exactly yeah and so then 25 of those 20 to 40 new customers from shopify each month something like that yeah but the majority so really the biggest part is um organic seo and organic what of most traffic yeah okay the organic seo terms what sort of terms have you been optimizing for typical german buzzwords so german terms for for inventory management order management invoicing e-commerce invoicing invoice creation bill creation all this kind of stuff and do you require a credit card on the trial or no no it's email and password only okay and what do you know you had to have to do during the trial period to get them to get work to paid at the end how long is that trial period drug period is 30 days um and but but i think the majority who is um or yeah who's able to work with bilby and is productive will be within the first five days this is the the most interesting group so we've we've always thought to cut the trial to ten or five days or so and i think this might be enough because if you haven't get the benefit you've done that you've actually done i don't know no we haven't we're thinking about it and maybe doing it in the yeah in the near future because i think if you if you're not used to bulby within the first yeah five days or so you won't probably get used to it in the first 30 days so that's a good i mean that's i think that's an astute observation now what do you know people have to do during the trial to drastically increase the likelihood they can work to paid at the end of the trial is it a javascript in bed is it number of product sales what is it um i think it once they connect the marketplace or shop wherever they sell the ecommerce stuff i think once they connect this this is a trigger point so if the orders flow into bobby and they see how easy it works how easy they they can create invoices how easy they can create shipping levels and so on so i really think the trigger point is connecting any third-party application to bobby being in the marketplace being an e-commerce store so yeah and have you started really developing additional products to upsell your 12 000 customers or is your rpu still about 17 bucks of a customer um actually we have um simplified pricing however we have increased our put through this so we are at around 32 at the moment yeah that's a that's that's almost that's almost doubled over the past seven months how did you do that um on the one hand the customers were growing through maybe covet and and christmas and holiday season and so but also we haven't yet dramatic shift of our pricing strategy so beforehand we had different modules so you could have a very few modules and you could have more modules and you could have premium support and so on and now we have completely simplified this so we have only one pay-per-use pricing which is 100 based on the number of orders you have and this ranges from one euro with uh zero orders to 499 euro with yeah unlimited orders let's say it's logarithmic so uh if you have fewer orders you pay more per order and if you have a lot of orders you pay less product and so with all that strategy and the change you've implemented what was monthly recurring revenue last month we had um in june 385k that is so impressive i mean the amount that you've added since just december is i mean that's how you've almost added i mean you always had a 200 000 a new mrr 2.4 million new ar run rate in about nine months are you still bootstrapped yes we are i mean i imagine you're getting all kinds of inbound what's the highest valuation of bc is thrown in front of you actually we haven't seen any number for this so far and um to be honest tomorrow i have a first call where we yeah maybe here a number for it a valuation for it but we haven't really to be honest we haven't yet any numbers so far so what would you do what's a range that you would set i mean what do you think it's worth on the high end i don't know i i mean we are very profitable so we had in 2020 we have an ebitda of around 700k and at the moment we are at yeah at least 100 to 150k per month ebit so um yeah to be honest i think if you if you find the right seller it might be something between 30 or the 30s range also but um yeah at the moment there are no specific plans to to sell or to do so but yeah let's see i hope you don't understand yourself 30 million to me seems actually very conservative considering how profitable you are and how fast you're growing i bet you if you run a true process you probably end up closer to between like 40 and 60. but that's if you want to go to the vc route you're killing it we're not going that route right i mean you remind me a lot of of jan and uh and chipmunk and how he grew and did secondaries are you the only founder or co-founders um actually i'm the first employee so we'll be single founded by our by by the founder jan and and cto and yeah i was a first employee and at the the revenue part and ops part so and you have some equity at least bso okay so you have some upside yeah yeah very cool what's the team size today how many people um we are 30 30. how many engineers um and what's churn look like um it's less than one percent per month right we had a little more uh churn when we when we had the pricing switch but um yeah it's three months a month ago and now we're at uh below one percent again and your expansion revenues increase drastically because of your arpu expansion right yes it is so yeah i don't know i'm haven't have the actual number but yeah it's it's huge of course this is very exciting david let's wrap up the famous five number one favorite book i'm still scaling up you're consistent i like that number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yes there's still a guillaume from from lemlist still you know uh number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business um to be honest still finding out so we are at your moment looking at asena and click up for a yeah for a for a project management tool here number four how many...