How Bird Eats Bug CEO Jacky Chung grew Bird Eats Bug to $21.4K revenue and 600 customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is dan makroff he spent most of his career in product management roles in companies like google bcg ventures and rocket internet now together with 2x colleagues he co-founded a b2b sas startup building a new kind of dev tool that helps software development teams report and fix technical issues 30 faster it's called bird eats bug.com dan you ready to taste the top yes absolutely so when did you guys start writing the first line of code for this tool um about two years ago like in summer we had the idea and the first line of code was written and i think two months later we already launched the mvp so like the minimum viable product on product hunt and we got to number five product of the day and that basically kick-started the the company and this was in 2019 uh correct okay and and tell me more about the product hunt launch uh why do you think it did so well were you guys intentional with that launch or do you just sort of get lucky um i think it's a combination of both i think there's a like a big element of luck when it comes to product hunt launches um but we tested the waters like we did some uh preliminary let's say launches for like smaller products um like useful for the community just to get a feel for product hunt in general um but i think the the main advantage for us is that like usually for example we heard that the audience on product hunt doesn't have very good retention and i think that the reason for this is that you have a lot of repetitive products like a lot of website builders for example and in our case like we were very unique um and i think also the name helped and like the the whole branding um and like we see a lot of the uh people who tried bird on the first day like on the launch day still with us today so um that's very interesting to see you got 319 uh 361 upvotes on that day uh this was back uh september 23rd 2019. do you remember what your web traffic looked like like how many leads did you get from product do you remember um like we we didn't have signups at the um at that stage uh i can share the how many um chrome install uh chrome extension installs we had and that was about five six hundred installs and um i think about like seven to one hundred thousand bucks reported on that day and um like it was like a massive peak then it first went down and it took us probably like a year to get like consistently to that level of usage where are you now in september how many bugs reported on your platform i assume that's your critical usage metric right uh correct um like we have about uh sixteen hundred bugs a week um so uh that would be like what six thousand uh a month roughly and we're growing like um in the last uh quarter we were growing 20 month over month and how do number of bugs reported correlate back to revenue is that how you price um sort of so like we have a generous free tier but then once you run out of feed here so like on a free tier you can store up to 30 bucks you you can access up to 30 bucks and then you need to upgrade but then once you upgrade we don't have like a specific tiering so like we just have one plan for simplicity and the um the correlation is pretty direct although there's like a time lag because it takes you a while to like uh go through your freemium uh plan and then upgrade how long does it take your you know obviously you track onboarding so if i sign up today how long will it usually take for someone to hit that 30 bug limit um like it really depends on average it's uh two to three months uh that we see a company but that was before our pricing change that was like 50 bucks per person we were giving and now we're given like 30 bucks per company um partly to reduce that amount and um i think that's going to be like within a month like most companies will hit that i see okay so how many paying customers do you have today uh we have about uh six percent um and that's um like the target like it's kind of an interesting story so we took dropbox um as an example and because they have like a a free tier as well and they have a lot of word of mouth and in our case we have forty percent of uh signups coming through word of mouth which is like crazy um and uh we decided not to make uh the free plan too restrictive to keep the word of mouth going on but also like we want to know that we're you know spending uh time on something worthwhile that companies are willing to pay for and i think dropbox is at about four percent and then we're like targeting roughly um that amount to um to stay happy and so dan when you say six percent six percent of what uh six percent of uh all of the sign ups are now in paid tiers i see so how many total sign ups do you have you had then uh we had about 10 000 signups we got it so you've got about 600 paying customers right now yeah i see okay cool so tell me more about that obviously product hunt which is an initial strategy to get a bunch of these signups what else did you do in the early days to get your first sort of ten thousand signups um like once we launched the product hunt um most of it was like seo and and direct traffic and like we listed on a few platforms like captain for example or get up and at the moment we're like essentially trying like every single channel that we can get our hands on um in terms of the most successful like in terms of signups i would say it was google ads um and we're like advertising you know for general screen recording um i guess categories um and other than that um it's uh like it's interesting like because you have kept error and get up and software advice and that's like one umbrella um but like we get more leads via get app although we were originally kind of like betting on capterra and what also worked for us um is newsletters i can i can recommend that i was not expecting this and also we we have an onboarding video and we just tried to like uh put it on youtube and see how it would perform and uh like that performed surprisingly well so like even for an ad like 75 percent uh watch time we're getting like on average watch time is 75 so looking just at your paid spend i mean what are you paying to get a new paid customer these days uh i believe it's going to be like under 10 euros oh prepaid customer that i don't know from the top of my head from the ups i think we're paying like less than 10 euros per um sort of sign up and then i guess you can uh convert that so like what about 15 sign ups yeah yes it takes you 15 times 12 right 10 euros to 12 so 15 sign ups for one paid times 12 dollars about 180 bucks per paid sign up something like that yeah yeah interesting and um let's talk about git app you know everyone always asks me nathan should i go on g2 first or capterra get up i would say it's like an underdog in this category but it's performing well for you you rank number five under the category bug tracking so you rank fairly high with 29 reviews 4.7 do you pay for placement here or is this are all organic um so i think on get up like you have to pay like if you want to track clicks um so like we're paying in some regions uh i think mostly like the us uh in like europe and north america um i don't know how much like the cost per click um i'm not that sure about like the the thing with getup is that like you have high purchase intent so that's great um and like if you have a good retention customer lifetime value i think that's uh that's also great i think the challenge that we find with getup um is that we are essentially creating our new um our own category so like we're not um something that's been that's existed before and like we're not technically bug tracking yeah so like people are like looking for adjacent things and then they find bird um so it's not always easy to kind of like um tell the person that it's not you know exactly a bug tracking for example yeah but get up i think works for us more because get up seems to have like more technical audience versus captera or like more like developers um uh looking for tools there how many leads do you get from github per month right now uh that's a good question that's uh or arranged could it's like in the tens uh but we're not you know spending too much money so um like because the cost per um sign up is um quite high like for us at least um we pay for the present i think like we in general on get up to terra like we're spending under like 800 uh dollars a month to list on all of them uh second to list on cap tara like all of them all together under 800. yeah okay interesting so let's let's go back to like again how you're currently building so bug tracking tool over ten thousand free signups which is great you're converting six percent which is high for premium tools so congratulations on that what are they paying on average per month um it really depends on the uh on the uh on on the size so sometimes like we have like a single bug reporter for example and they're paying like eight uh bucks...