How Blox CEO Alon Muroch grew Blox to $240K revenue and 100 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is alan mort she is an israeli entrepreneur focused on uh developing code from an early age he's been working for many different startups over the past decade include across many roles in 2014 he read the satoshi white paper which inspired him to explore and get deeply involved in the world of blockchain and crypto technology he was a code contributor contributor to bitcoin ethereum developing his own multi-sig pdp wallet peer-to-peer wallet and later on co-founded blocks dot io which we'll talk about today are you ready to take us to the top yeah definitely all right tell us thanks for coming on man all right tell us about box uh what's the company do so blox is developing on crypto as a tracking management and boot keeping platform basically we develop an atc management platform for crypto professionals might be individuals or companies uh to really really engage with their crypto assets on a daily basis and you know do a wide variety of different functionalities that you have to have built in place in order to really be in the space okay so and and how are you guys making money is it a sas platform or what yeah it's a sas platform you have a monthly subscription uh we actually start from 100 a month uh you you still have the free tier uh but once you're are a professional like again might be an individual or a company we start from 100 bucks a month and going out depending on different parameters like the number of transactions you have assets under management and so on and so what's the average customer pay per month well it's difficult to say my guess is that the average will probably pay around two to fifty something on that 200-ish yeah okay very good and when you launch a company what year so we've launched at march 2017 so around two years ago um um yeah and uh we had a long kind of way we developed a ton of things along the way and kind of the product you see today is really the kind of the culmination of the past three years and how many customers have you scaled to so we have the uh the individual side and the company side let's say uh or individuals we have around a hundred thousand uh most of them are free individual free killers yeah yes sorry just just just paid just paid customers how many paid so around 100 okay 100 paid customers total today that's great now how did you find these folks so it sounds like you were already contributing in these ecosystems did you just you know stick a link up and say come use us well so we are very involved in the industry we've been in the industry person has been in the industry the blockchain industry for around six years now so uh we know our way and we know the different companies and the different players in the industry and so it really was um just a thing you know just approaching them offering as we go along get more and more clients and it's also important to say that this again this version of the product where you have three queue but also the premium tier um the premium tier has only been around for past four months so we we only started to really offer it uh since the beginning of the year um and so from the beginning of the year we started to basically approach different companies and we managed to onboard around 100 what are the top tier companies in the industry the kind of the bread and butter the guys who developed the guys or the grassroots kind of companies and through us and and by blocks they manage over three billion dollars worth of crypto today um so again giants from etoro all the way to the small companies um really the top professional i'm sorry i want i want to really actually i want to really dial in right so how you so 100 000 free users 100 today are paying 200 bucks a month so you're doing about 20 thousand dollars per month in sas revenue today is that right uh we're doing i can't get into the exact numbers but we're doing more than that because we have part of the customization installation part which i don't know just i'm talking i'm just talking just burn revenue it's still it's still a bit more than twenty thousand okay uh but uh i think that one of the key things we decided from the get-go was to really cut the prices if you compare us to our competitors most of our competitors take anywhere from starting from around 500 a month and so we decided that we don't want the price to be a factor in the decision because we want to be aggressive and so um from the get go we started with very low numbers yeah in terms of no i think it's fine it's a market grab play i get it um but if you know two 100 customers today paying north of 200 bucks a month 20 grand north of 20 grand a month today help us understand growth in december of 2018 so about six months ago what were you doing per month back then so back then nothing because again the premium version was uh was only launched four months ago so true or false you've gone from nothing to about north of 20 000 bucks a month and pure software revenue under six months uh four months yeah four and a half yeah four and a half that's great now have you done this all bootstrapped or have you raised capital so we did risk okay i liked you so much and then you destroy my heart and you tell me you've raised capital i'm sorry dude how much have you raised let me destroy your heart a bit more so we didn't uh we did do a small seed round back in 2017 early 2017 then we did an ico uh which where we sold tokens um and we can get to what the token does in the system but we sold tokens that was july 2017 we raised 10 million dollars um and basically from that moment on um we are running on that that amount of money we sold tokens and uh um hold on hold on no no no break this one real quick just the ignore the ic on the token issuance just equity that you've sold just under a million dollars okay so we'll call it around dominant okay we'll call it a million dollar seed round and was that convertible note or pure equity i started as convertible node was an element of the tokens and themselves as well so the equity investors also got some uh some sort of a discount on the tokens um but uh yeah mostly just convertible notes okay so a million bucks in cash basically you then a year later it sounds like did an ico uh you sold 10 million dollars worth of the token at the time how much of that did you convert immediately to fiat actually not a lot i mean we uh we converted some but we still had some from the actual um sea browns so well but we started selling you know during 2017 and early 2018. uh we were very conservative in conservating the way we managed ourselves because we did not think to pay salaries we didn't get into the whole hype of you know the craziness of 2017 and so the end result was really uh we converted enough fiat uh to last uh for around four years how much was that are you trying like a two million five million how much uh north or fifteen million uh just in fear uh wait hold on hold on hold on i'm confused you said you did a ten million dollar ico i know because because of the appreciation so we raised the ico ether ethereum was around 150 yep right so it went all the way up to 1200 so we we literally enjoyed that appreciation during 2017 so we've managed to sell uh some of it to fiat most of the crypto is still in crypto and we didn't convert most of it um but the end result was that we converted enough to have around four or five years runway which means if you kind of tackle it backwards still have around two two and a half years of runway only on our fiat and the rest of it is still in crypto um which we barely use you know we hold and pay for a few occasions but mostly it's still there so let me summarize this then i want to talk about the actual the value of the token in your ecosystem so in 20 you raised a million dollar seed round before 2017. that was pure fiat right and then in 2017 you did a 10 million dollar ico at the time ethereum was about 150 bucks a pop over the next 12 months after that as ethereum went from 150 to 1200 each you'd convert about 15 million dollars to fiat which you believe is enough to cover your burn for the next four years the rest you've left in in your token yeah okay so that's a year and a half ago right so the actual burn rate relative to the amount of money the company has um that that gives you around four years of runway so it's not theoretical it's actually what's happening okay very cool now what's team size today how many people so we have around 35 people uh we're growing slowly i think that by the end of the year we'll probably hit 40. okay uh both of them are you know developers product guys and now we're obviously because we got into the kind of the premium side of the product we also have sales people um only in the us that's our focus focus we have um and so you you start seeing the team in the u.s starting to build up and more and more people and they do customer you know just customer stuff so sales support and stuff like that how aggressive are you being in terms of growth what how much are you burning per month right now uh so my guess so we're burning around four million a year something like that um so three three hundred...