How Bookafy CEO Casey Sullivan grew to $2.2M revenue and 8K customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is casey sullivan he is the creator of a company called bookify.com casey are you ready to take us to the top yeah it's pronounced bookify oh good yeah it's funny i just asked you right before we started by the way why not go buy that domain like b-o-o-c sorry b-o-o-k-a-f-y-s how is the domain you have correct right you need to go get like i-f-y and e-f-y and all the variations yeah that's a good idea do you have those um no they're they're owned by some kind of random other software that's not quite related but yeah got it that's a bummer okay well enough about them tell me about you what do you do and how do you make money yeah cool so we're at a pure b2b sas company uh bookify is an online appointment scheduling tool um we originally created for our own company use and then we began to share with our friends and now we're serving businesses all over the world from startups to universities marketers churches coaches people doing podcasts no no pressure yes we have a ton of smb uh folks using it a lot of individuals from companies of all sizes and then a handful of enterprise clients so we're working our way up the fuji it was gonna say so most people start smb then kind of go up what would you say the average customer pays you per month right now it's 22. okay okay you knew that very quickly so that's that's an average i watch your show so i kind of have an idea of what you might ask oh that's good do you like it are you enjoying the show i love it yeah i love it it's good good good okay and then yeah so so put this on a timeline uh 22 bucks is kind of an average when you launch the company uh 2015. and where were you kind of in your life at that point you just like quit corporate or you know what happened no i did i was running another company um and so um so i started using this software for our own company and then i um you know as this grew it seemed to be more of an opportunity and and so we took this on full time that's great and so that was 2015 so i guess three years later today how many customers have you scaled to uh we have just over 11 000 between paying and free customers okay and how many just paying um about a third of that about a third okay good so call it about 3 300 something like that yeah closer to four probably yeah okay and what what's the number one thing that gets someone to move from one of the 11 000 like free into like an actual paid plan what's like the activation metric you know you have to get them to hit yeah so um the the main difference between free and the pro plan is is the different integrations for you so pro you add the ability to take payments to do classes and group events um to have um teams so more than one user um and then getting test text message reminders and syncing to all your personal calendars and all that stuff so the the basic free plan doesn't include the the pro features then we have one plan above that which is our enterprise plan got it so it sounds like um you know a lot of other scheduling tools they'll kind of hyper focus on one area like scheduling tools for sales people or you know booker was like salons and gets wrapped up by mime body right it sounds like you're kind of playing all over the spectrum we are yeah it's does that mean is it a good thing or a bad thing is it is it helpful for you or not uh from a marketing standpoint it's actually a pretty big challenge from an opportunity standpoint it's i think it's a i think it's great i mean we can serve um you know most industries really really well so i would say we do like 95 of what um the the very you know linear focus companies do for each industry so we're um yeah we have a bigger opportunity so we can we can serve people from every industry but yeah from a marketing standpoint it's challenging because if somebody comes to your website you can't say you know how to have a great message for a ton of different industries but yeah that's just yeah no no it is interesting and you know the space is obviously fragmented but it sounds like you've got good scale you know i think you said about 4 000 customers 22 rpo that puts you right at that million dollar run rate is that basically accurate uh yeah a little less than that okay and what's growth rate where are you where were you a year ago we were a lot less probably less than 50 okay so less than 40 grand a month in revenue what drove most that growth was it you know captera deal appsumo deal you know government organizations it's a combination of a lot of things so um you know most all of our money we've been spending on product development so as the product has gotten i mean our 2015 product was pretty you know bad in hindsight and so we've spent just you know almost no money in marketing and almost all of our funds have been on product development so as a product has gotten better you know our logo return has gone down our people are willing to pay more paid more often and so there's more users per account so there's a combination of of many things that are working but we're still on almost a like a zero marketing budget at the moment so we're kind of relying on people loving the tool enough to to give it a try yep how are i mean well let me let me dive into your team first so what is the current team size today and how many are engineers eleven and eight okay okay wow so probably and all in seattle um all remote oh everyone's remote so our offices in seattle we're we're all roommates we have three customer service including myself and then um and then between project manager designer and development team there's another remote yep interesting how did you find kind of the the remote developers a lot of people struggle with this yeah it's it's not easy so i've been the company i had before we had remote developers too so we had um on-site one person in seattle that managed the team and then you know if you have one good person it's a lot easier to hire other good people but i think i think it is a challenge if you go from zero non-technical people to hiring a team of technical people not in the office but yeah so we did it incrementally um and then with those contacts i had from the other you know other projects um you know we were able to grow our team and now we have a nice fully functional remote team and and i'm gonna love you so much more if you say you're still bootstrapped are you bootstrapped or have you raised we are bootstrapped yes i love that that's great i know you love the bootstrap so yeah well everyone everyone i just feel like like tech crunching these people they just they sell the wrong message right like i i would much prefer to get the story from the ceo doing a million bucks a year in revenue bootstrapped and paying himself like a quarter million dollar check then i would like the guy that's like you know a billion dollar company with a 3x liquidation preference ratchet clauses and a board that he hates or she hates right right right um yeah what'd you say yeah i know and pre-revenue yeah yeah so include revenue with a billion dollar evaluation that'd be nice yeah tell me about churn so what is your turn today yes so we're about 1.5 per month logo okay and what is that on a revenue basis do you know um well on a revenue basis it's tough because we so so we lose about 1.5 of our customers per month but we also the revenue per customer increases per month because we're getting a combination of bigger clients and then also the existing clients are going from say one user to two users or six to seven or you know 80 to 100 or whatever and so so um and then they're also upgrading so we'll have customers that are going from our pro plan at seven dollars per user to enterprise at 11. so it's it's actually i tried to research that before and i had a tough time yeah it's a tricky it's a tricky metric um the reason it gets asked is because it's especially true in companies that have um a huge delta between what different customers are paying and basically what it tries to capture logo or revenue turn it tries to capture that someone paying you way more them churning is like a way bigger impact than a much smaller customer churning and that's why they look at revenue churn instead of logo count churn uh i see yeah yeah i don't i don't have a great number for you and we don't have a ton of big clients so most of our clients are either individuals paying us seven dollars or teams that are like say you know 10 to 15 people yep and we have a few clients that are you know much bigger but we haven't actually lost new those clients because we haven't it just hasn't happened and we also haven't had them for a really long time so i mean we've just kind of been ramping up into the bigger client space and so we have zero turn with bigger clients and then you know individuals tend to be the majority of our turnout yeah i wanna i'm gonna go really in the weeds here for a second a lot of people ask me about are g2 crowd and kept era worth it i happen to notice you are on captera and it is a significant according to similar web it does drive you significant traffic and i do see the visit website button next to your listing which means you're paying for something on there um is it an effective channel for you yeah um it is it has been the best for us um and and partly because um we don't have like a we don't have a marketing team per se so we've been doing like i mentioned before we're spending almost all of our time on product development not on um sales and marketing and so when we've done sales and marketing through other channels we i just had it i just had a lot of pain like yeah you know going through say facebook we get customers who are really interested in the product and they're like oh that's awesome and then they just never really they would set up but then never actually use you know use the product or or eventually of course pay and so our percentage of um people going from using to paying was really low where i think when we're getting direct clicks from say google or from capterra they're already expressing a need for a software like this and then they're and then they're coming to us and we actually are um yeah we actually do pretty well with that with that customer because they they're looking for a product we're super versatile um it's a really pretty product and so we we actually do pretty well with those customers especially when they've looked at a bunch of customers so do you i mean do you know if stopping right how many click i guess clicks is the right number how many clicks from captain you get per month i do so we have a we have a really really low budget so as i mentioned we spend almost nothing on marketing so our budget the only money we spend on marketing at the moment is through catera and we spend less than 500 per month okay 500 like just like and we primarily use it for um you know metric tracking and feedback and kind of building our our sort of long-term scaling plan but we haven't actually really you know put the pedal of metal in how many clicks where you get from that what's that how many clicks we get for the 500 spend we spend less than a dollar per click okay and then how many clicks do you need typically to convert a customer from captain do you know yeah so it's about so our our conversion from um somebody coming to our site to actually signing up for pro our product is just under 20 at cafetera actually actually signing up for free or actually sign up with paid signing up in general and then of that about 35 percent will become a paid client i see okay so if captain gives you a hundred clicks see what you're saying is because there's intent there 20 will sign up for free and paid and then of that column around seven ish will become a paper that's i mean that's actually a pretty healthy channel actually it's actually really good yeah so why not double your spend there um we just haven't i mean honestly i've been more focused like we we have so much we're doing on a product side and that i just um i just feel like i want to make it and this is probably um not i mean i know there's there's a there's a blind spot here but you know i'm i'm so um interested in making the product better that i haven't really focused on the sales side of it yeah and are you developer do you code i don't okay so you're like specking stuff out and passing it to the dev team exactly yeah yeah interesting so so you know like we're doing a huge a huge uh we did a big launch about two weeks ago with a ton of integrations we've been working on um we're doing another big um launch tomorrow with a whole new um site you know whole new user interface design kind of i mean so what we use captera for uh in large part is we track what they're doing how they're interacting do a lot of split testing with different language and the idea is that if we can refine that and use their feedback to refine our product that we can have more success when we actually put some fuel in the tank so um so that's the idea are you doing anything i see you have 107 reviews people always struggle how to get reviews on these things did you did you like send an email to your users and tell them to go leave a review or like how do you drive reviews no we don't yeah we've been approached by them of course a million times to to you know give them our customer list and they'll go get reviews but i i just i i've never done that i feel like that what we want the most is for our customers to use our product not to give us a review so i didn't want to trip up the use of the product and the experience of using it with my desire to get them to give us reviews so we haven't done anything from that standpoint but it's not unusual if someone's like oh my gosh this is you know going great can i leave a review somewhere then i'll fire back or one of the people will fire back with a link typically send a g2 crowd or to um or to captain one of those and they all seem to end up on the same spot like get app and all those they all yeah they all you know you get a lot of traffic from appsumo which means you must run an app smoke deal at some point a lot of people sometimes it works and sometimes it's a huge backfire because you have a bunch of people that paid one time for life and they just clog your support channels i mean how did it work for you did it work well yeah it was great i mean it was like it was uh i mean i would compare it to um you know some of the other things we've done like it it's it actually i would say there's an overall success like we got a lot of good customers um we we did a really limited uh a limited project with them so we did one user per account um so we have a lot of appsumo people that have added more accounts um we also have had um we've also had a lot of them refers to other people so it's actually been a pretty good channel for us but if if no one ever upgraded and no one ever referred us and our product wasn't very good so somebody just paid for it and then you know never shared it with their friends and never then it would it would probably be a bummer but i think we're on that the flip side of that we're actually getting pretty good feedback um yeah good good use cases to share and yeah i think it was a good project for us that's good so look it sounds like only direct paid spend you're spending 500 bucks to get seven new customers so that's about 70 cac on those accounts and they're paying 22 bucks a month on average so payback there is what like three four months on average yeah about that yeah and that's just again that's only you know a very small 500 spend per month which is great do you is a lot of your growth the organic growth coming from do you have like a powered by you know anywhere on we do so we actually get a lot of customers through that so we get about um between like 10 and 30 customers per day that will sign up for our product sorry just to be clear i want to make sure we talk about customers and trials the right way that's 30 new trials or actual paid customers uh trials okay trials got it yeah so we get between like say 10 and 30 it's it averages probably closer to 20 per day of of new trials and a lot of those are coming from a combination of like some we get from captainer some we get from direct from google and a bunch we get from customers just our customers customers using our product and liking it and liking the experience and signing up that's helpful though so we can understand your velocity just to be clear every day your entire kind of the entire machine produces 30 new trials from these different channels right yeah yeah and then you obviously work the system with an average spending budget of like fifteen dollars per day that's great absolutely yeah what what do you know you last question here before we wrap up what do you know you have to get a new customer to do in the first like 72 hours to make them sticky or or greater you know likely that they sign up for a paid account well we haven't um really i don't i don't think i've really got my the um like i really know exactly what the answer to that question is but i mean i'll tell you what we've tried to do so um we've gone through the the sign-up process and really try to get them to sync with their personal calendar um right up front so we went from having that be a background activity to being like the first thing they do and so by the time they get to their calendar page they've already synced their exchange calendar their google calendar outlook or you know office 365 so so that's been a big a big factor for us and then um and then i think you know i think us our team reaching out and trying to help people get through the the final setup has actually been super helpful too so the more people that we talk to that the more likely they are going to stay on and become a paying customer yep any uh any plans to sell the company in the near future uh yeah i mean it's we don't have plans we've been approached a couple times we were approached and in pretty good talks like a couple months ago but um we we just didn't pull the trigger on it and felt like there's a you know more opportunity but um and frankly the numbers just didn't work out but the uh i think you know where we're going with the product and and i think if i think there is a big opportunity if we find a strategic partner and you know i think a bigger ecosystem would actually be good for bookify yeah yeah no i agree it's a great great product everyone's always going to need appointments to be scheduled so it's you know it's a life lifetime product very good let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh love is a killer app i love izzy and i also really like the uh the book by jason freed um his uh rework rework how's it that's always been a favorite number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i i actually do really like jason from base camp and i think i think he would be on my on my list for sure number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company besides your own online tool so we use um a lot of we use uh zapier and we use um jira and we use uh stripe and all those are great for automating but i actually use a tool called snagit a massive amount to give feedback to my team it's like a screen capture thing on steroids so i think that's the product i use the very most in running the business interesting strangely number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight that's good from about ten to six every day that's good and i it looks like you i see dad posters behind you and makes like soccer pictures how many kids you have i have four kids from uh four seven ten and eleven four so married yeah seventeen years holy mackerel amazing married four kids and how old are you i'm gonna be 40 in december congrats that's exciting last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew casey yeah i thought about that question so i think i think i would um you know when i when i was 20 i was mostly focused on you know growing revenue so building businesses and and flipping houses and doing all this stuff to grow up and i think in hindsight i would have um told myself to to slow down and focus on the relationships and the money and sort of you know whether you have a big house or a small house or like any you know richer before it's it's uh the relationships i think that i would have told myself to focus on more slow down build the relationships again launch the company back in 2015 today 11 people all remote around the world 4 000 paying customers about a million dollar run rate let's call it doubling year over year bootstrapped which i love based up again hq in seattle but spread all over the place 1.5 logo term per month so healthy economics from casey casey pronounced the company for me again bookify see that's how you make sure you don't get it wrong you have the ceo pronounce it thanks so much for taking us to the top yeah hey thank you take care