How Bookafy CEO Casey Sullivan grew Bookafy 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...