How Breakcold CEO Arnaud Belinga grew Breakcold to $43.9K revenue and 53 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is arnold bolenga he's the co-founder of break cold a personalized sales outreach tool he dot he's documenting their journey from 0 to 20k and mrr on twitter loves skateboarding and is based in france which we love arnold you ready to take to the top yeah thanks for having me nathan you bet so is this is breakfall your first sas company yeah it's actually our first task company uh basically with my co-founder we met a year and a half ago during a hackathon in france and at the time i was a training lawyer yeah he was a developer and um i i always had this drive for entrepreneurship and i say you know what um let's put some savings and take a flat together after i i finished my studies and that's what it's what this is what we did eight months ago we took a flat outside of paris to do sas seven days a week and after a few iterations um we ended up with breco which is our first sas project yeah so what what tell me what it is what are customers paying you for uh customers are paying for um even in terms of pricing plans so no what's the tool do my audiences know what the tool does what do you guys do yeah so it's basically a personalized sales outreach tool so the pain point we had with our side projects before was when i was prospecting i spent a lot of time personalizing the first lines and so um in late december last year we decided to play a bit with the ai and we we built our own ai models to personalize your sales outreach so for example uh if you import csv with the linkedin europe of your of your prospect and the web if your prospect has the website url or a linkedin url we're able to generate uh four different first lines per prospect uh at scale and then we are called outreach tools so you can personalize that skill uh your first lines and then put it into your email sequences okay so you're helping with copy like copy ai but also helping with sending like lem list yeah exactly it's a mix of it's it's yeah it's pretty much a mix that's great and so what do you charge what are customers paying on average per month yeah right now we have free plans uh so you have this warmer thing where you can uh where we help you to improve your email durability and it's not 29 dollars per month and then the the upper plans are 49 per month and 99 a month but initially uh the price were way lower and uh we learned along the way that um that we had to double the prices and since we did we doubled the conversion rate so it's good so let's talk about doubling the price in a second but first i want to bury the lead arno where are you at today in terms of monthly regrowing revenue yeah right now uh it's pretty new it's been three months and a half uh for four months um now uh and we're about to break to two thousand in monthly record revenue so until then how many and how many paying customers uh we have 50 53 paying customers okay so we can take 2 000 mr divided by 53 your average customer is paying about 37 per month yeah right now is yeah i see so so i want to talk about doubling pricing but before we do that how did you get your first five customers do you remember yeah uh actually um i was um starting to kind of build my personal brand on twitter and so i was a building in public um because it's thing in texas on twitter and this is how we got our first um five paying customers um like one week after releasing the mvp uh we got our first mrr paying customers and then the week after afterward we got other customers like that so thanks to twitter um not cold emails uh in the first place how did uh i mean how many twitter followers did you have when you started uh so i started in mid-november i had zero followers and now i have almost 7k followers um so yeah and when we started the sas i had probably um 1 000 followers that's awesome oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview yeah i reached out to you because i saw your mrr update and i said i love people are always scared to go on the show when they're smaller but the thing is most of my audience is just starting their sas coming so they love stories like this how do they get your first customer so you start off with one price point uh how did you and when did you know that you needed to double the pricing yeah when when i was on calls uh with startups um tech startups or um traditional smbs and they were like um man why your pricing is so low um i don't understand you you showed me the product it looks great uh it works um you've done an incredible job in a short amount of time uh why is it so cheap um what's the trick and and then some some people were just uh we had some paying customers that turned really quickly and they were custom cheap customers i would say and then realize um you know what let's try to double the price and see what happened and then we we had a better retention of customers and more quality customers so what did you do the price from from what to what uh so initially it was 15 per month then it became uh 30 dollars per month and then we started to do two different plants and then we dabble again basically but initially it was just 15 a month then 30 and then uh 49.99 and so when you when you're gonna have a 500 or a thousand dollar a month option uh two months yeah well i mean you doubled once and it worked why not keep doubling how do you know when to stop yeah i think um if we do that it will be to reach out to um more enterprises account or big startups and yet we're not able maybe to sustain um not a whole team but maybe we don't have the integrations yet to go with salesforce and crm integrations basically once we have that we might try to experiment actually with this kind of companies and pricing cars no what's the team size today uh tim san just uh just two people so me no technical background uh just seo design uh sales marketing and my co-founder um started coding on like age 10 or so yeah just the two of us in the same flat did you guys split equity 50 50 yeah yeah we did okay very and bootstrap so far yeah yeah bootstrap so far all on our savings and then we want to start contest in france and answer with that kind of money and how much did you win uh 40k uh dollars sorry four zero or one four yeah forty four forty forty thousand four zero or one four i can't tell if you're saying 14 or 40. of 40 40. okay forty thousand dollars yeah four zero sorry and how much how much of your guys's personal savings have you put in the business uh so i had about 10k in savings uh and my co-founder pretty...