Breakcold Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Arnaud Belinga. He's the cofounder of Breakcold, a personalized sales outreach tool. He dot he's documenting their journey from zero to 20 k and MRR on Twitter, loves skateboarding, and is based in France, which you love. Arnaud, you ready to take us to the top? [00:15] >> Yeah. Thanks for having me, Nathan. [00:17] You bet. So is this is Breakcold your first SaaS company? [00:20] >> Yeah. It's actually our first SaaS company. Basically, with my cofounder, we met a year and a half ago during a hackathon in France. And at the time, I was a training lawyer. He was a developer. And I I always had this drive for entrepreneurship. And I say, you know what? Let's put some savings and take a flat together after I I I finished my studies. And it's this is what we did eight months ago. We took [00:44] >> a flat outside of Paris to do SaaS seven days a week. And after a few iterations, we ended up with Breakcold, which is our first SaaS project. [00:54] So what what tell me what it is. What are customers paying you for? [00:58] >> Customer are paying for you mean in terms of pricing plans? So [01:02] No. What what's the tool do? My audiences don't know what the tool does. What do you guys do? [01:05] >> 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 in late December last year, we decided to play a bit with the AI and we built our own AI models to personalize your sales outreach. So for example, if you import a CSV with the LinkedIn URL of your prospect and web, [01:39] >> If your prospect has the website URL or LinkedIn URL, we're able to generate four different first lines per prospect at scale and then we are a cold outreach tool. You can personalize at scale your first lines and then put it into your email sequences. [01:57] Okay. So you're helping with copy, like Copy AI, but then also helping with sending like Lemlist? [02:01] >> Yeah. Exactly. It's a mix of it's it's yeah. It's pretty much a mix, I would say. [02:05] And so what do you charge? What are customers paying on average per month? [02:08] >> Yeah. Right now we have free plans. So we have this warmer thing where you can where we help you to improve your email deliverability. It's now $29 per month. And then the the upper plans are $49 per month and $99 per month. But initially, the price were way lower and we learned along the way that to that we had to double the prices and since we did, we doubled the conversion rates. [02:33] It's good. So let's talk about doubling the price in a second, but first, I wanna bury the lead, Arnaud. Where are you at today in terms of monthly recurring revenue? [02:39] >> Yeah. Right now, it's pretty new. It's been three months and a half, four months now. And we're about to break $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue. [02:49] So And how many [02:50] and how many paying customers? [02:52] >> We have fifty fifty three paying customers. 53. [02:57] So we can take 2,000 in MRR divided by 53. Your average customer is paying about $37 per month. [03:02] >> Yeah. Right now, it is. Yeah. [03:04] About I see. So so I wanna talk about doubling pricing. But before we do that, how did you get you the first five customers? Do you remember? [03:10] >> Yeah. Actually, I was starting to kind of build my personal brand on Twitter. And so I was building in public because it's a thing in tech Twitter. And this is how we got our first five paying customers. Like one week after releasing the MVP, we got our first MRR paying customers and then the week after afterward, we got other customers like that. So thanks to Twitter, I did not do cold emails in the first place. Mhmm. [03:41] How did I mean, how many Twitter followers did you have when you started? [03:46] >> So I started in mid November, had zero followers. Now I have almost seven k followers. Mhmm. So yeah. And when we started the SaaS, I had probably [03:59] >> 1,000 followers. [04:01] That's awesome. Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, [04:25] you connect your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're [04:50] gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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. [05:03] >> Right? So [05:03] 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 founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter [05:27] by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than [05:53] what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go [06:17] 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. Yeah. I love that. I reached out to you because I saw your MRR update, I said, I love people are always scared to come on the show when they're smaller, but the thing is most of my audience is just starting their SaaS company. So they love [06:36] stories like this. How do they get your first customer? So you start off with one price point. How did you and when did you know that you needed to double the pricing? [06:45] >> Yeah. When when I was on the calls with startups, tech startups or traditional SMBs, and they were like, man, why your pricing is so low? I don't understand. You showed me the product. It looks great. It works. You've done an incredible job in a short amount of time. Why is it so cheap? What's the trick? And then some people were just We had some paying customers that churn really quickly and they were cheap customers, I would [07:17] >> say. And then realized, 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. [07:27] So what did you double the price from? From what to what? [07:29] >> So initially, it was $15 per month, then it became $30 per month. And then we started to do two different plans, and then we doubled again, basically. But initially, it was just $15 per month, then 30, and then 49 and 99. [07:47] And so when you when you're gonna have a 500 or a thousand dollar a month option? [07:52] >> Per month? [07:53] Yeah. Well, I mean, you doubled once and it worked. Why not keep doubling? How do you know when to stop? [07:58] >> Yeah. I think if we do that, it will be to reach out to more enterprises account or big startups and yet we're not able maybe to sustain 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. [08:22] Arnaud, what's the team size today? [08:24] >> I'm just just two people. So me, no technical background, just SEO design, sales, marketing and my co founder started coding on like age 10 or so. Yeah. Just the two of us in the same flat. [08:38] Did you guys split equity fifty fifty? [08:40] >> Yeah. Yeah. We did. [08:42] Okay. Very and bootstrapped so far? [08:44] >> Yeah. Yeah. Bootstrapped so far all on our savings and then we won a startup contest in France and and so with that kind of money and and [08:53] then How much did you win? [08:56] >> 40 k dollars. [08:58] 14? [09:00] Sorry? 40 or 14? [09:03] >> Yeah. [09:04] 40,000 or 14,000? [09:09] I can't tell if you're saying 14 or 40. [09:12] >> Oh, 40. 40. [09:14] Okay. $40,000. [09:15] >> Yeah. 40. Sorry. [09:18] And how much how much of your guys'personal savings have you put in the business? [09:22] >> So I had about 10 k in savings, and my co founder pretty much the same. And basically, the savings are just to sustain our our daily life, you know, full the etcetera. [09:34] I love this. I love this story. I mean, one of the superpowers of an early founder that's gonna be successful long term is how low they keep their expenses when they're building. Right? So can I ask you personally? I mean, that's a personal question, obviously, but, like, what are your total monthly living expenses today? [09:48] >> I would say it's something about 600. No, it's in dollars. So I would say $750 per month. [09:58] That's awesome. So with savings of $10,000 and your personal life burn rate, you have over twelve months of runway. [10:05] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, initially, we we put some money into the servers, etcetera. But now with the MRR, we do we don't have to put our savings into the the small fees we have as a SaaS. But, yeah, the the runaway is good. I don't have a car. I don't have I'm not paying insurance for that, etcetera. So it's an an an advantage that we have to to keep to be full time for at least [10:27] >> one to three years. [10:28] What's the flat cost monthly? [10:31] >> The flat cost is $900, but then when you divide it you divide that by two because we're two people. [10:39] >> So 450. [10:40] And then what do you eat? Like, what do you typically eat in a day? And what what do you spend on groceries would you say each month? [10:45] >> Yeah. Man, it's it's pretty basic. It's like pasta, a bit of meat, fish, fish and chips, that stuff like that. But and then but we still do, like, some time to time with my girlfriend when I see her a few restaurants here and there. So I prefer to be really basic with food at home and to sometimes go to restaurants, etcetera, still having a life, you know, a bit. [11:09] What about breakfast? What do have for breakfast today? [11:12] >> I I don't I don't I don't do breakfast. [11:15] No breakfast. Wow. Okay. Coffee? [11:18] >> Yes. Since I was born, I don't do breakfast. No coffee. So I don't do [11:21] There's nothing? [11:23] >> Yeah. Yeah. Just nothing. Like water. Water and maybe eating like random stuff like croissant or pain au chocolat times to times, but normally I don't eat for breakfast. You know? [11:33] Interesting. Okay. Very cool. And then okay. So boot I love the story. Bootstrapped, 53 customers so far. Now you got your first couple of customers on Twitter. Are all your customers today still coming from Twitter or where are you getting them? [11:46] >> We had I was doing a lot of impressions per month on Twitter, and so we had loads of free trials, but they were just curious people. And so we realized that our target audience was not on Twitter even though we we we managed to do a lot of impressions there. And so our acquisition channel right now are cold emails and LinkedIn. And the goal will be to make some noise on LinkedIn because obviously salespeople or people [12:13] >> who are more educated about doing cold outreach or who need cold outreach, they are on LinkedIn. And so by doing cross channels like acquisition, contacting them on LinkedIn and on and by email is our strategy, but we also want to, you know, invest in SEO. I think that there's some space there. [12:32] Arnaud, quick. Sorry. Just to break this down. What what does the LinkedIn message say when you reach out? What's the copy? [12:38] >> You mean, if it's automated or not? Because we don't automate stuff when it comes to LinkedIn. [12:43] Well, no. Then don't yeah. I'm talking about you. When you your LinkedIn strategy. [12:47] >> Yeah. It's very the same as what I would do with emails. So I had the the person on on LinkedIn. And when when he or she accept my request, I will use Breakcold to generate the first line to don't have to not to think less about it. [13:03] But what what would it be? Like, give me an example what that line might be. [13:06] >> So it will be, hey, Nathan. I don't know your bio on LinkedIn, but if we take my bio for example, it will be, hey, Arnaud. So you studied seven years to become a tax lawyer and then you shift your you shifted career to become a startup founder. Awesome. And then there will be a message like, [13:32] >> yeah, we'd love to connect, something like that. [13:36] But why would someone respond? Like, what but my first reaction if I got that message would be, well, why does that guy wanna connect? [13:42] >> Yeah. Well, it it's it's the message I would send after the the invite that has been accepted because the goal is to just start a conversation. I don't want to be a salesy person. And so I would just spot something on your profile just to start a conversation and [13:57] to I understand that, Arnaud. I understand that. But what's the so, hey, Arnaud. Saw you studied seven years to become a tax lawyer then shifted. Awesome. Is that all? Are you asking for some like, what's the what's the next step? [14:07] >> Yeah. The next step would be yeah. I'm I'm happy to share tips and learnings with you about cold outreach. If you're doing it, let's talk something. Just just a quick CDI like that. [14:19] I see. And when you send out a 100 of those, how many of them typically respond? [14:25] >> I would say 20%. 20% when it's Pretty high. Yeah. [14:30] Twenty percent response rate. Interesting. It sounds like you're you're milking that right now. We'll see how it turns out. Hopefully, you come back on in six, twelve months. Give us an update. Or people can follow you on Twitter, is great. What's your Twitter handle? [14:40] >> So the handle is ArnaudBelinga, c x. [14:45] C x. And last name is b e l I n g a, Belinga, c x. [14:49] >> Yeah. Exactly. [14:50] Very cool. Okay. And first line of code. I know you officially launched four months ago, but when did you guys write the first line of code for this? [14:57] >> Four months ago. [14:58] Okay. [14:58] >> It was four months ago. [14:58] So you launched [14:59] >> We we built MVP in two weeks, basically. [15:02] Got it. So, like, December 2021? [15:06] >> Precisely. We bought the domain December 26 and Matthieu started coding that day. So I I I have the precise date, December 26. [15:14] That's awesome. You guys were bored the day after Christmas, Yeah. [15:19] Alright. Very cool. What anything else I missed about the story that you wanna touch on? [15:24] >> No. I think it was a really nice quick overview. Obviously, we're highly motivated to to keep it bootstrapped for now. Many investors come to us and I just had a call like an hour before with a guy who made it to $1,000,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. It was crazy. But yeah. I think we we still managed to bootstrap for now. And the goal for us with Matthieu is to to to make it this way. [15:54] >> And yeah. That's pretty much about it for now. [15:57] And why I reached out cold to you on Twitter and invited you on. Why'd you say yes? [16:01] >> Yeah. [16:03] >> Just to have a nice talk. [16:05] Awesome. Well, listen. We're we're thrilled to have you on. It sounds I think you're familiar obviously with the brand as well is what I was trying to get at there. It would be very hard for me to convince folks to come on if you weren't familiar with the brand already. So we're excited to feature you as sort of a new bootstrap story. [16:18] >> Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot. [16:20] Alright. Arnaud, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book? [16:24] >> Zero to One, Peter Thiel. [16:26] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [16:31] >> The CEO of Veed.io, Sabba. [16:35] Yep. That's a great story there. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Breakcold? [16:41] >> Online tool, you said? [16:42] Yep. [16:46] >> I would say Figma. [16:47] Figma. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [16:53] >> Seven. [16:54] And situation, married, single, kids? [16:58] >> In couple, not married yet. [17:00] No kids. And how old are you? 26. 26. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [17:08] >> Don't don't stop uni. Start now. [17:13] Don't stop what? [17:16] >> Don't stop uni. Stop university and start now. Start now. [17:21] Guys, there you have it. Breakcold.com, helping folks do better cold outreach. Think of it almost like like copy.ai. They come up with copy plus a Lemlist and then actually do the outreach. They're growing nicely. 53 customers, $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Just team a team of two. Arnaud and his developer, CTO, they split equity fifty fifty to start bootstrap to date. We'll see what happens next. Arnaud, thanks for taking us to top. [17:43] >> Yeah. Thank you very much. See you soon. Bye. [17:47] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM [18:12] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [18:35] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign [18:56] up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. [19:16] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.