How Breakcold Reached $24K ARR and 53 Customers in 2022 (Interview with CEO Arnaud Belinga)

Introduction and Guest Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, 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?

Arnaud Belinga

00:15>> Yeah. Thanks for having me, Nathan.

Is This Your First SaaS Company?

Nathan Latka

00:17You bet. So is this is Breakcold your first SaaS company?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

What Does Breakcold Do?

Nathan Latka

00:54So what what tell me what it is. What are customers paying you for?

Arnaud Belinga

00:58>> Customer are paying for you mean in terms of pricing plans? So

Nathan Latka

01:02No. What what's the tool do? My audiences don't know what the tool does. What do you guys do?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

01:57Okay. So you're helping with copy, like Copy AI, but then also helping with sending like Lemlist?

Arnaud Belinga

02:01>> Yeah. Exactly. It's a mix of it's it's yeah. It's pretty much a mix, I would say.

Pricing Plans and Structure

Nathan Latka

02:05And so what do you charge? What are customers paying on average per month?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Current MRR and Paying Customers

Nathan Latka

02:33It'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?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

02:49So And how many

02:50and how many paying customers?

Arnaud Belinga

02:52>> We have fifty fifty three paying customers. 53.

Nathan Latka

02:57So we can take 2,000 in MRR divided by 53. Your average customer is paying about $37 per month.

Arnaud Belinga

03:02>> Yeah. Right now, it is. Yeah.

How Breakcold Got Its First Customers on Twitter

Nathan Latka

03:04About 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?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

03:41How did I mean, how many Twitter followers did you have when you started?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

04:01That'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,

04:25you 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

04:50gonna 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

05:03the 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

05:27by 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

Why and How They Doubled Pricing

Nathan Latka

05:53what 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

06:17ahead 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

06:36stories 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?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

07:27So what did you double the price from? From what to what?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

07:47And so when you when you're gonna have a 500 or a thousand dollar a month option?

Arnaud Belinga

07:52>> Per month?

Nathan Latka

07:53Yeah. Well, I mean, you doubled once and it worked. Why not keep doubling? How do you know when to stop?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Team Size and Equity Split

Nathan Latka

08:22Arnaud, what's the team size today?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

08:38Did you guys split equity fifty fifty?

Arnaud Belinga

08:40>> Yeah. Yeah. We did.

Nathan Latka

08:42Okay. Very and bootstrapped so far?

Arnaud Belinga

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

Nathan Latka

08:53then How much did you win?

Arnaud Belinga

08:56>> 40 k dollars.

Nathan Latka

08:5814?

09:00Sorry? 40 or 14?

Bootstrapped on Savings and a Contest Prize

Arnaud Belinga

09:03>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:0440,000 or 14,000?

09:09I can't tell if you're saying 14 or 40.

Arnaud Belinga

09:12>> Oh, 40. 40.

Nathan Latka

09:14Okay. $40,000.

Arnaud Belinga

09:15>> Yeah. 40. Sorry.

Nathan Latka

09:18And how much how much of your guys'personal savings have you put in the business?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

09:34I 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?

Arnaud Belinga

09:48>> I would say it's something about 600. No, it's in dollars. So I would say $750 per month.

Nathan Latka

09:58That's awesome. So with savings of $10,000 and your personal life burn rate, you have over twelve months of runway.

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

10:28What's the flat cost monthly?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

10:40And 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?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

11:09What about breakfast? What do have for breakfast today?

Arnaud Belinga

11:12>> I I don't I don't I don't do breakfast.

Nathan Latka

11:15No breakfast. Wow. Okay. Coffee?

Arnaud Belinga

11:18>> Yes. Since I was born, I don't do breakfast. No coffee. So I don't do

Nathan Latka

11:21There's nothing?

Arnaud Belinga

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?

Shifting Acquisition to Cold Email and LinkedIn

Nathan Latka

11:33Interesting. 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?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

12:32Arnaud, quick. Sorry. Just to break this down. What what does the LinkedIn message say when you reach out? What's the copy?

Arnaud Belinga

12:38>> You mean, if it's automated or not? Because we don't automate stuff when it comes to LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka

12:43Well, no. Then don't yeah. I'm talking about you. When you your LinkedIn strategy.

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

13:03But what what would it be? Like, give me an example what that line might be.

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

13:36But why would someone respond? Like, what but my first reaction if I got that message would be, well, why does that guy wanna connect?

Arnaud Belinga

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

Nathan Latka

13:57to 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?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

14:19I see. And when you send out a 100 of those, how many of them typically respond?

Arnaud Belinga

14:25>> I would say 20%. 20% when it's Pretty high. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:30Twenty 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?

Arnaud Belinga

14:40>> So the handle is ArnaudBelinga, c x.

Nathan Latka

14:45C x. And last name is b e l I n g a, Belinga, c x.

Arnaud Belinga

14:49>> Yeah. Exactly.

MVP Launch Date and Build Timeline

Nathan Latka

14:50Very 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?

Arnaud Belinga

14:57>> Four months ago.

Nathan Latka

14:58Okay.

14:58>> It was four months ago.

14:58So you launched

Arnaud Belinga

14:59>> We we built MVP in two weeks, basically.

Nathan Latka

15:02Got it. So, like, December 2021?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Nathan Latka

15:14That's awesome. You guys were bored the day after Christmas, Yeah.

15:19Alright. Very cool. What anything else I missed about the story that you wanna touch on?

Arnaud Belinga

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.

Plans to Stay Bootstrapped

Arnaud Belinga

15:54>> And yeah. That's pretty much about it for now.

Nathan Latka

15:57And why I reached out cold to you on Twitter and invited you on. Why'd you say yes?

Arnaud Belinga

16:01>> Yeah.

16:03>> Just to have a nice talk.

Nathan Latka

16:05Awesome. 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.

Arnaud Belinga

16:18>> Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Nathan Latka

16:20Alright. Arnaud, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book?

Arnaud Belinga

16:24>> Zero to One, Peter Thiel.

Nathan Latka

16:26Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Arnaud Belinga

16:31>> The CEO of Veed.io, Sabba.

Nathan Latka

16:35Yep. That's a great story there. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Breakcold?

Arnaud Belinga

16:41>> Online tool, you said?

Nathan Latka

16:42Yep.

Arnaud Belinga

16:46>> I would say Figma.

Nathan Latka

16:47Figma. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Arnaud Belinga

16:53>> Seven.

Nathan Latka

16:54And situation, married, single, kids?

Arnaud Belinga

16:58>> In couple, not married yet.

Nathan Latka

17:00No kids. And how old are you? 26. 26. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Arnaud Belinga

17:08>> Don't don't stop uni. Start now.

Nathan Latka

17:13Don't stop what?

Arnaud Belinga

17:16>> Don't stop uni. Stop university and start now. Start now.

Nathan Latka

17:21Guys, 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.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Arnaud Belinga

17:43>> Yeah. Thank you very much. See you soon. Bye.

Nathan Latka

17:47One 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

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18:56up 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.

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