How Bugsee CEO Alex Fishman grew Bugsee to $27.9M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit so Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top drive this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Fon he's a 22 22-year-old Apple employee and he's listening to the show and loving it for your chance to win 100 bucks every Monday simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter Nathan ladka here this is episode 592 and coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from X data which launched in January 2014 and now and in over 12 months they build they put in $800,000 just to build the software now they raised 6 million to date and they just announced on the show they raised an additional 2 million for 8 million total they're up to 10 people now good morning everybody Nathan L here and our guest today is Alex Fishman he is the founder and CEO of a company called bug.com which we're going to learn all about Alex are you ready to take us to the top yes thank you very much for having me good so tell us what bugy does and how do you make money hi so again thank you very much for having me today naan my name is Alex Fishman and I'm the founder of Bugsy Bugsy is a bug and crash reporting tool for IOS and Android and what stands out for busy is that we are providing video Network and logs leading up to the event so if the app crashes you able to see video events of everything that happened in the app leading up to the crash all the network communication between the app and the server including the body as well as all the console logs everything they I was printing so you can see exactly what had happened and what led to the problem so basically you not only know what happened but also what exactly caused that it's very similar to a flight recorder or a blackbox on a plane it sits there and quietly records everything and everything goes fine it doesn't bother anyone but if something happen you're able to recreate what exactly had led to the problem Alex this is like if I'm Airbnb I might pay bugy and every time a user opens Airbnb if if a crash happens uh Airbnb would get a video showing what happened on that user's phone and why it crashed that's very correct okay got it and how do you make money well developer P to be to use the service it's pretty straightforward is it uh well it might not be straightforward right so is it pay as you go is it sass I mean there's a lot of different models you could be pricing oh absolutely yeah so we are s and we are pricing proportional to the size of the app so basically proportional to how many users use your application okay so so let's say I've got uh you know 500,000 users what would that cost me it's going to be in the order of $500 a month okay and what's the difference I see on your on your pro calculate uh your price on your website it says up to 100 test device deployment is 99 bucks and then it says number of of live device deployments uh up to 100,000 is 99 bucks what's the difference there oh absolutely so buxy provide provides different levels of value depending whether you're in development and beta testing or in life so when you're developing and testing your app usually you test your app on your phone or a your iPad or your spouse's phone and your spouse's iPad or you have a a set of beta testers you deploy your app to you know early early on to them to get them tested before you actually take it live so there the numbers are very very small right and every bug you catch there it's much more important be you know to catch it as early as possible before you go live H so that's basically the idea of test deployments and when you take it live then obviously the orders of magnitude of users is very very different and then we scale at 100,000 users and what is the if we just take an average what's the average customer paying you per month we're not ready to talk about that uh why because are you CL Revenue do you have Revenue we do have a little bit of Revenue but we just started okay so you don't that's why you're not ready to talk about it you just launched it that's very correct so we we started working on this in January of 2016 so we're about a year old we have launched our first beta customers in late April so we're about 8 months and we started charging at the last month so in December time frame okay so December uh kind of 2016 um well and this is Alex this is an important kind of part of any company when they're launching so I'd love for you to be transparent here if possible it's it's super valuable even if the numbers are small um what how many customers you have paying you a month in we have a very few customers paying us we have 1,00 customers sign up total and about 30% of them use it in the past months okay but those aren't customers those are those are users 1100 users well the if you define customer is pain then of course they're just users but what else would you what else would you define customer as isn't a customer mean money well we provide service we provide support there's a lot of things going on right you know you have to treat users as customers otherwise it doesn't you know it doesn't set the right tone okay sorry I'm asking the question in terms of how many people are actually paying for your products that's the most that's the most direct sign of of of value right value creation so you're saying these 1100 you're calling them customers you're saying they've paid you for other things like service and things like that no no no not customers and most of them are not so why do you tell me help me understand more of the psychology there why do you call them customers because it sets the right tone within our organization in terms of support and treating them and reacting very quickly to all the customer got it got it got it got it that makes good sense so how many of those folks have actually have you actually converted into a paid plan and and teach us how you're doing that cuz a lot of folks listening are just in your same shoes launching their new business Yeah so basically the way we look at it is the most of the customers who sign up before we announce pricing they help us to go through a difficult phase of stabilizing our SDK and we actually gave them a very specialized the free tier the not entirely free but the sign ific L extended free tier to for them to continue use it as as a small token of appreciation for everything they've done Us in for the past six months and the for the new customers obviously they all go through the current publicly available plans and the yeah so the way we convert new customers we have a basically three limitations so number one is when you so when you sign up it's entirely free free and fully functional but but it's limited in three things one is number of test devices you can test so if you test as I said on your device and your iPads then it's free but if you go above 10 which means you're basically testing is is something you're committed to release and you want to test it thoroughly then we start charging $99 per month and if you release it again up to First 10,000 users it's free because we want you to gain traction and you we don't want you to worry about that but once you go above 10,000 users that means that you are actually successful um somewhat successful app and we would like to be paid so basically automatically will will be forced to pay and the third thing is when you when you're on a free tier you can have you have access to your bags or crashes video recording of your crashes for 3 days only if you the Assumption there is that if you're a small startup just playing with bugy to try your new app or just doing some sort of testing then you should be able to have quick turnaround around your bugs but if you're a big organization and you have like a whole workflow and you have Team looking at that then obviously 3 days is not enough then you know you'll be so it's it's mid January 2017 so you're about a month into this how many paying customers are you at currently very few like under 10 a very few what does that mean though Alex that you're you're I don't understand why you're why why you're trying to be foggy here this is really valuable to listeners who are also just launching their companies no I understand it's not being foggy we just they haven't decided to disclose these numbers yet give us a range uh like like under 100 under 10 under a under under 100 great that's valuable and then talk to me more about the history so have you guys raised capital or are you bootstrapped yes we are funded by K9 Ventures the same guys who funded too o zero eare lift lro if you know so in total how much have you raised to date 1.2 million we actually you know we are reboot from a previously failed attempt so we raised a Bigg round before that and that's a remaining Capital that the the investors told us to keep after we decided to shut down the previous Venture so did the cap table also reset or do you have old investors still on the cap table we have old investors in the cap table but we had to reset the cap table uh so like so like you took them from having I'm making this up they had a larger chunk of the cap table before when you said we're going to shut this down and restart it now they have less chunk of the of the of the cap table and but you were able to keep some of the capital we well it's much more complicated conversation than for five minutes we have left but the basically we reset the the cap T from scratch and we honored everything the investors had and even a little bit more okay so in the before you kind of reset how much money had you raised in the other business idea 18 okay okay got it that's helpful and what so when did you that pivot happen so when did you actually start coding this new company what year yes so bugy was founded in January of 2016 and we shut down our previous Venture in July of 2015 and we had the the six months of period between July of 2015 and January of 2016 trying to figure out what the hell are we doing yeah and where are you at now in terms of Team size we are a I want to say seven people fulltime and five people part time and where are you guys based we're distributed across probably like five or six countries okay so totally remote yes totally remote I myself in s California okay very good well great what it be nice to stay up to date with you and kind of check in in 6 12 months as you continue to grow the business uh before that though let's wrap up here with the famous five number one Alex what's your favorite Business book hard things about hard things by Ben Horwitz number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now a Henry Ward from eers number three is there a favorite online tool you have like a QD scheduling I'm sorry what is that what's your favorite online tool and gmail number four yes or no do you get eight hours of sleep every night I wish and what's your situation married single do you have kids mared plus two two kids yeah very cool and how are you 37 all right so last question take us back 27 or sorry 17 years what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew that you want to start playing in the startup ecosystem as early as possible when you have less commitments and less things to worry about there you go top trib start playing in the startup ecosystem earlier you learned today from Alex's company Bugsy he raised 1.8 million bucks with is just restructured and has taken $1.2 million starting in January 2016 to build and grow Bugsy they help you understand why your apps are crashing or what your users are doing on mobile apps uh on their own phones he's doing this with his team of seven distributed across many countries Alex thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much Adam if you enjoyed Alex today go back and listen to Magnus yesterday Magnus runs now in track which just closed a $5 million round to funding on an $18 million pre-money Valu valuation helping Enterprises with Omni Channel data collection you don't want to miss that one top drive I love giving away free money I feel like Oprah giving away cars and I have something special for you today how many of you have heard our super sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook and Google ads well all of you listening right now yes if you're listening you get $100 in free AdWords here's how you get it okay again thanks for listening get the free $100 from Google right when you sign up with my website host provider HostGator go sign up now to get your free money hostgator.com Nathan again that's hostgator.com Nathan okay top trive I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning and don't forget before you listen to any other episodes subscribe on iTunes right now for your chance to win 100 bucks every Monday l