How Checkli CEO Marvin Russell grew Checkli to $74K revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is marvin russell he's the former ceo of a top digital marketing agency in chicago and founder of my site auditor a sas startup he grew to over 20 languages around the world both were successfully acquired today he's the current chief checklist maker at checkley.com a new and simple way to make and share checklists marvin are you ready to take us to the top i sure am let's do it all right so i think the name is pretty self-explanatory i mean am i missing anything it's checklists yeah it's checkly it's just like checklist without the st it's a nice short simple domain name but yeah that's it checkly.com just like pepsi you know ending the eye but checkly sure how do you so so this space is notoriously really difficult like if you asked who's winning like the to-do list kind of app space people could reel off maybe 10 20 different answers oh after the agency and after your other company exiting them why decide to jump into this space and compete here oh simple as an entrepreneur my head is everywhere i've got a million things on my mind at all times and there was no go-to super simple checklist maker out there that i could find there is a lot of to-do list makers out there but they make you sign up for stuff they're complicated they're bloated they have way too many features i wanted something super simple super quick and super fast so i ended up building one for myself and then that kind of just took off and is it a free tool or is it a kind of what's your revenue model if you have one it is free you can use you can make unlimited checklists all day every day for free but when you if you want to sign up and store those checklists and come back and manage them later there is a small fee so it's a it's a freemium model you can make unlimited free checklists but there's added features on that you can pay a small monthly fee to get more features i see and when you look across just your paid customer base on average what's the customer paying per month for that those paid features um on average they're probably paying about five dollars per month we have a personal plan and a business plan so the business plan is a little bit more expensive it gives you unlimited uh collaboration with unlimited other team members and the smaller personal plans five bucks so it averages uh probably more closer to six or seven dollars per month okay got it and uh put us on a timeline for us when did you launch what year uh 2016 2016. okay good and then fast forward to today so is it just you kind of doing this thing with contractors or if you hired a few people what's the team look like i have a small investor i work for i do a little bit of consulting for a private equity firm one of the same firms that bought my last software company my set auditor and they wanted to stay in the business with me they told me like we want to be in the marvin business whatever you're working on can we work on it with you so i had a small little investment um to help pay for a junior developer i'll call it but he's more senior now but i have one developer who is my lead senior engineer if you will but he does all the tech stuff and i do all the business design strategy i mean you name it all the other stuff so he does tech i do everything else okay so call two of you guys both in chicago yeah both of those in chicago that's great and then so what have you scaled to today over the past two years in terms of paying customers well we just we were 100 free up until this year and we had about 80 or 90 000 members and the cool thing about us is the way we find all of our members is we're ranked literally if you go to google and search checklist we're usually number one or number two and we've got about 90 000 members around the world and we just added that paid model on um that you can pay seven uh i'm sorry 5.99 or 19 dollars per month and now we we're up to a few hundred members that are paying on average we talked about before but a few hundred out of that 90 000 and that's growing like crazy okay so coming can we say 200 is that fair uh probably just under 200 but like i said it's a brand new paid option it's working so far but we're just at 200 by the end of the month we'll be over 200. yeah no by the way i think this is great i want to dive into it right so 200 customers uh six bucks a pop so call 1200 bucks per month right now in revenue what month exactly did you turn on that paywall um we turned it on we tested a bunch of different pricing models but the pricing model that we're on right now happened around mid-summer and we've been tweaking ever since so it's been a few months um a few tweaks in pricing but we're kind of locked in with what we're doing now to walk me through that process there's a lot of people that build a user base they go through the same process i mean and they struggle with things like well what test do i run do i double price do i cut it in half what do i do so so what tests have you run so far and why did you end up at six bucks a month well the first question we had was should we charge a truck we should we ask people for a credit card before they start their trial that was the first question should we let them do the trial with or without a credit card we tested both and with the credit card got way more conversions for us because on our model free conversions are paid uh the i'm sorry free conversions are paid yeah um it's well paid conversions yeah i'm talking about paid conversions all of our trials have paid conversions so the the unique thing about it sorry martin i don't follow that at all so so if you sign up for a free trial with a credit card at the beginning they don't all convert into paid at the end no that's i'm sorry maybe i misunderstood the question um yes you can sign up for a trial well the way checkly works is really different than a lot of other checklist apps out there right when you get to checkly you can make a free checklist you don't have to log in you don't have to sign up you don't have to do anything you can just start making a checklist right from the home screen and at that point you can do whatever you want you can share that checklist you can download it you can save it but you also have the option to to your account create an account and come back and manage later if you do that there's a trial sign up and you get a seven-day trial you have to pop in your credit card if you choose to stay after that seven days then we ding your credit card and we move forward and we've tested that out before with and without the credit card and with the credit card helps us get way more conversions people commit more they're more anxious they've like they've told themselves they like the site enough that they're going to continue paying so we asked for that credit card now upfront yeah marvin just to be clear when you say more conversions you're you're not saying that you get more people converting from uh free to a seven day trial with a credit card at the beginning you're saying more people convert from a trial to paid if you ask for the credit card up front yes we we have we have we have a higher conversion rate i should say not more conversions but a higher rate yeah i know i'm just asking about what rate in the funnel it's not the free to seven day trial it's the seven day to a paid that is the conversion rate that's going higher if you ask for credit card at the beginning is that right yes okay the flip side of that is well what how many less pa you know sign up opportunities are you getting because you require credit card at the beginning so did you run a test where you didn't have a credit card at the start we did run the test i don't have those numbers off the top of my head um but we did we did test back and forth i can tell you is the the one that we landed on which was asking for the credit card up front ended up giving us more paid conversions so we ended up sticking with that we tested two models we tested different pricing models and we tested whether or not we're going to ask for a credit card at the beginning of a trial and the asking for the bigger asking for the credit card definitely led to a higher conversion rate that got us more paid members in the end because the people who weren't willing to put their credit card in they weren't really serious customers and they might have you know for whatever reason um didn't continue using our software for every reason so once we got them to commit with a credit card it our conversion rates were a lot better marvin it's interesting though how you phrase that because no one ever talks about the upper the lost opportunity cost because you can't see it right so the lost opportunity cause in this case is well yeah they might not be your perfect paid customer but it's because they didn't get to use all their all your features because you required a credit card the flip side is well if they use some of those features and they got addicted well maybe they would have been paid so how do you balance i mean this is emotion by the way there's...