How Checkly CEO Tim Nolet grew Checkly to $561K revenue with a 51 person team in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is marvin russell he's a two-time founder with two successful exits now as head of growth at sureswift capital and moonlighting as the ceo of checkly at night marvin you ready to take to the top yeah absolutely thanks for having me all right so i want to dive into this decision you made to sort of split your time because back in uh november of 2018 it sounds like you were sitting on a a growing interesting company at checkley you had passed i think 200 customers paying on average six bucks a month to 1200 bucks in mrr and you were really just getting sort of the momentum going yeah it's funny i found a lot of frustration and um i think you said it best when i was on your show people want to relive that you told me it's going to really it's going to be really hard to grow a checklist app and you were right i found a lot of challenges there's a ton of free checklist apps and i thought you know we had really cool features that set us apart and even then with those really cool features you know the price point was like five or six bucks a month and just even 200 300 customers just wasn't putting a dent in anything that i could like it had anything that could be sustainable so i kind of took a break and kind of went back to you know like uh consulting for service with capital and they ended up being the head of growth growing your portfolio so i took a break from chuckling now i'm back we pivoted and the pivot is working really really well so i'm super excited so to maybe share that part of the pivot with you today yeah tell me about that what's the product do today so checklist you know we had a couple hundred people paying us a monthly for you know making checklists personalizing them and betting them on their website but that just wasn't paying the bills right you know i was making maybe one or two thousand mrr back then and the entire time people businesses i should say kept asking us marvin we need reoccurring business processes that's what we need i had cbs call me turn them down i had companies all over the world call me and say we want we love your product but we need repeating processes to give our employees so they can repeat them and do them over and over again and submit them i just ignored them right and i didn't do them but recently in the last few months we revisited checkly we decided to go full steam ahead on processes we've differentiated ourselves and now companies are signing up left and right as of the last couple of months for our recurring processes so that's huge and we're different and i'll explain that in a minute how we're different but that's the pivot we started listening to our customers became obsessed with customers and doing exactly what they wanted us to do instead of what we thought would make instead of what we thought we wanted to do we did what they wanted us to do so what's the status today how many folks do you have paying for the platform so we just pivoted and we have about 500 people paying for uh checkly most of them are still on the just paying us monthly for uh making checklists it's like between five and seven bucks depending on what part of the year they signed up um but now just in the last two months we've signed up 36 brand new business customers who are paying for the processes we haven't marketed we haven't done anything and it's growing like crazy for us so our our growth is up and to the right and i get it we're small still but man we just took off with processes and now we're just building calls left and right and how we can um i don't know uh add our process system to people's people people's workflows and businesses so around 500 customers at six bucks a month you're doing about three thousand dollars a month right now in revenue and you're excited about the new product launch so 36 of those customers are now on our new pricing plan for business that is 25 per month that's the new pivot we created a new plan called checkly business it's 25 a month and in fact the last customer i spoke with on the phone i'm trying to call every customer the last one was actually a local chicago company but they literally laughed at the price and said look marvin we love your product it's the simplest process tool out there at this feature and add this feature and they giggle and said we pay a lot more for this to be honest with you 25 bucks a month and we're planning on adding tiered plans like the more processes that you run every single month the higher your pay and that's actually launching here this week or next week um uh that and reminders people have been asking us like hey we need to send our employees reminders to get these processes done and you know we're launching this pricing plan so 36 of those people are paying 25 dollars per month the rest are paying between five and seven a month yeah that puts total revenue in close for like thirty five four thousand dollars a month is that right yeah we're we're growing up until two months ago we were at like two thousand now we're closing on four thousand and we're growing so we're pretty excited you know i'm still really excited why invest so much time building these products when you know darn well you know someone at google spends a day and essentially launches it natively inside of gmail and then boom people don't need it anymore right i mean i used to have a plug-in that did sort of the same thing instead of going i just shut it down it was 100 an arr just shut it down so i'm like i can't keep up with google and they're going to release this for free anyway soon it's pointless yeah you're right i've thought about that and here's what i came up with because back when i was running my set auditor the last that that's been acquired i had the same concerns i'm like companies like moz and sem rush are just gonna knock us off one day and i was wrong and here's why i was wrong and the same thing goes for google or other companies the the trick that i think of one of the biggest pieces to successful sas entrepreneurs is focus like google has a million things going on they're trying to perfect a million businesses a million apps a million pieces of software we have one thing our blinders are on we're now all in on process that's all we're thinking about that's all we're doing and i think that that's our competitive advantage interesting all right well we will see what happens now did you boot drop checklist or did you raise uh we bootstrapped at first but then sure swift gave us a little tiny uh funding amount just to pay for our developer which we were grateful for but we already blew past that so now how much how much did you raise oh we raised like fifty thousand dollars okay we got it so there was a conversation that happened at some point where where sure swift said hey we want you to start doing growth full like half time so walk me through that transition yeah so um you as you may remember uh my first sas startup was my side hugger that was acquired by cersei capitals one of their early acquisitions you know they've acquired like i think 36 companies right now and i was one of the first ones and about a year or so after that i came back to consult help them you know give them some advice and some pointers and some consulting on how to grow different sas products in their portfolio and honestly i got to tell you i just fell in love with the culture kevin is kevin the ceo is just huge on culture and i never thought i'd go back to corporate america and he's not really corporate america but the culture is what sold me you know he's very big on life work balance not necessarily work life balance so when he asked me to come back not come back but come on he said look we'll make room for your entrepreneurial endeavors and we'll also make room for you here we'll figure this whole thing out we can work through this together so that's what really sold me the culture and his ability his willingness to to work with me and know that i'm an entrepreneur and i have the bug um so that's kind of how it you know we transitioned back to shortsworth so i mean is there a salary involved with that are you just doing it because you're donating time i'm a salaried employee you got it so there's that plus you still have the upside of building checkly where you're 90 plus owner yeah and you know service of capital is all about hiring as many founders and entrepreneurs as possible that's what type of mentality but what comes with that is we want to be entrepreneurs too so if we can find that balance you know and i found a perfect balance of shirts with so i'm super happy i think my time i start at sureswift at about eight o'clock in the morning work till about three or for so and then i try to put an hour or two at night in that one checklist so it just works out perfectly um chubby doesn't require full-time work but um i just love the balance that they give me what's the checklist team look like is it just you it is me and one developer one software developer assignment okay got it so you got it and then talk to me about churn you have 400 500 customers what's your churn on jeffy look like right now it's at 3.4 percent and it's it's dropped a little bit so it's not bad obviously i want to improve that but it's not too bad that's monthly yes yeah and i assume the price point's super low there's probably not a ton of expansion opportunities here you're besides your new business plan at 29 bucks a month there's no way to move a six dollar a month customer to you know 10 or 20 or a thousand dollars a month kind of customer right in fact we might do the opposite as crazy as it sounds we might open up the floodgates and let all those people in for free like i have a hundred thousand people coming my website every single month but most of them are on the free plan well they use a free version of checkly some of them upgrade to a seven dollar a month plan and honestly like you can't get in our system and use our full system and test it out unless you upgrade to some paid plan so i'm struggling with that right now should we let all the personal seven dollars should we drop that plan let everybody in the door for free and hopefully they'll be able to experience checklist process and we'll upgrade more people so that's really the challenge that we're thinking about right now and i don't know what we're going to do i'm stuck you know what are you what's your cap to get a new five six dollar a month customer um it's honestly free because i think we've talked about this in the past like with my start auditor i have a massive seo background like if you google free checklist maker or checklist or any of those things i'm number one for almost everything related to checklist phone number two and now recently i wanted to do the same thing for process right like i wanted anybody to type in free process maker i wanted to be on page one of google and we just i just started doing it two months ago and we're already on page one so if you type in free process maker because there is a free version that we get in the door with and then we upgrade to a paid version um we're now on page one for that so i don't spend the dime on on customers well i mean so someone could buy you because of the assets here in terms of way rank and seo for example free checklist maker you're ranked number one canvas ranks number three their multi-billion dollar company i assume they have some m a dollars to play with why not just go sell this asset off to them for 100 200 grand well my my business partner my tech business partner on my site auditor brock ferguson i don't know if you heard of him but he runs um uh what's his company called strong analytics they do data science right and he didn't come on board for this venture but he always told me he's like look man he's like the money from czech league is in the data he's like you should figure out a way to sell your data so i was thinking about that i haven't i don't think anybody that acquires check lead just for the members right now is going to give us anything that i'm excited about you know my last acquisition was in the seven figures i'd be lucky to get six right now for this which doesn't excite me but i'm curious about the data side of things like like add this i know they have you know they they went 100 free and they're making millions off just you know selling your data i'm not there yet as far as customers but what do you think about that do you think that we're in a position to sell our data i have no idea because i don't know what the data is that you're sitting on well it's just like you know people make checklists they list off you know what hotels are going to stay out what what what things they're going to buy what things they're going to do so somehow there's got to be data in understanding you know user you know buying behavior and all that stuff anyway i'd love that i need to consult somebody if anybody's listening to this reach out to me you know if you're a data scientist because i'd love to learn more about how we can monetize your monetize our data so no exit on the horizon because you still need to build that data play and your first exit was for somewhere between 100 and a million but it was sub sub 7 figures no my first exit was my agency i built a small agency and that was a three hundred thousand dollar exit my company was was north of seven figures i don't give the exact number it was over a million and that was the site auditor my side auditor yeah yeah yeah yeah so what does what does growth look like at sureswift how are you trying to i mean what are you looking for what are you trying to pull in so growth for me so there so there's a team of acquisition people that we're looking to acquire you know sas bootstrap sasebo based people with zero uh uh uh investors right so bootstrap sas companies and we're looking for you know companies that are in the one to five million uh space right so we're looking for anything along those lines and um which you know is great but my role is more growing the portfolio so we believe we're sourced with that like all software tastes like chicken so if i'm looking at a portfolio of 36 companies right like i have to figure out what can we do to all 36 of those those properties that are kind of the same like does every one of them have a google sign on a single sign-on is does every one of them have a transparent about us page that people can see the people so we're kind of like applying that you know robert smith uh the the ceo of what's called vista capital or vista partners applying his philosophy of all software tastes like chicken and trying to just check the box across the t's and dot the eyes for the same things that we know moves the needle across the board so that's my role is looking at the portfolio and seeing how we can strategically move it together by just checking things off the box across the board processes really yeah marvin on that now let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book you got mad at me about this one last time but it was uh the checklist uh manifesto number at least you're consistent uh number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh honestly you're gonna hate this one but um i really like what kevin's doing at sheriff's capital because of the culture that he focuses on i'm really impressed with that and honestly i am following because now i'm a team member number three how many hours i see sorry kevin mcardle for those who didn't hear that number three uh what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides when your own um my favorite tool for building oh i will say i can't use my own that's the main tool because that's what everyone would say honestly just looking here i got one for you the biggest mistake we made was not having a support software we just incorporated help scout and helpscap is a game changer our support was all through email and it was atrocious if you want to be customer obsessed you have to have good support software so 100 help scout.com uh number four how many hours of sleep every night um between six and eight okay and which situation married single kids i am married we are trying to have kids and for you know those who are struggling too we've been through several rounds of ivf it hasn't worked for us yet but for anybody who hears that you're not alone like i'm struggling through it there you go all right last question what does your 20 year old self know i have a whole list of things that my 20 year old self i would probably say invest in index funds of money guys there you have it checkly launch couple years ago passed a thousand dollars a month in revenue back in 2018 now today with a new product line for recurring events it's over 3 800 3900 bucks a month in revenue kevin is working again marvin is working aggressively on that while also joining up with kevin and sher swift capital part time to help them drive growth across their portfolio companies all right marvin thanks for taking us to the top you are very welcome thanks nathan