How Chimney CEO Ryan Salerno grew to $1.8M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ryan salerno he's a cto and one of the three co-founders of chimney before chimney he was a self-employed developer building a variety of projects scheming to turn one of them into a viable recurring revenue earning business he also taught coding classes at general assembly and before that worked at news cred where he met his wife and co-founders all right ryan you ready to take it to the top let's do it all right so what is chimney what are people paying you for um so we launched so we have two products the first product we launched with our financial calculators that are embedded on bank websites so when people have questions like how much home can i afford should i rent or should i buy uh what are my retirement savings going to be we have calculators that go on bank websites that help answer so that those questions first product that we launched with and now after working with maybe 60 different financial institutions [Music] then looking at the data the data was streaming at us mortgage mortgage mortgage mortgage and so now we're building a new tool for uh homeowners existing homeowners so they can track things like how much home equity do i have can i click one button to tap into that home equity do i have expensive credit card debt that i can eliminate with home equity things like that and so how do you make that sticky i mean most people thinking about like their credit card bills or home equity they do like once and then they they don't come back right or how do you make them engaged yeah good question um and that's a that's a big question that we're trying to answer ourselves and the strategy is nothing new or secret it's it's notifications and emails and um ideally having the app embedded within another app that they do use like on a at some frequency at a monthly basis or something so is that your main use case is you're selling the ability to embed this calculator to insurance companies yeah so this this is a new product that is not in market yet and the idea here is to partner with um a big bank that had already has millions of users and they also serve up um like heat locks or other types of loans and then we'll be the tech in the middle that engages the users um and encourages them to to open up some of these products through the bank now you have pricing plans ranging from 44 to 10 dollars a month to enterprise what's the average customer pay per month uh per year it's like seven thousand per year for the calculators oh okay yeah interesting and what are you up selling against is like number of hits the calculator gets per month or something pricing is really simple so it's just um number of calculators uh so the average price is 99 per month per calculator 99 per month per calculator okay interesting very cool and then i guess put this on a timeline for me when you guys launch uh so we launched the calculator product in 2020. what about the whole business though or was that the business that was long that was yeah that was the launch so before that it was nights and weekends and we didn't have any customers yet um and so it was a long time it was actually we did we kind of in my opinion went about it the right way so before we ever made a serious investment in terms of time or money um we made sure that this was like a viable thing to do so like we went out and we asked for we told people hey you have existing calculators but they don't look great if we give you calculators that look better uh would you pay us for it the answer ended up being yes for like two or three different banks and so then um we went and built it and sold custom calculators to those banks and now we have money coming in and now we can sort of justify building out the rest of that library and building in all the other features that would make it an actual sas business oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we 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chase and i reach 30. i'm so i've never again i've recorded almost through those interviews i've never had a founder just admit that but it's so true anytime i see someone split 50 50 i go you probably don't have great communication with you you avoided the conversation basically is what happened before they avoided the conversation what if what if uh they they both like truly believe something and now they're kind of screwed like how do you make that decision yep that's right so you guys are 40 30 30 which is cool i think that's great um now have you guys bootstrapped or did you raise capital yeah so um i was pretty adamant about like bootstrap bootstrap bootstrap for a long time and so we made it to like about 300k in revenues um by being fully bootstrapped um and that was and then so in 2020 when we were locked down uh we were able to do it because we were working from home so i literally don't tell anyone i had two computers working on one thing and the other thing and that was and that was sort of what enabled us to be able to be bootstrapped for longer and then in december of last year in 21 we took a small seed round okay and how much was that for i was for 1.3 million and and so what did you use that money on or why did you need it to hire a team in-house because we were using um so we had the three co-founders and we had all of these different agencies we had a marketing agency and we had a development agency and a sales company that was doing outbound reach and so the first tires went for like a few key internal people a couple of developers a designer and somebody to help with like admin stuff what's the url of the developer agency that you used uh it is brights dot io right bright yeah so they were located in kiev ukraine um and so they've been unavailable um everyone is safe and we've been in touch with them um but not able to work yeah i see it i'm on their site now um you know i guess two things here one obviously we're really glad they're safe uh but this is also like for early founders this is totally what i recommend it's an outsourced dev shop and outsource sales like you know fixed expenses until you have some traction so these guys did a good job for you it sounds like it did yeah and uh the other thing that i would recommend is because i've heard a lot of people having like bad experiences with outsourced dev shop because what they get back is like slightly off from what they wanted and so like the joke is that you have to be able to build it yourself in order to have an outdoor outsourced dev shop so i'm giving them literally like the database schema and the relationships and the models and like okay here's how we should structure this here's the architecture and then they go and fill it all in and it worked really really well for a long time if you if you work with sort of a reputable development shop like the one you worked with then you get back a bad product it's usually because you gave terrible specs uh it's very rarely the developers you know it's very rarely the shop's fault in my opinion yeah so what'd you pay those guys to sort of get you from nothing to an mvp stage nothing actually remember this because this is the first money that we spent um from nothing to mvp was sixteen thousand dollars and this was a platform for people to log in create the calculator issue it to themselves and then embed it to their website okay that's great yeah no no stripe integration no nothing but this was like the the it actually working but like really minimal but it was viable that's great okay so that's the dev agency who was the sales company you used for your first outbound campaigns uh they're called memory blue memory blue were they good uh yeah and i was less involved with them in the day-to-day um but they were good because what they did was we had one there's three of us and now all of a sudden we have a pipeline and we have um people that are like doing outbound reach all the time and meetings like flowing to us um and so that worked that worked well for a while as well i mean i'm seeing they have over 300 to outsource like sdrs on their team this is also what i recommend this we don't have to teach an sdr yourself you don't have to pay for those salesforce instances like these firms take so much fixed expenses off of starbucks sheet now then you raise capital you want to bring it all in house which makes sense so what's full-time team today uh today we have uh three developers we have designer we have um like an admin person that helps with billing and like website maintenance and all sorts of stuff um we have one seller and and that's it and then the three co-founders so then one one position that is excluded from that is product um we did not hire for we were considering it but ultimately decided the small team of like eight or nine people who can't yet have a product manager like our ceo needs to be the product manager for now yeah yeah okay so nine folks three engineers one sales rep ceo's doing product engineering and then obviously you want to be smart with how you spend the money because delusion's a real thing so when you guys raised the 1.3 i mean was that like a four or five million valuation something like that it was uh seven million valuation cap on a safe note and that is yeah post money yeah that's great i mean that's super effective and just to be clear 60 customers at 7 000 acvs you guys are doing about 35 000 a month right now on revenue sounds right yeah sometimes okay and what is that up from from a year ago um it's up from so it's not uh it's not up as much as you would think because we have we've had this calculator business and instead of doubling down on the calculator business and like selling more calculators we've decided that we're going to launch the second product that sort of like augments the calculator business and so for that reason and we haven't seen like triple sales growth yeah i mean you said earlier you did about 300k when you race so you're doing like 28 000 bucks a month in rep 25 000 bucks a month in revenue about a year ago yeah um so we've had yeah it's been a little bit chunkier than than we might like um but we just finished the uh icba thinktech accelerator which is like the independent bank and credit union um like organization and so that was great because it's less of an accelerator and more of a rapid-fire way to have four meetings per day with banks and credit unions every day for for three months yeah so now our pipeline is is juicy what was the name of that what was the name of that accelerator i i cba think tech i think they do they take um yeah they participated in the safe note as well they i think they put in seventy five thousand dollars interesting do they require that if you're going to go through their program they do yeah they require the investment because we were like you don't have to and like we're good like we we've raised them ready they're like we need to and we're like okay yeah very cool this is a heck of a story i'm rooting for you guys i'm curious to see what you released next but in the meantime ryan let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book favorite business book um i would say four steps to epiphany um by steve blank great yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying that's a good question um [Music] let's see like today present day no there isn't i i don't think there's like one person i've always liked the bootstrap people so um bear metrics i'm actually forgetting his name um when he's sold pigford uh he's exited now but yeah we love obviously yeah yeah so those stories were always kind of my favorite um so josh pickford is one but no i don't i don't think there that's probably something that i should do no no sometimes there's not one that's totally fine number three what's your favorite online tool for building chimney for building chimney for like writing the code yeah or however you define building gotcha um let's see online tool sigma yeah number four how many hours of sleep you get every night the honest joke is uh like guys i need my nine hours tonight but uh no that's not true probably seven seven okay and what's your situation those unlucky people that kind of requires a little extra sleep yeah yeah what's your situation married single kids uh married no kids yeah married in october so like six months now oh congrats that's great and how old are you yeah thanks uh 30 on saturday i'll be 34. okay 14 years till 50. yeah happy early birthday or 14 years past 20 you know last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh man um let's see that everything will turn upside down and nothing will stay the same no i'm just kidding um something that i knew when i was 20. or that you wish you knew when you were 20. that i wish i knew i was 20. yeah yeah yeah um it's probably the fact that like they're so i used to think and probably a lot of people maybe still think this is that um like people in power maybe they did something different or they're special or they know something that you don't know and like turns out that's not true and everyone's trying to figure it out as well i didn't know that yet okay so uh you know you know fingers up to power a little bit is the takeaway there from ryan but look he's building a chimney he's running chimney dot io which enables companies like banks to embed calculators in their web experience to get more customers right so they're now doing about 34 000 bucks a month in revenue up from 25 000 a month about a year ago they raised a 1.3 million dollar seat at a 7 million cap before that very scrappy they used deb agencies sales agencies to get their first 510 customers now serving 60 customers three co-founders nine turtle on the team today about to release a brand new product which we're excited about ryan we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top thanks a lot nathan yeah yeah 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