How Cogsworth CEO Boris Gefter grew Cogsworth to $10.8K revenue and 100 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is boris gefter he's the founder of cogsworth a growth hacker passionate about time scheduling having built several sas and nonsense companies in australia with industries ranging from insurance to e-commerce he's also got a deeper respect and passion for data and the power of well-built software boris you're ready to take us to the top i am indeed all right so are you competing with like calendly sunrise security scheduling you can book me these kinds of companies yeah yeah i noticed you're using one of our competitors as well yeah yeah yeah i am and i mean by the way you know square just actually bought acuity you know for a pretty good chunk of change i mean how do you see the space playing out over the next got a year to three years it's funny when i first set out to build cogsworth um i did i had a bunch of google survey credits um because i was one of the first to use it and so i surveyed a 500 australian businesses to see if they used any scheduling tool and the vast majority of them almost 90 of them said that they didn't use any scheduling tools at all even though the space looks fairly congested and fairly well penetrated to and to someone that's technical like you're a uri um but the the reality is that 90 of the space just isn't penetrated and isn't well marketed um and part of that has to do with the fact a lot of these tools are quite hard to use and so uh we think that we will not only be able to take a good percentage of the existing uh customer share but we'll be able to grow the pie uh significantly as well if we can do what we need to do so what is i mean are you focused on any specific niche or is it scheduling tools for anybody no it's we're not focused on any specific niche um much to um much to the contrary uh advice given by a lot of kind of would-be advisors and investors and part of that is because um i personally view scheduling as our niche because scheduling is a is a problem across many different industries and to limit one's industry focus would be to pretty much become a marketing tool for an industry which i really don't want to do i just think there are there's so much variability across scheduling across sectors if you don't pick a specific niche you risk getting beat out by point solutions and every single niche you try and serve you know all of them um so i mean let me ask this a different way if you look at all your current paying customers or users and you sort them by who they are do you see a cohort that is kind of more aggressive or more actively using yeah actually we do um and i'll go into why that also means that we can't be a niche player right now um so our the vast majority of our users tend to be marketers developers consultants and so in other words they tend to be um customers with customers of their own and the biggest thing they want out of cogsworth which is what we're about to release very shortly is the ability to resell cogsworth in other words to install it for their customers and make money off of it well then you're selling agencies well they were selling to agencies that's right but the fact is that agencies don't have a niche right agencies need to be able to say okay this customer who it happens to be a restaurant needs a scheduling tool this customer who happens to be a beautician this customer who happens to be whatever they need a scheduling tool um but but you know your point about um about you know us being risk us risking being beat out by uh niche competitors is a valid one and that's why we kind of approach it in a very interesting way so cogsworth has a core set of scheduling features but we also have add-ons and so when we release a feature into the into our add-ons we don't bloat our existing product we release it as a discrete feature that can be bolted on and that add-on helps us tackle particular niches as well yeah express plug-in model uh kind of yeah exactly so so uh for example we could when we release group group scheduling and class scheduling we'll also open ourselves up to for example the fitness and gym industry you know to to use cogsworth rather than just going for the gym industry first so help me understand pricing is obviously also critical in this space right so on average what are what are customers paying you per month or per year for this so we're really really new so our um our revenue is almost non-existent i mean by the way that's fine everyone has to start at zero but do you have any paying are you pre-revenue yeah no no we have some stuff um so we have um so just to set the context the way that we launched is we know sorry i want to go back just trust me on the process so current customers are the current customers that are paying how much are they paying per month uh they're paying about nine bucks a month okay nine bucks a month so so now let's backtrack so now that we have that what year did you launch uh we launched in late like literally december 2017. so call 2018. okay so um okay and you've scaled up today so how did you get your first whatever you know 100 beta users or 10 paid customers yeah um so we did we did product hunt um and what was interesting is that like there's a little story behind that i can go into that if you want um but we did product hunt and then we looked at lifetime deals so hold on tell me the product on story first so when did you launch on product time uh we launched i i think it was a march of 2018 on product and how many votes that day uh we we were like one of the most upvoted companies i think we had like 400 300 or 400 i don't exactly remember now okay um but it's on product hunt if you want to check it out how am i well no okay i want to go down the product funnel right i do this with people that launch on product hunt and then i can compare different products on launches so 400 uploads that day how many clicks back to your website that day uh we had a few few hundred um clicks it wasn't like a huge surge in traffic like i'd read other people had maybe yeah so why is that by the way because mostly usually usually usually it's a 10x multiple 400 votes would be 4 000 clicks yeah i don't know um i don't know why that would that was the case um i yeah i i'm no expert in product okay but look we got we got um i think we got uh like a lot of this is memory but i i reckon we got between about 100 users off the back of it i don't think we got any paying customers what's a user sorry what define a user uh somebody who signs up an account creates a business things like that is it including an email sign up sorry yeah yeah with emails okay cool but no paying customers did you have a paid plan at that point or no no i don't think we even had a page i think we had like a paid plan but it was really just a just something to have there because everything pretty much was unlocked at the time yeah and so so we did that and we got a bunch of feedback off the back of that and a lot of people came up to us and kind of asked you know partnership um opportunities and i don't think any of them really again this is kind of kind of new for us so i don't think i i necessarily so yeah let's move on past product hunt so the second thing you did was lifetime deals tell me how those went yeah so we we launched with siftree um and then up until recently we've been with stack social and i think right now we're just finishing off some stack social stuff as well um yeah it was an interesting experience we required the majority of our customers that way uh part of it part of the necessity for lifetime deals with us has been the fact that we're completely bootstrapped and um we've been focusing all of our energy on the product and not on marketing so in this way we've been able to get maybe 1500 users of the back of um lifetime deals and probably over over 1200 paying customers who have paid a lifetime uh price to be on conference with of about how much and that's and that's allowed us to have beta testers and people who built that right now boris about how much is the lifetime price uh it's varied because we've had some different what's the cheapest the cheapest is probably 49 okay and the most expensive uh we did one really really early on for 199. okay so it's somewhere between kind of 60 and 240 k right from all these lifetime deals that you've made uh not quite not quite because um all of the thing that people don't understand about lifetime deals is that the actual lifetime deal company takes a huge chunk of it uh no no no no i know that but i wasn't i want to get top line first so top line was somewhere between 50k and 280k depending on if it was a 50 price point or 200 price point for the top line for the lifetime deal companies correct yeah that's i'm going down the funnel okay so then typically they will keep i've seen sometimes up to 70 percent right so what percent did they keep of yours yeah it's roughly 70 okay so how much cash just from lifetime deals over the past 12 months did you end up with in your bank account uh probably 40 50k okay fair enough so that times we'll call...