How Competitors.app CEO Razvan Girmacea grew Competitors.app to $78.9K revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is razvan gormacha he is the ceo of a company called competitors.app which allows you to monitor competitors marketing channels he built two profitable startups and sold both of them one e-commerce national and one international the last startup he got vc investment without meeting the investors incorporated in ireland without ever going to ireland and ran a team of eight people all remote because it became profitable and sold it in 2017. all right he's been into accelerators and currently accelerators including one right now razvan are you ready to take us to the top yeah sure all right so what is competitors.app that's the url what's the company doing how do you make money well it's a software as a service of course uh it's uh monitors competitors every all the marketing channels for ten dollars per competitor per month okay and so what is kind of the average customer pay you per month would you say total on average we have like uh four uh competitors per client okay for so they each pay on average about 40 bucks a month yeah yeah interesting and who who are the kinds of people paying are these like you know heads of marketing at companies or what yeah uh we have now two markets we have eight big agencies where they can add like even 100 domains and they will add like three three four competitors for each but we also have small businesses where the either the ceo or the marketing uh a guy will just read the reports and when did you launch the company what year uh this year okay good so launched here in 2018 and how many customers have you scaled to today and now we have 20 paying customers 20 paying customers and so walk me through how you got you know your first customer what channel did you use so uh the shortest version is uh getting from facebook groups and linkedin outreach but the long-term strategies with search engine optimization so i'm focusing a lot on search engine optimization but that takes a lot of time so currently i'm doing linkedin outreach and facebook tell me what you do specifically in facebook groups uh i just comment talk to people at them and when i see an opportunity if it's something of interest to them i just connect with them and ask them if they want to try for free for like one month or three months what what come on we have to be specific here so like what how do you find the facebook group what do you search in facebook yeah i'll close the video because i know i'm getting poor connection or roswell leave the video on as best you can right my question was what do you search on facebook what kinds of groups do you look for uh marketing groups so like what would you search name a group that you're in sus marketing okay sas marketing group okay so and even lifetime deal groups uh are are pretty good uh they i i got uh users uh from there even if they search for lifetime deals i told them that i do not agree and i will never sell lifetime deals this is like an appsumo model yeah exactly yeah and there are a lot of groups now uh on facebook like this but when they hear i will not have uh the lifetime deals they are willing to try it and uh some are buying so why do you think lifetime deals are bad it's it's bad for a business uh if i think long term um you you can if you get an investor or you sell the product uh not everyone will agree to take on board uh people that will not pay anymore so that can be an issue and also with when you're the beginning for sure you have bugs you know you have a lot of stuff to uh solve so uh you will do a lot of customer support and if you think of how many hours you spend with everyone that's give you feedback or suggestion or complaining um i think it's not worth it yeah especially if you have the money yeah so 40 40 bucks a month is the average a customer pays you you have 20 customers you're doing about 800 bucks a month right now yeah and zero a year ago because you just launched yeah have you bootstrapped your company or raised yeah bootstrap because i have money from my other exit that's great so so how much of your own money have you put into this so far about 50 000 euros okay and where are you spending it what's your team look like today just you know me and uh someone in marketing and the one developer okay so three three people in our so do you own 100 of the company since you're really just you're paying them with cash yes why is that important to you you answered that very quick i i tried uh last year a new project with two co-founders and when we launched the product this i said i won't pay any more we have to make it work and they said you know we'll go get a job but they remain with the shares in the company so i i had to cancel the project spent six months trying to recover all the shares negotiatings and it killed the project yeah i said i will not do it again are you too stubborn are you hard to work with i don't probably i i never worked with the theme so maybe that by the way there's nothing wrong with that by the way there's a lot of value to just you know a lot of you know actually the analogy i use when you look at like politics the countries that like change the most or you could say get the most done or something are actually ones run by dictators because there's one person in charge and they can quickly move versus like nothing gets done in a committee right so there's there's something to be said for just having full control and driving your vision yeah exactly yeah walk me through so bootstrapped three people is everyone remote yes even my last startup was we are we were eight people remote so you're burning cash right now you've put in 50 grand i mean how much when do you get to break even or is that something you're focused on my uh my goal is to break even in one year okay but i mean i have time i have i have the money to survive until then so it's fine it's a very small cohort but do you know anything yet about churn yes of course what's your turn not do you know what it is but like your your economics yeah uh no one canceled yet okay so it's too early yeah yeah from all the paying customers they're they're happy and that's what i i think it's a long term even at start i wanted to all the plans to be yearly because you have to monitor the competitors and wait for them to do something important this may not happen in the first week or first month something really really important that can change your business so it's something long term and people understand that and it's okay why is this so cheap um i i wanted to make an affordable solution for small medium businesses that that was my entry there are complex solutions already out there that sell only to enterprise i've even met the ceos of some enterprise solutions uh that monitor all marketing channels so i'm trying to do this cheap acquisition uh channel of of users uh with seo because i have experience in 2005 and i've brought traffic on my last startup of 50 000 dollars worth of value every month so if i'm doing this again it's a very good viable business um and i can sell it ten dollars per competitor per month what would you sell your last company for and was it a sas company or e-commerce uh would you be the question was it a sas company or e-commerce a sas company an seo tool monitor backlinks oh i see okay and did all that money go to you or jeff you have to split it uh 10 to the investor okay and then okay but the rest to you you don't have another co-founders yeah exactly why'd you sell it why not just keep building that one well uh it was complicated with an investor on board um [Music] i would i couldn't be very flexible i so and also i like going from zero to one i'm not really good manager once the company starts to grow i i get really bored and quite depressing so for me going from zero to one it's really good listen i love that you know what you're good at i love that you know what you enjoy and i love that you optimized for that i think that's important all right very good um so okay scaling this company how do you get your next 2 000 customers where are they going to come from [Music] uh i didn't get the last part yeah how do you get your next 2 000 customers um i'm starting uh facebook ads uh some remarketing and trying linkedin is going quite well so i'm starting uh i am doing linkedin outreach using dark soup and uh then manually talk to everyone and uh already sorry you're doing you're doing linkedin outreach using what tool uh spell it uh d-u-x s-o-o-u-p s-o-o-u-p no it's dash duck soup you search on google annually yeah i just found that i've never heard of this it's very very good why do you like it it's it's safe i've read a lot because with linkedin tools you have to be really careful not to get your account banned and it has a big community a big private facebook group that uh you can share knowledge you're sure it's safe well i i've been using it for more than one month and uh with their limited recommendation everything works fine so i think that i've got uh about 800 new connections in uh about two few weeks interesting targeted connection so it works really well for me and tell me exactly how you use it what is it what does it actually do uh what i'm using it uh mostly...