How ConnectBooks CEO Nachman Lieser grew to $1.1M revenue and 400 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is nachman lazer as an accountant with nine years experience in dealing with complex accounting issues he's simplified accounting for e-commerce sellers by building out a powerful accounting integration it's now called connectbooks.com knock mining radio takes the top sure okay so are you exclusively focused on automating bookkeeping for e-commerce brands correct we are focusing on e-commerce as we started off just with um amazon that's where the biggest demand was and we're branching out now to all the other platforms as well walmart ebay shopify you name it so you were really focused on amazon like fba sellers uh fba and fbm you know both from all over you know it's uh it's a big market amazon and so what are these sort of fba sellers the fba fbm what are they paying you per month on average to use connect books on average we'd say we get around 150 a month you know we have our pricing starts from 25 a month it goes up to 8 900 000 a month so really depends on the size of the seller and how many customers are you serving today well certainly i would say around 400 active customers meaning that let's say you know 400 customers at the moment okay can i take 400 times 150 or doing about 60 000 a month in revenue yes around that yeah around that that's great and help us understand growth where were you exactly a year ago do you remember uh we definitely had more than 100 growth over the last year the company started less than two years ago so we're like kind of still like right in the beginning so what you were founded in like 2019 2018. uh yeah we started right beginning of january now this is gonna be the second january yeah so 20 january 29th and that's actually when we went live we went to our first show and that's where we went to an amazon networking event so that's where people actually saw our company saw who was an actor knew about us and after the word spread and that's when it started you know to go got it so through 2019 you grow revenue to about 30 000 per month now today about a year later a year and a month later you're doing double that 60 000 per year that's right per month in revenue where did most of that growth come where did most that growth come from um we have done a lot of like trade shows and uh you know not really so much trade shows because they're covered so we stopped the last year of trade shows we did it the year before more like um community style trade shows and then a lot of come by word by mouth we had some multiple ads placed here and there how many ads do you what do you spend on ads per month uh now we're on a very tight marketing budget meaning we're not uh we're trying to get the money in the places where we see the highest return but roughly i would say anywhere between five to ten grand a month and where are you spending that money typically um it's anywhere between ppc google um it's going to be let's say a newsletter you know every anything focused on the selling community we focus very strongly on you know on reaching our market our market is very hard because they're hidden all over we don't know who they are uh people selling announcements don't have any storefronts they have no way to target them so it's kind of like we're really trying to get into these communities which the amazon sellers come together and they talk to each other can you name one or two of these communities that have driven you a lot of customers uh there's one very powerful community called um as asg tg it's based more on brooklyn they're all worldwide and we got a lot of sellers from all over um they have you know we have got a lot of customers through there so what do you what deal do you do with them asg tv you reach out to the founder of the community and what do you offer them uh so they had they had some trade shows which we attended attended and we took out a booth they charged a lot of money for that exhibiting there where they charged you 5 000 just the booth but plus you know props and whatever else you want to do five thousand just for the table to be there uh-huh and what about any other communities what about our news that are send uh let's say we reached out we sneaked the crux finder that's a newsletter say it again crux finder spell it c-r-u-x-f-i-n-d-e-r crux finder how many people are on that email list they claim they have 200 000 amazon sellers but i'm not sure you know that and they get like 50 60 000 open emails stuff like that but you know we have seen significant traffic you know from what did you pay crux finder to market you in one of their newsletters um it was just like a little snippet paragraph and they charge that two thousand dollars charge 2k how many clicks did you get from that um we saw based on visits i would say we definitely had in the first day we definitely had an increase i would say like uh probably like good 500 clicks i'd say yeah interesting so are you able to go spend a bunch more money on sort of dedicated newsletter sends or is it mainly ppc ads driving you new customers today uh ppc doesn't really drive so much it's good we have people you see that let's see somebody will see us a crux finder and they google us that we come up right away uh ppc isn't major much but it's more about getting the word out to who we are once people hear about us and you know they come and that's you know really where we start to get more of the traffic and it's a lot of word by math we just need to pick up one one customer in a new area and they'll spread it to all their friends now as you've driven this growth have you done it bootstrapped or have you raised capital uh so far on bootstraps oh love that now are you pro so you're profitable today or your break even you're reinvesting everything uh we are we are profitable uh yeah we are profitable company how much do you take to the bottom line every month on sixty thousand dollars a month in revenue uh sixty we can definitely hit ten thousand a month but you know if that all the extra money goes back in the company we don't take anything out yeah that makes sense that makes sense and and what's the team look like today how many people uh we kind of operate a team of seven how many engineers uh we got three engineers here uh we got like two full time and then we have some part-time like uh you know people who we we used all the time since we started the company we got um we got sales people on sales and then we got a support and then we have an onboarding setup as well and any sales reps yeah we have you know our our models more in-house how many reps so we have two one of them is full-time sales the other one does like sales and support together as well do they both have quota or no quota targets when we uh we have quarter targets so we do have quotations they each have a quota those two people uh maybe the guy who does full-time has a quotation guys part-time is more like does support but you know we focus on our software very much not to have to give too much support like so we optimize in a way where once we set it up for the client that actually works so he's not really so much like um i would say like a quota sales person what is the what is the quota target for the one that has it uh we always try to hit every month at least 5k got it so if he or she lands 5 000 a new quota each month or about 60 000 uh in new mrr each year that's a good that's a good rep yeah yeah interesting so sixty thousand dollars a new a in new monthly recurring revenue after a year of selling would be what is that about 720 000 dollars in new ar that's good that's not bad um can you i mean do you have any plans to hire more reps as that reps hitting quota you could scale this way uh yeah we have we do want to hire more but the thing is we're more of an inside sales team we don't really reach out to people it's more people coming to us so now i'm focusing on building a stronger funnel and are people sticking once you land them what's your turn look like uh we have the car the retention rate is very obvious because it's how high it's over 90 annually yeah meaning i mean we're only in business for two years so you know it's not like we have a scene but it our hard part is to get somebody on board and to get them set up but once we have them set up and they're actually using our software meaning they have the quickbooks integration and they're using quickbooks and everything is flowing through smoothly they they're not going to switch so quick because first of all there isn't you know it's not like there's like a million one competitions and also it's something that once you just set up and it's working it's it's a lot of configuration involved so it's a setup process and once it goes they just stick with it on a fully weighted basis what are you paying to get a new 150 a month customer um what i'm paying i'd probably say my average would be like three and a half four months you've got it so you're paying what is that 600 bucks something like that something like that yeah any plans to raise capital or you want to stay bootstrapped uh yeah but i'm still waiting to go a little higher so you know we're just welding we just finished rolling i mean we're rolling out now our walmart integration your web integration we just until now we only had an amazon integration just to connect to seller central meaning if we selling on amazon we have all the marketplaces you us uk stuff like that we're rolling out integrations down to the walmart marketplace and ebay and shopify you said walmart yeah marketplace yeah so people already starting to sell walmart they're seeing better numbers uh ebay as well and shopify now it's it's more of an existing demand from existing customers they're like if give us the full package not just even if 90 of our revenue is amazon we still want additional 10 percent so we're waiting till all that is said installed like another let's say other full marketplaces and we believe that we should really you know be at that point three times the size of now this is great i mean do you have some experience that you want to run but would require some capital what do you have a list of experiments that you want to run but that require capital um it's going to be a different ballgame with capital meaning with capital we would just expand the team and move at a very fast pace um it's not like that's the biggest challenge who would you hire first um i would definitely need to build out another two engineers in here so that you know they can not be so overloaded with work and we would definitely get a marketing director to help us out with marketing in terms of analyzing new funnels new leads and you know building out stronger pipelines what are those engineers cost do you think engineers uh they're not so expensive i mean probably i would say we need to pay 120 annual salary for an engineer that's cool and where are you hiring these engineers from um we'll play some ads look around slack groups play some nights on something no but geographically where are we talking like u.s ukraine poland got it very cool well hey congrats on the growth what a great story let's wrap up here with the famous five number one is there a book uh what's your favorite book uh the facebook event is the e-myth revisited number two is there is there a ceo you're following or studying uh the ceo that i followed was matt russell from t-sheets he actually you know i thought he was my role model sometimes i remember his company before quickbooks brought it out and you know i'm i'm a customer from still back then that's very cool amazing uh number three what's your favorite online tool for building connect books my favorite online tool um i mean like what do you mean in terms of a tool like which tool i use yeah your favorite online tool it's probably excel i don't know i don't that's really good for how many hours of sleep are you getting every night i was asleep i i i go for six okay and what's your situation married single kids married four kids four kids like how old are you 29. oh my lord okay what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. um is when you go is to really make money is about taking risks guys take more risk connect books he helps amazon fba and fbm sellers connect with quickbooks he's doing this at scale 400 customers paying 150 per month he's growing revenue to 60 000 per month up from 30 000 a month just about a year ago so 100 year-over-year growth all bootstrapped which we loved he's doing this on a budget of basically five to 10k on ppc ads google ads newsletters it used to be trade shows before that got all shut down team of seven people today three engineers two folks focused on sales as they look to continue to scale they've got about only you know under 10 annual churn and spent about 600 bucks to get a new customer for a four-month payback period knockman thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before 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