How CookieFirst CEO Kees Van den Bos grew to $1.5M revenue and 5K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is tom bendenbos right after business school in education web development he started a web development agency with his brother in 2010. after that took off he started focusing and noticing the increased demand in legal tech privacy sas they launched the web agency and then eventually built their first privacy sas tool cookie first having that background uh the uh on online marketing digital design these are currently his roles at cookie first as he looks to scale the business privacy software as his service at cookiefirst.com tommy ready to takes the top tom you ready to go yeah yeah of course yeah yeah all right so cookiefirst.com is the website who tell us who you're selling to who are the customers today well that varies um a lot so it could be small business owners to yeah so uh corporates and everything in between so we got yeah it's also from different uh sectors because obviously everybody in every company in the eu needs to comply with the current regulations so in the u.s you might not have these uh privacy regulations yet um at least not the federal uh federal federal laws but in europe we do have that so tom what are what are brands and companies what are they paying on average per month to use your technology well we have a per domain pricing and per ship domain pricing so it depends on your plan could be nine euros a month for 19 euros a month per domain and per sub domain obviously larger clients they have multiple websites multiple domains so yeah we got clients that pay a thousand euros a month uh but also of course clients uh which who pay just nine euros a month is a thousand dollars a month your highest uh paying customer well um i guess it's the highest paying customers could be 1500 euros a month okay yeah and how many websites would they be managing probably well we do i need to look that up because we do have the bulk discounts so we have two pillars which we based the monthly fee on which is the number of domains and the monthly traffic the combined traffic across all domains and some domains so suppose a company would come to us and they they say okay we got a lot of domains but uh small traffic across the domains then we might be able to uh you have to give them a build discount understood so there's a big range here 15 bucks a month up to 1500 per month but if you look at all your paying customers today i'm going to force you to an average here what's the sweet spot is 500 bucks a month a good sweet spot uh so if you've taken the the average uh okay i think average on average uh customer would pay 30 euros a month 30. so two two domains two or three domains yeah okay fair enough uh let's get the backstory here when did you launch the business um we launched the business in at the end of 2019 so um in october we went live at october 2019 and um we did some uh some pre-launch soft launch before that 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 took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you wanna check this tool out if you wanna jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and right from the start it headed off because yeah gdpr was kicking in a lot of requirements at the end of 2019 so yeah immediately we got we got clients on it do you remember how much total revenue you did your first year in business in 2019 uh in 2019 it was not it was not that much i guess it was 15k but it was of course the last the last two months and we're just we're just kicking in so um 2020 it was uh i guess uh almost 300k euros um so um yeah from there it grew it grew a lot what are you at today uh last year we were we had um was it 885 85k euros which we did and we plan to do next year we hope we hope to do 1.2 million that's well you it sounds like 885k euros would be north of a million dollar usd run rate uh so so congrats on breaking the million dollar mark did you do all this bootstrap have you raised capital uh that's all yeah we've been bootstrapped and there's a lot of um there's a lot of vcs that are interested so we get contacted by people all the time however and we are of course we are we're interested in that but we think it's it might be too early um we're currently working on a few other privacy sas tools which we want to do which we want to launch first see how that goes and right after the launch and we get a couple of customers on those platforms then we want to start funding and why do you want to go raise capital you obviously have to give up equity if you want to do that yeah i know but um i guess we might need it to really um yeah to get more more budget for for marketing what are you currently spending per month on marketing um i guess last year we spent 200 000 euros the whole year what was that mainly on google ads facebook ads something else it was it was it was uh linkedin ads and um but maze mainly google ads yeah interesting so with that google ad spend how much do you have to pay to get a new 40 a month customer uh this was told one of my team members told me this number but i uh i i'm sorry i i don't have an answer right now for you no problem how many customers do you how many customers do you have today uh 35 000 30 those are all paying customers um not all so i need to take a look here so it's yeah i think you have about 2100 paying something like that no it's it should be more actually i don't know where you get your well if you're doing if you're doing if you're doing i'm just using your numbers if you're doing 85 000 a month in revenue divided by a 40 average that's 2125 customers that could be but there is uh there might be a little bit [Music] it might be a little bit off because we do work with resellers which have a discounted price so um i i need to to take a look at that number well so what what's your guess i mean how many paying customers do you have do you own you want me to look it up yeah yeah i think it's 5000 or something okay about 5 000. cool so so average our proof might be lower than 40 that's because sometimes you sell through resellers so you don't actually make the full forty dollars no no that's right but there because resellers they um they get the pricing uh for a 30 discount they could uh plans for it got it got it so so do they typically charge more than so that they make a margin or in other words what do you what what kickback yeah we also of course they can use our own pricing so they can uh they can have the 30 margin but they also can charge an additional fee or an input implementation fee if they would like so how many resellers drove you at least a dollar of revenue last year uh i get i guess we got 350 resellers so of those paying of those paying customers are resellers so my question was how many resellers drove you at least one customer last year do you know [Music] okay so that's so that that is at least the 350. so a reseller only drives you one customer each no no no no of course so tom the question is you have 350 customers last year from resellers no 350 resellers okay my question was how many customers last year did you get from resellers so if there's 350 resellers there's going to be more customers from the resellers unless they all only signed up one reason customer oh that's probably a lot more because most we got resellers to do with like 80 clients or or 100 but i can yeah i can say there are resellers who only have free domains or one of one customers i see how are you signing up that's a lot of resellers to manage 350 how are you finding them and managing them [Music] um so i found them partially through linkedin with also just like like google uh does they send business owners uh a cart so i went through the chamber of commerce lists and got the addresses so i milled those people so we got a number of ways to to reach these these resellers what are some other ways chamber of commerce and direct mail is a great idea what are some other things you tested uh through linkedin of course and linkedin advertising sales navigator [Music] those kinds of uh ways yes so sales navigator direct mail anything else yeah and google ads of course and uh uh google adsense so benefits so you'll run google ads not just to target customers directly but also to target resellers yeah because it's more profitable to to target resellers of course because you you only have to explain the tool once of course and then the reseller can do can take that that knowledge to their own clients to some clients and then it would uh it would be quicker and less support for us i understand um how many peaks folks are on your team today uh we got nine nine and how many of those are engineers six six six engineers why do you laugh when i ask that well because um we as a team we wear many hats but what's needed the most at the time at this time is we need the engineers we do the online marketing and the management ourselves also legal aspects uh we recently um recently added a team member who is responsible for the legal aspects and that's more like a like a privacy expert but what we need now is to uh [Music] people that can free us from our own time so my brother and i we need to delegate a few other things like marketing uh marketing stuff so tom do you and your brother since you guys are bootstrapped do you guys own together 100 of the business yeah would you guys consider selling for 5 million today all cash up front i think that would be not enough but of course that that is something that i need to discuss because yeah we're both 50 shareholders so uh i can't take that uh uh i can't answer that question right now all right we'll see what happens in the meantime though congrats on the growth let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book actually i got it right here it's a data protection implementation guide sounds thrilling he would like he would like that if i if he saw this i've never been more excited looking at a book title than i've have looking at that one okay it's it's it's about legal tech and legal frameworks no i'm kidding it takes a special kind of person to get excited about that stuff so congratulations i mean that's a key part of your niche is staying on top of all that stuff clearly you are number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um well i do follow uh andrew gasteki which might be a uh an acquaintance of yours number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business um [Music] for bill for building the business yeah i'm i'm a designer but uh so for shaping the tool and the ux we use ux pin you actually i don't know and what's your situation married single kids uh i'm married and i have two kids two kiddos okay and how old are you i'm 37 37 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 i'm sorry something you wish you knew when you were 20. what what i wished for something you wish you knew back when you were 20 years old hmm that's don't party too hard and don't game guys there we have it cookiefirst.com making it easy for folks especially back in 2019 brands in the eu to comply with new regulation new laws they had 15 000 in revenue in 2019 350 000 and 2020 1 million last year closing i'm hoping to grow this year all bootstrapped which we love we're 35 000 free users 5 000 of which are paid on average between caught 10 and 40 per month scaling nicely with their team of nine tom thanks for taking us to the top okay one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we 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