How CookieFirst Bootstrapped to €885K in 2021 Revenue With a Team of Nine (Interview with Co-Founder Tom Van den Bos)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Folks. My guest today is Tom Van den Bos. Right after business school and 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 SaaS. They launched the web agency and then eventually built their first privacy SaaS tool, Cookie First. Having that background on online marketing and digital design, these are currently his roles at Cookie First as he looks to

00:24scale the business. Privacy software as a service at cookiefirst.com. Tom, you ready to take us to the top?

Tom Van den Bos

00:31>> Yes. Of course.

Nathan Latka

00:33Tom, you ready to go?

Tom Van den Bos

00:34>> Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Yeah.

Who CookieFirst Sells To

Nathan Latka

00:36So cookiefirst.com is the website. Who who tell us who you're selling to. Who are the customers today?

Tom Van den Bos

00:42>> Well, varies a lot. So it could be small business owners to, yeah, to corporates and everything in between. So we got yeah. It's also from different sectors because, obviously, everybody in every company in the EU needs to comply with the current regulations. So in The US, you might not have these privacy regulations yet, at least not the federal federal federal laws. But in Europe, we do have that.

Nathan Latka

01:24So And, Tom, what are what are brands and companies? What are they paying on average per month to use your technology?

Pricing Model and Plans

Tom Van den Bos

01:31>> Well, we have a per domain pricing and per sub domain pricing. So depends on your plan. Could be €9 a month or €19 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, but also, of course, clients which pay just €9 a month.

Nathan Latka

02:02Is a thousand dollars a month your highest paying customer?

Tom Van den Bos

02:06>> Well,

02:09>> I guess it's the highest paying customers could be €1,500 a month.

Nathan Latka

02:15Okay.

Tom Van den Bos

02:16>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

02:16And how many websites would they be managing probably?

Tom Van den Bos

02:19>> Well, we do I need to to look that up because we do have the bulk discounts. So we have two pillars which we base the monthly fee on, which is the number of domains and the monthly traffic, the combined traffic across all domains and subdomains. Mhmm. So suppose a company would come to us and they say, okay, we got a lot of domains, but small traffic across the domains, then we might be able to

02:55>> give them a bulk discount.

Nathan Latka

02:58Understood. So there's a big range here, $15 a month up to 1,500 per month. But if you look at all your paying customers today, I'm gonna force you into an average here. What's the sweet spot? Is $500 a month a good sweet spot?

Tom Van den Bos

03:09>> So if you would take in the the the average

Nathan Latka

03:13Yes.

Tom Van den Bos

03:13>> Okay.

Average Revenue Per Customer

Tom Van den Bos

03:18>> I think average on average, customer would pay

03:25>> €30 a month.

Nathan Latka

03:2730. So two two domains. Two or three domains.

Tom Van den Bos

03:30>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

03:30Okay. Fair enough. Let's get the backstory here. When did you launch the business?

Launch Story (October 2019)

Tom Van den Bos

03:36>> We launched the business in at at the end of two thousand nineteen. So in October, we went live at October 2019, and we did some some prelaunch, soft launch before that.

Nathan Latka

03:54Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:18your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:42get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

05:04not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:30going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

05:52you 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/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the

06:18interview.

GDPR Demand and Early Traction

Tom Van den Bos

06:19>> And right from the start, it's headed off because,

06:25>> yeah, GDPR was kicking in. A lot of requirements at the at the end of twenty nineteen. So, immediately we got got clients on it.

Revenue History and Growth

Nathan Latka

06:36Do you remember how much total revenue you did your first term business in 2019?

Tom Van den Bos

06:41>> In 2019, it was not it was not that much. I guess it was 15 k, but it was, of course, the last the last two months, and we're just we're just kicking in.

06:54>> 2020, it was, I guess, almost 300 k euros.

07:04>> So, yeah, from there, it it grew it grew a lot.

Nathan Latka

07:08What are you at today?

Tom Van den Bos

07:12>> Last year, we were we had

07:16>> was it 885 k? 885 k euros, what we did, and we plan to do next year. Yeah. We hope we hope to do 1,200,000.

Nathan Latka

07:31That's well, you it sounds like 885 k euros would be north of a million dollar USD run rate. So so congrats on breaking the million dollar mark. Did you do all this bootstrapped, or have you raised capital?

Bootstrapped and VC Interest

Tom Van den Bos

07:43>> That's all yeah. We've been bootstrapped, and there's a lot of 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 we're interested in that, but we think it's it might be too early. We're currently working on a few other privacy SaaS tools, which we want to do which we want to launch first, see how that goes. And right after the launch

08:21>> and we get a couple of customers on those platforms, then we want to start funding.

Nathan Latka

08:27Mhmm. And why do you want to go raise capital? You obviously have to give up equity if you want to do that.

Tom Van den Bos

08:33>> Yeah, I know. But I guess we might need it to really

08:41>> yeah, to to to get more more budget for for marketing.

Marketing Spend Breakdown

Nathan Latka

08:46Mhmm. What are you currently spending per month on marketing?

Tom Van den Bos

08:51>> I guess last year, we spent €200,000. Yeah. The whole year.

Nathan Latka

09:00Was that mainly on? Google Ads, Facebook Ads, something else?

Tom Van den Bos

09:02>> It was it was it was LinkedIn ads and but may mainly Google Ads. Yep.

Nathan Latka

09:10Interesting. So with that Google Ad spend, how much do you have to pay to get a new $40 a month customer?

Tom Van den Bos

09:21>> This was told.

09:24>> One of my team members told me this number, but I I'm sorry. I I I don't have an answer right now for you.

Nathan Latka

09:32No problem. How many customers do you how many customers do you have today?

Total Users vs Paying Customers

Tom Van den Bos

09:37>> 35,000.

Nathan Latka

09:3830 those are all paying customers?

Tom Van den Bos

09:42>> Not all. So I need to take a look here.

09:48>> So it's yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:49I think you have about 2,100 paying, something like that.

Tom Van den Bos

09:54>> No. It's it should be more. Actually, I don't know where you got your

Nathan Latka

09:58Well, 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 2,125 customers.

Tom Van den Bos

10:08>> That could be, but there is there might be a little bit

10:15>> it might be a little bit off because we do work with resellers which have a discounted price. So

10:26>> I I I need to to take a look at that number.

Nathan Latka

10:30Well, so what what's your guess? I mean, how many paying customers do you have do you own?

Tom Van den Bos

10:37>> You want me to look it up?

Nathan Latka

10:39Yeah.

Tom Van den Bos

10:41>> Yeah, I think it's 5,000 or something.

Nathan Latka

10:43Okay. About 5,000. Cool. So average ARPU might be lower than 40. That's because sometimes you sell through resellers, so you don't actually make the full $40.

Tom Van den Bos

10:53>> No. No, that's right. But there because resellers, they

11:01>> get the pricing for a 30% discount. They could transfer it for 30% discount.

Nathan Latka

11:07Got it. 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 do we get here?

Tom Van den Bos

11:16>> Of course, they can use our own pricing so they can they can have the 30% margin, but they also can charge an additional fee or an implementation fee if they would like.

Reseller Count

Nathan Latka

11:31So that's How many resellers drove you at least a dollar of revenue last year?

Tom Van den Bos

11:37>> I get I guess we got 350 resellers.

Nathan Latka

11:43350?

Tom Van den Bos

11:46>> Of those paying of those paying customers are resellers.

Nathan Latka

11:50So my question was how many resellers drove you at least one customer last year?

11:58Do you know?

Tom Van den Bos

11:59>> Okay. So that's

12:04>> so that that is at least the 350.

Nathan Latka

12:08So a reseller only drives you one customer each?

Tom Van den Bos

12:11>> No, no, no, no. Of course.

Nathan Latka

12:13So Tom, the question is you have three fifty customers last year from resellers.

Tom Van den Bos

12:18>> No. It's gonna be three fifty resellers.

Nathan Latka

12:21Okay. My question was how many customers last year did you get from resellers? So if there's three fifty resellers, there's gonna be more customers from the resellers unless they all only signed up one customer.

Reseller Channel Strategy

Tom Van den Bos

12:34>> Oh, that's probably a lot more because most we got resellers who do with like, 80 clients or or a 100. But I can yeah. I I can say there are resellers who only have three domains of one of one customer.

Nathan Latka

12:51I see. How are you signing up? That's a lot of resellers to manage, 350. How are you finding them and managing them?

Tom Van den Bos

12:59>> Oh, I found them partially through LinkedIn, but also just like like Google does, they send business owners cards. So I went through the

13:17>> chamber of commerce lists and got the addresses. So I mailed those people. So we got a number of ways to reach these resellers.

Nathan Latka

13:30What are some other ways? Chamber of Commerce and direct mail is a great idea. What are some other things you tested?

Tom Van den Bos

13:36>> Through LinkedIn, of course, and LinkedIn advertising, sales navigator,

13:42>> those kinds of ways, yes.

Nathan Latka

13:45So sales navigator, direct mail, anything else?

Tom Van den Bos

13:50>> Yeah. And Google Ads, of course, and

13:54>> Google AdSense. So Benary

Nathan Latka

13:56So you'll run Google Ads not just to target customers directly, but also to target resellers?

Tom Van den Bos

14:00>> Yeah. Because it's more profitable to target resellers, of course, because you you only have to explain the tool once, of course, and then the reseller can do can, yeah, take that knowledge to own clients, to some clients, and then it would would be quicker and less support for us.

Team Size and Engineers

Nathan Latka

14:25I understand. How many peaks folks are on your team today?

Tom Van den Bos

14:31>> We got nine.

Nathan Latka

14:33Nine. And how many of those are engineers?

Tom Van den Bos

14:37>> Six.

Nathan Latka

14:38Six. Six engineers. Why do you laugh when I ask that?

Tom Van den Bos

14:42>> Well, because we as a team, we wear many hats, but what's needed the most at the time at this time is we need the the engineers. We do the online marketing and the management ourselves, also legal aspects. We recently

15:04>> we 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

15:17>> people that can free us from our own time. So my brother and I,

15:25>> we need to delegate a few other things like marketing marketing stuff.

Nathan Latka

15:30So Tom, do you

Ownership Structure

Nathan Latka

15:31and your brother, since you guys are bootstrapped, do you guys own together a 100% of the business?

Tom Van den Bos

15:35>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

15:36Would you guys consider selling for $5,000,000 today, all cash upfront?

Tom Van den Bos

15:43>> Think that would be

15:46>> not enough, but of course, that that is something that I need to discuss because, yeah, we're both 50% shareholder. So I can't take that. I can't answer that question right now.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

15:58Right. 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?

Tom Van den Bos

16:05>> My favorite book? Actually, I got it right here.

16:14>> It's a data protection implementation guide.

Nathan Latka

16:17Sounds thrilling.

Tom Van den Bos

16:19>> He would like he would like that if I if he saw this.

Nathan Latka

16:25I I've never been more excited looking at a book title than I have looking at that one.

Tom Van den Bos

16:30>> Okay. It's it's it's about legal tech and legal frameworks.

16:34>> 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.

Nathan Latka

16:44Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Tom Van den Bos

16:48>> Well, I do follow Andrew Gazdecki, which might be a an acquaintance of yours.

Nathan Latka

16:55Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business?

Tom Van den Bos

17:06>> For build for building the business? Yeah. I'm a I'm a designer, but so for shaping the tool and the UX, we use UXPIN. UXPIN. I don't know. Don't know.

Nathan Latka

17:18Number four,

17:19how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Tom Van den Bos

17:23>> Six.

Nathan Latka

17:24And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Tom Van den Bos

17:27>> Both. I'm I'm married and I have two kids.

Nathan Latka

17:30Two kiddos. Okay. And how old are you?

Tom Van den Bos

17:33>> I'm 37.

Nathan Latka

17:3437. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Tom Van den Bos

17:39>> I'm sorry?

Nathan Latka

17:40What's Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Tom Van den Bos

17:44>> What I wished for?

Nathan Latka

17:46Something you wish you knew back when you were 20 years old.

17:51That's

Tom Van den Bos

18:01>> Don't party too hard and don't game.

Nathan Latka

18:05Guys, 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 in 2020, 1,000,000 last year closing and hoping to grow this year. All bootstrapped, which we love. We're 35,000 free users, 5,000 of which are paid. Pay on average between, call it, 10 and $40 per month, scaling nicely with their team of nine. Tom, thanks

18:30for taking us to the top.

Tom Van den Bos

18:32>> Okay.

Nathan Latka

18:35One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

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