How Crowdcast CEO Sai Hossain grew Crowdcast to $2.9M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is sai hussein he's the ceo of crowdcast a live streaming and webinar platform for professional creators born in a small village in bangladesh she immigrated to country at a young age and slowly made his way to silicon valley there he teamed up with some great thinkers to design and build a new way for people to share ideas at scale say are you ready to take us to the top yeah i'm excited to be on the show the audio is breaking up a little bit now no worries we'll be good talk to us about crowdcast what's the company doing what's your revenue model how do you make money yeah i mean ultimately we are structured in a similar way as a webinar platform uh in the sense that it's a sas platform that we have customers paying us a recurring basis but um ultimate you know we're basically kind of combining what you see in the live streaming world with what you're getting in the webinar space so we're giving the tools that you typically get in the business world by giving you the experience of social live streaming okay and give me a use case like name a customer that's paying you and how they're using you uh i mean a good example is just yesterday we had amanda palmer who's a youtube celebrity and she had about a thousand people who are her patrons paying her on a monthly basis but she's able to hang out with them over crowdcast so she's combining patreon with crowdcast which is one of our integrations i was gonna say is that an api play there yeah it's an integration it's one of our deep integrations and they're like a really close platform ultimately they have a lot of customers that are also creators we call it the professional equator market so not necessarily like enterprise companies or things like that but individuals solopreneurs small businesses and i would say innovative startups that are you know trying to use live video to grow their audience do marketing and do content very cool help us understand kind of your revenue model is it a pure place sas company uh it is from from a from a structural point of view uh but you know typically sas companies are going after larger businesses whereas we're going after like the solar printer style uh sizes yeah well i mean just to be fair there are thousands of companies with sub hundred dollar a month plans that are sas going after kind of smb so help me understand kind of average price point are you talking a hundred bucks a month on average or what yeah around 89 is their midpoint i see i see okay and build the story for us here when'd you launch the company what year uh i mean we launched the beginning of i guess 2015. it was just me by myself um a month before that i teamed up with a friend to host a 30 000 person conference on crowdcast we brought together the leaders of the the sort of the web development world and that led to us uh sort of me just raising out of capital paper you know pay for my own salary for a year uh and so 2015 was when i was just kind of out there uh doing it solo and then about halfway uh through i met my co-founder and cto who's now at crowdcast and then we basically kind of re-gutted the whole thing and rebuilt it in a way that actually people would pay for and so um the following year 2016 is really our first year in business that's great very good and so how much have you raised a date uh just about a million from seed investors okay good so yeah enough to kind of cover basic things get things going not be too over funded exactly yeah yeah and so you know our goal i mean typically in sas and you're trying to get to like that million dollar run rate and we're not there yet but we're pretty close so we want to make sure we hit that number before we go out for the next big round how close are you we're well we're basically about break even uh i mean officially speaking we're close to around the 70k mark okay and mri that's great and you said you are break even or you're still burning a little we're we're almost break even so we were still slightly not profitable uh but we're about basically our main project right now ultimately video infrastructure as you might have guessed expensive probably the most expensive api out there and so uh we kick things off you know with a company to kind of you know pull it off at and kind of show people this is possible in the browser we're doing a lot of fancy stuff here and now we're in the process of kind of bringing some more of that in-house that's great so i mean when you say close to break even you mean you're like you're burning like five-ish grand a month or something more aggressive less than that oh good okay that's great very good and then help me understand growth so if you're at about call it 70 grand a month today where were you about a year ago yeah i mean we must have been around 30 i would say 25 to 30. um where's most that growth coming from uh how are you getting you know these customers yeah i mean we're a small team we're like less than seven people and so uh we've been pretty much leaning in on our uh you know network effects of of crowdcast directly when you do an event you are incentivized obviously to market that crowdcast event and in the process you're exposing more and more people to it and those people might see your event and be like wow that was a cool platform i want to use that myself so we've been almost 2090 of our growth has been just natural organic growth through our users using crowdcast that's great and how many customers are you at today we're past a thousand essentially yeah just past that cool i took 70 000 divided by 89 bucks a month and got out 787 customers is that just because you maybe have grandfathered ones paying a little less than 89 exactly yeah exactly we had a starter plan back in the first year okay got it so yeah that would make it average closer to 70 but today the ones signing up are called 89.90 something like that that's great um talk to me uh more about cac right so like are you doing any direct paid spend even if it's not even if it's not facebook ads or google ads you have sales people or anything uh honestly no i mean we're probably in sort of the ad and there and the fact that we haven't done any sort of real paid acquisition at all and that's partly because we're just like a small team and you know there's there's only so many things we can do um so yeah we don't really have any sort of clear uh you know like sales person on the team we've been pretty pretty much focused on 90 product and a little bit on the marketing end in order to sort of tell the story of broadcast but we haven't done any sort of like direct stuff where are you guys all based are you remote we're mostly remote but you know me and my co-founder out here in the san francisco bay area that's good and churns critical in a sas company especially at 89 bucks so at this price point right what's your churn today and how do you keep it low yeah i mean it's a difficult one um it depends on sort of you know so with live video itself you typically get a lot of people who are starting and stopping so we get turned from like five percent to ten percent depending on which plan you're on that's logo churn per month it's less that's that's per that's uh i guess that's per month yeah yeah okay low but but is it logo trend per month or revenue trend per month or they're the same what was that first word is it logo churn per month or revenue churn per month or are they the same oh uh that's that's revenue essentially okay got it very good five percent revenue trend per month and then um do you have any strong ways to drive expansion revenue like people for people to upgrade like number of seats or higher bandwidth or number of people watching or things like that yeah i mean primarily it's based on the number of live attendees per event so you know at our business plan you get 500 people live in the event on the lowest line you get about a hundred and so uh what we do is you know sometimes it's hard to predict i'm actually it's always hard to break how many people are actually going to show up live so we have overage fees and so if you're if you're getting more than 100 people showing up on the light plan probably they're getting enough overage fees that you want to hop on to the bigger plan so that typically is what drives expansion revenue um but besides that i mean we'll occasionally do like campaigns to push people up to annual plans uh like the one we just did last month which worked really really well um to just give up give us uh you know a lot of cash forward yeah yeah exactly that's great very good and then um let's uh i'm curious when was the last uh the last round of funding when did you do it what month and uh must have been at the beginning of 2016. okay so any i mean any plans to scale i mean if you had additional capital do you know where you might spend it to drive growth or drive the tech yeah i mean most immediately probably get some sales folk on crowdcast um there's just a lot of segments and that we can really go after but beyond that you know we do want to invest a little bit more on the engineering side um running sort of the infrastructure is a very complicated piece of the puzzle uh and as we do more and...