How Data Fetcher CEO Andy Cloke grew to $435.6K revenue and 51 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is andy cloak he's a freelance software developer building profitable tools on the side in 2020 bootstrap eventually sold a tick tock marketing platform called influence grid he's now working on data fetcher dot io a low code airtable app that lets you run api requests he's bootstrapped to ten thousand bucks in arr over the past four months andy you ready to take us to the top yeah nathan happy to be here yeah i'm thrilled you're here i mean you are if i could spend all my days and all my time with one kind of founder it would be the one that's always launching side projects growing from nothing to a hundred thousand bucks an ar and then selling it and then moving on to the next idea so you're my people i'm excited you're here thanks all right so let's let's work backwards so you're working on data fetcher today it sounds like you started on this idea four months ago yeah that's right so launched in november started a couple of months before that okay and the what were you building for your own need here how do you think about what new side ideas you work on uh yes i've got a kind of framework that i kind of follow that's basically taking like an existing tool or an existing kind of profitable business and then trans like basically taking that and then applying it to like a growing platform um so both the projects i've done that i've actually made some money from um the first one was basically taking tools that work for instagram and building them for tick tock and then this one i got the original inspiration from like a google sheets add-on and we're basically just applying the same kind of tool to airtable um and making it kind of more kind of a table native so that's kind of the ideation process um and just then just like getting into like a growing kind of platform and riding the wave basically and you're so much more refreshing talking to you than like a yc founder who will come on and say we're changing the world we've invented this new way to do something and you're saying look i just look at what worked on google sheets and now i'm going to do it for the airtable app store yeah i think that's probably the the lazy developer mindset rather than trying to be jesus i think it's smart right i think i think if you're optimizing for a life where you've got freedom flexibility you don't care about raising vc this is a great great model so kudos to you for just calling it what it is which is looking at what works and copying it with a new angle so uh what was there a particular google sheets add-on that inspired you that you're now replicating for airtable uh yeah so there was one that's called api connector um and i saw their product on page um it's made by a lady called anna he's now kind of a context of mine so um she basically built this this um add-on um i think she's got like 150 000 users she's got some massive companies using it and stuff um so i saw that and then i had actually run into the problem on air table um so i had actually i was an a table user i tried to pull in like financial data and found it was a really like complicated process so that when i saw her uh google sheets had on the penny just dropped and i thought why not build this for airtable um but when i launched my product on product time i gave her a shout out i said full credit this is where i got the full idea from um and i've not just kind of copied it screen for screen i've actually built other features that she's then copied into her app and stuff so we've actually got a really nice working relationship now where we're both kind of building tangentially for different platforms and helping each other out there's an important lesson there though which is you know it's not always about waiting on and waiting years and years until you come up with a perfect brand new idea no one's done before right you know very very rarely is that the case what's more frequent is you copy something that works and add your own spin to it so it's nice to see you doing that and crediting the original creator that's the right way to do it talk to me today you know dumb it down for me right so i use airtable a ton if we have listeners right now who are not developers how could they use your tool yeah sure um so yeah the high level so an api is just the way that a website sends structured data to each other so for example if you have subscriptions in stripe stripe make available an api for you to get a list of those subscriptions um what my tool lets you do um is very similar to something like zapier or integra map is set up those api calls you kind of put in the url um and you put in you can configure things like headers and stuff like that which is um getting a bit technical but basically just lets strike know that you're who you say you are so it's kind of authorization you can set all that up in data fetcher my app and then you can click run and you're going to pull in or post out any kind of data that you want to depending on what api you're hitting um that's the kind of the high level way that it works and then within that you can do kind of stuff like pagination so catching multiple pages of data um referencing your table or base in your request so for example if you had a list of stock tickers you might want to call the price that's the price for each of those stock tickers interesting so my current way of solving this when i want to you know take everyone that is paying for latke magazine uh that is via stripe right so they pay 29 bucks a month and i will just export from stripe under subscriptions in an excel file then reformat and re-upload as a new worksheet on error table the csv you're basically saying your tool save me those two steps i can just use it an error table and do it all the api requests yeah exactly i've actually got a youtube video on exactly that use case of pulling in all your strike subscriptions um pulling them in as like currency fields and then working out your maybe your monthly revenue or something based on that um or you could do it for payments you can set that um to schedule so if you upgrade to a paid account you can then say run this every monday at nine o'clock or whatever or every hour depending on you know how frequently you want to pull in that data i love the specificity of the use case and that you know the use case it's not like an accident like you built a youtube video for it you're clearly identified like a mousetrap here high utility value let's say i start using you for that exact purpose when will i see a paywall what what do i hit uh so it's a premium model um so there's you can get 100 requests a month for free and then beyond that this kind of scales with usage um and that has been quite a nice usage metric to kind of you know track people and and drive them through the upgrades and the only other thing that's paid is scheduled requests so if you want to just manually click run and fetch that data that's completely free um if you then want to say as i said like run this every monday and schedule it that's a paid feature as well i love this okay and how many customers are paying today uh so i'm on 51 customers 51 customers that's great and what are they paying on average per month on average it's 25 you have your metrics board up you will you listen to the podcast you're expecting all these questions aren't you a hundred percent okay all right so 51 customers 25 bucks a month you're doing about what 1 275 bucks a month something like that yeah just just over that but yeah pretty much and get personal with me here for a second annie what's that mean for you as a founder right now your current living situation have you minimized expenses like is a grand a month meaningful for you uh yeah it is i mean it's the first time so in the last month the growth's just gonna be crazy and it's gone from like 400 to yellow 1300 and suddenly it's like oh this is actually paying my rent i can i could in theory take this out as dividends i'm not bothering because i'm already freelancing and stuff with software but it's like it's suddenly like this is makes a tangible difference to my life what has to i mean can i ask you when you ignore all your sas revenue your freelance revenue like how much will you do in a month in freelance revenue usually uh probably around eight thousand uh pounds so maybe like twelve fifteen thousand dollars yup yup and how do you get that business do you use like upwork and top tell these things or it's individual clients that you know personally uh so it's a mixture of like contracts in where you're on like three month contracts on a day right and then i'm also doing some freelance airtable app development um kind of like fixed price stuff as well so yes and what has to happen with this sas tool in terms of a revenue target where you don't need to do the freelance stuff anymore i mean you just want to if it gets up to 10 15 grand a month recurring revenue then you stop freelancing you go all in on this tool exactly i think i'd probably do it sooner maybe if it gets to like five or six thousand a month and i've got savings and it's growing and i can work out you know in three months this is gonna be on ten thousand or something and i just live off savings for a few months so yeah um yeah five between five and ten i think is is the sweet spot to go wait so like let's and you bootstrap this right you haven't raised yeah and is it just you right now yeah amazing the the one person one grand a month side project with potential to be much bigger so let's brainstorm together real quick i mean what's the next step how do you take this from you know a grand a month two grand a month to up to 10 15 grand a month what has to happen um so i think the hardest bit is working out the customer the target customer so with airtable because it's complete horizontal tool the use cases are just all over the place and even from isil i mentioned the stripe one that's quite a nice self-contained one but like the other stuff i'm seeing is um like when i try and do customer development it's people that run like vacation homes or um garages or like it's just like all over the place so the hardest bit is just trying to find like the repeatable target customers that i can then do content marketing towards um so recent one it is crypto and that's working quite nicely and just went through like six different crypto apis and made a youtube video on each of them i think the next one is probably like marketing so going after people doing like facebook ads reporting and adwords and stuff like that so it's basically just speaking to customers looking at the analytics and people's usage and then like tailoring content marketing towards them um until a month i was doing like all development so i've only just switched into kind of marketing mode and like pumping out youtube videos and stuff and so far the signs are pretty good like i've had i said i did the crypto ones and i've had like a few people crypto people like convert and actually start playing um so i think it's just a case of doing that like vertical by vertical and going through customer personas how many people that hit the 100 requests per month limit what percent of them convert to paid versus they just stop using it once they hit the limit uh do you know you're not uh it's okay i know that overall rate is like four to five percent so if people that just sign up as a user yeah customers is like five percent i haven't got any more granular than that um in terms of like what's prompting the upgrade or yeah what points to upgrade do you know currently how many customers are on the platform sorry sorry users that are not paying that are on the platform that are like very close to hitting a hundred like api calls per month hitting that limit and no again i haven't got that into those analytics but i don't have to talk about maybe trying to do like prompts or something like that so if someone hits 100 doesn't come back to like ever or for a week or something then just send in an email out saying maybe just like here's 20 off or you know here's a limited time offer or something just trying to get a bit more value from those people or pull a drop box and say invite three of your friends in and we'll unlock 100 extra credits for you per month yeah that some sort of referral plan yeah yeah this is really this is really interesting um i mean some of the largest com i mean you should study have you studied the super metrics interview that i did you would love that one yeah i've listened to that like three times okay amazing i was gonna say like you remind me so much of that crew like in their very early days because they were so focused on a google sheet and excel sort of add-on vba code they rode that for a while before you know it it's a 40 million a year business with a 450 million dollar evaluation i see so many of those same traits uh in sort of what you're building this is really interesting um how do you you know one of the things that can trip folks up in your shoes is you your api tool could be used for so many things it's hard to figure out what to say no to so so how are you figuring out what use cases say no to yeah that's a good question um at the moment when i basically some people yeah well email saying can i use it for this and i'll go and have a look at the api docs and it would like it's just gonna require like five features if it's even possible at all and like there's a lot of like very dated apis um that just work in like really peculiar ways um and yeah often those it's just a case of being like telling them to use like another use code another way or like yeah just basically like unless the feature request comes up twice i'm not really building it i think that's kind of my rule of thumb moment there you go super easy straighten to the point this is great let's wrap up your andy with the famous five number one favorite business book uh blue ocean strategy number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh tyler king from lesson nine crm number three what's your favorite online tool for building data all vector it's probably heroku doesn't say you can't you can't say air table yeah yeah number number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh seven seven okay and what's your situation married single kiddos i am in a relationship okay no kids no kids all right and how are you how old am i yep 27 27 last question what's something you wishing you when you were 20. i just learned marketing i spent way too long just head down coding and didn't realize until i started doing my first projects how much i used to learn in the marketing world datafetcher.io it's a tool that you can use inside of your error table to quickly do use api requests to pull in things like stripe data he does freelance dev work on the side doing 10 15 grand a month and said you know let me build this tool the tool now has 51 paying customers it's pure sas doing 1200 a month in revenue all bootstrapped one man team he says if it gets five six seven grand a month in revenue he'll go all in full time i'm gonna be a user i hope you guys do too andy thanks for taking us 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 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't 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appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya at the top thanks nathan cheers