How Developerhub CEO Zaid Daba’Een grew Developerhub to $46.8K revenue and 80 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is dabane he's the co-founder and ceo of developerhub.io he's a uk exceptional talent building products and team since seven years old he occasionally flew drones at nasa and was the youngest ordaining to publish in a world-class journal he's a member of tech nation founders network tech london advocates along with many other great organizations zed you're ready to take us to the top yeah sure uh it's pleasure to be with you on this podcast you bet so tell us about developer tell us about developer hub what's the company doing what's the revenue model of course uh developerhub.io it's hosted documentation as a service so we help tech teams uh remove their engineering resources from the documentation process by providing them with the complete platform to publish modern customer-facing documentation basically we're building a 2019 version of confluence for product for public documentation having an absolutely wonderful editor that works for everyone in the team the model is pure sas companies by subscription with that to get a fully branded documentation platform for product and api documentation and all you need is to write your content we link the pages for you we'll provide you with real-time search versioning collaboration tools all kinds of integrations just everything you'd expect from a top-notch documentation and said what do companies pay on average per year to use your technology so the cheapest uh uh subscription is thirty nine dollars what's the average though not the cheapest the average right now is fifty five dollars okay per month got it very cool and then put this on a timeline for me when you get this idea what year you launch uh so i got this idea uh a year and a half ago i've been building products for seven years as i said before and uh every time you finish building a product you want your customers to understand it they're the understanding of the customer is a key for its success and you get to the problem where okay now i need documentation well what do i do there is a very boring process of building up it's a huge initial cost to build the documentation platform and then to keep on maintaining it it's a weekly incurring cost on you and that's when i was like why are we doing this all over again just let's focus on building a great experience for the writers and for the developers or whoever is reading that documentation and and and and that's how i got with developers so what year did you write the first line of code i wrote the first line of code probably in uh april 2018 okay and when was first dollar revenue first dollar of revenue was in september i launched in in september but i would uh say that the product got solid around february or january of this year okay and now today how many customers are you serving i'm serving around 80 customers um which are from all kinds of backgrounds there are global customers it's organic reach mostly through uh search so is that 80 folks at 55 a month you're doing about four or five grand a month right now in revenue that is correct yes where did you find them you said organic search what's a search term you've intentionally made sure to try and dominate so i was first focusing on developer hubs or developer portals uh which is what what the first idea was because i'm a developer myself and then um that was the the search uh developer portal or developerhub or managed service for documentation and then i realized that this is a much bigger uh problem that everyone has not just developers it's a documentation problem uh globally so our customers are not just using us currently for developer services or api references it's actually going to wireless equipment hardware user guides and all kinds of writing because well there is no editing sorry sorry my specific specific question is how did you get your first 10 customers how did i get my first 10 customers um i launched through product hunt i launched on hacker news and uh some of these got me my my first customers the rest is really through seo okay so on let's talk about product on here for a second um how many you do remember that day how many hits you got to the website and how many new signups um i wouldn't say it was more than 500 signups on that day and how many website hits um i i don't recall really okay so 500 signups that means they go to developerhub.com they actually sign up with their email address yes there was a free tier at that time and they signed up for the fee tier okay and how many of your current 85 customers did you get from that product how launched you know or range i i wouldn't think it's more than four to be honest okay so not a ton yeah yeah yeah uh hacker news was like 10 000 hits probably on the website uh and around two thousand users but still it's it's it's mostly um people who just wanna see what's going on uh it's not really the customers that you need so the developer this was posted ten months ago is developerhub.io on hacker news create beautiful product documentation hassle free got 91 upvotes you're saying this post drove the site about 10 000 hits and 2000 signups that is crazy like when i look at the google analytics it's just like that if you look at the day where hack news existed why haven't you been able to convert more of these thousands of sign-ups into paying customers um the product was really different uh back in in august and september it was more of an actual product i would say than what the product is right now it's now i i think i really understand what the market needs and uh when i talk to technical writers they'd be like wow we really need this it's a different response from what i had a year ago how have you funded the company have you raised or bootstrapped it's completely bootstrapped uh buttons but for myself that's great what's your team size today how many people um we are around four people i mean around four people sorry what do you mean around you're there for people or you don't have four people yeah uh so it's myself full time doing this uh i've got my advisor uh who's helping me in strategy i've got a content marketer who's a contractor and an intern in design okay so like two full-time yeah kind of interesting okay what about churn any customers start paying and stop what's your turn last month uh last month none uh over the entire time it's around 12 that is most of the customers who started back uh before they got the product got solid and do you have like do you have an engine to get new customers say are you using any like paid do you have a crack a cac um i tried lots of facebook didn't work linkedin didn't work google display ads worked a bit but i don't have a solid cac i would say it's around 150 and 300 dollars okay so you have like a three four month payback period yeah yeah so where are you getting that money to put up towards cac it then takes you four months to make that money back so is that just your own money your own savings not at all it's we've been like because i'm not taking any money for the company right now so all the money is getting invested back into itself um and the average revenue right now is 55 but we started having better pricing plans in the few four months so most of the customers are signing up for the 99 price plan got it very good we're going to move up to other pricing plans higher good all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um that would be lost in founder number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um that would be randy finchkin of lost and founder yep number three he's obviously moz uh number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh mailchimp it makes everything so much easier number four how many hours of sleep to get every night between five and seven and situation married single kids single no kids no kids and how old are you i'm 26 years old last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um that would be never get comfortable always keep yourself on the edge don't get comfortable developerhub dot io got 2000 signups from a hacker news post now today doing four or five grand a month across about call it 40 or up to sorry 80 customers now today uh it's a hosted document uh documentation as a service kind of platform again for developers launched in 2018 bootstrapped obviously i love that two-ish people on their team 12 annual churn revenue basis so far spending 200 bucks get a new customer for a three to four month payback period zed thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much