How Doodle CEO Amit Shah grew Doodle to $750K revenue and 25K customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is a Gabrielle Latino he joined doodle in 2016 to transform it into a sass business after studying physics he went to consulting on MBA at London Business School and joined doodles mother company to MIT to media Swiss and Italian he's a pilot and loves the Mediterranean and Swiss Alps seafood and Swiss cheese Gabrielle are you ready to take us to the top yeah sure okay so just I want to get one distinction oh you were not one of the founders of doodle but you joined in 2016 so what's that relationship like yeah exactly so so actually dude was founded 10 years ago actually 11 now already by 2 to PhD students at ETH in Zurich that's our Technical High Technical University here in Zurich and and so where was that what year they found out in 2007 ok it's been around for quite a while and we've grown to be yeah 200 million users in a year that our visiting doodle right now so so it's been around for a while and so it's it's pretty well known around the world as well you know I look I think all my audience probably use doodles especially you know I find them coming into my inbox when there's a team meeting where the email thread gets past 100 messages long and someone says screw this use doodle absolutely okay all right so I get that but I won't understand so did they per sure pursue you in 2016 or did you pursue them and what revenue model were they before turning to sass yeah so so what we've been what we've been doing is that two media the mother company of doodle has has owned doodle now for four years so in 2014 two media took one 100% stake of this and it you know grew steadily especially on the revenue side it grew nicely on the user side but on the revenue side it grew steadily and so the feeling of the commedia you know of the corporate was there is so much more potential in this yeah let's come let's do and change something and at that point in time when I came in we really would really were a task to say look what is what is going to be your growth strategy and so we looked at what we had been doing all of the years before which is advertising advertising business and we just saw that you know the growth trajectory there wouldn't be as interesting and also that you know given that this is a Productivity tool you really want to align you know your incentives with the incentive of your users and customers and so you know they come to you and and pay or what they they get and and so we're now really turning this into a subscription business where we are we're about enabling great meetings so really going into the scheduling full-on with with a suite of other tools as well not only the group scheduling you you know but also you know one-on-one scheduling integrations into your calendar smart scheduling as we do with our BOTS that we bought so we bought two years ago and Israeli startup that does that does a smart scheduling bot in slack called me Khan and so all of these pieces together we're really now putting together to a you know all-encompassing scheduling tool that you so can use to media per shoe you in 2016 or you pursued them I was I was in the media and they asked me to do this job well I see you were at the parent company and you said oh I want to go jump into that thing it looks fun yeah I am exactly I must be doing this now for for two years and we've changed quite a lot so we've grown from you know being 20 people to being about 60 people now where's everybody based we're based about half is based in Zurich about a quarter in Berlin a little bit less than a quarter in Tel Aviv and we have some people helping out from from an outsource or in Belgrade so we are spread across four offices in in Europe and Israel yeah and just be clear today now pure-play SAS company or do you still have a legacy trailing we have we have still we have still a large part of our four of our revenue still advertising so so we've we've spent the last year or so really to to get our technical house you know and and to really focus on on the premium product and now we're starting to monetize it so we're starting to be more aggressive monetizing the the premium premium business I want to focus the rest to show on the sassa business but again just before we do that just so people can understand what you mean when you say the advertising stuff like when I use doodle I can't remember when I saw advertising where our advertisers paying you to put them inside of the old tool so it's very often on the participation page so when you set out the link and your buddy's answer on that link so there's quite a lot of space around so that's also a lot of the traffic comes from the participants obviously right and when you send out the meeting it goes through several people so that's that's most of the traffic we got but also when you create a duel you can we we have been we have some advertising but they are around so it's the tool itself is is is you know well protected if you wish sure and so it's it's a the customer experience is not really you know compromised in the tool itself it's around know it makes good sense and and last question on this for move on on the advertising side you said it makes up the majority of revenue can you give me a percentage we talking seventy percent fifty percent up ninety percent it's about it's about eighty-five fifteen still so we want to flip that that's momently had like last month 85 yeah I'm just curious though if you're taking all the revenue over the past year just last month eighty-five percent was advertising 15% less ass yeah last month last month okay good okay so you're making the transition now so walk me through you come in and you go okay what do we price this thing at and you're going let me try and put some data behind this otherwise I'm just gonna basically pull this out of my ass how did you come up with a price point so we're still testing prices so we're we we actually had we've had a premium product for a while before it was just never into focus and has never been really worked on additional features and so on and so forth so for the time being we are we keeping that price and so there's a little rise point so we have for the for the private we call it it's it's $49 and for the for the business it's it's $69 for year and so the difference is that the private you get no ads and some additional features but you don't get the branding feature and in the business you get you get to brand doodle as you wanted with logo with the back background and so on and so forth and on the business side also you can add more in one user so you can have administrative rights and so you can have you know business package for 5 10 20 up to there is companies who have thousands of doodle seats so thousands of users can can actually use the premium doozie and grab real just to avoid going on every customer cohort will you say on average just on your site a customer's paying per year on average they're paying about 30 to 40 bucks because we have the big accounts are have quite an aggressive price market good so 30 bucks 30 bucks a year or call it maybe 3 bucks a month something like that yeah ok and and you can do they all have to pay annual or do you have a monthly plan we are introducing the monthly plan shortly but for now it's all annual okay and why not just stick all annual what did you see in your data that said hey we need a monthly option so it's a it's just the to to see another conversion point so to have to have a lower lower barrier of entry and and obviously as as most sales companies do that you know the monthly price will be higher if you you know multiply it up by 12 then then dandy annual so so we want to see how that how that works out and if we can get some more revenue growth out of having a monthly plan and I'm curious how it's you know how the experiment is gone so far so 2016 you join you thinking about price and you start transitioning to SAS and now except 15 percent of your revenue walk me through how many customers do you now have just on the SAS project nor your advertising side yeah so so so we are we have about between 25 and 30 thousand customers and do you feel like that is that's a good conversion rate from your 200 million free users or a bad conversion rate I mean how does that set you that's that's really low that's why I that's why we have that's why we have a huge potential in front of us so so and that's that's where really that's where really we are all totally convinced that we can conflict this over to a 90 to 10 business where 90 percent is subscription and actually keep the advertising growing so so if you so so so we really believe there's a huge potential in the in the south side of this business yeah and again this only Gabrielle speaking to the south side if I take that yeah those 25,000 customers times that call it $3 a month ish price point right I mean that puts you right now this revenue stream for you guys about sixty to sixty four grand per month something like that is that accurate um yeah it's actually a bit more okay like a bar you about have you broken 100 yet or no hundred grand a month um not yet okay cool um...