How Dux Soup CEO Will Van Der Sanden grew to $3M revenue and 15K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is will van der saan and he's building a company called ducks soup that's dux hyphen soup.com it's software for online lead generation will you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay so first off it looks like you're playing pretty exclusively on linkedin is that correct uh yeah we uh we just started linkedin we uh we started out with a whole range of uh platforms that we supported but um we really found that uh yeah linkedin was the most in demand and also the most different shading for uh for our company when did you launch the business uh it was in 2016 2016. okay great and tell us more today what are customers paying you for what's your most popular package the most popular thing well the fastest growing one is absolutely the turbo uh turbo edition uh turbo edition basically uh is the uh the update that we get uh about two years ago uh in apart from the initial package which is the pro edition uh which which provides you with basic automation capabilities and exporting export and importing it also adds the automation also the integration capabilities um and most recently we also added trip campaigns which are a really popular feature with audience and when you look across your entire customer base what's the average customer paying you per month the turbo plan is 41 bucks a month but what's the average uh the average is about 25 a month per uh per user yeah 25. okay so launched in 2016 do you remember what you guys did in first year revenue first year revenue that must have been about uh 1500 i think okay that's not hey it's better than zero right all right absolutely absolutely and it was a whole calendar year so excuse me that was a we actually started out in in january and uh uh yeah so that's a whole full kill on the year and yeah it's uh it's amazing but um so how did you that first year you only did 1600 bucks in revenue a lot of entrepreneurs listening right now that want to launch a side gig or a full-time company they don't know how to cover their first year expenses that they're growing their sas company how did you cover your expenses that first year uh yeah the first year well i was basically contracting uh as a as a developer um because well i'm a software developer i i wrote most of the software of the code for uh for dog soup uh so yeah i just was doing this in the uh first in the evenings really that's uh and in the weekend and and yeah after about a year and a half or two years we saw revenue going up to the level that really the standard or the normal contracting could stop and i could focus full-time on the unboxing and fast forward out today how many customers are you serving uh today what we got if you include the free ones uh 70 000 but if you if you're looking at paying customers we've got about 15 000 customers one five what five yeah yeah okay so 70 000 free you've ordered 15 000 to paid right absolutely how did you get 70 000 free users what what growth tactics did you use over the past you know four years [Music] well we as a tactic uh we basically uh use pricing at the moment at the starting of the company there were a lot of tools out there that were really expensive and not very functional uh so we uh we got in there with uh using pricing as a way of clawing a bit of the market and we also yeah uh yours but but will nobody knows about your pricing unless you get them to the website how are you getting how did you get 70 000 people to the website and opting in uh we we used or used or talked to influencers um basically asking them to to review the product and or to try the product and if they like it to review it as well can you name it the influencer that drove you the most new users uh the first the biggest one for us was uh was john nemo i would say can you spell that john who john nemo said uh yeah just john as you spell john nemo n-e-m-o l-e-m-o o-n and for november oh nemo n-e-m-o yeah and what made him like what gave him the ability to drive so much traffic what platform do you have a big following on um well the first year we obviously did not get to 70 000 uh the first year we probably got to about uh maybe a few well a thousand or two thousand so um it's not that it's that we really had a single um a single influencer really driving this uh forward though what we've seen really is that um uh because the trend at the moment at that point was was uh social selling and uh and now growth hacking that a lot of businesses were looking for tools to differentiate themselves and they would be looking at influences to see what tools were uh basically uh getting on going on the market and it was yeah a lot of those companies that consult big companies or they train companies they're doing social selling they were picking up uh ducks who were really running with it and promoting it to their customer base that is also really a big part of what really grew the um uh understood so if you guys if you're listening right now i want to copy this strategy you look at john nemo on linkedin okay he writes for inc linkedin social media examiner he's been an entrepreneur on fire he wrote a book called linkedin merch's content marketing all the placements that he writes for enables him to backlink to will's company right so if you want to go find your own john nemo you can go on linkedin search for writers at these similar outlets and go try and incentivize them to promote your product now will that's the big question how did you incentivize john to promote your product over at competitors um uh he just liked it like the way he worked so you didn't pay him anything no commission no anything nothing at all no zero uh he liked the way that the product worked he liked the way that he was priced and we also got along at a personal level just uh beautiful conversations online and uh uh yes it was just a bit of a click and it was understood 15 000 customers 25 average rpoo that would put your mrr at about 325 000 or 375 per month is that right yeah it sounds like yeah do you think you can break 400 000 this year well that's definitely the the forecast yeah well what have you going on over the past 12 months if you're at 370 000 a month today in revenue where were you a year ago i would say probably like two and a half okay so 250 000. now have you done all this bootstrapped or have you raised capital uh no this is all self-funded so there's no uh no bootstrap no uh uh capital it's basically as i said uh i was contracting um and just to pay the bills and doing this on the on the side and at some point i managed to flip the switch and make it a full-time thing are you the sole founder yeah okay so you own 100 of the business right now absolutely most most engineers like you when they launch a business like this they really struggle with marketing and sales i mean how did you overcome that hoop without having you up 40 to a co-founder well i've got a background in uh working in other product companies and really also working with people in marketing and just generally being involved in also the product positioning and so i spent well i also failed one product just before this so i spent a lot of time really thinking on well to make sure that this was very much a self-service product so that the uh the end user could just uh download it and run it and use it and actually get value without anyone having to teach them or getting involved in this process and that really helped scale the skill to reach really of the other products without requiring uh heavy advertising yeah nice nice product-led growth there what's your team look like today how many people uh with 20 people 20 how many engineers um well i would say one there's only one engineer building the product is that you uh yeah that's me yeah you have no other engineers on the team uh we occasionally or uh yeah occasionally we basically get freelance uh engineers to do some additional developments where do you hire those freelancers from uh oh we get them from upwork upwork okay and and what's the trick to using up work a lot of people have tried upwork for developers and they get a bunch of crap out they don't get good code oh the the the thing is to do the interviews with the uh with the developers um obviously being a developer myself i know what i'm looking for in uh in in this uh sort of uh market and yeah well i i tend to try and avoid uh going indirectly it's really important in my view to talk directly to the developers without having someone interpret your requirements to then uh uh to translate to somebody else to to build because it just it takes too long and you end up with uh long delivery times expensive feature sets so yeah just to hide them directly if you if you're able to uh to select them yourself so uh obviously you use your directly for a very short period of time and then you let them go you're the only full-time engineer on the project yeah guess what yeah what do the other 19 team members do we have a few investors we've got quite a few customer support staff marketing staff and well obviously just the admin staff to do the uh to do the accounts and that sort of thing so yeah turn is critical in a business like yours what was gross revenue churn over the past 12 months gross revenue i'm not sure if i know what gross revenue churn is what what is your churn oh just oh well the true we're at about uh 10 percent 10 of your users turn monthly yeah okay and and are those usually high paying customers or lower paying customers folks that are on like the free trial or something it takes to be the lower ones the uh if you look at just the uh the higher the the turbo edition especially um the turn i've i would say is is probably less than five percent five percent monthly right yeah yeah yeah that's still fairly high right that means you're turning sixty percent of your user base every year how do you how do you get churn down well we well we get turned down by uh growing up again by growing customers but there is a natural turn uh that you get in this uh in this market because a lot of people they change jobs they change uh or they just change uh companies so um there is a yeah just a natural term that you will never avoid and we uh we reduce it by making a product that works and delivers to uh to the people what what they're looking for and that's a strategy so the reason you're seeing 60 percent of your base churn currently per year is because they tell you they're switching jobs uh yeah well jobs or projects absolutely yeah i mean if someone loves your product and they're in company one and they switch over to company b don't they then buy the product and company b2 so you just turned away but we can't link those two together so we also i mean we have about uh 4 000 new users every month so if you uh if you basically just look at those those numbers it's uh it's yeah it's probably quite a lot of reoccurring uh or revisiting uh users but we don't uh yeah we don't have the link to those uh how many of the four thousand new users per month convert to paid typically um that would be about i would say uh fifth probably one fifth so call it like 800 something like that yeah um interesting any plans to raise capital you want to stay bootstrapped uh you always say we stay the way we are uh there's i've worked with investors before uh i think it might only be interesting in a larger uh uh becoming part of a larger larger organization which is where a company will be acquiring taxes but uh no there's no we have no uh reason to to get capital in there's no benefit to us well you've built a great life for yourself using the sas business model as leverage right i mean 375 top line 20 full-time folks they're only one engineer engineers are usually the most expensive so i imagine you're highly profitable uh yeah absolutely yeah so how much would you say you take the bottom line every month um okay so my question to you as a capital allocator as a founder trying to build wealth get more freedom etc when you take 80 percent of 325 000 a monthly revenue to the bottom line every month i'm sure you don't just let the cash sit in the bank how do you think about it what do you do with the cash oh the it's uh cash is to make sure that the family is okay um you gotta take care of the family and um yeah but we'll just be clear i mean eighty percent profit is three hundred thousand dollars in profits per month i don't i mean unless you've got 300 kids uh you can't spend 300 grand a month on a family i don't think no no no no that's right no no no what i'm asking really is how you as a smart guy building a business think about capital allocation personally oh it's partially well it's just invested in different uh yeah in different assets so you're buying physical assets houses real estate things like that yeah in the stock market what are you a crypto guy no not so long so stock market traditional equities and real estate and family yeah yeah yeah very cool this is great all right now last question here you're at about a 4.5 million dollar run rate today if someone came and offered you uh you know a seven or eight x multiple so call it 30 million bucks all cash up front to sell the business today would you i would definitely have to uh get a good thing and what would be like the deciding factor in the offer what would you be looking for um it would be well obviously it would be uh well the way that the uh that the by i mean cash in hand um that would be very difficult to reject because i i've got plenty of other ideas that i want to work on and uh and try out and so if but if there is something uh that that includes basically um yeah being able to develop new things or uh becoming part of a bigger a bigger team in the past i i work with bigger teams with people who who are clever and who are striving to uh to do something to make a change uh so yeah if there was somebody to work with uh a team like that that would be uh that would be great but um uh yeah it so it depends on the people really that uh that you know they're talking to will on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh i actually don't read any of that number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh no number three what's your favorite online tool for building duck soup my favorite what something online tool besides your own uh for for building the company i mean yes i would say buckets bit bucket number four how many hours of sleep to get every night oh eight eight and what's your situation married single kiddos how many kids two two two kids okay and how old are you i am 50 i just turned 50 recently happy late birthday all right well last question what's something you wishing you when you were 20 sorry that was too fast for me what's something that you wish you knew when you were 20. oh then um um yeah that just just having a good idea is not uh it is not enough actually delivering uh living on an idea is uh it's a lot of work and it's a lot more work that you might think than coming up with daddy guys doug super day lead management tool founded in 2016 totally bootstrapped broke 250 000 a month one year ago now at 375 000 per month so about a 4.5 million dollar run rate 70 000 free users he's converted 15 000 paid here's the crazy thing one engineer on the team incredible if you look at revenue per engineer it's through the roof i don't think anyone breaks 4.5 million so will congratulations thanks for taking us to the top well thank you for having me 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 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