How Dux Soup CEO Will Van Der Sanden grew Dux Soup 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...