How Ease.Space CEO Nathan Harris grew to $7.8K revenue and 11 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Benjamin present he's 24 years old living in France and is currently leading a product called ease space which will dive in today he's lived in the u.s. Cambodia South Korea and Switzerland he launched his first company four years ago doing smartphone repairs for students on campuses about 18 months ago he started his company space with three other people let's dive in here Benjamin are you ready to take it to the top yeah all right what is e space and how do you make money so basically we are slack for passwords so today you have a whole new generation of companies that works almost exclusively on the Internet and this basically brings a whole new set of of problems such as like security breach potential security breaches and and also a whole like organizational problem is a new this kind of company needs to control who has access to which to because those two basically have a lot of sensitive information and so we bring a whole set of a feature to the CTO and the whole team for them to be able to organize control and view who has access to what and how do you views as different than a company like LastPass LastPass is is mainly b2c and and has like a lot of b2b features as well but what we really focus on is the ease of use because you know like security at the company level is is important but mostly to the CTO and the whole the rest of the company their goal is not to have a secure way of working it's basically to get stuff done so our main differentiation is having a really really simple UX and UI for the whole team to have like a security let's say security practices embedded inside that workflow got it so you are basically LastPass but b2b and more secure we have the same security features I mean the same security and encryption methods Azzam but we you know like as a password problem at the company level and at the personal level is definitely not the same because some passwords need to be shared so you need to be a to have them synchronized in real time across people and devices is kind of stuff I understand okay very good and how do you make in a sass company yeah yeah basically it's assassin so we price per company uh and not per user per company not per user and what's the average company pay you per month 59 year okay 59 euro and and what if someone has a thousand people they sign up it's still 59 no no it's basically 59 euro per 50 people it's like mmm like staircases god it's about a dollar a person or sorry a euro a person yeah that okay very good and then take us more tickets more into the back story here so you said you're doing kind of repairs on campuses and then 18 months ago you launched this company why did you get out of the repair business what didn't you like about that well actually I really think you need to be really passionate about the end product you're building even if you are the accountant I truly believe that you like if you are passionate about surfing you need to do and you're good at accounting you should be an accountant in a surfing company and I was not we were not really passionate about the smartphone repair business and actually I learned to code during the summer so I was like wow IIIi really discovered a whole new set of possibilities when I learned to code and passwords are really a problem for me because I'd love to discover new tools like I don't know right now yesterday I discovered Koda which is like a new sharing a file system and and so I have passwords everywhere and within my company I share and I encourage people to have unused tools every day and I wanted to help this kind of teams and so take me back though for the repair company in your best year how much did you do doing repairs or your best week is the best week we were doing five to six K but I was still student so we were doing five to six K every week and half time yeah we will yes sir we were retrained during the night did you shut the company down now or what or did you sell it yeah we said you sold it okay very good how did you negotiate the sale basically we went to a legs of French Craigslist Craigslist and we contacted every guy that was doing smartphone repair and one by one we phoned them because we had this new idea about is that space and we wanted to let this company go and so what'd you sell it for the amount yeah I'm actually not ability I don't have the ability to discuss it is that a problem no that's not a problem but generally how is it valued do they look at your total kind of monthly sales and multiply by some multiple or what was it based on yeah it was it was January that we took her around our three last months where our best month so we calculated an annual value revenue on that and we also valued the code the code I had done the website our lead space I'm sorry uh our client database and we sold all this very good and and was it you said we so was it just you or do you have co-founders there yeah one of the confounder we have that is the space used to it was a co-founder I started as a smartphone repair shop with a very good and then he is he or she the business guy or do they also code no he's a designer and I'm a business guy okay and and you're also doing all the code I just did the first version of easy tough space and then we took like a really some like people from a great engineering schools and who actually did that because I come from a business background at the beginning very good okay so so good so launch is officially in 2016 after you sold the iPhone or pair company and what are you had now in terms of total customers you're serving we are we iterated a long time so we basically studied by solving the password problem for students and an enterprise and and universities and we did that for like six months but the problem was was that because we were a young company universities in France they basically take up to a it's gonna sound crazy for you guys in the US but a a French University will have a C negotiation period of between from 12 to 24 months and we had a runway of two to three months yeah so we we signed some clients during that during that business model and then we we went to we wanted to start b2c to try out b2c but then we encountered you know last path like we were a hundred percent competitive laugh bus and we didn't do a lot of Revenue on that one how much how much did you grow that one - that one - no we you know we went like we had a thousand customer in three months okay each paying about it like a dollar our customer no it was only free in b2c Oh God so you weren't making any money no any okay like and so at that point we were we arrived around like it was 2017 in April and we looked at all the data and every person that was you know hardcore user were basically twitching our product and using it using it in b2b so we called all those guys and we said okay if you are using in a b2b mode how can you how can we make your life easier and basically in April we you know we did like this phone survey on 300 plus people and they said we we basically shut down the whole product and restarted from scratch between April to October 2017 and so what hands way in terms of customers right now so by we studied in October lis October 2017 and we are up to 150 customers 160 years now Emme and these are each they're each paying about called 59 60 euros no only 15% of them of and what of the rest pay zero it's free up to ten clients up to ten employees okay so we are as to be clear you have about you have about eleven companies or so paying 60 euros yep okay got it so 11 companies paying 60 euros I mean you guys are doing like 600 ish 700 euros a month right now is that right yeah yeah yeah so how do you I mean so how do you see I mean obviously everyone has to start at zero and build from there and you're in the building process but I mean how do you make that six hundred euro per month be six thousand sixty thousand six million yeah well so right now we're really in the process of building our product so basically we talk to users on a daily basis asking them for ok how can we improve your experience and basically they just tell us everyday like okay you need to improve this you need to improve that I would like these kind of features this needs to change and this and that so we are we are building in this way we are really like customer focused I would say yeah I mean you look that's all good I mean I just the product seems based what I know about this place super cheap I mean I know I know companies that do b2b kind of pass for management and it's it's 50 bucks a user you're charging 50 bucks for 50 users or you're 1/100 of that essentially I mean why so cheat it's almost like you did you start with consumer you set a pricing model for that now you're doing business but you kept consumer pricing yeah yeah but I think we are still not at that level of development right now we are focusing on having a retention and having a great activation and I think revenue should come a little bit later for us where we are making money and we have new paying customers almost every week but but I truly believe that wait hold on Benjamin you have 11 total paying customers right now right over the last six months you have signed about 11 paying customers yeah yeah so I mean how so how are you measuring retention was such a small cohort I'm measuring retention on usage based on the whole 150 companies I see I see so what's the number one thing you look at in terms of when a new user signs it for a free trial you've got to get them to do X to make them really sticky so and it's this is like our main focus right now because we discovered that the companies that really loved us applauded up to 200 passwords on the platform and those to 100 plus passwords are spread all over the company and the company sometimes he isn't even in one place it's like all over the world so this is like activation force is a key metric I mean that seems like a lot of work and is there a manual way to upload 200 passwords well yeah yeah we so basically what we tested what for example a CSV file but and when you when the CTO uploads a CSV file we're going to be able to actually treat the whole data and she will just have to tell us like okay this is a marketing password this is a design password keep other passwords in a CSV file though no no no not all not all of them so do why do you say that was your onboarding because some of them asked us to do that and really thing is we hold a budget I find that so surprising you have CTOs who care about security storing all their passwords in a CSV file yeah yeah it's crazy that's yeah yeah yeah and sometimes it's even like Word documents stored on on the hard drive or stuff like this yeah interesting okay good so focus on activation now what does retention look like right now in terms of a number retention you mean whatever what is our key metrics that we look at in terms of retention well like look so you're looking I would say right now what you're doing is you're focused on activation right where tensions hard to talk about in turn is hard to talk about so they're actually paying but when people once people get activated what do you care about in terms of an ongoing weekly basis what do you want to see them doing a weekly basis to consider them active right now what we are doing is we want half of the team to be to be using passwords on our platform half of the week okay I don't understand what that means so you if I understand you question why right you want me to tell you what does an active team looks like yeah but what do you mean using you half the week well I love their passwords now half of the team so if there is a team of ten I want five people to be there at these three days a week beware on our platform logged in and taking passwords okay so you're so like for example LastPass for me I pay for it but the reason I love it is I'm never in it because the reason it works is because I never have to go in it it just works like I go to a website to log on to my bank and it just like automatically fills it so so they might measure their activation as in the first week like they see me adding one new password and then I added one new password per every you know four days but I'm never actually going and logging in on lastpass.com I mean how do you how do you make sure that the retention metrics that you're measuring against are the true actually retention metrics people care about okay well so first of all I want it's important that people actually store passwords on our system so the first metric is how many pass go to the store on our system and the second one is how many passwords do they use every week thanks to us and when I say I want people to be using our product three days a week at least it means I want them to actually use passwords stored on us in us every week got it so they're not actually logging into the website but they're logging into some tool and you are powering filling out the password exactly got it okay so how many people are doing that right now actually right now it's like 350 okay and at what point at what point do you like look if these people are retained why haven't you I mean when you show them a paywall well is it we're also working on that like we discovered that we were hiding too much as the paying features so for example we have a feature that helps you automatically update and change a password but we didn't even let people who were using it for free try it even at this once so it like if they wanted to try it they would have to pay right away so we are changing this kind of like um is a flow of how people try and use a paid feature to give them the wheel to actually pay for every month um all right last few questions are before we wrap up are you bootstrapping a server you raise capital bootstrap okay and what's the team size today today we're five people five people and everyone there in France yes and we're all living into the same apartment very good okay so you get a lot of work done all right so so five people France founded 2016 totally bootstrapped and I guess I usually like to talk about growth rates but if I asked you what your revenue was 13 months ago you'd probably say nothing right yes okay good so you're just now launching or growing well I hope you come back on any year and we get to chat about all the growth that you've driven all right hey I would love to I'm Benjamin let's drop him here with the famous five number one what is your favorite business book actually I would say from zero to one a Peter Shields good one number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now yeah I mean it's a classic but I really love Elon Musk number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business unlike too wait let me check I would say I mean Koda CUDA is really good I've spelled ur Co d8 Koda okay good number four how many hours of sleep dude every night sorry I didn't get how many hours of sleep do you get every night between five and six okay that's good and what's your situation married single you have kids no no I'm twenty four a single single no kids alright good and what do you last question what do you is your 20 year old self knew more about interation and talking to users more about iteration guys there you have it yet success building an iPhone repair company when he was still in school did a couple thousand euros per week before saying okay we're gonna sell this thing he then obviously took the money took the winnings moved in with five of his friends they're now building EES dot space which essentially b2b password management makes it easy to pass off passwords store new passwords give new team members passwords and give you know take passwords away from fired employees right so Benjamin thank you very much for taking us to the top thank you very much have a good day