Expandi Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Thanks for the warm introduction. I hope everybody can hear me well. Okay, good. I guess I'm the last one today and I did not expect that people here, so really appreciate all your support, especially as I come all the way from The Netherlands. And we're talk today about sniper targeting. So before I start, I just want to know do we have some power users here, some LinkedIn power users? Just raise raise raise your hands. Who's leveraging [00:26] LinkedIn for lead generation? Who's actually leveraging LinkedIn to create content? We have people who create content on LinkedIn or people who recruit and use LinkedIn to attract candidates. Okay, this will be really great for all of you. I have two left hands, so I hope I can manage click on the right times. What I actually want to share with you, I divided it in three easy things and it's all about out of the box strategies and [00:55] race on how to search and find your audiences on LinkedIn. So I'm not talking about self navigator searches, I'm talking about search tricks divided in, for example, LinkedIn groups, inbound leads and some strategies which I leveraged for the past couple of years and which get me each and every time up to more than 70% acceptance rate. And as a bonus, some hacks, some in mail hacks and how you can get a 55% reply rate after finding [01:23] the right audience and outreach these people on LinkedIn. There's no need to make that many notes as I want to share everything with you afterwards through QR code. [01:36] For the ones who do not know me, my name is Stefan. I'm the Founder of expandi, world leading software for LinkedIn automation and I bootstrapped my SaaS within two and a half years up to 7,000,000 in revenue. We mainly did that through LinkedIn outreach and the best place out there, we created Playbooks out of it and heavily distributed them to the audience. I shared this story at Founder500 last edition in Austin. So for the ones who [02:03] want to watch that back, I think it's on YouTube or Nathan put it on YouTube as well. But [02:12] let's start with some search tricks. And I think for the ones who are quite active on LinkedIn and some people already raised their hands, it became a bit of a more challenging one and a half year ago when LinkedIn put unfortunately in all these limits, right? [02:28] So I will share a bit about that and why it's important to do quality searches and sniper targeting. And because if you have less people to outreach, it will become way more important to find the right people as we have less shots left to approach all these people, especially on LinkedIn. Spotlight filters and I see people thinking LinkedIn groups, there are so many LinkedIn groups, but I will tell some tricks about that and how you can [02:54] leverage it yourself. For the ones who are using LinkedIn to build out authority, to build out a personal brand, you can attract a lot of inbound leads. And with some tricks, it's quite easy to import all these people into a CSV and follow-up on them on LinkedIn or through other channels. [03:12] But let's start with the 100 weekly limit. LinkedIn is fighting spam. It's the number one problem, especially as the platform is growing super, super fast. It means that they want to stop people approaching each other as at least people you do not know. So therefore, I think it becomes way more important to only outreach people you know or at least that's what LinkedIn is aiming for. And of course, it's not possible. We have a lot of [03:38] workarounds. We can bypass these limits, but that's not what we are going to talk about today. I especially want to focus on sniper targeting. So only tactics on how you can find people with out of the box strategies on LinkedIn to build your audience. [03:56] LinkedIn groups, I just talked about it. Who's leveraging LinkedIn groups? Are we here have some people here who are already in LinkedIn groups or use it? Did you know for example that if you're part from a LinkedIn group for more than four days, you can message these people without making connection requests. [04:13] So LinkedIn limited amount of connection requests up to 100 a week, which is sort of 20 a day. And if you're part of a group, you can message these people without making connection requests. And it's quite an easy conversation starter. If you go to your basic search bar on LinkedIn, you search by hashtag on a specific topic and you select the tech groups, it will pop up all the relevant groups related to that specific keyword. [04:41] And you can make quite an easy introduction. If you're not using it as a connection request, you can send a message as I just mentioned. And this is an example of how you can make kind of an intro. If you're part of the same group, let's exchange IDs. And if you're for a coffee, just let me know. [04:59] I will share all these things afterwards as well. [05:04] We'll feed your profile. If you have a paid subscription on LinkedIn, for example, Sales Navigator, it's possible to see who has viewed your profile. I, for example, leverage LinkedIn by producing content consistent each and every day. And I attract, I think in the last ninety days, almost 8,000 profile visitors. With a tool like expandi, we can easily import all these profile visitors and you can use that as a lead source or as a starting point to [05:29] engage with these people. You can do that on LinkedIn. We can export them in a CSV. We're capturing all the email addresses, which make it quite easy to retarget these people to follow-up on them per email. And I think it's quite interesting because these people already showed interest in you, in your profile. So it's quite easy to engage with them afterwards and refer to that profile visit. This is an example of how you can do that. [05:53] It's not that special, quite easy. [05:56] And you can personalize that even more if you want that, of course. Sniper targeting, these are my three favorite strategies. LinkedIn is full of content, right? I just mentioned it, we see our timelines, everybody's posting. But how cool would it be if we can scrape each and every post on LinkedIn and then not talking only about your post, but let's say your competitors post and company posts or any post on LinkedIn. And we can import within [06:25] a split second all the people who like and comment on that specific post. We can capture all the email addresses and within two minutes, we can provide you with a CSV file You can use for retargeting, you can use for email outreach to a cool tool like instantly, for example. Or if you can leverage a tool like expandi to follow-up on all these people on LinkedIn. It's quite easy to make an introduction as you can refer [06:50] to us a specific post. I never ever achieved and I did it many times over for the past couple of years, lower acceptance rate by using or leveraging this strategy than 70%. [07:06] This is actually how it works. You go to the specific post, you copy the URL, you go to a tool like expandi, you import the URL and within a couple of minutes, it will pull over all the people who are engaged with that specific post. After that, you can decide what you do and leverage such a tool to follow-up on these people per LinkedIn. It's not needed. [07:29] An example of how you can break through the noise with your messaging as everybody is approaching each other some boring, outdated messages and bring some fun in it. They'll always help me a lot to get people engaged. And this is an example of how you can do that. You can do that through connection requests to open email, for example, but also through group messaging or event messaging. That's also for events. If you're part of an event, [07:55] it's possible to engage with these people without making connection requests if you're part of that specific event. Sniper targeting poll voters. We see still a lot of people who are asking questions on LinkedIn and ask people to vote on that. If it's your own poll, it's possible to scrape all the people who vote for your poll. To get engagement, you can use, for example, an engagement poll, which will give you a bit more traction and more [08:23] people will see your post. And a tool like expandi can import all the people based on answers and funnel them based on answers to funnel them further to approach them afterwards. This is how it works. And an example, again, of a funny connection request, which you can leverage in relation to someone who voted on your poll. [08:50] Events. LinkedIn is also full of events. Are we joining? Are some people here who are joining LinkedIn events or LinkedIn live sessions? [09:00] Nobody? [09:02] Cool, yeah. Hosted yourself, guess, as well, right? Yeah, yeah. If you go to your basic search bar and you search for a specific keyword on LinkedIn and you enter the tap events afterwards, it pull out all the relevant events in relation to your keywords. Which means that if you decide to attend that event, then you're able to scrape all the people who also decided to join that event. So actually, all these people decided to spend their [09:31] valuable time to join that upcoming event. We can pull over and expound the older people who do that and we can provide you with all the email addresses and additional information. So you can use it for again retargeting, you can use it for email outreach, or you can use it for approaching them on LinkedIn as well. And it works for each and every event. The only requirement is that before you do it, you need to decide [09:55] to join that event yourself as well. [09:59] The reason this works so well is that you actually have a lot in common and these people already decided based on the topic to join that specific event. So if you provide something which is a bit similar or related, it's actually quite cool to engage with these people and you will achieve a very high acceptance rate if you decide to send them a connection request. GIF animations, I think is by far one of the most interesting [10:28] approaches I will share today as most of us are struggling on LinkedIn, especially if we use LinkedIn for outreach to break through the noise, right? And I did at least 100 active campaigns [10:46] without actually just with messaging and the rest of them with GIF animations. And each and every time, a doubled reply rate as everybody is sending the same messages, outdated, boring, finding them on Google. And instead of sending that, will show in a bit some examples. For the ones who have a paid LinkedIn subscription, let's say Sales Navigator, it's possible to send in mails, right? But it's always a challenge with these credits. You have a couple of [11:16] credits and then at the time point you want to use it, they are gone. So I can learn you a trick how you can send more than 800 free emails to open profiles without using any credits. And on top of that, I will share all the playbooks, all the strategies, a breakdown of the strategies we talked today. [11:38] It's per calendar month. Per what? Per calendar month. Calendar month. Yeah, calendar month. [11:46] You're familiar on LinkedIn, [11:50] you see there on top of my profile that I have kind of a golden icon. And that golden icon, that means that your profile has a status open. And if the profile has a status open, it means that you're able to send them free email without using any kind of credits, lengthiness, or requesting. Of course, it's undoable to walk through all these profiles one by one because it's causing a lot of time. So what we can [12:19] do is if you retrieve and search, it doesn't matter if it's in post engagement search, I just explained, if it's in sales navigator search or an event search, you can pull over all these people into expandi and within a split second, you can set a filter and we can see and provide you with information if it's an open profile. And then you can start a campaign only to people with an open profile. So it's actually kind [12:41] of an in mail with a subject line and some messaging you can use in there, [12:48] like here. Instead of only using content, it really helps to use personalized GIF animations. And an example here, you see a colleague of mine, Amy, who is leveraging GIF animations. Animations. And if we send it to one, ten, 50 or 100 people, at each and every time we'll personalize the GIF animation based on the personalizations we put in. So it can be a first name, a company name, and it can be an image, but it also [13:14] can be the profile image as you see right there. You will actually receive super cool reactions from a lot of people as it's different in terms of what they receive on average each and every day. [13:30] From all the at least 100 times I experimented for different purposes with leveraging this at each and every time uplift engagement up to 50, sometimes up to 70% in comparing to maybe on average at 25%, 30% if you're not using it. So it's definitely worth to consider it and especially if you have not done it yet, it's quite an interesting approach to break through the noise and maintain. And here you see some statistics and examples from [14:00] campaigns we executed on with our own team. [14:07] You can use it for example, these are just some random examples. I can provide you with more if you want. After the connection request, to push, not to send a link on the left side, you see our colleague Amy. And it's just, yeah, they call it an icebreaker image where you just actually thank people for connection if you want to use it for that purpose. In the middle, you're seeing call to action from our colleague, Sharon. [14:29] It's also with a dynamic content and it will really help to get kind of a positive reply from people, kind of a different vibe. And if you want to send or use it as a reminder, for example, if you invite people for your webinar, as you see on the right side from our colleague Ivan, then you can also use it and you can personalize it, in this case with first name. And no matter if you send [14:54] it to 11050 or even 1,000 people, it will each and every time use the right personalizations to execute on that. [15:04] For the ones who are familiar with Sales Navigator, you have a filter in Sales Navigator that you can select people based on changing job roles. For example, in the last ninety days, how cool would it be if you can send them in connection request or congrats or in kudos with a bottle of champagne based yes, sorry. So your software is putting name into the video? Correct. We do that in combination with Hyperice. It's a personalization toolkit [15:38] which you can also leverage outside of LinkedIn for personalized landing pages for email outreach, and in our case also for LinkedIn outreach. You can also use it, for example, as inbound. So let's say I think we all use Calendly or sort of a similar tool that people book in an appointment, you can just add an extra step or actually ask an additional question that they need to fill in before they confirm or submit their LinkedIn profile. [16:05] If they fill in their LinkedIn profile, we can pull over by reverse web book automatically in connection request and push such kind of cool GIF animation out there. You can use it if you do a post on LinkedIn. I did myself a lot of posts where I ask people to leave and comment and then return I will provide them with a guide. And there's an example of how you can send them [16:37] such kind of a guide after they leave a comment and it's fully automated. [16:42] For the ones who are leveraging LinkedIn for recruitment, I think we all see that the kind of outdated approaches, I saw your profile, it's super, super cool. I really want you to engage with me. It's not working perfectly fine anymore. I experimented a lot with most wanted posters. So let's say I pull over a most wanted poster and I put in there, I'm looking on the lookout for a new rock star, let's say your first name. [17:11] You really get such cool replies from people as they never received it before. So if you want to leverage LinkedIn recruitment, it could be a really interesting idea to do it that way. I have playbooks about how you can do that and you can find them on our expandi blog as well. [17:30] And we talked about these kind of strategies, so how you scrape people by leveraging content creators. We talked about open InMails and how you can find these people and what place you can use for that. [17:47] We talked about scraping LinkedIn events. So actually every event possible and visible on LinkedIn. And we also talked about LinkedIn Pulse and hyper personalization using personalized images and GIF animations. For the ones who became quite enthusiastic after I shared all these things, I have good news, you can scan this QR code, you can leave your email, I will not spam you, I promise. And then you can access all these guides. So it's a breakdown of all [18:17] these five strategies with the house, with the wise, with the place and all the messaging you can use to leverage it yourself. This was what I want to share today. Give me some love if you like it. And I wish you all a great evening with some beers as well. [18:37] Thank you so much, Stefan.

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is stefan smolders he's a sas entrepreneur and he's bootstrapped to 5 million in revenue in just under 15 months he's the founder of the world's safest software for linkedin automation called expandy.io based in the netherlands and also a father stefan are you ready to take us to the top yes it's a honor to be here and uh thanks for that for the great introduction nathan you bet now you rarely see linkedin software or marketing software branded as the safest usually that's like construction work or you know dangerous work why do you use the word the safest linkedin automation software yeah let me tell you the story behind i am i'm managing multiple sas companies in the netherlands and one software already for more than five years is a very intelligent ip tracking software it's called lead express similar to software's like elite forensics albacross lead feeder where we can identify website visitors and it's actually a nice software to have but almost all the users of this kind of a software as they struggle with what's the best way to follow up right so actually i receive tons of such kind of requestions from people using the software and what they do is that they try to pick the phone they go to the reception nathan it's stephanie okay you please forward me to the person who's visited my website but it's actually a hard one so after receiving tons of such kind of questions i try to challenge myself to find a way to do acquisition on a much more modern way and then we're talking about somewhere around three years ago uh i jumped on linkedin and uh after be voting a bit on linkedin it became after a lot of spending a lot of time to educate myself as my number one lead channel so that was actually the starting point of helping people achieving results on linkedin as kind of a linkedin agency so you hear first did you write your first line of code for the software then in 2019 uh no uh in between and so so so i think it was somewhere around 2017 i i jumped actually on linkedin to provide a service uh uh in the beginning for myself to generate leads on on the linkedin platform by optimizing the profile or target audience and actually outreaching people in the beginning i did everything manually with two left hands i can't code anything myself and just one simple excel sheet after managing five customers accounts i found out that it was that time consuming that i could it was not scalable so i searched on linkedin or sorry on google on google for tools which could help me automate some repetitive tasks on linkedin and i've had tons of tools and we all know that are hundreds of tools which can automate some repetitive tasks on linkedin from drugstore to linked helper to meet learner to alfred and especially in that time mostly of all these tools were chrome extensions and some of them were catched by linkedin as well that means that linkedin is able to detect which kind of tools and they will actually flag the accounts who are using it so it was not that comfortable especially because i was managing a profile from c-level decision makers which did not know that yep so stephen just sorry just to split up the story because again we're short on time and i want to get sort of as many points here as possible so you launch the agency and it sounds like 2017 2018 you had five clients you were managing on linkedin their accounts you were doing this manually how much revenue did the agency do in its best month it it it's it's best month but that was later on i think uh maybe 100 100k a month and what year was that what month which month yep what year that was in 2018 and 2018. okay and so when did you start building the software expanding when did you launch it yeah we started building it in february 2019 we made our first github registration and we were able to run an and better version in july 2019 okay so in july of 2019 you launched the beta version and how much do customers how much do the initial customers pay you to use the software uh in the beginning uh we did not ask any money just to retrieve and get our feedback for us to define which audience is the best fit for us and we start with outreaching local users which are not that familiar with using any type of linkedin automation but that are all people who are using such kind of an ip tracking software and we found out in that beta that that was not the best audience for us for the simple reasons that we have to sell linkedin first second we have to sell linkedin automation and third we have to educate them because he did not know what they have to send so it was that time consuming and not scalable so after and i think it was september we decided before we launched it globally mid november 2019 to focus on the global market and only on linkedin agencies which had actually the same challenges as i faced when i was an agency owner myself and one of these challenges was to do safe outreach on linkedin because we all know that we're operating and let's call it kind of a grey area right yep no i understand that so those first agencies that were your customers you knew very well because you were a linkedin agency a year prior um so walk let's fast forward to today and then we'll get the growth story over the past two and a half years how much revenue did you guys do in terms of monthly recurring revenue last month Monthly recurring revenue yeah last month we closed on 445 k dollar monthly recurring revenue okay 40 45 000 last month and if you go back a year ago how much did you do in that month yeah we uh we implement our our strike it start counting mid november 2019 at zero dollars and what were you doing in the middle like 2020 uh in june 2020 we did one uh one million annual so let's 85 85 uh monthly so you're doing 45 000 a month today 445 400 okay i was about to say i thought you said five million dollar run rate so okay got it so last month you did 445 000 in revenue and a year prior to that you broke a million dollar run rate eighty three thousand dollars a month uh yeah in june 2020 last year one year ago i'm just trying to calculate a growth rate so a year ago you're at a million dollar run rate today you're at a five million dollar run rate now in november 2019 that's let's say uh 15 and a half months ago we started at zero okay yeah i understand that yeah you said in june of last year which is 20 20. yeah that's let's say nine ten months ago then right it's now april yeah ten months you did eight you did eighty three thousand dollars that month which is a million dollar run rate correct yeah now today you've broken a five million dollar run rate correct correct so over the past ten months you've 5xed from a million to five million dollar run rate correct that's what i was trying to get at so this is Bootstrapped impressive growth have you done this all bootstrapped or did you raise capital uh no it's all bootstrap so how did you do this i mean this is not easy right how did you get those first hundred agencies paying you to use the tech use your technology the first thing i actually did was finding out why people are buying from it so in the beginning i run more than 700 demos in five months with only agencies myself to understand why are they making a decision to pick x funding and not one of our competitors to have a better understanding about how we can position ex-funding and i find out that safety is it's it's the main topic for everybody that was one thing another underestimated thing in this grey area and let's call it a special market is that people want to do business with a reliable partner and a lot of our other profilers they are hiding themselves for linkedin so actually you even do not know who's behind that software especially if you want to outreach them or contact them or try to ask support it's very hard so we decided to not hide ourselves related but show our faces and our team and create videos and be visible and try to provide high priority support almost 24 7 around the globe with myself and our team of course and i think these two points are the basics which achieve the most success for us and the fastest growth and only picking a nice because the market is so huge so we decided to only go after linkedin agencies because we really understand what where their main challenges and we understand steven so help us understand sort of growth today so so this month how many new customers will you add i think we have two revenue streams and one revenue stream is that people can sign up straight from our website and we have somewhere around 300 signups per week on our website they are they they start trialing with the seven days trial and then we hope to convert as many as we can and the other revenue stream is that we provide wide labels and they are exclusively for agencies with more than 20 accounts and we have agencies on board with more than let's five six seven hundred accounts um so on the website we have uh let's say a thousand signups a month new signups and uh our revenue stream is that we only focus on wide labels and larger agencies because they are bringing more more accounts and they grow with somewhere around maybe 10 10 larger agencies per month got it so on the website you get a thousand sign ups per month now as a sign up are they putting in a credit card they're putting in a credit card but they can cancel it uh in the trial of course how much does the does the trial cost or is it free uh it's free they only have to add their card and then they can use it seven days for free and so you will automatically build them at the end of seven days if they don't cancel all right and what do you build them for what's the starting point price 99 okay got it uh makes a lot of sense and how many customers are you are you uh Currently serving 10,000 customers serving today uh we managing more than ten thousand active accounts in the expanded software along all the user ways so including the white list you said 10 000 total right and that's 10 000 customers or 10 000 linkedin accounts among your customers linkedin accounts among the customers and how many custo instead of counting the individual linkedin accounts if you just count the number of customers how many customers um i think for the for the for we have 155 right labels running so that are actually the customers and we have somewhere around 2000 i think 1970 or so people who are paying a subscription on the site but they can also manage more linkedin account of course i see so it's about a 50 50 revenue split between revenue you make from white label partners versus revenue you make directly from people paying 99 a month uh not exactly it's somewhere around 60 40 at the moment 60 white label yeah we have 300 k revenue at the moment per month from people who are paying straight with a card on the website and somewhere around 150k have coming from from agencies and white labels tell me about your team today stefan how many people total we have 22 people 22 and how many engineers nine nine engineers any quota carrying sales reps or no uh no we have uh uh uh only a small marketing team with five amazing girls which are providing demos and that's them that's their main job and supporting and serving our agencies and white labels so no no sales reps correct okay no sales reps nine engineers four on the marketing team or sorry five on the marketing team uh they're only goldar two demos so so again nine engineers five on marketing where's the rest of the team what are they doing it's in the support support okay got it and and and obviously churn at this price point with these kinds of tools is critical what was your churn over the last 12 months i have to verify it with my co-founder glenn you can see it exactly in our swipe so i have to came back to you later on that um it's not that bad but since we're growing so fast the numbers are going to be larger because of the amounts of course so the i think it's somewhere around the [Music] turns and downgrades 35k a month 40k a month okay about 35 000 of churn per month and downgrades but yeah we can divide turns on different ways right yeah that's a lot though i mean that would be 35 000 against your 450 000 a month in total revenue i mean that's about an 87 revenue churn per month which means over a year you're going to turn through the majority of your full customer base for example last month in total we growed with 68 000 dollars uh monthly recurring and so maybe we go with 110 and then 40 was done grace insurance and then 70 was the girl okay um 40 churns okay so you're saying last month you added 68 000 of new monthly recurring revenue net that that was the end result i see i see yeah i mean the the tricky part with that is when you're measuring churn on a cohort basis you don't include new customers that sign up and start paying so in the math you just gave me obviously you include new customer sign ups that's how you got 110 000 of of new revenue before subtracting away churns so we'll skip that for now since you don't have your stripe dashboard in front of you but let me go back to your funnel you're using so a thousand new signups on the website per month into the seven day trial how many of those will convert into paid accounts at the end of the month it will be somewhere around 400 380 400 that's a lot how do you get such a high conversion rate um i think because we focus a lot on people who are already familiar with using automation right so our main lead generator is actually our content strategy we have more than 15 14 15 000 unique visitors per week on our website so most of them are coming from our content and they actually are more familiar with they already use this kind of of a tool and what are you spending on when you look at your fully weighted cac to get a new 99 a month account all marketing budget you mean or what are the actual initial costs for for for the hosting and uh yeah we calculated that we have i think 70 more than 70 profit at the moment my question is how much do you spend all Customer acquisition cost in to get a new 100 a month customer that's actually not that much at the moment maybe uh twenty twenty dollars okay okay do you include your marketing team salaries in that calculation then it is if we count all the costs then it's let's say [Music] okay so if you take all of your five people on your marketing team and their salary let's say they make 5k each right so it's 25 000 a month in expenses there and you divide that by the 400 new customers that you convert on your website each month right that's sort of one way to calculate customer acquisition cost i'm just trying to understand when you say your 30 is your customer acquisition cost what are you including in that 30 dollars uh yeah that are the salaries we don't have for all areas the expertise in our team so we are outsourcing a lot of activities for example our whole sales strategy we are outsourcing that to kuliti from i don't know if you know from olga and we're working with the bumps team together to to to to help us also with marketing activities we have a lot of content writers so if i count all these costs together um that's somewhere around 4 40 40k 45k a month okay got it yes of 45k a month divided by 400 new customers right that you get from your website each month that's not including new white label partners obviously but across 400 customers it's about 100 100 bucks to get a new hundred dollar a month customer that's obviously a very healthy payback period so the math works out nicely there um help me understand how you go from 5 million today to 10 million by the end of the year where do you think your growth is going to come from yeah our growth will come from managing the company more based on data right we see also that we can improve a lot in in interns and in onboarding so from next month we will hire an external expert to focus more on the onboarding and and for the previous three months we start tracking why people are canceling and why people can't move forward for example from the first to the second payment so i think the quickest wins for ourselves are in that area to close the door in the back a bit more and if people are satisfied we see for example now that if we can bring people from the first to the second payment and that's also the uses challenge to make it more clear for them and if you can bring them results with examples and templates in that time period they if you can bring them to the second payment they will go to the third fourth five six and center step and are you guys profitable today stephen are you or you break even uh now we uh Profits we are very profitable we have an er i think from all the revenue 70 70 percent is perfect so of the 450 000 you did last month you're saying you take about 300 000 to the bottom line in profit yeah definitely okay so last month your bank account went up by three hundred thousand dollars after you pay all expenses salaries everything it's three hundred thousand extra yeah i think 275 to 80. oh it's still pretty close it's still pretty that's still pretty darn good so as founders what do you guys do with the profit do you pay it out as dividends or do you let it sit in the company bank account um a part in the company bank account we invested a lot of things in the beginning with our own money so we took that back as well and we investing at the moment a lot in um a new product so we hired some additional developers who are focusing on developing new software because we rely with everything what we do on one huge platform which is not that amused with it so it can be any data case that we have to change with them or move to some other products in the meantime and staphon what does your founding team look like how many of you are there and how did you guys split equity yeah we uh we are ready to i have to go call farmers so we are with the three of us and everything is uh uh divided uh separately do you so you each own 33 of the business that's correct so you did it equally okay and do you do anything since your bootstrap do you do anything with your team last year to give them a bonus if there's a lot of profit do you do a profit sharing plan with employees uh what we what we do is that we have a quarter bonus it's it's a along all the company uh so we will give everybody 500 net per quarter um if we reach reach to goals and we have a salary increasement of 10 for the well-performing people so you'll increase their salary 10 and you'll give them a 500 cash bonus if the team hits the quarterly goal yeah that's uh that's correct and what we also do but that was before the cove but now it's a little bit hard and every month we have a team activity uh for example we will go karting or a dinner with everybody uh who is in over we our company is located in eindhoven in the netherlands and most of our colleagues are there as well just a small amount is working remote but since it covered it's a full log down here in the netherlands so it's a little bit harder to do it now we have the idea in mind to do somewhere in july and huge work vacation for a couple of weeks in a house in spain where we invite everybody with mention somebody for for for the company but it's not realistic i understand that'll be that'll be fun once you can do it can you tell me what the court with the quarterly goal is right now for this quarter what's the goal yeah that we go with uh 35k a month okay so last month you did 68 000 so you're you're way ahead of that goal so if you if the team adds another 35 000 next month and the month after then everyone will get a 10 salary increase in a 500 cash bonus uh the salary increases are per six months and the quarter bonus are yeah per three months yeah okay got it that's great do you like that plan do you anticipate changing that profit sharing plan for employees at all over time or do you stick with it um to be honest when we started the company we were just with a couple of people less experienced and we all were single entrepreneurs solo entrepreneurs before so it's an interesting journey in terms of educating ourselves um how we can improve such such such kind of things and also to ask feedback from the from all the people working in in the company so such things can be changed uh fast and stevon before we uh wrap up here with the famous five tell me how 2020 ended how much total revenue did you do in 2020 and how much profit uh yeah we ended 3.1 million uh annual and how much profit did you make in 2020 uh that was uh a little bit less because it was our first year and i think somewhere around um one nine okay about one million in profit that's great well we love what you're building i love that you're doing this bootstrap out of curiosity what would you value your company at today um i i really don't know maybe maybe you can help me out but no i don't know either it's all personal that's why i asked yeah it's uh i put a lot of effort time and love into it so it's it's also a little bit of emotion um it it it's yeah it's really hard for me to say also because of that we operating on on the linkedin platform and which makes it maybe a little bit harder with all the upcoming changes and that they try to avoid spam and that we have to do smarter outreach and it's not so i think a lot of such kind of things will affect it as well so let's wrap up let's wrap up with the famous five years on number one what's your favorite business book um favorite business book is predictable revenue from uh from advanced number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um yeah i like uh uh following the landless team so uh our french friends number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business um i use actually mostly our own tool like spending uh besides yourself yeah besides your own oh oh sorry besides uh besides your own um then i shoot that on hyper eyes hyper white hyper eyes personalization tool number four how many hours of sleep to get every night five and what's your situation married single kids i'm married and i have one one kid a boy from uh four years and how old are you stefan i'm 37 37 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 that i have the knowledge i have now because then i was quite my school very early as they launched their linkedin automation tool called expandy back in 2018 today they just broke five million dollars in revenue profiting almost 70 percent so last month they did 450 000 top line they took 300 000 in profit to the bottom line which they're paying out as dividends and rewards and reinvesting in new products across their bootstrap team of 22 people they finished last year 2020 with about 3.2 million revenue and about a million in profit they've grown 5x over the past 10 months really incredible growth story here stefan thanks for taking us to the top yeah it was a pleasure to be here and uh i wish you all the best as well my friend 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 remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it 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