How Expandly CEO Alan Wilson grew Expandly to $880K revenue and 200 customers in 2025.

hello everybody my guest today is alan wilson he has over 17 years of experience in building technology for a number of high growth startups in finance and shopping television as cto alan has successfully built the technology of four startups involved in the first meeting to fund raising turnover in excess of gbp 10 million and has been involved in other successful startups systems designed by alan are used in major corporations including deutsche bank and process millions of transactions annually allen are you ready to take us to the top yeah okay yeah okay so so what the company you're working on now is called expandly you're playing in kind of the e-retailer space help us understand what the company does so what expanded does is help um e-retailers sell online so we manage the marketplaces and shopping channels like ebay amazon xc shopify so they can save themselves time and increase their revenue by putting their products in our platform pushing it to all their channels we manage all the live inventory and help them print shipping labels got it so you're essentially like if a company is creating products especially you know a startup or something like that and they don't want to have individual teams for all the channels like shopify or ebay or amazon they can go to you and it's kind of a one-click solution to get their product out on all these platforms exactly that interesting very good and and kind of help me understand what's a company or what's a what's a new startup paying to get access to your platform on average per month so the the the base cost is round about then dollars fifty dollars and then we have companies who pay and a thousand a couple of thousand dollars so we have higher value customers as well but the initial small to medium size is um about fifty dollars okay and would you say the fifty dollar mark versus the thousand dollar mark is more is closer to your average nice it's more it it's closer to fifty dollars um but um yeah so closer to the fifty but in the hundreds more average okay okay so maybe call it 200 or something per month is is maybe a mid-sized medium not a startup not a not someone pre-revenue maybe someone already selling some products they pay you 200 bucks a month to get going yeah we have i mean yeah so the a more i start off with pay sort of 50 someone who's wanting to get into the space or doesn't mention people are using it more serious as a business more around the 200 mark that's great and talk to me more about kind of your story when did you launch this company what year so i initially launched in 2013 so as a developer i'd spend the first two years developing myself then i raised a few rounds of investment and angel investment how much turtle so we raised a million gbp angel investment so um i guess a million and a half ish usd and then we just closed the first institutional round of 588 gbp which i guess is around 700 usd uh okay so just be clear so how many pounds have you raised total so far 1.5 million okay 1.5 million which would come out to about kind of what is that i think 1.1.8 million united states dollars i i'm not sure in exchange yeah yeah yeah it's a roundabout there um and so that first institutional round wouldn't you close it in july this year july and what was the thesis i mean why raise the capital what's the growth plan with the money the they i mean as a techies we've all been techies so we've never actually had sales and marketing and so all we've ever cared about is a product and so the money has allowed us to to employ a really good person from zero an accountancy platform and the uk so experienced sas sm sales director ali miller would have just employed and and he's been exceptional so far that's great so what's the team to now how many people so we have the 16 with part-time manufacturing how many full time 11 i'm unemployed just know so that's great and where's everyone based on where's everybody we have a development office in india which is in a sales order starting sales out there as well so the development office is our our team and our staff employees in india and then we're based in milton keynes in the uk which is um yeah oh yeah very cool what's up the window okay india and the uk that's great so eleven people full time and then you're talking about uk as well hq yeah yeah talk to me about i mean growth so you launched in 2013 how many customers have you scaled to today so we're in the hundreds at the moment so um we're at the tipping point of scale now yeah what so i mean obviously you can give us some price points you get with some customers when you're kind of motivating your team we're about to end kind of 2018 what's the next big kind of revenue milestone you're hoping to hit so we're we're looking it depends we're going after a few higher value customers at the moment and if they drop then there will be will be a higher higher amount of revenue so we'll be pushing the million recurring at that point what is that your goal that's your next big goal is getting to a million a year that's great i mean uh right now if you've got you know a couple hundred bucks in terms of what they pay per month and you've got a couple hundred customers let's just say both those numbers are two hundred that puts you at about forty thousand dollars per month right now is that kind of where you're at right now um a bit more but yeah the enterprise d so these enterprise deals that you're counting on to push you past the million dollar a year mark um what drove kind of the what drove you to start kind of chasing those was was it the higher valley it's not it's it's actually not our vision is to go after the 200 or 50 to 200 a month in scale by volume that's what we're main strategy and but quite a few large companies actually just signed up to the platform and approached us so um it's we are we are positioned as a a light touch help yourself platform not a professional services platform but we are um we're not hiding away from the opportunity the advantage is that the tech itself does the and the tech itself is is doing the service as opposed to using people so our advantage against our competitors who are moving higher up market is that the software will do it but we're not turning large clients away and help me understand kind of year over year growth so if you're getting close to kind of pushing a million bucks a year today which would be about 80 000 per month where were you exactly a year ago do you remember um monthly around about ten then two pounds or usd yeah yeah so i mean that's you've had great growth then yeah the other 20 which is why the institutional monies came on so we are growing and i assume because you've just raised capital you're burning capital today right you're not casual positive yeah yeah when you do go out and raise institutional round especially i'm curious what you're seeing in the uk i mean how many months of runway are you raising for or do they tell you to raise for a year or two years or 18 months or what yeah so 15 to 18 months and so we've got over we've got over a year left and runway with full expend and my current revenue so we hope to obviously create increase to break even we will look to raise a series eight and nick yeah and but we're in my main aim is to to get to profit that's great churn is really critical especially with price points less than 400 or 500 bucks per month what's your churn today and how do you keep it low i don't know the percentage but as high like everyone else it's not i'm surprised i've found out some other figures in industry and recently and it's it's it's it's quite low but i i i take offense every time someone cancels it like personally it hurts obviously and but we are um we we've done tools we launched a new um manuals guide um recently and we're doing a community that's been in development just now so we've just been with the new sales director as well we're pushing an awful lot to um understanding why anyone would want to cancel with price points quite low so there's no excuse on that um but people can't throw the difficulty of the channels and integration so we do believe the primary reasons is education and we're working on educating better yeah well and they go out a bit i mean people paying these low price points are smes they go out of business yeah exactly that and yeah i mean we've seen yeah so some we don't believe it's someone who says we only sell on ebay now we don't want to sell on amazon yeah when we know the solution it's easier if you can sell on all your channels and we need to be able to deliver software that does that but you're right some dude just go out of business now and i don't know i know you don't know your exact number but do you generally know kind of where i mean are you sub three percent churn per month do you know what you're definitely below we're above that okay do you know what you're below are you below five percent or ten percent we're definitely okay so like between three percent and ten percent maybe per month okay that's that's great um the end that's on a logo basis or revenue basis is that based off logos leaving or the revenue that they make up and yeah logo is yes so yeah so okay so between three and ten percent logo churn and that's per month not per year correct yeah i mean yeah it's less yeah between three and seven three and seven okay great yeah fair...