How Feedier CEO Francois Forest grew to $2.7M revenue and 430 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is batiste de bavar he is the co-founder and head of marketing at federer he's a french entrepreneur passionate about user experience and innovation batista are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right let's write it good what's the company doing how do you guys make money sure so fear is a software as a service focusing on providing feedback survey for different types of companies from e-commerce to you know sas to other sas companies retails and yeah different verticals basically and so when you say sas company what's the average company going to pay you per month to use your software so a pricing start range from like it's a female model so uh we have free version and then our pricing uh go from 50 a month to 200 and more for uh like payload contracts okay so would you say the average is probably like 60 or 70 dollars a month yeah okay interesting and then put this on a timeline for me when'd you launch so we started the products in april 2018 so eight ten months ago basically and um so far it gets okay so 2018 and then over the past year and a half how many uh new customers have you added so we've added uh three thousand five hundred customs so far well users and also from all over the world from france so we're from france to the u.s to australia to um even smaller countries how many of the users have converted to paid uh so we have i think you know about that uh we we started uh with uh appsumo campaign so some of our customers are on appsumo so we have like i would say 2000 something on absumo um then we have free users and uh we have uh between 50 to 100 bankers so far okay so about 50 customers that are you know actually paying you on a software as a service model monthly recurring yeah okay so 50 customers um at 70 bucks a month you're doing about 3 500 per month in revenue that's about it yeah okay and a year ago what were you doing probably close to nothing right since you just started uh i was uh i was actually studying and um i was also um doing uh well i was also doing some some kind of entrepreneurship on selling wordpress templates on the marketplace called team forest okay and then walk me through the appsumo campaign real quick so appsumo drive you 2 000 paid customers what did you charge for the deal we charged i believe it was the usual deal so 50 bucks uh but yeah as you may know absolutely would take a big cut and i think it's important to to to mention that and uh to emphasize and uh but it was still i think for us it was not about the money uh because you know we could have gone after uh investors or any any way any other way of finding money but it was more about getting getting quick feedback but also getting a lot of users in on figuring out uh what kind of market we can go after because you know on appsumo we can find every types of uh business from agencies to entrepreneurs to uh sas to e-commerce to whatever you want to find so so just just to be clear so 50 price point you got 2 000 customers from that so there's a hundred thousand dollars in revenue appsumo keeps 70 correct yeah we actually sold 3500 uh coupon but you know one person can buy one more more than one coupon okay so 50 so i can take 50 times 3 500. yeah okay so that's 175 thousand dollars in revenue appsumo keeps 70 thousand or seventy percent which would be about a hundred and thirty thousand so what you got about a hundred and or how much basically how much did you get from the campaign 30 grand 40 grand uh we i believe we got 60 uh 55 i think okay about 55 and what'd you use that money for uh we haven't used all of that yet but we used that for advertising we also uh hired a few people and so we grew the team and uh we you know went to the web summit we went to different events uh we tried uh we tried different things basically finding the best channel okay so so appsumo was a bump but really weak in terms of actually helping drive a sas company it's good for cash but for and feedback but not much more how are you now getting you know you have 50 customers that are paying monthly 70 bucks a month how are you landing those kinds of customers today uh so we're doing a lot of content we have a blog and we are really investing in content and also in guest blogging so it takes time but i think it's a good long-term strategy and also because you know um not everybody needs feedback so it's good to we i'm also doing uh you know cold emails and all of this stuff but sometimes it's hard to convince people that uh they need to to change their feedback software or uh also they actually need uh needs ads because it's just not the right priority for them so so what's your i mean when you look at your your growth channel today it's obviously content what's your team look like how many people uh so six people and uh so many developments and then two guys involved in uh so myself and another guy here and are you remote or where is everyone based yeah remote okay and then have you raised capital are you bootstrapped strut boots dropped outside of this money kind of from appsumo yeah okay interesting so so right now you're essentially paying six people on three thousand five hundred dollars a month in revenue plus the sixty thousand dollars you got a while ago when you do the appsumo deal is that right plus the wordpress business which is still making enough money to to do that to cover that well so are you still splitting your time between the wordpress business and feedier yeah okay and and so if you if you take ten thousand dollars from your wordpress business and put it into feedier um do you get more equity in feedier like how's that relationship between the two companies so it's actually the same company it's just figures product so the name of the company is not uh like the name of the actual company registered is not video i see so you own both yeah basically both are products from the company i mean i mean you like how much equity do you have in both of them oh like it's a it's a week of under so it's like 50 in the company okay so on the wordpress side and on feeder you guys just split it 50 50. i see interesting okay very good um talk to me about churn it's critical at any sas company what's your turn today um so i think we lost like one customers at the most because we i really spent ages on support and on helping people doing the right survey um i also consumed a lot of content to learn a lot about that so my really my main goal is is to make sure that people get the right feedback and to make sure that our software like they they guess they get their error from from the investment so you've been selling for like seven months it's too early really to look at churn right it is yeah um what about cac do you know what it costs you to get a new 50 a month customer i i think it's too early as well because if you if you don't properly want to to man for the cat you need also to like you know to take into account uh uh salaries and all this stuff uh which i think is not uh the right time to to do that so no i don't think i'm able to give you a clock figure very good all right baby chica let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um my favorite business book would be gross hiking i can grow sorry hacking growth you said hacking growth yeah okay no number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh i it's it's a bit mainstream but i i also like uh elon musk i think he's a crazy crazy guy and i love his way of doing it number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um for marketing it's up here cyber is just amazing and uh otherwise uh for project management i love uh click up i don't know if you've heard of them if you have them on your podcast but uh i definitely love them number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night six to seven okay and what's your situation married single kids single no kids i'm no kid and how old are you uh 22. 22. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh stopped earlier guys there you can even come in from a 20 a 22 year old he would have started it even earlier launched his company feeder recently about a year ago on the back of his wordpress agency which was producing cash for him he has 50 customers paying 70 bucks a month so five 3 dollars a month in sales they are bootstrapped operating at breakeven six people remote too early to talk about economics as they look to scale they did an appsumo deal which sold 3500 lifetime plans at 50 bucks a month so 175 grand and revenue there but absolutely keep 70 percent federer got about 60 000 of that to reinvest in the product as they look to scale batista thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much