How Fleeq CEO Shai Wolkomir grew to $48K revenue and 400 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is shai wokomir he uh cr helps create share localize and track customer facing videos and gifts in minutes he's the tool is built for support sales training hr and product teams it's called fleek no camera product crew narrator hosting needed we'll jump into it today shy are you ready to take us to the top let's go okay so tell us what the company does and if you're a pure play sas model or not so sure so flicks very simple in concept what we've done is we've created a format that lives somewhere between a classic presentation or a you know a powerpoint deck and a video uh we realized that then organization loves to provide reach media communication internally or externally whether it is for an employee or for a customer but creating a video is pretty hard updating a video is very hard i mean if it's for support usage for pre-sales for employment boarding and the like so think of flicks a very simple concept think of something like you take a screenshot of your dashboard and then you go with your mouse and you say something like i want to talk about this i want to talk about that i want to talk about this and then you write a sentence or two here you can see the password location et cetera et cetera you click on the button and it all turns into something that relates to a video so it's an html format that lives that drives the talks with a voice to text or your voiceover but it's very easy to to manage to update to share no hosting et cetera and the beautiful thing about flick is given that it's an html format its extendability is enormous aka tracking is embedded immediately so you can see where the user is going and what he's doing while he's watching the flick analytics is automatically embedded into your user flow with google analytics key et cetera et cetera we are a sas model based on seats uh that's the business model for the product and that's like in a very high nutshell that's great and just give me a general sense of the customers you're serving what are they paying per month on average so uh it relates to the size of the team we do have a sizable number of smbs and smes meaning that there's small teams like agencies like we'll talk about the diversity of the market and industry that are using flick but you can see very very small teams of two three creators that we call them in the platform but we have enterprises as well and there then we can see seats from 50 to 100 to 200 and like it's very based on the number of the people within the organization beyond the fact that it's a land and expand strategy where one team might get that product and then it jumps into a technical marketing team and hr team etc so should i just because i know you have tons of cohorts here based off size but what give me an average what's the average team pay per month would you say um so the price per seat is 10 bucks yeah so you would see some somewhere between 15 to 22 on the small smbs and the big guys pay on an annual base somewhere between three to 20k and again it's sizable it's just based on the dependency yep which um well i guess we'll get back to that in a second give me more of your background when did you launch the company what year so uh it's it's a pretty funny story but basically it it's the company itself is not about flick it was actually an offspring from a different from a whole different product you can call it a pivot or whatever but we're a tech service based company from 215 we didn't send it to the cloud product the cloud cover we did uh with a company called elasticode which did mobile onboarding for mobile native apps basically you would go online you would create some sort of an experience and it would land within your mobile app uh but we saw a lot of challenges within that realm and the main three was that uh the market was not big enough in the sense of mobile is great but the number of companies that are willing to optimize their product using a third-party integration within the mobile native app is much smaller than expected the there was no instant gratification in the sense of from the moment you were seeing the product you're getting value there's tons of time and the integration was very long thus we took that technology and we played around with it and we added voice and it took it to the web and then we realized after showing it to a couple of people that's some sort of a video environment experience and this is how it was launched yeah officially launch it yeah so it's 2018 this year it was uh it was uh on january we set the product uh to market got it that's great so 2018 that's great now did you where were you before me did you quit a big corporate job or you know where where was your head at well before that i was i was in cyber or network security i worked with checkpoint with rsa with these companies on the research side of things and then i switched over to a whole different story got it okay very good and then fast forward to today so how many seats are on your platform so uh currently there's a freemium model where more than 10 000 users on the platform itself more than 25 000 flicks in the air well and give me a sense too right so 10 000 free seats but how many are actually paying so we did an appsumo uh campaign uh back at the start of the year so a lot of uh a lot of the the number of customers that joined the platform are on a lifetime deal a large assessment yeah let's not count that because that's essentially one-time revenue unless you can figure out how to change them to a monthly plan which is difficult because they just bought lifetime value so let's just focus on monthly paying seats right so just one one point about that uh a lot of our appsumo users are paying not on a monthly base but we've done an appsumo store for them and they're buying in for more value not subscription based but we actually done more money from the absolute campaign within the the platform itself later on is an upsell so that's like that for a second we're still doing some great uh revenue there uh but on a monthly basis from the 2000 customers that are on the platform we have more than 100 customers that are paying and that's beside that's only the self-service product that's beside the number of enterprises that we're seeing on a whole different like not user based but on an annual you know custom sort of uh um um offering that we're doing there so we have um customers shy sorry there was a lot of like different kind of things going around there and i don't i'm i'm confused right so you sell your basic businesses you sell seats at 10 bucks a month you've got 10 000 people using it to some degree whether it's a one-time payment on a lifetime thing or they're using it for free or whatnot how many are paying on a monthly basis on a per seat model across all your logos whether it's a small business or an enterprise uh 120 on the self service but on the enterprise which is a whole different pricing not per seat there's tons of value there like single sign-on et cetera et cetera that's a different pricing we have five enterprises big enterprises with a whole different pricing structure okay so how much if you had to look at your monthly recurring revenue right now what would you put it at uh it's not disclosed but i would say that this year we would we would uh uh get to 180k per year including the absolute why do you i see i get absolutely people on here all the time and it drives me up the wall why would you include appsumo and recurring revenue it's not recurring revenue it's one time for life no no i set a run rate yeah i said run rate for one for 280 i didn't say uh uh four for a reoccurring i didn't say about ar for 2018 i said that the run rate for 2018 would be about 180k including the app supervisor yeah but you don't include one-time payments in a run rate because there's no they're not gonna run those payments aren't running anywhere they're dead they pay once and it's done i agree with that so but why do you do that because you're just i mean when you say when you convince yourself of that in your brain you're just lying to yourself you know it's not recurring revenue so why would you put that in your run rate no i totally agree it's not recorded yeah but by the way i love where you're at right like i'm not like hitting your business everyone has to start somewhere you've found some great ways to use appsumo to get some cash right a lot of money to reinvest that's like a smart move it's just now you got to figure out how to build the recurring stream and it sounds like you're fairly early which is fine i mean i'd love to know what you're actually it sounds like you're maybe at like a couple grand a month right now and you're figuring out how to skill that's correct okay good by the way i think you should own that like everyone has to start somewhere right so you're at four or five grand a month right now how do you get more monthly paying seats how are you gonna scale this thing okay cool so um we are doing a couple of a couple of um strategies on how to get more users one of these is that we've done in our former company as well we're doing small project and putting them on product hunt okay uh like free free like work on the marketing strategy and they're bringing great traffic that converts this is one thing second you know classic cold call we were looking into uh um we're segmenting via linkedin um customers within the realm that we know that are attracted to this kind of product and we're hitting them with a you know sort of replied io uh drip campaigns of cold calls and we're good we're getting great conversion there on scale and obviously we're doing some more paid campaign but should be on a lower scale discipline okay what do you have a good idea of kind of what your cac is right now when you are doing paid acquisition uh right now it's very hard to assess because there's so many channels so we don't have the the correct number at this point i mean what is it around pick a channel and tell me what it is on that channel so on on what we're seeing basically on the reply dot io it's it's fairly low it's somewhere between three to five bucks uh but on the marketing tech side it's it's much much much lower because we're grabbing you know technology that we're doing within flick itself we're taking it into a sort of sell so to an open source offering we're putting in our product on so there's no even like you know value they're just the hosting for 10 bucks a month for that specific site and that brings in great traffic so that's like you know the big cost there is the salary of the person whose time it takes to execute that strategy right listed on product hunt put in the open source environment manage the product replies you know manage the product hunt leads what's your team size today so we're for people and this is just you know one of the things that we're doing so it's fairly fairly you know incorporated in the weekly work okay got it so so four of you guys are in you are you all based in israel or are you remote yep yep all israel very good okay good so based in israel and then look if you're paying four or five bucks to acquire these guys and a ten dollar per seat arpu i mean your payback period there is about one or two months right so obviously that math works if you can do that at scale well yes and no uh we're talking about the freemium model where we're getting the subscribe person the conversion rate right now is close to eight percent meaning that it's not for five bucks you time we you x that like 12 times but the ltv for our customers because the price is very low and the churn is very it's very low is more than 200 bucks so it does make sense as well so it's more than so just to be clear you know cac is 550 yeah yeah yeah it's 45.55 exactly yeah you're you're like cost per lead is like four or five your cac yes 60 your payback is six months because they pay 10 bucks a month exactly and you just said you're pegging your ltv at about 200 bucks right something like that that's great that's very good um try is churning issue yet what's your turn so currently it's zero because we only have six you know months on the run but giving the the value of the product and and you know the the price itself we don't see any fallback okay got it so no no the cohort's not big enough yet to be able to have an accurate measurement return yeah exactly now are you bootstrapped or you raise capital so we actually raised capital for elastico that company then like um 18 months back we got to investors and tell them we have 200k we're raising one million dollars we have 200k in the bank we want to like focus and build something new that was flick the money was actually uh dried out eight months ago and we're living on customers so it's fully bootstrapped but right now we're in currently around and it looks very good and we're probably going to have some news in the next two months are those people that put in the initial million in the other company are they still on your cap table sorry you can get that the people that put in that early money right you said they put in a million in the old company are they still on your cap table at flick yes yes so this is the same company so you've raised essentially a million bucks you're currently raising more capital exactly got it how um how you said you had four people you're living off cash flows you're doing call it a couple grand a month right now how are four people living off call it four grand a month in revenue well basically as mentioned before this year specifically given the appsumo deal we have much more cash for this year and still going later on until the end of the year um what you're saying is the money you made from appsumo is enough to cover salaries through the end of the year how did the appsumo deal do how many how many how much revenue did you bring in and how many customers signed up through that so appsumo was awesome uh we've done um so they have the main campaign and then they have their briefcase offering so all in all with the app sales that we've done from the customers that signed up the app symbol we've done more than 130k got it and that's your cut or that's the total that's our your cut okay got it so multiply that times three because they typically keep 60-ish 70 and you get 30-ish right that's that's including the upsell that we did on our platform directly from the campaign and the briefcase we did something close to 90 to 80. that's 50 more we've done internally with i see so okay same question though even if you have a hundred grand in the bank right now right how to for how do you how do you support four people on a hundred grand is our expenses really low in israel uh first stop yes and and b there's two more answers to that we are currently uh raising more money and we are seeing more cash coming in even in the on the firmer note that we had that we raised a million so right now the round actually started without we're seeing money that coming in from investors currently that we can supply to the team and we are seeing money from the former product from the elastico product as well that's coming in into the bank so got it all in all it keeps us alive got it that makes good sense you're in hustle mode i love it let's uh let's wrap up your shot with the famous five number one what is your favorite business book well um i would go uh the hard things about hard things yep number think that's the name number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um wow uh good question um no not currently number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business besides your own number four how many hours are number three yeah number four how many hours i sleep to get every night um four hours but two of them are basically because of getting up because of my two daughters oh okay so you're only getting four hours of sleep so you have two dollar daughters total or do you have more kids so i have two daughters and i run uh 80k per week so i'm getting up a lot of the time early to run like like run like running exercise right right 80k per 80 80 kilometers per week got it got it got it that's great and what's your situation married single obviously you have two kiddos um separated separated and how old are you i'm 42. 42. okay last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew what sorry what do you wish that your 20 year old self knew ah wow great question um don't waste any time guys don't waste time there he got it from shai again helping you build kind of an interactive pl uh presentation he pivoted up from an old product into fleek brought about into flick brought about 200k with him now have four full-time people in israel scaling this they have a couple grand per month right now in revenue they just launched in 2018 so growth rates obviously we can't calculate yet they're currently raising additional capital have about 10 000 free users on the platform those are kind of logos and seats again it's too early for things like churn when they do do a paid experience experiments they're paying about 60 bucks to acquire a customer with a six month payback and shy's assuming a 200 lifetime value should i thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much