How FlowChat CEO Chris Baden grew FlowChat to $1M revenue and 246 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is chris baden he's the ceo and co-founder of company called flowchat a sas company that has a unique way of acquiring new customers their organic tool and strategies have led to boosting their company and others to uh over a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue now while chris isn't building businesses he's building a lifelong marriage world impacting family and competed on american ninja warrior chris you ready to take to the top let's go nathan how did you do an american ninja warrior you know uh not as well as like because i just i want to climb mount midoriyama which is stage four it's the championship but there's only been like two people-ish that have done that and uh but i i had a blast doing it it was really fun being on the show i was there for three seasons and uh met some met some really cool people it was a great experience that is amazing okay so what is flowchat flowchat is the premium crm for chat so think facebook instagram linkedin all those social dm's all in one place uh simply being managed that's the short punch version punchline version interesting okay when did you launch the company we launched the like we formed the company all the legal stuff was the beginning of this year our first full uh month of sales was april of this year okay so launch in april and how much sales is you in april uh in april we did just over 35 000 in sales and uh year to date we just passed 260 000 in sales so far 35k your first month uh yeah so we have been running chat sequences essentially we're using flowchat to grow flow chat which really helps because we're you know eating our own cooking uh the congruency of that and uh we've we've been in we've had a sales agency so it's not like we this is really important to know we didn't go to our warm market first i really don't bring any company or product uh to warm market first i like to go to the cold market because frankly they're just more honest they're like you suck and here's why i'm like thanks that's what i needed to hear actually so we just it's kpis outreach how many book calls how many showed how many clothes and it turned out we're solving a real problem and people just started responding to it well and then we moved into war market okay so so in april how many like how do you quantify how many outreach you had and how many book calls did you get uh yeah so we're booking about uh 10 plus qualified sales calls per week per profile we're currently using two profiles and so so that's those are the numbers uh and then we've yeah i mean uh closing you know 20 ish uh and yeah and so how many customers do you have today uh we currently have uh 246 i had i had i got some numbers ready so i've seen at least a few of these that know i'm about to i'm going in right now so and so what do they pay average per month uh on average per month uh that's we're primarily selling annuals so i could give you my pricing we have a basic and a pro which is 2 000 or 8 000 for the year or it's 250 uh for the month and it's or a thousand a month okay guys so so what i'm trying to back into is what your actual like recognized mrr was last month so take your annuals divided by 12 what was your mro last month uh like our current mrr is just over forty thousand forty thousand two hundred sixteen as of right now like per stripe amazing okay i was gonna say so you're using strike for this yeah yeah so forty 000 bucks a month across 246 customers um and just making sure again you are reading the mrr thing in stripe that doesn't include like annual upfront payments all in the 40k right it it is including that uh the one that we have on our dashboard is including that calculation yeah so if you took only monthly members at mrr it would be a lower number i don't have that one uh ready for the conversation but um yes i don't want to exclude the annual payments i just want to only count 112 of what they paid otherwise we're looking at basically what you're saying oh oh yeah that is 1 12 so we you know uh so the 40k the 40k represents our monthly like actual monthly payments and then it's taking our annual divided by 12 and adding that to so it is a clean mrr calculation yes yeah that is clean then yeah that is clean so you've from since april you've gone from nothing to 40 about 500 000 a year company yeah and under like correct five months right correct yes so how did you do that how are you signing up so many customers you like i i mentioned you just mentioned sort of outreach booked calls paid customers how are you doing the outreach though at scale yeah so uh referrals uh affiliate program um that that is a part of our equation so for example last month alone we did just over 105 000 in sales 41 of that revenue actually came from some type of referral uh direct referral um so there there may be like other you know conversations that kind of assisted in the sale but like hey you should meet so and so that represents 41 of the revenue so that's how it's kind of created the acceleration beyond just you know two profiles doing some outreach now it's important to know that um we currently have three partners uh prior to this software company it's actually our second software company so we built and sold one uh our first one on accident about a year and a half ago and there was only two partners in that business sean uh melissa malone um they represented one entity and me another entity and we've been doing business together for like the last five or six years or so go ahead what's up what did you sell that company for um it's how do i answer that quote we like it wasn't like an exact amount uh we licensed like our list and different and it's still kind of going um it wasn't like anything like life-changing or really like i don't i don't have a headline for you unfortunately nathan because see here's what happened i learned about you after i did that and i was like oh i didn't i didn't sell that i screwed that's it was that i'm i'm trying to understand is like did you get cash from that sale that you used to read yes uh yes yes you did it was good question um look can i look can i share a little bit of the story like i don't know and you can tell me how to answer that exactly it's more time than money is the short answer i like oh that i lose you you're like oh chris what's with this chris guy what's that very common i mean obviously this sweat equity is a big thing but people also put cash in i mean you must know so zero keep it in no cash none of your own money yeah correct but i we also didn't like put like we're let me uh what we started doing is saying we started solving this problem with the spreadsheet and people said hey this is really good but it's just kind of manual with the spreadsheet so we're already profitable so like i mean we've um if we need to exp like hire we have 10 people on the team currently we'll be bringing on the 11th uh in a few hours i have an onboarding call with them uh and so like we were profitable from the beginning now we've taken some of those profits to pay expenses for the company we're currently at like 41 percent ebitda um so i am i how am i doing over here nathan last month of about 40 000 an mri you're taking about 15 000 to the bank right cash so out of the out of the hundred and uh last month specifically was forty five percent profit net profit out of the 105. just just talk about mrr because what you're when you say 105 what's happening there is you're selling upfront annual plans from referral partners yes so we're talking about two separate that's fair i'm sure that's fair fifteen to twenty like you take forty ish percent to the bottom line or something like fifteen correct correct yes i'm sorry yeah you're right you're right that makes sense um and then so 10 people on the team today uh 246 customers again what i'm trying to understand here is also what your software does is how you know where to drive outreach are you sending cold messages on via your facebook fan page and your twitter profile on linkedin managing them in flowchat and then converting those people that way to book calls uh yes correct um and outreach too that's my question it's primarily outreach we do we have cold we also have warm so uh to put a flowchat into two buckets really quick uh we have importing tools so we can build lists of ideal uh customers or prospects essentially uh really efficiently and very quickly and then we engage that list via chat so we deploy chat sequences to build relationship eventually start a conversation so uh for example um any like facebook group that your facebook profile is a part of uh you can go and import that member list or if there's any post comment or facebook what's that facebook group you can get and import the list of all the members of your group um you don't have to be you just have to be a part of that list it's only public data for example if it's a private facebook group you can't touch that um yeah so you um if like for example nathan like if you're a part of a facebook group your profile is you're able to see that whole list already it's you have access to that yeah so it's just an efficient way of grabbing that another one could...